In most years, come rain or shine, executive pay at technology startups always goes up because the competition for talent is always so intense. In 2009, however, cash compensation for CEOs at private technology companies will be flat compared to last year, according to a new CompStudy by executive search firm J. Robert Scott and Ernst & Young. This will be the first time CEO pay at private tech companies won’t go up since the survey began ten years ago.

Even with flat paychecks, nobody will be shedding a tear for these CEOs. But it does show that nobody was immune to the recession.

The average cash compensation for private tech CEOs in 2009 is on target to be $231,000, versus $230,000 last year. The average bonus for 2008 (which is also normally part of 2009 compensation) was an additional $61,000, and was down 6 percent from the prior year. These numbers are based on a survey of about 500 tech companies, most of which have fewer than 75 employees.

The survey also looked at executive pay at 200 private biotech and life sciences firms. Life Sciences CEOs fared better, with a 3.2 percent increase in base pay to $273,000. Their average bonus for 2008, however, was smaller at $48,000, or 44 percent of their target compared to 77 percent of the target the year before.

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One of the long-standing problems with Flash games is that they often have a very short shelf life: you may play for a few minutes when you’re bored, but there’s nothing to really keep you coming back for more. Today Heyzap, the startup that offers a platform for monetizing and distributing Flash games, is looking to help developers with that problem by bringing the achievements system popularized by Xbox Live (and subsequently Playstation Network) to Flash games. The company is also allowing developers to integrate a virtual currency into their games that is based on a player’s achievements.

For those that haven’t played Xbox Live before, achievements are essentially arbitrary tasks created by the game developer (for example, beating the first level or creating a new character). Using Heyzap, developers can create these achievements and reward players with points that can be put towards buying in-game items.

Heyzap has offered support for virtual currencies before this, but up until now these have been based on real money — to earn points, you either had to buy them with your credit card or complete offers. Today’s launch introduces a second set of currency that lets developers reward players for playing their games a lot. In effect, it presents gamers with two routes to success: they can either play through the game the old fashioned way to unlock things at a fairly slow pace, or they can pay money to jump ahead. It’s the same mechanic that has made games like Farmville so successful.

For now, Heyzap will help developers syndicate a player’s achievements to Facebook and Twitter. In the near future it also plans to offer a profile that compiles all of a player’s achievements — even across multiple games — into one place.

Heyzap says it now powers 10 million game plays monthly across 100,000 websites.

If you want to see what the new Points and Achievements systems look like in action, you can see them in the game embedded below:

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The results are in: Bing, Yahoo, and Google have all released their top search trends for 2009. We’ve been following them over the last few days, and decided we’d put them side by side to see if any interesting patterns emerged. Note that Bing’s results are US only (and Yahoo’s exclude other English-speaking properties) so we’re including Google’s US results for the most apples-to-apples comparison.

Before we draw any conclusions, it’s important to note that the methods employed are neither consistent between search engines, nor are they scientific to begin with. Aside from the obvious removal of porn and other NSFW related queries, the search engines generally ignore items that are always popular in favor of more timely keywords. I’ve included the methods used by each company below, but the theme here is “really vague”.

It looks like Yahoo appeals to a mainstream, less tech-oriented audience. It may also be skewing younger than the other engines. Pop culture queries like Twilight and Britney Spears are dominant, with only two tech-related queries (RuneScape and Twitter). And Yahoo’s list stays consistent over the years: half of the queries (WWE, Britney Spears, Naruto, American Idol and RuneScape) made Yahoo’s top list last year. And most of those repeats were on 2007’s list.

Bing seemed to shy more towards current events, though these were influenced by celebrities as well. Four out of Bing’s top ten queries were related to celebrities who passed away during 2009. And “Swine Flu”, “Stock Market”, “Cash for Clunkers”, and kidnap victim “Jaycee Dugard” are all related to major news stories over the last year, some of which are still ongoing.

