The winner of TechCrunch 40 is: Mint.com.

Here’s the CEO, Aaron Patzer. He just won $50,000. His site is being hit so hard it’s down. He gave us a demo yesterday morning. We’ll try to get that up tomorrow.

What’s interesting is that two days ago I asked who would win and within minutes one commenter here said he thought Mint would. More proof that my readers know more than I do?

Here’s the TechCrunch coverage of the contest. Mint is also at the top of TechMeme right now.

I never even got into see a presentation. The hallway was too good. Here’s my photos. Damn, I love my Canon 5D camera (thank you Maryam!). Imagine how good my images will be after I learn how to use it. Thomas Hawk or Scott Beale don’t need to worry about losing their status as best Web 2.0 photographers anytime soon. Hah.

I got a demo of Mint and it lives up to the hype someone gave it in my comment section this morning. Nice way to look at and manage your personal finances. Cubic Telecom did live up to the hype, too. I gotta get some of those phones for Maryam’s family in Iran. She pays so much for her mom to call back home.

There’s plenty of chatter over on TechMeme — I’m not going to try to live blog conferences anymore, it’s a thankless task and one that’s best left to people who actually like sitting in the halls. Me? I’m a hallway rat. CenterNetworks’ Allen Stern has a good wrapup and links to a few of the best posts..

Oh, anyone want to be on the ScobleShow? I’ll be hanging out in Half Moon Bay and have a few extra hours this week to do some interviews. Family is here, so it’s good to get out of the house.

Finally, in that picture above is Renee Blodgett, holding the camera. If you can identify all the other people in the picture you’ll be ready for some hallway networking at tech conferences in the future. Hint: a famous journalist/blogger, a wife of one of TechCrunch 40’s co-founders, and a famous lawblogger is there.

Part of the fun of the next two days will be seeing who’ll win the $50,000 at TechCrunch 40, which starts in a few hours here in San Francisco.

I’ve asked a few of my friends and the early hype goes to Cubic Telecom, a company from Ireland headed by Pat Phelan. Several of my friends say that they are the ones to watch — their demo is on Tuesday (makes international calling, and traveling with a cell phone overseas, better than before, my friends say). Formerly known as “Roam4free.”

The problem is no one who has seen all these companies’ new offerings is talking (the companies are under strict embargoes not to show anyone their stuff outside of NDA land), so we’ve gotta do some triangulation to figure out who’ll be the best (which also makes this, at best, an educated guess at what will win).

Why try to pick a winner before you know? Well, that gives you some context. You go check out the company that’s getting the early hype from your friends (they usually are right, by the way) then you compare everyone else to that company. If you find a company that’s better than that one you have a story.

So, how about it — which company is better than Cubic Telecom?

Oh, and I love that the early favorite doesn’t come from Silicon Valley. I bet if Cubic Telecom wins Ireland’s best tech blogger, Tom Raftery, will have a big party.

Allen Stern and Dave Winer noticed that my name is no longer on the list of judges for the TechCrunch 40 conference.

Allen guessed that was because of the impending birth of our son. Totally true. There’s no way I can make next week’s conference. I wish I could go. I’m missing several important conferences in the next month including this week’s Conversational Marketing event, Demo, and probably the Web 2.0 Summit.

Allen also noticed that Jason Calacanis was bragging that there’s big news coming from Arrington on Tuesday. I have a call into Arrington about that.