We heard earlier that AT&T was making calls to Japan free until between March 11 and March 31, in the wake of the devasting earthquake and tsunami in the region. Verizon is also joining in this effort and will be making calls to Japan free for most wireless and residential customers through April 10.

According to the release, all Verizon Wireless post-paid customers will receive free calling to Japan from March 11 through April 10 and will receive free text and multimedia messaging to Japan for the same time period. And Verizon Prepaid Phone Card charges for all long-distance calls placed to Japan from the United States will also be waived from March 11 until April 10. Verizon will also be providing FiOS TV customers who are not subscribed to the channel free access to TV Japan through March 17.

Like many of the carriers, Verizon also waived text message fees for text donations to non-profit organizations raising money for the earthquake and tsunami. Customers can easily make a $10 donation by simply sending a text message and may choose from 10 organizations aiding those in need in Japan.

Who do you trust most when it comes to recommendations: an algorithm or your friends? Or perhaps a mixture of machine learning and your social graph. That's something that a lot of startups are trying to figure out right now. LoveThis.com, which launches out of Beta today, is firmly in the social camp with its 'black book' of your friends' recommendations, from websites and apps, places to eat and go, or something more practical like a good plumber. That may sound like a very general list of recommendations but the site's premise is that your friends not only know best but also vouch for products and services all of the time, just not necessarily when you actually need those recommendations. LoveThis attempts to solve this problem of recall by encouraging users to store this info as structured and searchable data for later use.

RedLaser, the barcode scanning mobile app that eBay acquired from Occipital in June 2010, is nearing a significant milestone—nine million total downloads of its iPhone and Android apps. That’s up from 2 million downloads at the time of the acquisitions, which is nearly a 350% increase in downloads.

RedLaser’s barcode scanning technology allows users to comparison shop on the go. Anyone can scan a barcode on an item at a store and then automatically access any eBay listings and local availability (courtesy of Milo) of the product on the marketplace. Sellers can also use the scanning technology to scan and item and list the product in very little time. RedLaser’s technology was also integrated into eBay’s dedicated iPhone and Android apps.

eBay also added QR Code scanning to RedLaser last Fall, and the apps are currently seeing 4,000 Quick Response code scans per day.

eBay says that more than half of RedLaser scans are in the U.S., followed by the U.K. at 20 percent. And the top five U.S. regions using RedLaser are New York City, New Jersey, Los Angeles, San Francisco Bay Area and Houston.

Additionally, RedLaser licenses its barcode scanning technology, and eBay is reporting that RedLaser licensees has doubled to 150 since June 2010 and includes Coupons.com, The Knot and Shopkick.

For eBay, mobile has been a huge strategy and the company is revealing that all of its family of apps (including eBay, RedLaser, Half.com and more) have seen more than 33 million combined app downloads.

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Mobile media company Neomobile has acquired Onebip, a company that provides mobile payment solutions to online game publishers, social networks and ecommerce companies. The Italian group says the acquisition of Onebip will enhance its offering to international merchants, particularly coupled with its strong mobile carrier relationships throughout Europe and Latin America. Financial details on the transaction were not disclosed but we've learned Onebip's co-founders, Diego Mortillaro and Marko Maras, will remain on board.

Betting on sports is one of the most popular forms of gambling in the world. And for good reason. Unlike more traditional gambling, people often have feelings about the teams and stars they’re betting on. Both the money-making and the fan aspect are also what help drive fantasy sports. And StarStreet thinks they can tap into what people like about both with a different approach.

But don’t call it “betting”, founder Jeremy Levine is quick to note. These are “investments”, not “bets”.

One of last year’s TechStars graduates, we first noted StarStreet last June. What they’ve built is a stock market system for sports that uses real money. The first market was for the NFL, but it temporarily closes down when that season is over. So now they offer a NBA market. And beginning today they’re offering a MLB Market and a NCAA March Madness Market.

Oh, and StarStreet is getting some money of their own to help pay for the new features.

SV Angel and Jarr Capital have led a seed round of funding for the company, with angels Don McLagan, Andrew Blachman, Ben Littauer participating. It’s probably an easy investment — not bet — for these guys to make since StarStreet has a clear road to start making money. They take a 4 percent cut on the sale side of every trade (but there are no fees to buy, and no fees for depositing and withdrawing money from the system).

Others have tried this sports stock market idea before and it hasn’t worked. Notably, OneSeason lasted for, well, one season. But StarStreet believes their model will actually work because it’s a zero-sum market. With StarStreet, the total value of each sports’ market is constrained from the time of players’ “IPOs” until their “retirements” at the end of the season. (And IPO's occur as a blind yankee auction, so everyone has a shot at getting a piece.)

In terms of legality, again, StarStreet is about investing and not gambling. “It is a game of skill (not chance) that does not depend on a single end outcome or result (like a bet does),” Levine says, noting that they’ve had plenty of lawyers vet the idea.