Google’s list has more of a tech slant, which appearances made by Hulu, Facebook, Twitter, and Hi5. Three of its top queries were related to celebrity deaths (Jackson, Natasha Richardson, and Farrah Fawcett). And three of the top trends are related to breakthrough artists and entertainment content: Glee, Lady Gaga, and horror film Paranormal Activity.

You can find more Google trends at its Zeitgeist site. Here’s how it compiled its results:

To compile the 2009 Year-End Zeitgeist, we studied the aggregation of billions of queries people typed into Google search this year. We use data from multiple sources, including Insights for Search, Google Trends and internal data tools. We also filter out spam and repeat queries to build out lists that best reflect “the spirit of the times.”

You can find more Yahoo trends here. Here’s how they gathered their data.

To develop the Yahoo! Year in Review, our editors analyze Search queries
based on a number of factors, including absolute volume and growth
versus previous periods, to see which themes and trends bubble to the
surface. Individual users and their Search queries always remain
anonymous.

Bing hasn’t revealed any more trends yet, but it gives this awesomely nebulous description of its methods:

“If you’re curious how we determined the top searches, we analyzed billions of search queries and developed the list based on searches made with Bing.”

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If you’re interested in finding hot news on the web it’s not too hard — provided the topic is technology. Twitter, Tweetmeme, Techmeme, Digg, and the like all offer up a mixture of what’s hot in technology with varying degrees of success. But for other topics, it’s not so easy. That’s why Topicfire was built.

Topicfire is what co-founder Ryan Sit calls a “realtime hot news aggregator.” It uses what the service dubs its “HeatRank” to rate any particular story on a 1 to 10 scale, with 10 representing the hottest stories. These stories are broken up into dozens of categories so users can drill down to find just what they want, and easily sort the stream to find just the hottest stories.

For example, Sit likes to read about coffee, but there was no good aggregator of that news on the web. With Topicfire, there is. There’s also a page for beer news. And bacon news. And of course, they also offer the bigger topics that are tradtionally aggregated, such as the aforementioned tech news, and celebrity news.

But what’s nice about Topicfire is that it’s very simple. The main page is a single stream of news that is updated in realtime as certain stories from thousands of sources around the web get hot. This hotness is determined not by links (part of what Techmeme uses) or votes (what Digg uses) or retweets (which Tweetmeme uses), but instead mostly by comments on the originating site itself.

Topicfire looks at every site they pull in content from and rates individual posts based on the comments they are getting in a set amount of time versus the average posts on that site. This creates the HeatRank. They are also looking at retweets as a backup, but as they note, those aren’t really a good indicator of popularity beyond tech news. The main page and each topic page has a slider along the top to allow users to easily filter which content they want to see on the 1 to 10 scale.

Perhaps even better is that Topicfire is great at highlighting popular stories by making their images dynamic. That is to say, if a story is really hot, it may have an image in the stream that is the full width of the stream. If it’s less popular, it may just have a thumbnail view. This is something which is an obvious but natural visiual cue to let a reader know that one story is more important that another one.

Another nice element of Topicfire is that it’s entirely built on top of Facebook Connect. This means there is no new service to sign up for, you simply log-in with your Facebook account and you’re done. If you comment on an item or like it, this all gets sent back to your Facebook profile. “We want to be the news for Facebook,” Sit says.

That said, Topicfire also easily allows yout to tweet out any story you find on the site as well with the click of a button.

So why use something like this over an RSS reader? Well that should be obvious. Most people still don’t get that concept, nor do they necessarily want to see every single story from every single source, there’s just not enough time to read that all. Topicfire takes the RSS feed for these thousands of sites and breaks it up into the hottest items. They use both rssCloud and Pubsubhubbub to pull in these feeds in realtime.

Unlike Techmeme, the only human curation done on Topicfire is the picking on sources and topics. Eventually, the team may crowdsource both of those as well. Google News is also all algorithm-based, but it’s often severly lacking when it comes to breaking news — which again, is the main focus of Topicfire.

Topicfire is launching its first iteration today. Down the road, they hope to add elements such as an iPhone app that would allow them to alert users when a new story they are interested in is breaking. They also plan to create a comprehensive search element, and open an API so others can pull in their data.

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