Kara came out swinging this week over Meg Whitman’s insistence that the Skype acquisition by eBay should be put in her “win” column. Whitman, former CEO of eBay (EBAY), is running for governor of California, and Kara had her spin detector set to maximum. Speaking of dystopia, Kara covered the release of Ken Auletta’s new book, “Googled: The End of the World as We Know It.” Auletta posits that Google (GOOG) is more Spock than Kirk and lacks important emotional intelligence. He made similar accusations about another subject of his recent works: Microsoft (MSFT). Insert sarcastic gasp here. Kara rounded out the week with a flight aboard the airship “Broadband,” aka Virgin America. It seems as though Facebook is everywhere these days, and on this day in particular, Facebook was just a few rows behind her in the person of a PR guy from the company. The moral is that maybe the greatest thing about that speedy in-flight Internet is farming out the awkward seatmate talk to your email inbox. Kara did get an invitation to Facebook’s Washington, D.C., offices out of the deal.

Digital Daily opened the week with an invasion of droids. No, John wasn’t stuck in front of an Xbox playing Terminator; he was covering the release of the first 100,000 units of Motorola’s (MOT) newest iPhone competitor. John also covered Apple’s (AAPL) opening of a “significant store” in New York this week, which may shed light on the company’s future retail strategy. John sees potential for the newest store to serve as jai-alai palace, should the whole iPhone thing not work out. And just in case Kara’s story about Google’s lack of feeling wasn’t frightening enough, John brought us a look into the search giant’s designs on the software space occupied by Microsoft Office. While Google claims to have no plans for domination of office productivity, it sure seems like it would like to paint the whole cloud Chrome.

Peter gave us the cold hard facts about the projected costs of the coming AOL spinoff, as he began the week in somber tone. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, AOL estimates losses will run to nearly $200 million and end employment for up to 1,000 people. Nothing gets Peter up from that kind of low quite like a good session with “The Office,” and this week’s episode was just too good to pass up. The team at Dunder Mifflin did a little Wall Street Journal paywall pole-vault right on screen. Commentary on recent “Murdochian” events or not, Peter thinks it’s just good TV. MediaMemo covered the pending AOL spinoff from the other end this week and addressed the biggest problem in the room head on: AOL is going to enter a space it hasn’t filled since the days when the sound of “you’ve got mail” meant you were high tech. Google runs the yard now, which will make it harder for AOL’s old dog to play with the comparatively young pups.

Most people think bigger is better, but in the strange world of tech columnists, small reigns supreme. Walt’s Personal Technology column this week covered three new laptops with some very sleek features to please the holiday consumer. New offerings from Toshiba, HP (HPQ) and Lenovo came under the Mossberg microscope, and all were pronounced impressive, if a bit pricy. Walt’s semifavorite is the Lenovo, but his preference for the slim, light design admittedly came at the heavy expense of limited battery life. The trip to Mossberg’s Mailbox this week yielded answers on pressing questions from potential Motorola Droid owners, a person hoping to make the move from a Palm (PALM) PDA to an iPhone, and from an older computer user thinking about making the switch to Apple’s new bigger-screened iMac. Over at The Mossberg Solution, Katie reviewed the new BlackBerry Bold from Research in Motion (RIM), which seemed to have 10 percent more features and a similar reduction in size. The newest model wasn’t quite as Bold as its predecessors, Katie found. Many features originally reserved for this higher-end model have been passed down to the rest of the product range. Her advice: have a look at the Tour or Curve 8900 before going Bold.

Tune in next week to get the 30,000-foot view on the wide world of tech from the road-ready AllThingsD team. Let’s hope we can get Wi-Fi on that flight too.

“EA is performing well, with quality, sales and segment share up so far this year,” EA CEO John Riccitiello said in a statement. “We are making tough calls to cut costs in targeted areas and investing more in our biggest games and digital businesses.”

Under terms of the deal, EA (ERTS) will initially pay $300 million for the developer of such social games as Pet Society, Who Has the Biggest Brain and Restaurant City, including a $25 million retention agreement with Playfish employees. It will subsequently pay $100 million more if the company meets undisclosed profit targets.

By acquiring Playfish, EA is not only validating the social gaming market, but perhaps setting the valuation benchmark for Mafia Wars creators Zynga, which is expected to go public next year. It also tempers–to some extent, anyway–concerns that the lead-generation scam controversy that recently blew up around Zynga and Playfish might harm their perceived value in the market.