In fact, the non-gambling issue is why StarStreet’s NCAA market will only be for play money, and not real money. First of all, they can’t use the names of amateur athletes because unlike professional athletes, their names are not in the public domain. So that means you have to invest in teams, but because of the way the tournament works, some teams get eliminated before others and the money invested in them returns to the pool — that gets a little too close to gambling, Levine says.

Levine won’t say how much money they’re bringing in from the NBA market yet (the initial NFL market was done without their fee to test things out). He will say that engagement numbers are high though. “About 25 percent of the traders are active every single day, over 50 percent almost every single week since we launched real money,” Levine says.

Travel search engine Kayak is making an interesting move today. The site is now allowing users to make hotel bookings directly through the company's website. Kayak is partnering with Travelocity to power the hotel booking feature.

So previously, if you wanted to book a hotel using Kayak’s search engine, you would click through to the hotel or partner site to book the reservation. Kayak would receive a affiliate fee from the transaction but the actual booking would be made outside of the search engine.

Now, you can make the reservation within the Kayak platform, similar to the experience of making a hotel booking through Expedia (although you’ll still be able to book via the hotel or other sites as well). Travelocity will process the transactions and provide customer service on a white label basis. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The feature was previously released in a limited beta and will be available on its website and iPhone application in the coming weeks.

Of course, Kayak will now compete with Expedia, Orbitz and others for travel booking. Also, it doesn’t appear that Kayak will be extending the same functionality for airline bookings for now.

It’s a strategic move on Kayak’s part, and represents the company’s move beyond just being a search engine to becoming a full-fledged bookings site. As the company prepares for a public offering, Kayak is looking to create more lasting revenue and bookings within the site could bring the company more direct sales. Kayak also recently struck a deal with Microsoft Bing, to integrate its travel search results into the search engine.

Today, the United States Marine Corps completed its largest solar installation to date — a 1.4 megawatt ground-mounted system — that will generate electricity for Base Camp Pendleton outside of San Diego, Calif. The system was installed atop an inactive landfill.

According to a press statement from the Naval Facilities Engineering Command (NAVFAC) Southwest: the installation should produce about 2,400 megawatt-hours (MWh) annually, or enough electricity to power 400 average U.S. homes.

The $9.4 million project is expected to save the Marine Corps at least $336,000 yearly in electricity costs, while tripling its previous solar energy capacity.

A Japanese company with significant operations in San Diego, Kyocera Solar, Inc. produced and supplied the photovoltaic modules for the system, domestically. Kyocera reported that 6,300 of its KD235 variety solar modules were used in the project, within some 225 panels.

San Diego-based integrator Synergy Electric Company installed the system in partnership with AEE Solar, a wholesale distributor of solar equipment and services. AECOM, an engineering and design firm, provided system designs.

According to 2010 research by Pew Environment Group, the U.S. Department of Defense has “set a goal of producing or procuring 25 percent of its electric energy needs from renewable sources by 2025… [and] incurs more than $1.3 billion in additional energy costs for every $10 increase per barrel rise in the world market price of oil.”

Intel, through stand-alone subsidiary Intel Mobile Communications, today announced that it has acquired most of the assets of SySDSoft, a Cairo, Egypt-based software company to accelerate its 4G LTE efforts. The privately-held company develops embedded wireless systems. Intel says it will hire roughly 100 of SySDSoft's electrical engineers and computer scientists.

It’s no secret that we’re big fans of Animoto, a website that lets you easily create photo and video slideshows matched to music. The startup basically allows you to take your images, video and your music and mash them together to create cool videos. Not only is the platform easy to use, but it also renders the pictures so they’re in-step with the music you’ve chosen, adding nice transition effects. Today, the company is expanding its ecosystem with a new partner platform that allows third-party developers to embed Animoto’s video slideshow creation tool on their sites.

As we wrote a year ago, Animoto previously opened up its API with Animoto Quickstart, which allows websites to connect their own content, including photos, video clips and music to Animoto as the first step in creating an Animoto video. But with this functionality, users on partner sites still have to click to Animoto to actually create and edit the slideshow.

With the new Partner Platform, developers can actually customize the video creation service into their environments, allowing users to create and develop video slideshows, start to finish, within third-party sites.

Already, Kodak Gallery, AG Interactive Inc. and Aviary.com have signed on as partners to benefit from the Animoto platform. Kodak’s Photo Moments service is weaving Animoto into their user experience so that its users can make a slideshow from their Kodak Moments photos in their Kodak Gallery. Kodak is actually charging users for the service and will share revenue with Animoto. Similarly, AG Interactive’s property Webshots.com is rolling out an Animoto-powered Premium Subscription.

Partners also pay for use of the API, so not only is the Partner Platform expanding Animoto’s ecosystem, but it also creating a new revenue stream for the startup. Animoto’s CEO and co-founder Brad Jefferson tells us that the company is cash-flow positive and just passed 2.5 million users. And he says that in the future, it’s likely that the majority of Animoto’s revenue will come from partners as opposed to subscriptions and plans to announce more partners in the new platform soon.

