Social gaming company Playdom is definitely on an acquisition spree. Last month it bought Hive 7, this month it is Metaplace, a startup that launched at TechCrunch 40 in 2007.

Metaplace has developed an in-browser virtual-world engine which can be applied to social games. Founders Raph Koster and John Donham previously worked at Sony Online Entertainment, where they helped develop games like Star Wars Galaxies and Everquest II. At Metaplace, they’ve already launched two Facebook games: Island Life (with 457,000 monthly active users) and My Vineyard (with 822,000 monthly active users). A third game is on the way. Playdom will use the virtual world game engine Metaplace has developed to create even more games in that genre and add the game design studio to its growing roster.

The company has raised $9.4 million from Charles River Ventures, Crescendo Ventures, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The acquisition price is not being disclosed.

Playdom just raised $33 million of its own last month from Disney’s Steamboat Ventures and Bessemer. Some of its other recent acquisitions include MMORPG developer Acclaim Games, Facebook game developer Offbeat Creations, Three Melons, and Merscom.

Today, exactly two years after launching at TechCrunch40, I’m excited to announce that Mint.com has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Intuit for about $170m. Intuit, a $10b company (NASDAQ: INTU) is perhaps best known as the maker of Quicken, QuickBooks, and TurboTax.

This is a great opportunity to bring Mint’s technology and easy-to-use personal financial management system to potentially tens of millions of consumers, an eventually small businesses and banking customers as well.

What’s perhaps even more amazing about this opportunity is that we made it to this point just three years after the company started: one year to build, and two years in operation. I doubt this could have happened anywhere but Silicon Valley.

Mint was built in the Silicon Valley way. It started in my apartment, with Matt Snider and Poornima Vijayashanker. We interviewed the first real “professional,” our VP of Engineering, David Michaels in our kitchen.

Our technology was all open source, and essentially all free: MySQL at the bottom, Hibernate to avoid the need to hire a DBA, Tomcat on Apache, Yahoo’s YUI served as the base for our AJAXy goodness.

We didn’t have money for a lawyer, but no fewer than three offered to help us incorporate and accrue $25k in legal fees for a little bit of the company. We shared office space in a type of incubator, renting by the cube to avoid a long-term lease.

We didn’t have money for advertising, so we started a blog. We didn’t have money for writers, so most of our original blog content then was guest posts from other personal finance blogs, plus a couple of columns on people’s worst financial disasters.

To build demand, we started asking for email addresses for our alpha 9 months in advance of launch. Then when we had too many people sign up, we asked people to put a little badge that said “I want Mint” on their blogs to get priority access. We got free advertising and 600 link backs which raised our SEO juice.

When it came time to launch, we choose TechCrunch 40 – why pay $20k for DEMO?

We decided not to do SEM – it’s too easy and too additive. Instead, we relied on press. It’s where I spent 20% of my time. I’m spending it right now while writing this.

The net result has been millions of visitors and 1.5m users essentially for free. Mint is not inherently viral like a social network – but all good things are viral by word of mouth.

And so here we are two years later. We’ve attracted over 1.5 million users, found over $300 million in savings, managed $50 billion in assets, and helped people track nearly $200 billion in purchases. Most importantly, we’ve helped a lot of people better understand and do more with their money. Thousands of people have told us that Mint.com has helped them pay off debt, control their spending, manage job loss, and even resolve money disputes with their significant other.

Expect all of this goodness to increase after the acquisition closes. And yes, expect Mint.com and Quicken Online to remain free.

So that’s the Mint story. $0 to $170m in three years flat. While everyone else was doing social media, music, video or the startup de jour, we tried to ground ourselves in what any business should be doing: solve a real problem for people. Make something that is faster, more efficient, cheaper (in this case free), and innovate on technology or business model to make a healthy revenue stream doing it.

Without the free (for a while) lawyers, free advertising (winning TechCrunch sent us sky high right from the start), and most importantly, people who come to Silicon Valley, we couldn’t have done it in this time frame, if at all.

Here’s to the Mint team, from New Zealand, from France, Tunisia, Armenia, Ukraine, Russia, Canada, Greece, and all over the U.S. I’m proud of you all today, and I’m very happy to live in this Valley.

As the party goes on in downtown San Francisco, a quick wrap up of the first day of the TechCrunch 40 Conference. We live blogged the whole event, and added some great pictures as well. I’ll clean up the typos tomorrow…or the day after.

