The week that took us from August to September was one for the books over at BoomTown, especially if you’re 12.

Kara spent Monday morning at Activision Blizzard (ATVI), where they are pushing forward with the entire Guitar Hero line, even as the game industry faces a nearly 50 percent decline in U.S. sales this year. Kara got to play hero to several of the forthcoming releases, including previewing the much anticipated DJ Hero console.

The youth movement continued with the fancy bar graph from Forrester Research’s annual “State of Consumers and Technology,” which drove home an important fact of life for media outlets. All the money being spent on new media expansion is a fight for the young; older consumers are sticking to more reliable fare.

BoomTown wasn’t just about the kids though, as 23andMe co-founder Linda Avey announced her exit from the gene-juicing business to focus on a foundation related to Alzheimer’s research. Avey co-founded 23andMe with Anne Wojcicki in 2006 with early money from Genentech (DNA), Google (GOOG) and New Enterprise Associates, as well as Wojcicki’s husband, Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

While BoomTown was keepin’ it real with the kids, Digital Daily was abuzz with a spate of iPhone news. John started Monday off on the topic of the Sept. 9 iPod event with confirmation that music, indeed, will be center stage. In the Apple world, that means iPods and iTunes, though Beatles fans are keeping their fingers crossed.

Readers got a compare-and-contrast of Apple’s (AAPL) foreign and domestic policy when John covered a potential two-carrier system in China and the long-awaited stateside activation of MMS features in the iPhone OS3. Meaning that while China may get the iPhone carrier flexibility so far absent in the U.S. market, American consumers are just about to get a new feature that’s been standard on every smartphone for a year or more.

MediaMemo covered a fluid week in the world of media giants and Top Chefs. Disney (DIS) went off to the mines and instead of seven dwarfs, found Marvel and the rights to its 5,000-character portfolio. Disney CEO Bob Iger didn’t think $4 billion was too much to pay to bring Iron Man and friends to the happiest media empire on earth and is sure the company will benefit from such “rich intellectual property.”

If the Disney vault got 5,000 new friends this week, eBay said goodbye to one long-time partner. Peter reported that the long, difficult breakup between eBay and Skype was finalized when eBay sold a 65 percent stake in the VOIP juggernaut to the internationally mixed bag of Silver Lake, Index ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and a Canadian pension fund.

Peter rounded out the week of motion with lots of changes in Google’s ranks. The search giant shuffled the chairs with David Fischer moving out of the self-serve ad business with no sign yet of a replacement. Google China saw the big chair turn upside-down when Kai-Fu Lee announced that he’d leave the company this month to begin his own venture. Lee will be replaced by the tag team of Boon-Lock Yeo and John Liu, who will oversee engineering and business, respectively.

Not all Google’s shifts were outbound though. “Charlie’s Café” at the main campus got its Top Chef back after Preeti Mistry failed to make the cut on the Las Vegas iteration of the popular TV show. Regular fans of the show weren’t surprised by her dismissal, but at least Google can put one in the plus column this week.

Over at The Mossberg Solution, Katie took aim at a possible answer to a question plaguing all image-conscious technophiles: Yea or nay to the omnipresent Bluetooth earpiece. Plantronics (PLT) and Aliph, maker of the Jawbone, both say yea and are upping the ante on the recently reviled symbol of cellphone userdom. Katie reviewed the fashion-forward Discovery 975 and Jawbone Prime, each designed to separate its users from $130. In exchange, they’ll get redesigned outsides and some new features that might even put one back in Brad Pitt’s ear.

There is no gene for the human spirit.

Only one criterion : genetic perfection.”

–Taglines from the film “Gattaca”

The Genetic Nondiscrimination Act of 2007, which would prevent health insurers and employers from using genetic information in decisions of employment or insurability, will soon be signed into law. And, given recent advances in retail genetics it really couldn’t happen at a better time.

This morning the Google-funded 23andMe opened its doors for business, and began peddling its Personal Genome Service. What, exactly is a “Personal Genome Service?” Kara Swisher explains:

For [$999], a person spits out a largish saliva sample using an at-home kit, sends it in for intense analysis and then uses the site’s interactive tools to go to town with the scads of the DNA information.

“That could mean everything from analyzing personal ancestry and genealogy to determining inherited traits to finding out way too much about proclivities for a range of scary diseases.”

So what’s the founder of the Institute for Genomic Research doing at a Web 2.0 conference? Shilling for his new book, “A Life Decoded” (Viking), which arrives at market today, and chatting about the implications of DNA sequencing on medicine.

Venter, widely known for his work on the Human Genome Project as the former president and founder of Celera Genomics, takes the stage with conference co-host Tim O’Reilly (founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media).

O’Reilly opens with a question about the relevance of knowing your genome. Venter replies that it affects your attitude toward risk. Without knowing your entire genetic code, he explains, you can’t know what’s at risk. Venter, who famously sequenced his own DNA as part of his research, says the costs of sequencing DNA are dropping–his cost around $70 million, but with refinements in the process he expects that in a couple of years, the cost per sequence should go down to $100,000 or less. It won’t be long before it will become part of a standard medical work-up. And when it does, it will change the medical world. Genetic medicine is truly preventative, he says: “We like to pay for disasters, but we don’t like to pay to prevent them.” Venter cautions, however, that the nonscientific public may be challenged in interpreting all the new information.

On the subject of customized genome sequences, Venter says that companies like 23andMe that are commercializing genome sequencing need to be taken seriously. But this “revolution” should be approached with caution. At first, it was believed that we all had the same genes with minor variations, “but now we know it’s much more complex. Some companies are using just a fraction of the code, and that could be misleading.”

What about the obvious next step, taking the genome from read to read/write? “I’ve been trying to digitize biology for the past 15 years now. With synthetic biology, we can remake the analog genetic code in the form of DNA. … We are learning how to design life. We’re currently weeks to months away from being able to synthesize bacteria.”

Synthesizing bacteria? To what end? To change “everything,” says Venter. Replace the fossil fuels on which we currently rely, for example. “We now have biological fuel cells driven by bacteria that can take human wastewater and make electricity or clean water out of it. Each home can generate its own fuel in the future.”

But as for bio-engineered fuels, he says that ethanol is not the one you’d develop if you were looking to design a fuel from scratch.

(To read more on Venter’s conversation, see the blogs by Eric Savitz of Tech Trader Daily and Bobbie Johnson.)

What is surprising is 23andMe’s pedigree. It was established by Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s wife, Ann Wojcicki. More surprising still, $2.6 million of Google’s investment in 23andMe is essentially a repayment of a loan Brin made to the company as part of some interim debt financing.

Now, clearly this investment makes sense for Google, and Brin did recuse himself from all discussions of it. That said, friends-and-family transactions like these almost always spark charges of nepotism. Not a good thing for a closely scrutinized public company, especially one with an “evil scale.”