“This deal came about very quickly, but let me say that Playfish was never ‘up for sale’,” de Halleux told PaidContent. “We were focused on building our business, because we believed—and still do—that the game industry is changing. EA approached, and we realized that we could be in a better position to act as an agent of change, through them. We could build games and attract users on our own, but this deal accelerates that to a degree that wouldn’t have been possible.”

“Social gaming, with its emphasis on friends and community, is seeing tremendous growth and this is the right time to invest to strengthen our participation in this space,” said Barry Cottle, senior vice president and general manager of EA Interactive. “With the addition of proven expertise from Playfish, their broad consumer base and strong game brands, we’re moving ahead aggressively in our plans to lead in the category of cross-platform social entertainment.”

If there was ever a doubt that social networks might be a viable gaming platform, this acquisition pretty much obliterates it.

As Google’s Maureen Heymans puts it, “Your friends and contacts are a key part of your life online. Most people on the web today make social connections and publish web content in many different ways, including blogs, status updates and tweets. This translates to a public social web of content that has special relevance to each person.”

So, for example, a search for a nearby restaurant would return not only the standard list of official Web sites and mainstream media reviews, but also informal comments made by friends on the Web.

It’s an interesting idea–using the blogs, status updates and tweets from trusted users to refine our searches and make them more personally relevant to us.

That said, there’s a fine line to be tread here between sharing information within a social network and protecting privacy. Of course, as Google (GOOG) notes, the information that it’s indexing is already published publicly on the Web and you need to be signed in to a Google account to access it. So presumably, information that isn’t public won’t show up in social search. Says Google: “What we’ve done is surface that content together in one single place to make your results more relevant.”

How nonexclusive is Microsoft’s deal with Twitter?

So nonexclusive that just hours after Microsoft (MSFT) announced it, rival Google (GOOG) lurched forward to say that it has entered into a similar partnership with the San Francisco-based microblogging service.

The search giant may be second to this party, but it’s not going to be late. But make no mistake–this is very clearly a rush job.

Some proof? Microsoft has code running. Google does not.

Twitter and Google announced the deal in posts to their respective company blogs.

“Our friends down in Mountain View want to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” Twitter co-founder Evan Williams wrote. “A fast growing amount of information is coursing through Twitter very quickly, and we want there to be many ways to access that information. As part of that effort, we’ve partnered with Google to index the entire world of public tweets as fast as possible and present them to their users in an organized and relevant fashion.”

Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search, was similarly enthusiastic about the deal.

“We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months,” Mayer wrote. “That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.”

Once Google gets around to indexing Twitter’s real-time data.

T-Mobile USA has priced the handset at $199 with a two-year contract, which seems a bit dear considering you can get a 16GB iPhone 3GS for the same price. Given $200 to spend and the choice between Motorola’s first-ever Android device and the first iteration of its Motoblur social networking service or Apple’s (AAPL) third-generation iPhone and second-generation mobile OS and App Store, what would you opt for?

How might your choice change if the Cliq were priced at $150?

[Image credit: LeakDroid]

Geekfighting may never become its own UFC event, but following tech news this week seemed, in places, like a view to a big, well-funded cage match. Things got so rowdy that Kara Swisher could hear them all the way across “The Pond.”

Before heading off on her tour of Euro-BoomTown this week, Kara set off for Carlsbad, Calif. to visit with Warren Buffet and the ladies of Fortune. Après Buffet, readers were treated to an exclusive interview, Kara-style, with Loïc Le Meur, Seesmic founder and namesake of the Web’s cutest logo. Kara wasn’t just visiting Europe for some cute overload, though. She wired back a report on the Oxford Social Media Convention, where she spoke on social media’s effect on business. Kara rounded out her week with rowdiness and the legal tantrums of Skype founders Zennström and Friis.

Closer to home, Digital Daily covered the media battle between Apple (AAPL) and Google (GOOG), which recalls a shoving match between the prom king and the captain of the football team. Apple continued to insist that it was still “studying” the proposed Google Voice app for iPhone, while Google insisted that it had already been rejected. It’s tough being the popular kids.

Between the smartphone scuffles, Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein was urging everyone to play nice, even as Palm still may have to fight for survival.

The Silicon Valley malevolence even spread to Gotham early in the week. MediaMemo got the backstory on how the New York Times was hacked into spreading malware to its Web visitors. The explanation: It sold an ad to hackers, who posed as mild-mannered VOIP client Vonage (VG) to make the purchase. Meanwhile in a related–or not–story, Microsoft is seeking and suing some mystery malvertisers who perpetrated a similar scheme with ads sold by the software giant. Whether it is a growing trend or a few overachieving hackers, it was a tough week in ad land.