TechCrunch 40 Session 1: Search and Discovery.

The first session in front of a crowd of around 1,000 people, all wielding laptops and camera’s can be daunting, and despite the odd hiccup the first startups did a great job.

CastTV was our pick from the 5, however ultimately it’s up to the expert panel to decide the winners tomorrow.

Yahoo Presents Yahoo Teachers.

The title says it all, a clever product for school teachers. Check out our post for the demo video.

TechCrunch 40 Session 2: Mobile and Communications

A diverse session title for a diverse range of presentations. A much closer field in terms of picking the best presentation. I picked Cubic Telecom at the time and it’s a name that’s come up in conversations a lot since the session, even being mentioned by some as being a possible winner. Not all the experts on the panel were hot on the business model/ idea though…I can’t help but think that they don’t travel a lot.

TechCrunch 40 Keynote Speakers: Humble Beginnings

Marc Andreessen, David Filo and Chad Hurley. Royalty. There is no need to say much more.

TechCrunch 40 Session 3: Community & Collaboration

By far and away the standout startup session of the day. The presentations were smooth, entertaining, informative and most of all engaging. Flock was the big surprise for me: I expected to see more Firefox with plugins and saw something in the soon to be released 1.0 version that was completely different, unique and new. TripIt was just one of those useful ideas that made you wonder why someone hadn’t thought of that before. Story Blender took video mashups to the masses. The stand out performance in the most competitive field of the day was Music Shake. A couple of blokes from South Korea took the stage and delivered a great presentation. The product is unique, easy to use, and looks like a lot of fun. 95% of the people I’ve spoken to since the end of the day nominate Music Shake as their favorite startup. They enter day 2 as the short price favorite to take the $50,000 first place prize.

AOL Launches Blue String

Read the post for more. Nice to see the AOL team coming up with something new and unique. I had dinner with some of the AOL people, engaging folk, decent dev team who probably don’t get enough credit for the various products they are creating.

TechCrunch40 Session 4: Crowd Sourcing

Last session of the day and always a hard sell when talking to a crowd that had been sitting for the better part of 7 hours.

Cake Financial as the best presentation/ product for my liking, but as with Session 2 it was a fairly close field.

TechCrunch 40 Keynote Conversation: Mark Zuckerberg

First impression: Mark Zuckerberg is human, and normal…and engaging, and interesting, even if some of his responses were great corporate waffle in an attempt to avoid answering the question. No matter what you think about Facebook, Zuckerberg surely must be a champion of Generation Y, for very few have achieved so much at such a young age.

Well be back Tuesday with more live blogging here at TechCrunch. Check out the TechCrunch40 site for company info, video highlights, and the Tangler powered chat room.

Sequoia’s Michael Moritz introduces the three guests: Marc Andreessen, David Filo and Chad Hurley.

An amazing lineup: for those old enough to remember Andreessen was the CTO and Co-founder of Netscape, more recently he co-founded while label social networking startup Ning. David Filo was a co-founder of Yahoo, the first great internet company of our age. Chad Hurley is CEO and Co-founder of YouTube…and that story doesn’t need repeating.

Chad Hurley is first. First business was selling trying to sell paintings as a kid..apparently not a huge market in Philly.

David Filo was at Stanford..he selected Stanford due to the connections and possibilites.

Marc was from Wisconsin, middle America. First business was a lemonade stand when he was kindergarten. Distribution method was wrong though, he set up 10 miles out of town Went to U. Illinois, had no idea about business…he lucked out by being able to come to Silicon Valley.

Back to David Filo. Question: what made you leave Stanford with Jerry Yang. DF: when Yahoo started they weren’t thinking of it as a business. 6 months after they started they were still trying to come up with business ideas for new projects…they didn’t consider Yahoo as a business proposition.

DF had an early business relationship with Marc Andreessen and Netscape…Netscape provided data space when Yahoo was moving out of Stanford.

Back to Marc: question: did ppl know what Netscape would turn out to be. MA: it was a crazy idea, no one was doing this stuff in 94. 99% of ideas are crazy and fail as well, no one can say with any degree of confidence what will absolutely work.

Question: were there key things in the first 60 days of Netscape, MA: radical distribution model, the first with free for personal use.

Question to Chad Hurley: how long did it take to get YouTube up and running, CH: we sat down and thought out the problem, within a couple of months we had a working model. Within 12 months we’d closed funding to grow. Scaling was the hardest part, didn’t expect YouTube to grow like it did.