SuccessFactors has acquired Jambok, a SaaS social learning company founded by former Sun Chief Learning Officer Karie Willyerd and former Sun Chief Technology officer Charles Beckham. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Jambok’s SaaS enables companies and communities to share knowledge in the the cloud. Ideal for the "informal learning" (everything that's not official training) part of corporate communications, the Jambok platform allows you to post video, audio, photos, as well as screen capture your desktop in order to share knowledge within your organization. Users can also rate, tag, and comment on content on both the web app and via mobile apps.

SuccessFactors plans to integrate Jambok’s social video creation and sharing tools into its social collaboration offering as well as other areas of the Business Execution (BizX) Suite, including social recruiting.

This is SuccessFactors’ fourth acquisition in a year. The cloud software giant bought social enterprise software company CubeTree for $50 million, Inform for $40 million, and cloud-based analytics platform YouCalc for an undisclosed amount.

Three short years ago, almost to the day, I arrived in San Francisco and instantly fell in love.

As a former technology columnist for the Guardian (and, unbeknownst to me, about to become one again), I had more than a passing familiarity with the goings on in Silicon Valley. But unlike most tech writers, I'd never had more than a fleeting desire to actually come here.

London was my town – profane, drunken, debauched, wonderful London. Sure, our tech startups might never amount to shit on the Valley's shoe, but by God we knew how to party. And I loved it; literally writing the book on the capital's entrepreneurs and the fun we all had during the first three-quarter decade of the 2000s.

Fittingly, given what I'm going to say in a few lines' time, it took a chance encounter at South By Southwest to change my mind. A pretty, enthusiastic girl called Eris who jumped on my shoulders at a party, under the misapprehension that we'd met once before.

"How are you?" she yelled into my ear.

"Uh… who are you?" I replied.

"We met in San Francisco" she insisted.

"Seems unlikely," I said, "I've never been."

"Oh my God, you have to visit after South By Southwest, you'll love it"

And so I did, and so I did. Within months my British cynicism faded, my short-lived gig at the Guardian became a long-lived one at TechCrunch, I settled into a social scene – first a hectic one, then a more grown-up one, I (finally) quit drinking, I shed 42 pounds (the "quit drinking, start walking up hills" diet) and generally made myself at home in the skin of an adopted Northern Californian. Today I wish the bag-packers at Whole Foods a nice day as sincerely as if I truly gave a fuck. Hell, perhaps I do give a fuck. They all seem so nice.

And yet for all that I've loved my time here, I can't help but wonder if I'd make the same decision today.

Let's start with South By Southwest: otherwise known as spring break for Valley fanboys. Just three years ago, it seemed like a conference packed with potential: Twitter had just reached its early adopter tipping point, Foursquare was barely a gleam in Dennis Crowley's eye (he was too busy celebrating his recent sale of Dodgeball to Google) and a business reporter called Sarah Lacy was interviewing Mark Zuckerberg in front of a crowd of screaming Facebook fanboys for whom their idol could do no wrong.

Today Foursquare is the new Twitter, Twitter is the new Facebook and many of those same fans who cheered on Zuckerberg now vilify him for failing to safeguard their privacy. Sarah is now Senior Editor at TechCrunch who spends the bulk of her time reporting on entrepreneurs outside the Valley. Zuck is old news — Rwanda, China, India and Brazil are where the real action is.

For all those reasons, I'm not sure SXSW would have the same draw for me today. It seems like a sad anachronism: a gathering for those who care less about world-changing products and services, and more about the latest fucking location fucking based fucking mobile fucking app. It's also way outgrown its venue: it's nigh-on impossible to get a hotel room in Austin this week, and the flights to and from the city are all booked up. For all of those reasons, many serious entrepreneurs and reporters are staying away.

But even if I did end up in Austin today, and even had I had a chance encounter that inspired to travel to San Francisco, I'm certainly not sure I'd fall so instantly under the city's thrall. Because, as with SXSW, the magic has moved on from here too. There was a time, not that long ago, when each new day in the Bay area seemed to dawn with the arrival of a game-changing web service. A Facebook, or a Twitter or a Google or a Tesla. Today it all seems so – I dunno – derivative.

A few weeks ago I attended a drinks reception at the home of a prominent Valley angel investor. Also in attendance was a young entrepreneur who, according to our host, was creating "the next Facebook". The entrepreneur in question was – to say the least – hesitant to talk to 'the press' (the press, in this case, being me, Mike and Sarah, eating pizza). "Are we off the record?" he asked, when I enquired what his app actually did. This, by the way, was an app which had already launched. More worrying was his answer to the question "what are your plans for the app?".

Without a flicker of irony, he replied "we're going to be a billion dollar company."

