Piryx is payments for the social web, but with a host of intelligence and data mining features only available to huge companies and campaigns in the past. With roots in political fundraising, Piryx has a track record that's somewhat impressive, having recently rolled out a site to accept donations for Rep. Joe "You Lie!" Wilson, and claiming another 150 payment taking users nationwide.

The social media element comes to play as users track their incoming payments. By using custom generated urls, users can track where, who and why their customers and contributors took action and slapped down the credit card. Was it that Twitter retweet campaign, a sympathetic blogger or just another happy customer referral? Piryx helps you track the success of the efforts within your campaign.

Piryx is launching publicly with a better payments experience than the common payment sites, but they're looking to own much of the upstream marketing that funnels and fuels eventual payments, as well as providing backend analytics, compliance, and reporting functions which until now necessitated another piece of software and a larger commitment of effort. .

The fee structure of Piryx is higher than that of Paypal, but creating the same tracking and analytics with Paypal would cost far more in effort and time. At 4.5% for first $100k, and a sliding scale running down to 4% for intake of over $1 Million.

Of course, it's 2009 and "there's an app for that". Piryx's DEMOfall presentation includes a developer market, allowing third parties to build and market integration of Piryx with other services and tools. Currently available at launch are apps for Linked-In, SMS, Twitter, Facebook, with more to come.

Also launching with Piryx is a campaign for the Jon Bon Jovi Soul Foundation, raising money with the platform to combat homelessness and poverty in our nation's inner-cities.

Online dating is a somewhat static market. You have premium players Match.com and eHarmony, who seem to suggest at every commercial break that the person you've been looking for your whole life just signed up a few minutes ago. At the other end of the spectrum, there's Plenty of Fish which, although vastly improved from a few years ago, is still one of the least visually pleasing and user friendly sites on the web. PoF does ridiculous volume and traffic, is free, and doesn't do a stitch of marketing.

Enter new kid on the block, Ge.la.to. Launching today, Gelato takes online dating and mating to the social web. Incorporating your lifestream into the process of getting to know you, while paying a keen eye to keep privacy at a reasonable level.

For those of you lucky enough to still squeeze your boss for a travel budget in the tough economy, San Diego's weather for DEMOfall09 today will be a balmy 90 degrees with what Weather.com refers to as "Abundant Sunshine"

From where I sit, I'm only slightly more jealous of the weather than the lineup of presenters I'm going to miss in person.

I spent the better part of yesterday getting early previews of a whole slew of DEMOfall 09 companies. I thank whatever higher power you hold dear that not one single company I've talked to has made me wretch with the term "cloud computing."

So what's this year going to be about? Data. As we march forward into the third coming of a brave new data enabled world, squeezing every last drop of relevant info from everything becomes more crucial, less cumbersome and opens to a wider field of players.

Don't feel bad if you couldn't make the flight. Grab some popcorn, and a healthy dose of skepticism over the next big thing and tune into the live stream starting at 8:30 Pacific. And, for my take on some of the companies I checked out yesterday, keep watching the demofall09 tag on Download Squad!

Best of luck to everyone presenting. Now, bring on some new Internet hotness!