Q to David Filo: on growth, did it surprise you. DF: as said before we didn’t expect to make a business out of Yahoo, so yes it was surprising.

David Filo is asked what he does at Filo has he’s not seen at industry events that often. Broad laughter. DF says he covers data centers, growth etc..

Marc Andressen Q: what is it like being in top roles. MA: I’m not the CEO for a reason, I’m the chairman (laughter). MA talks about the stress and work involved with running a company. David Filo added that as soon as they realized that Yahoo was going to take off they hired a CEO. Chad Hurley takes running YouTube as being a challenge.

Q to Marc Andressen: what would he do differently, MA: things are different now (makes some jokes about Red Herring), advice is to not take too many people with you from company to company, it’s healthy bringing in new people.

Q to Chad Hurley: how did you cope with growth, CH: our first hosting company was setup to deal with us, so we had to go out and build our own data center, which was “scary.” Luckily YouTube never suffered from major outages, only scheduled downtime for maintenance, no longer required.

Q to Marck Andreessen: how close have you gone to going under, MA: 60 days with LoudCloud, we were burning too much cash, the crash had happened.

Q to all 3: what’s your worst business decision. Chad Hurley: we would have hired more people, more quickly to deal with the growth. David Filo: we underestimated the opportunities and hence like YouTube we would have bought on more people at Yahoo in the early days, we also weren’t taking a proper long term view. Marc Andreessen: we treated search money as free money, VC’s would give it to search companies who gave it to Netscape for traffic. With hindsight Netscape would have worked better as a content company as opposed to a service company.

Q: who do they admire outside of their own company. David Filo: Steve Jobs. Chad Hurley: Steve Jobs. Marc Andressen agree, Steve Jobs.

Q to all 3: what are your fondest memories. David Filo: it’s hard to pin down a particular time, I’ve enjoyed it all. Being able to shape the internet was exciting. Chad Hurley: when we started, it’s difficult to ever recreate that experience, a “special time” where YouTube didn’t know what would happen, or even how they’d pay the bills.

Thoroughly interesting sessions. Audience questions

q: tips for startups. Marc A: a founder should be CEO, don’t bring in CEO, professional CEO’s can dupe the company, second tip: beat off with a stick hiring to many people too soon, keeps burn rate down. Chad Hurley: small teams work because you can “aerate” more quickly and solve problems. Use the product yourself..important tip. David Filo: be passionate about what you are doing, even if you fail people will enjoy the experience.

q: 60% of traffic is global, how do accommodate that audience. Chad Hurley: at first it was mostly US traffic at YouTube, now much broader, but we were acquired by Google so we could handle the international traffic. Doing things like language support and tagging.

q: is there a myth or thing related to your company that isn’t true. Marc Andreessen: Al Gore never said he invented the internet.

Favorite sites: all 3 say TechCrunch then get serious, Chad Hurley likes Facebook, Marc Andreessen loves Amazon, David Filo Sequoia.

Session finishes. You don’t get that caliber of speakers at many conferences at all.

We’ll be bringing you live coverage of TechCrunch40 through the next two days. Enjoy, and also checkout the TechCrunch40 website.

Couldn’t snag a ticket to this year’s TechCrunch40 conference? Head on over to techcrunch40.com to follow the action online.

We’ve put together a fully-featured website for the event, which starts this morning and continues through Tuesday evening. Get the scoop on the 40 presenting companies, the 100 demo pit companies, our expert panelists, and our keynotes. As the conference progresses, we will upload video clips of each set of presentations. While you are waiting for those to appear, you can view Flickr photos of the conference and Twitter messages from attendees.

Three companies have helped us to enable viewer interaction through the website. Tangler has equipped the website with several embedded live discussions in which you can discuss the presentations and share your general thoughts about the conference. JS-Kit has provided ratings badges for all of the presenting and DemoPit companies. While you won’t be able to rate the companies if you are not at the Palace Hotel, you can check out what the attendees think of the companies. Finally, Mozes has offered a way for everyone to vote on their favorite companies via cell phone (whether or not you are at the event).

Keep checking techcrunch40.com throughout the following two days, as we will be releasing more information about the companies as they actually present.

Also keep visiting TechCrunch for a live blog of all the presentations, keynotes, panel discussions and big company presentations.