"You realise that's not just a thing you can decide to be?" I asked.

A glare this time. A shrug. And then again, as if he were addressing a simpleton: "We're going to be a billion dollar company."

"How?" I said.

"You'll see," came the reply.

It was only then I noticed his outfit. Everyone else was in smart-ish jeans and shirts, but the entrepreneur was carefully dressed in a hoodie and a pair of open-toed flip flops. Later investigation would reveal that his "billion dollar" app was a social network for people with .edu addresses. The secret sauce? The fact that it gave college kids a way to flirt around campus.

Any of this sounding familiar? All he needed to complete the picture was a couple of embittered rowing twins baying for his blood, and maybe a central casting Svengali urging him to consider "what's cool…. a trillion dollars".

All over the valley, I'm seeing the same depressing picture. Kids who have grown up memorising the playbook of Mark Zuckerberg or Evan Williams or Dennis Crowley and who think that by literally imitating their idols, they too will achieve the same success. The true lesson is lost on them, like it was lost on the thousands of would-be directors who – inspired by the apocryphal Spielberg story – tried to brazen their way into the Universal lot carrying a briefcase full of self-confidence. It’s only cool when you're the first one to do it.

Of course, I've only been around for one cycle, and it's quite possible it was ever thus. Maybe at the same time Zuck was blowing up, there were a couple of dozen Jerry Yang or Larry Ellison clones shaving their eyebrows and bleeding purple around the Valley. I'd ask Mike Arrington what it was like a decade ago, but he's moved to Seattle so he's not quite so easy to get hold of. I'd ask Sarah, but she's in Indonesia. Even Eris, the girl who convinced me that SF was the best city on earth, has moved to New York to work for a bank.

I just landed back at SFO following ten days in Los Angeles, where a friend of mine is negotiating a film deal. During my trip, I hung out with old pals from London including a few who are now working as screenwriters and actors and comedians. Despite being firmly ensconced in "old media" they all seemed to be having a ball. Likewise on a recent trip to New York, I was inspired by the unwavering passion of my journalist and author pals – who have kept their sense of wonder, even as all their industry faces its greatest challenge since the great ink drought of 1885. The reason for their enthusiasm? Partly it's because their jobs are awesome; writing books and films and TV shows is a whole lot of fun.

More than that, though, it's a form of Blitz spirit: the same energy that Sarah found in emerging markets, and wrote about in her new book. The business of "old media" is so screwed that, like an entrepreneur building a business in Rwanda, its participants have nothing to lose by taking ridiculous commercial and creative risks on the basis that – as William Goldman put it – "nobody knows anything". The risks may pay off, they may not – but in a climate of total uncertainty the one thing you should never do is try to duplicate what worked in the past.

Just three years ago that same spirit used to typify the Valley, and was the antithesis of Hollywood and New York media's obsession with derivative dreck. But as more and more 20-something tech billionaires were minted and become the new breed of investors, so their impulse to invest in mirror images of themselves has seriously stunted risk taking and creativity in the Valley. Meanwhile, waiting for the ominous click of the firing squad, it's the old media players who are once again taking all the risks and having all the fun.

What I'm trying to say, I suppose, is this: I'm bored. Yesterday, when I landed back at SFO, I felt something I haven't felt in three years: regret. I missed LA instantly. Today I looked at the cost of hotel rooms in New York – and I fired off an email to my publicist back in London to say I'll definitely be back in May to promote my new book. I'm looking forward to a couple of weeks of old media press junkets and of drinking (orange juice) my way through literary London. And it's not just me: of the five new friends I made during my first week in San Francisco – all of whom work in tech – four no longer live here. Moreover, of the dozen or so friends I've known longest here, all but – maybe – three have recently talked about leaving, citing the fact that more interesting opportunities for creativity and business exist elsewhere.

Of course, there's no reason why the Valley or any of its inhabitants should give a damn whether I stay or go. Except — well, maybe there’s just one reason. Over the past few years, I've made a decent living writing about interesting people – entrepreneurs, creative types, wasters, losers and bums alike. As such, I tend to live in places where unique characters can be found, and to leave places where they can't. A few years ago, Silicon Valley felt full of exciting people doing fascinating things. Sarah wrote a book about them, as (with a different level of fidelity to the source material) did Ben Mezrich. Aaron Sorkin wrote a movie. Today Lacy, Mezrich and Sorkin have moved on and it's hard to imagine which stories might inspire a writer in today's Valley. The Path Story? Instagram: The Movie? Desperately Seeking Quora? Please.

It's an old Chinese curse to wish your enemy might "live in interesting times". But interesting times also tend to be the mother of invention and revolution. And it's in that spirit that I wish the Valley's times were a little bit less charmed right now, and a little bit more interesting.

For an idea of how likely that is to happen, let's jump back to the Zuckerberg clone I met at the party. The writer, and misanthropist, in me would love to report that investors sent him back to the drawing board and come up with something truly new and innovative. Something exciting. Something worth writing about.

