Now more than ever, personal finance education and help is crucial to anyone’s financial health. Mint.com, a former TechCrunch 40 company who won the top prize at the conference, has grown incredibly since its launch and was recently acquired by Intuit for $170 million. TechCrunch50 startup LearnVest is serving a different purpose when it comes to online finances; the startup focuses on helping users, particularly women, organize their finances and learn how to become financially savvy. It’s kind of like the online version of financial planner Suze Orman.

When you first log in to LearnVest, the site will ask you a series of questions about your financial health (i.e. how much credit card debt do you have), you life stages (i.e. do you rent, are you planning a family soon, do you own a house) and your financial education level (i.e. have you checked your credit score lately). LearnVest will use all this information to diagnose your financial health and education level and will then give you a snapshot of what you need to learn and improve.

Online event planning and invitation platform Evite was on the forefront of innovation—ten years ago. TechCrunch50 startup Cocodot is hoping to be the Evite of this generation of web technology, serving a style-conscious, eco-friendly event platform that people and brands can use to create an online presence for celebrations.

Cocodot’s platform, which is targeted towards women, is a one-stop-shop for event planning and invitations. You can create a high resolution, chic, stylish invitation (that can be printed as well), a vertical event pages, guest management tools, seating charts, and a directory for event planning vendors. When you create event, you can build an event homepage that aims to be a social conversation hub. Once you create an invitation, you can import your contact lists from Yahoo, Gmail, AOL and other contact managers and email services. Cocodot also lets you send links to the event homepage and invitation to Facebook, directly from the platform.

Per Michael Arrington’s request I ran backstage and shoved a camera in CitySourced’s founders’ faces just after they completed what was one of the more compelling presentations of the day.

Question one: Palm is really paying companies to write apps for the Pre? Yes. How much? All I got despite truly obnoxious questioning was “under $500,000.”

We also talked about the biggest execution risk: Whether or not cities will actually use this data to make citizen’s lives better? Gavin Newsom: I hope you’re paying attention to this.

Video is on the jump. (Sorry for the jumpy camera work. It’s still early here.)

For any business, from a startup to a large company, mundane, yet time-intensive tasks like transcribing video or removing spam comments from blogs, can be a waste of employee time. TechCrunch50 startup CrowdFlower CrowdFlower provides Labor as a Service (LaaS) by letting clients access an always-on, scalable workforce.

Unlike traditional methods of outsourcing and hiring, CrowdFlower’s web offering lets businesses instantly access thousands of workers without picking up the phone. Here’s how it works. If a company has a transcribing task, the administrator can fill out a task form on CrowdFlower. Once all the fields are filled out, CrowdFlowers will price the task based on the amount of time it takes to perform the assignment per unit. The startup will break the task into units that can be performed by a single person and price the task accordingly.

Coding is a highly competitive industry where programmers are often pitted against each other based on level of skill and ability. TechCrunch50 startup Trollim has created a competition platform and social network for programmers that assesses their coding skills through coding battles.

Users are identified as “trolls” on the platform and once a user signs up, he or she fills out a profile that includes their age, location and coding language skills (C++, Ruby, PHP etc.). Trollim then gives the user 3 to 6 pieces of code, or a “test,” to fix to asses their baseline level of skill and based on the results of this test, the user is given a skill level of 1 though 5. Once a user has been assigned a skill level, he can then start challenging other programmers on the site to one on one battles, where trolls have to fix different pieces of code, or “rumbles,” where multiple programmers participate in a battle. As you win battles, Trollim’s proprietary algorithms will evaluate your skills and increase your coding skill level. Trollim says that you can search for users by country, skill level or age, letting users battle a variety of other programmers. Users can also see statistics and metrics on their skill level and improvement. You can also publish your ratings as a widget to a blog or web site.

Ever seen a nasty pot hole or a wall full of graffiti and wished you could report the problem on the go instead of writing a letter or email to your city bureaucracy? TechCrunch 50 startup CitySourced is launching an a slew of smartphone applications that let you file an issue to your city from your phone, aiming to crowdsource this information for cities.

It’s pretty simple. The app on your Blackberry, Android or iPhone lets you take a picture of the infraction. The app detects your location via GPS and once the image is loaded and approved, you are brought to the reporting screen. You can then identify what the problem is, add comments, and Tweet the problem out from your Twitter account.