Amid all the kneecapping and eye-gouging, all things Mossberg was a helpful calm in the storm. Walt liked the new features in iTunes 9 and found it uncluttered, easier to use and more intelligent than its predecessor. Also among the hits were upgraded management and improved content-sharing.

Mossberg’s Mailbox was stuffed full of sage advice about online backup as the kids go of to college, compression and the vinyl vs. digital dilemma, and some on-target advice for the family genealogist making the switch from PC to Mac.

The Mossberg Solution delved deeper into email mastery with some unmissable tips and tricks for Microsoft Outlook users. Katie made an industry standard better, and even gave readers a peek into some coming attractions for Outlook 2010.

Tune in next week. We’ll keep bringing you the blow by blow ’til the final bell.

Quite a coup for HP. Andreesen–who co-authored Mosaic, the browser that popularized the World Wide Web–is an icon in Silicon Valley and his expertise is highly sought. In addition to helming his new venture capital firm, Andreessen-Horowitz, Andreesen also serves as chairman of social networking outfit Ning and sits on the boards of eBay (EBAY) and Facebook. HP (HPQ) is lucky to get him, if only because it seems unfathomable that he’d have the time or bandwidth for anything else.

“Marc Andreessen is a software pioneer whose leadership has helped shape the Internet,” an ebullient HP CEO Mark Hurd said in a statement. “Marc’s entrepreneurial background and industry expertise will be a welcome addition to the HP board of directors.”

“As of today, Facebook now serves 300 million people across the world,” founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in one of his typically somnolent blog posts. “It’s a large number, but the way we think about this is that we’re just getting started on our goal of connecting everyone. We’re also succeeding at building Facebook in a sustainable way. Earlier this year, we said we expected to be cash flow positive sometime in 2010, and I’m pleased to share that we achieved this milestone last quarter. This is important to us because it sets Facebook up to be a strong independent service for the long term.”

This is important to us because it sets Facebook up to be a strong independent service for the long term.

Interesting remark. It would seem then that Facebook has no interest whatsoever in selling itself off to Google (GOOG) or anyone else. It would much rather go public.

UPDATE: A couple of quick points courtesy Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg: Growth is apparently widespread, and while it’s true that 70 percent of Facebook’s user base is now outside the U.S., growth in the U.S. is not slowing.

[Image credit: San Francisco skyline by m.john16/Flickr]

BoomTown was abuzz with Pixis, Plums and power this week as Kara focused on tech that wasn’t Apple, and reminded us that lady geeks hold the power in Silicon Valley.

While Apple was gathering clouds for its Rock and Roll storm, Palm (PALM) released the teeny Pixi, designed, Palm hopes, to steal some of that Apple (AAPL) thunder. The Pixi smart phone, while smaller and thinner, reported Kara, has fewer features and less power than the already available Pre.

Small can be good in the world of tech, and BoomTown reported that a certain Nordic tech behemoth thinks so too. Nokia (NOK) announced that it had acquired “microsocial networking” start-up Plum, whose signature offering allows users to build smaller, more intimate electronic social networks.

Kara did it “like a boss” this week and highlighted the tech sector mavens from Fortune magazine’s annual list of most powerful women. Ursula Burns of Xerox (XRX), IBM-er (IBM) Ginni Rometty and Oracle (ORCL) President Safra Catz were among those at the top. BoomTown will be at the upcoming conference associated with the Fortune list, so look for Kara’s Flip video interviews with these Titanias of tech.

It was nice of Apple to release new iPods just in time for John’s birthday this week, and Digital Daily returned the favor with high-bandwidth, hard-rockin’ coverage of Apple’s music-themed event, complete with live photos and blogging. John liked the video feature of the new iPod nano, but focused on the biggest news of the week–Apple’s upgraded CEO.

Digital Daily’s Apple coverage didn’t stop at The Steve. Ever since announcement of the exclusive Apple-AT&T (T) partnership, current and would-be iPhone freaks have speculated as to what kind of deal will be struck when that contract expires. John reported that iSuppli prognosticators think the agreement may be extended when it runs out in 2010.