The truth, though, is that his college-based social network recently secured a huge round of funding, not just from the party's host, but also from one of the Valley's biggest investment firms. It's certainly possible that he'll achieve his dream of a billion dollar exit, but even if he does, the story has already been told, the excitement spent.

I assume he's already been booked for next year's South by Southwest keynote.

Google will launch a “major new social network” imminently at the SXSW conference, said Read/Write Web early this morning. They were stupendously wrong on timing – Google told us and others that there was absolutely nothing launching in the next few days at the event.

The product details they got were fairly correct, though, from what I’ve heard from sources who’ve seen Google’s product iterations over the last few months. Google will focus a lot on groups of friends and how you share with them, and try to differentiate themselves from Facebook in this and other ways.

But that’s beside the point. Google doesn’t appear to want to have a big launch announcement around the product, now or down the road. They keep releasing (or dealing with leaks) new social features in drips and drabs: toolbar stuff, profile stuff, video stuff.

I’m guessing we’ll see more small releases over time, and won’t get hit with any big announcements just yet. This isn’t based on any sourced information, just my hunch based on what I’ve seen so far. In particular I note Google’s sudden reluctance to even admit that they have an actual social product.

Why? Big press announcements are excellent opportunities to get the press completely focused on you for a day, and get blanket coverage on both tech and mainstream media sites. Lots and lots of people will rush to join the service, and if those people like it they’ll get their friends to join.

But, really, there’s nothing Google could launch that would get people to ooh and ahh. They’ve already sort of had their strike 1 and strike 2 in the social space with Orkut and Buzz. And big launches like Google TV and Wave didn’t turn out so great, either.

Apple certainly couldn’t pull off a successful social network with one big press push, either.

There’s really nothing that could be launched that people would say “Wow, Facebook’s in trouble” by Google or anyone else. Even if Facebook itself launched today no one would be particularly excited. What makes Facebook exciting is that everyone you know is using it all the time, so you need to, too.

So all the stuff that Google is putting together won’t be hurting Facebook all that much, at least for several years. The last thing they want is some big press event that everyone can point back to for those years and say Google blew it again.

But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be pushing aggressively in social, and launching new products and features. Citi analyst Mark Mahaney cited Efficient Frontier data in a recent report showing that marketers are spending 6% on Facebook of what they spend on Google, and getting comparable click through rates and ROIs. He also says that Facebook today looks a lot like Google did in 2004, and that Google's growth trajectory post 2004 could be a proxy for Facebook’s future growth rate:

6% of Google's Ad Spend Jives With Facebook's 2010 Revenue — EF's data point that marketers are spending 6% of what they spend on Google, implying Facebook rev of ~ $1.8B (based on Google's 2010 rev of $29.3B). In our opinion, this is roughly in-line with the rev that FB may have generated last year, and we think FB made 25-30% net margins. For context, in the year that Google generated $2B in Net Rev (2004), its Net Margin was 24%. In our opinion, Google's growth trajectory post 2004 could be a proxy for FB future growth rate – given what are similar growth end-markets in Internet advertising. Also, over the last several years, Google has expanded Net Margins to 40%+.

Funnily enough, if people assume Facebook will grow like Google has over the last several years, Facebook’s valuation would be right about where it is – between $50 billion and $100 billion.

That means Google is trying to get its share of a huge new online advertising market that will be worth hundreds of billions of dollars in market cap. That market is just developing now, and those dollars, notes Mahaney and Efficient Frontier, are being taken from offline advertising dollars.

In other words, Google is playing for the long term. And I don’t think they’ll risk that opportunity by having a huge press circus and hoping for the best like they did with Google Buzz, Google Wave and other products. Instead they’ll boil the frog, and hope that in a year or two they’re a serious competitor in Facebook’s world.

What I do expect, though, is for enough stuff to be released that Google can at least talk about their social strategy to developers at Google I/O in May. A controlled physical environment packed with Google fanboys. That’s a much better place to do a song and dance, even a muted one, than in front of the fickle and party crazed crowds in Austin.

TechCrunch has learned that John Montorio has been named Culture and Entertainment Editor for Aol's Huffington Post Media Group content division.

Montorio is a 30-year veteran of two of the country's biggest newspapers – the New York Times and LA Times – but that's not why his hiring is news-worthy. It's news-worthy because it represents a dramatic shift in favour of real journalism within Aol.

Make no mistake there’s a battle raging for the soul of new media. Not the clichéd war between print and Web or between Silicon Valley and New York, but rather a series of internal battles being fought within nearly every publication. It’s the battle between  journalism and churnalism.

On on side are things like Demand Media, The Aol Way and the seduction of cheap hackery that is designed simply to generate easy page views and to help investors to sleep at night. On the other side is stodgy, snobby, old-school journalism which needs to find a new online home if it's to survive the decade. The latter carries with it the seduction of everything Woodward and Bernstein – and is the only way to really build a media franchise that stands for something and can demand Vanity Fair-like ad premiums.