Sentiment detection is fast becoming a popular method of deciphering Tweets, news stories and other content on the web. TechCrunch50 startup Affective Interfaces, which launched at the Business Applications session today, has built emotion sensing technology that detects a web user’s facial expressions via a webcam.

Affective Interfaces’s SaaS uses a webcam to monitor facial expressions such as smiles, frowns and other emotions. The software analyzes these expressions and how they related to different parts of a site. So for example, Affective Interfaces will compare the emotions of a user while they are on CNN.com vs. Gawker.com. Or the software could be aptly used to determine emotions on an e-commerce site, like Zappos.com, to see what emotions affect engagement and purchasing decisions.

For any web-based small business or startup, there is a plethora of online real-time business data, such as page views, ad impressions, financial information, that need to be tracked frequently. TechCrunch50 startup Metricly, which launched at the Business Applications session, helps online businesses create easy-to-use dashboards to track their key metrics and better understand their business.

Metricly actually pulls in data from different sources, including financial systems, web analytics, social media and CRMs, and then provides dead- simple tools to create custom graphs and dashboards based on that data. So for example, users can see unique visitors, ad sales broken out by inventory, ad impression and CPMs, and more. Metricly will graph all this data, letting users easily see the ebbs and flows of this information and filter information.

When pitching a creative idea to a company, often the mechanism by which you pitch the idea to clients is as important as the pitch itself. TechCrunch50 startup ClientShow, which is presenting during the Business Applications session, is hoping to help creative, advertising and marketing professionals show, pitch and sell their work to clients more effectively through real-time collaboration and communication. It’s sort of like a Web-Ex for creative professionals.

The application, which is built off of Adobe Air, is broken down into four parts. The first part is a dashboard which lets the agency view clients, projects and pitch sessions at a single glance. The dashboard acts as an organizational launching pad, where you can see attached notes and images about upcoming pitches and a schedule of sessions. The second feature is a “work” section which actually lets you set up and prepare for the sessions. You can drag and drop your files into the application, where you can views the projects.

So that was day one of Techcrunch 50. The best tech conference in the universe, that pays my wages.

And what did I learn today? Today I learned that the Rocky soundtrack makes any technical hitch a million times more dramatic. I learned that Yossi Vardi believes that any disaster can be solved with a show of hands or a forced round of applause. I learned that, where other entrepreneurs quote Sun Tzu, Calacanis prefers the wise words of Disney’s Ratatouille. I learned that when Arrington and Calacanis squabble, they sound like a gayer version of Statler and Waldorf.

But most importantly of all, I learned that there’s no way any of us are going to make it through a second long day without downing some serious booze. And so, with that in mind, I’m delighted to announce the rules of the Techcrunch 50 Day Two Drinking Game.

Soft-spoken Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh had some surprisingly harsh criticism for the TC50 companies he saw today: Why aren’t you trying to change the world? I asked him more about that in our backstage sidestage interview during the TC50 cocktail party. “To be fair, is selling shoes changing the world?” I asked. Watch the clip after the jump to hear his answer.

I pressed Hsieh on details about his relationship with Jeff Bezos and Amazon. He can’t really comment because the US Justice Department hasn’t yet ruled on the deal, but he did admit “I’ve always thought Jeff was a lovely man.” So that’s how it works in that soon-to-be corporate family.

The most interesting admission may be his advice for start-ups: Do you really need venture capital?

The second company to emerge from the TechCrunch50 DemoPit as a peoples’ choice winner is YourVersion, a discovery engine that looks to help recommend new content based on your past searches and interests. The company was among the top two recipients of TechCrunch50 tokens, which are used by conference attendees to vote on their favorite companies in the DemoPit, and shares today’s Peoples’ Choice Award with oDesk.

YourVersion launched today, and looks to help users search for content across blogs, multimedia sites, Twitter, and other social sites, updating with relevant content in real-time. Rather than force users to run the same searches multiple times or rely on a clunky bookmark system, YourVersion pays attention to your interests, and presents results accordingly. You can browse through results from all of these content sources, indicating which ones you like (or dislike) using thumbs up or thumbs down functions.

Each year we see hundreds of impressive applications to TechCrunch50 — unfortunately, we always have a number of great companies that deserve attention but don’t quite make the cut as finalists. That’s why we have our TC50 DemoPit, where we invite a few dozen other strong startups to demonstrate their wares in the conference building’s main hall. Each conference attendee is given two TechCrunch50 tokens — one for each day — which they use to vote on their favorite startups in the bunch. We then tally up the votes and give the top two companies the chance to present on stage.