John closed out the week with Twitter leaks about the newest incarnation of Microsoft’s (MSFT) Google-toppler (GOOG), Bing. Microsoft showcased Bing 2.0 at the annual company meeting, which some employees took as a green light to tweet away about the unreleased product. Microsoft HQ was more tight-lipped, telling John only that the rollout would happen over the next few months.

MediaMemo followed the money this week–specifically advertising dollars. A year after the Lehman collapse, Peter cited a MediaPost survey that showed some growth in ad spending. In a down market, Peter reminded, sometimes the only place to go, is up. Let’s hope so.

Not to be left out of Apple’s party, MediaMemo covered the release of an iPhone app from RealNetworks (RNWK) that brings all-you-can-eat music for a monthly fee. Wall Street barely blinked at the deal, but changes may come if the service catches on as competitor Spotify has in Europe.

And while the NFL won’t let players tweet from the end zone, it is upping its tech quotient by bringing blacked-out games to your Internet browser. MediaMemo reported that the lower-attendance games would be available to tech-savvy sports nuts–after midnight on game day. Get out the Fritos and espresso, guys, its game time.

True to form as the Lincoln of our very own Mt. Techmore, Walt’s address this week was aimed at helping the wayward get back on track with a bevy of new iPhone navigation apps. This new breed of high dollar apps harnesses the power of the iPhone 3GS to replace those ever present dash top GPS navigation units.

Walt extended his techno-presidential benevolence with another installment of Mossberg’s Mailbox. Networked storage, Quicken for Mac and the ominously impending switch to Windows 7 were all up for discussion.

At the Mossberg Solution, Katie tested Postbox, software designed to bring novel management solutions to your inbox. Developed by some of the guys from Mozilla, Postbox does offer lots of great features, Katie said, even if the switch to the new tools might not be easy for all.

Lots more shiny new tech talk next week. Stay tuned.

Clearly, there’s quite a bit of enthusiasm around the device and its Motoblur feature, which connects a variety of social networking services to the phone’s core functions.

Said Mark Sue, an analyst at RBC Capital: “Our initial take is favorable, and it seems that Motorola is carving out a niche in the crowded smartphone market by focusing on socially minded demographics as opposed to enterprise users or pro-sumers. We think it’s a step in the right direction.”

C.L. King analyst Lawrence Harris was similarly impressed. “Our initial impression of the CLIQ is that it is not an iPhone killer, but that it will be a contender,” he said in a research note issued today. “…Initial reviews suggest that the CLIQ’s build quality is excellent with a solid keyboard, two important selling points.”

And Tavis McCourt at Morgan Keegan said the CLIQ is a credible device–assuming Motorola (MOT) can sell enough of them. “MOTOBLUR clearly differentiates a Motorola Android-based smartphone from others on the market and provides Motorola a fighting chance at successfully turning around Mobile Devices with Android-based devices,” he noted today.

“The CLIQ appears to be a solid touch screen smartphone,” McCourt added, “but we will defer from offering a more confident opinion until we get a chance to test one and note that we expect the upcoming Motorola Android-based device for Verizon Wireless may be somewhat more impressive. We believe Motorola ultimately needs to sell about 2 million smartphones/quarter in order to become sustainably profitable in its Mobile Devices business.”

McCourt’s conclusion: “Given Motorola’s global distribution, this does not require a ‘home run’ product, but only a series of ‘solid’ products. The CLIQ appears to be a good first step in this turnaround.”

Now, in the run-up to tomorrow’s invitation-only Apple event, the question is: Will Apple (AAPL) reach the bar? And with what? The answer, if the latest rumors prove true, depends on your feelings about iPods with cameras. Because according to reports, when Apple refreshes its iPod touch and iPod nano players, both will feature cameras–the nano’s for still images, the touch’s for photos and video.

We may also see a new price point for entry-level touch models, one intended to undermine Microsoft’s (MSFT) forthcoming multitouch Zune with HD display and to really juice App Store sales. Perhaps the 16GB touch at $199 and the 8GB at $150.

Beyond this, the event might also include the announcement of iTunes 9, said to include some sort of social networking element; “Cocktail,” a new music format that bundles full-length albums with art, video and other bells and whistles; and perhaps even Blu-ray support (no Beatles, though). And after that? Well, it’s tough to say. Apple’s never an easy read when it comes to product announcements, even when there’s evidence floating around that would seem to suggest otherwise.

So join us tomorrow for live coverage of Apple’s event to see if the above rumors prove true or if Apple’s got something else entirely up its sleeve. The event kicks off at 10 am PDT.