No company represents this tug of war more ably than our overlords at Aol, to the point where sometimes the battle rages within a single soldier. No sooner had ad sales guru turned CEO Tim Armstrong laid out his SEO-centric "Way", and renamed the company's media properties as “towns” ruled by “mayors” than he pulled an apparent 180, acquiring the Huffington Post and naming its founder Arianna Huffington as head of all content.

Huffington quickly did away with towns, mayors and publicly distanced herself from Armstrong’s obsession with metrics over reporting. She’s thinning the piecemeal freelancer ranks in favor of pedigreed full-time editors and promising that college graduate journalists will be mentored by seasoned old hands, not just stuck at a desk rewriting dreck with an SEO-optimized headline.

And while some commentators complained that the cull left some AOL properties with no editorial staff, that’s not necessarily a bad thing for the journalism side of the house. Bluntly put: while a number of some great journalists were caught in the cross-fire, some of Aol's content sites deserved to be decimated. Or worse.

Not even the dorky streets formerly known as TechTown are safe from fighting. The editors of Engadget are quitting en-slow-motion-masse, leaking all sorts of anti-Aol bile to Alley Insider as they go. Meanwhile at TechCrunch, we’ve explicitly been told the Aol Way doesn’t apply to us. Indeed, even though some TC writers – ahem – continue to throw bricks at Tim Armstrong's content policies, we've never once had a memo asking us to curb or alter our editorial voice.

Most writers at TechCrunch and Huffington Post didn’t seek out a job in the middle of this war, we were sold into it. But Montorio is stepping into this fray of his own volition. What was he thinking? In the best traditions of old media, we picked up a landline phone and called him.

"It started with a wonderful conversation with Arianna," he said, "if there's such a thing as love at first sight on the telephone, we experienced it. We were of a single mind on so many things".

So far, so Match.com testimonial. But surely Montorio will at least acknowledge that, to a lot of his former print colleagues, his move represents a step over to the dark side?

"I don’t know why old and new media view each other suspiciously," he said. "We all have to stop talking about saving newspapers — the big question is how we’re going to save journalism. The Huffington Post is trying to build a great 21st century news organization."

On SEO foundations?

"Content farming is about giving people what they want — great news organizations give the people what they need.  Trust me, over the past few years, advertisers have exercised tremendous influence over print journalism too… I've been in meetings where pressure from advertisers has directly affected editorial policy. Let's just say, it’s very hard for print to shake its finger [at digital] and say 'shame on you'. Online, though, there’s so much content that [SEO and journalism] can co-exist… with revenue from SEO paying for real journalism".

Try telling that to Bill Keller. Just days before Montorio's hiring, the New York Times' Executive Editor wrote a blistering editorial about the Huffington Post and AOL's decision to buy it, saying that "buying an aggregator and calling it a content play is [like a company] announcing plans to improve its cash position by hiring a counterfeiter."

Indeed while everyone we spoke to for this story was glowing in their praise for Montorio (the NY Times’ Dean Baquet called him “a wonderful journalist” while the paper’s Arthur Gelb counts him “among the very best editors I worked with during my decades as a masthead editor”), we were at least expecting to hear some measure of Keller-style cynicism towards his new employer. In fact we found a surprising enthusiasm amongst the crusty old media elites to embrace the HuffPo and what it represents…

“You have to be pretty stuck in the sand not to get [that blogs like HuffPo are the future]“, said Polk award-winning essayist Frank Rich, who worked with Montorio at the Times and who describes his new gig as “a huge coup for the Huffington Post." Indeed, Rich credits his own decision to move from the New York Times to New York Magazine in part to the latter publication’s growing web presence. “The print version is increasingly an adjunct to the website” he said, predicting that print vs web will soon be “a distinction without a difference”.

What's especially interesting about Montorio's hiring is that, rather than directing hard news, he'll be heading up entertainment and culture – areas which have traditionally been SEO cash cows. Frank Rich describes his former colleague a brilliant editor of “back of the book” [culture, entertainment, city diary] stuff… He’s wonderful at conceptualization – anyone can create a book section or a culture section – but he knows how to make it ‘pop’.”

Hiring someone with Montorio's skills means one of two things for the Huffington Post: either a bold step away from Bieber-filled headlines towards quality coverage of the arts, culture and entertainment — or a train-wreck waiting to happen as Armstrong and the Aol bean counters try to force their "Lady Gaga pantsless in Paris" agenda. Isn't Montorio concerned?

“An editor of mine once said that the worst hire you can make is someone who fits right in. What you want is people who when they get in the pool, they change the water temperature. I want to change the water temperature. Sure there will be some people who don’t like it – who preferred the old temperature – but there will be others who take the opportunity to swim a little faster."