The first winner for today is oDesk, which is today launching a new iPhone application that allows project administrators to monitor the work stream of their team members while they’re on the go. The stream features photos of your team’s workplace, keystroke events, and lets you know when your workers are checking in and out. Alongside the launch of the iPhone oDesk will also be bringing the new stream functionality to the desktop with a desktop app.

It’s not often that you hear about innovation in the used car space, but Mota Motors, a new site that’s launching today at TechCrunch50, has managed to pull it off. Mota’s multi-faceted service effectively holds your hand through the entire used car buying (or selling) process, offering a level of trust and convenience that has been difficult to achieve on traditional peer-to-peer car sales channels like CraigsList or Ebay. And with that trust comes some options that used car buys previously haven’t had: using Mota, you can elect to finance a used car — something that you’ve previously only been able to do through deanship used car lots, which typically charge a 20-30% markup.

Here’s how it works: Mota has a database of car listings from multiple used car sites, which you can browse through much as you would on a site like Autotrader. But rather than simply aggregating these listings, Mota adds a layer of intelligence to the process.

For most startups just getting off the ground, cash on hand is extremely limited, to be reserved for only the most essential expenses. But that doesn’t mean these fledgling companies don’t have an abundance of talent. TheSwop, a new site making its debut today at TechCrunch50, is looking to help these startups and other growing companies trade ‘favors’ to each other, in whatever fields they specialize in. These can run the gamut from advertising and business planning to graphic design and development, or resources like office space.

Because exchanging goods and services this way can be a tricky business — you wouldn’t want to swap time with one of your extremely talented developers for work by a shoddy designer — TheSwop features one-on-one videos of each of its subscribers so that you can see the “whites of their eyes” before you consider a deal.

Getting a meeting with Marc Andreessen isn’t easy so I made sure I cornered him and shoved a camera in his face backstage at TechCrunch50 to ask him about his new life as a VC. It’s been seven weeks and one day, and so far, he says he loves it and it’s fun. Of course, as he notes, seven weeks in there’s no expectation that companies will have exited and it’s not enough time for any of them to fail yet either.

Andreessen also reiterated what Ron Conway said earlier: There’s no dearth of funding for good start-ups in the Valley. More on why he did that Skype deal and what he’d rather hear TC50 companies talk about in their pitches on the clip.

RefMob is launching at the TechCrunch50 event today a service that allows business owners to make more noise about their paid referral programs online while at the same time giving more people the opportunity to earn bonuses for referring people using social networking apps.

RefMob enables people to share paid referrals that they know of for a variety of business categories, like bonuses for getting new apartment tenants or driving more job applications to a company looking to hire, instantly on Twitter and Facebook. The general idea is to let people leverage the tools they’re already using to keep in touch with each other for sharing referrals and consequently making arrangements for splitting the financial gains between them.

As an employer, chances are you use sites like Craigslist or Monster.com to try and get the best candidates for vacant spots. If that’s indeed your modus operandi for recruitment, than you’re probably also used to receiving bad or incomplete resumes, applications from totally unqualified persons or just utter spam. LocalBacon thinks it doesn’t have to be that way, and believes the solution to the problem is making job seekers pay to apply for jobs.

Launching at the TechCrunch50 event today, LocalBacon wants to remove the clutter from the inboxes of many a manager or HR professional looking for the right person to put to work while at the same time giving job seekers the opportunity to stand out from the crowd in their quest to land a good position. The way they want to achieve that is by both increasing the quality of applications and decreasing their amount by charging potential candidates $0.99 (or more based on interest/demand) to apply.

We grabbed Google’s Marissa Mayer backstage just after her launch of Fast Flip. Michael asked her about that name change, Google’s on going innovation with news online, and whether any big players did not want Google using their content with this new product.

Her product manager was also on camera. Mike’s question to him? Rate Mayer as a boss on a scale of one to ten. It’s just not TC50 until we get someone in trouble with his or her boss.

The video is on the jump.

Yext, a popular local business search engine that for some reason managed to stay under the radar so far, is launching a new product dubbed Yext Calls at the TechCrunch50 event today that’s bound to raise some eyebrows.

Local businesses can use the Yext Calls software to process incoming phone calls and organize them based on semantic analysis of what was said during the conversation, providing them with an easy way of searching or browsing through them at any point. Based on keywords that occurred in the call, the software can detect that e.g. price estimates were requested for a car repair or which part of what type of vehicle the caller was having problems with exactly.