Tim Armstrong already had his work cut out for him to transition AOL from an Internet company which makes 80% of its profits from users who don’t know they don’t have to pay for dial up anymore to a thriving public company. But Huffington’s quest to transition the company’s content properties from slavish dependence on home page traffic, where content is frequently written to order for advertisers, into a profitable utopia of high quality journalism is far, far more ambitious.

With Montorio's hiring, Huffington's vision has moved one step closer to reality. Like everyone at Aol who believes its possible to have both a paycheck and principles, we'll be keeping a close eye on the thermometer.

Content discovery engine StumbleUpon, which most recently received 17 million in Series B funding, is unveiling a new ad platform today, StumbleUpon Paid Discovery. Whereas the old Stumble ad model was primarily targeted to getting traffic for publishers, StumbleUpon CEO Garrett Camp tells me that Paid Discovery is setting its sights on bigger brands, like movie studios promoting a movie or stuff like NFL teams promoting their sites.

Paid Discovery ads (which can range in format from websites, videos to mobile sites etc) will show up in a Stumbler’s stream without them having to click on a banner or other kind of intermediary mechanism. Advertisers can drill down on the targeting the ads as well, by around 500 different topics and demographics like age, gender and location as well as by mobile platorm.

Users can also rate the quality of the ads, and more upvotes means additional (free) traffic.

Paid Discovery introduces a tiered pricing plan, serving priority and analytics services for campaigns, charging advertisers .10 or .25 per unique user depending on when the ad is served. The price points also include access to revamped system of analytics which takes into account information like user upvotes, demographics, share patterns and time spent on site.

We took some time to talk with StumbleUpon CEO Garrett Camp about the new platform and how it will affect the service’s more than 14 million users as well as advertisers. You can watch the entire interview above.

LaunchRock, the startup that wants to help companies launch by setting them up with viral launch pages, is also launching  a “Battle of the Startups” contest during SXSW. Companies that use LaunchRock pages to get beta signups will now have the chance to win $30K ($25K as a standard angel investment from collective VC firm Vencorps).

The contest is sponsored by LaunchRock, Sprout Social, Slate Studio, CloudSponge, HootSuite, Posterous, Rapleaf and VenCorps and consists of two parts: The first part is how many signups a startup is able to generate using the LaunchRock, up to $5K. The second consists of the VenCorps’ contribution, where LaunchRock startups who generate the most “social proof” via @ mentions in tweets and votes on Vencorps.com (from March 15th onwards) win 25K . Technically two different startups could win each contest.

Signups for the first part have already started, but the voting for the second will commence on March 15th and run through April 15th (sign up here). The top nine companies in terms of buzz will enter into the finals, and the winner of that contest will be announced on April 31st.

LaunchRock has also set up a leaderboard for SXSW startups on top of the Chupacabra at 400 E 6th Street and Trinity, and is ranking startups based on tweets in a number of categories. Right now it looks like Instagram is #winning in overall.

Did you know it was exactly five years ago today that Jack Dorsey and a few other team members working at Odeo first started to work on what would become Twitter? How do I know? Dorsey is tweeting about it right now.

While programming began five years ago, it wasn’t until eight days later, on March 21, 2006, that Dorsey sent the famous first (non-automated) tweet: “inviting coworkers”.

Dorsey also notes that it was exactly five years ago that they got the official go ahead on the Twitter idea, then called “twttr“. He has also shared (via his Tumblr) the conversation he had with Biz Stone about the project on that day. The first mention:

me: Biz! How goes?  We’re starting work on the twttr implementation today.

Biz: really?! NICE

Dorsey also reveals that the reason they initially droped the vowels out of “Twitter” was to try and get the SMS shortcode. …But Teen People already owned it.

Dorsey promises to share more of his original drawings, emails, and notes about the early days of Twitter. Naturally, he’s going to share them on Twitter.

Moving from iPad 1 to iPad 2 has been an exercise in confusion followed by fear followed by despair and now acceptance. I have no idea what I'll be left with, given that I've attempted to move from one Mac Book Pro to another, back up iTunes to DVD, upgrade to 4.3 of iOS on 2 iPhones and the old iPad 1, and finally move everything that's left to the new iPad 2. At this point I really don't care what happens, just that it does.

Apple haters can jump in anytime with comments (oh, wait, they can't anymore on the new Facebook Connect what-is-your-real-name gateway) about how iTunes should go away. Maybe, but who can say if this insanity would be improved by making it wireless. So while I'm waiting to be dismayed by the elimination of music, Mad Men 4th season files, family photos, contacts, my grandfathered unlimited AT&T account, and other arcana I don't realize I'm going to miss, I'll talk about something else.

We've been watching Twitter and Facebook, but mostly Twitter, upend the business of news as practiced by major networks around the world. While developers moan about Twitter's consolidation of power in its core applications, the cable networks have restructured themselves around providing live video and talking head context with a Twitter feedback loop as editorial monitoring. Even when Twitter and other realtime traffic is driven underground by government or corporate censorship, the Twitter backchannel persists via the media and their new masters, the blogs.

This is not a new media revolution but a classic political one, carried on the backs of realtime social networks that move faster than any attempts at shutting them down. Twitter's ability to nail up instant affinity groups with direct messages and @mentions has created instant power centers that transcend borders and the previous political institutions. The speed with which Wisconsin Republicans pushed through their union-busting legislation is evidence of this restructuring, as will be the Democratic counterattack funded by the first blushes of a electorate-rallying 2012 recall movement.

Mistaking this for yet another Web revolution misses the changes brought about by Apple's App Era. Apps blend realtime information with transactions, fueling startups and app platforms in much the same way that Obama used the caucuses to gather people and resources who in turn marshaled a disruptive wave of financing. As Twitter-esque collaboration tools such as Chatter move to the business community, the same restructuring around the influence of individual contributors is transforming companies in the same dramatic fashion.

It's been fascinating to watch the networks tweak their release schedules and marketing to reflect this new reality. Reruns are a thing of the distant past, victim first of the summer reality shows that don't support replays, and then the rapid undercutting of marketing strategies by the Twitter underground. Before a show has the legs to survive the 8 show network commitment, trending topics pick winners like Charlie Sheen over so-called family fare. Sheen's rapid adoption of Twitter and live streaming video may seem desperate and out of control from a messaging perspective, but the move to Apps and the iPad may prove prescient.

We're seeing an odd similarity between incumbent governments and network programmers, where the upstarts are laughed off as delusional right up until the fans swarm the streets. And the reverse, when Twitter executives are derided as ruthlessly crushing their developer communities. Neither analysis is compelling; Egypt fell because the military backed the rebels, while Twitter third parties like Seesmic's Loic Le Meur moved to the enterprise before the door slammed shut on the client side.

Where rapid disruption is occurring is at the intersection of the social and mobile waves. The noise emanating from South By SouthWest is notable for its fragmentation. Group chat is this year's model, but the real action is in the media disruption. iPad 2 and its expanded AirPlay capabilities will be popular among those of us who already are shifting away from Sheen reruns to NetFlix and socially-chosen series. But look out as AirPlay hits the enterprise, with a next wave of presentation and authoring software built on HDMI cabling today and the MobileMe back end tomorrow.

Microsoft Office is looking more and more like the Mubarak regime when you can move from push notification to workgroup commentary over FaceTime and Twitter. It's clear from recent moves that Facebook and YouTube will go after NetFlix on the consumer side, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out where that leaves CNN and its ilk. Most of the tech conferences are now streaming live; entertainers will do a Sheen too as their contracts expire. It won't be easy, with the major studios still locking up the big screens, but time is not on their side.

Sex and rock 'n roll still sell mainstream, but savvy entertainers like Lady Gaga and Steve Jobs are blending generations into a new more elastic population that straddles age and humor in a disruptive mix. Network programmers still covet the young crowd, but they're harvesting the boomers' deep pockets with experiences that reach back into the soundtracks and comedy of their generation. The Appstream, with its fertile landscape of @mentions, multitasking, and analytics, is increasingly fueling the realtime revolution. Now back to our movie, Waiting for the @mention or Something like it.

“The must-have app of SXSW would be the one that lets people with hangovers order Gatorade/Advil deliveries. Make it happen Zaarly.” — Jason Kincaid

If you’re like most people at SXSW the time change today and the drinking last night has hit you like a iron hammer. Well luckily Zaarly, the much buzzed about HTML 5 mobile app that connects buyers and sellers in a localized market place, is now live today in Austin. So if you’re stuck in bed needing Gatorade and Advil (or a change of clothes, or an iPhone charger, or …) you can now hit up Zaarly.com on your phone and put in your order.

With Zaarly people who want things and people who want to provide services are brought together in an unprecedented way, with the focus on the buyer’s needs as opposed to the sellers. Buyers post what they want and how much they’re willing to pay and sellers can log in to Zaarly view the needs and prices of tasks around them. Sellers bid for the tasks, and the buyer chooses the best one, with Zaarly connecting the two via an anonymous Twilio-powered phone number.

While, like Craigslist, the service basically runs on the honor system, Zaarly community managers keep close watch and filter out bogus and inappropriate offers.

Zaarly also has an amazing story, having gone from an LA Startup Weekend winner to 1 million in funding in a little under 3 weeks, impressing the likes of Paul Buchheit, Ashton Kutcher, Felicis Ventures, Bill Lee, Naval Ravikant and Lightbank with its disruptive concept, despite being a work in progress.

I caught up with co-founder Bo Fishback here at SXSW, paying a visit to the Zaarly “mobile world headquarters,” or basically an RV in a parking lot by the Austin Convention Center, to talk more about the ins and outs of the proximity based market platform. Right now Zaarly is only live in Austin, but Fishback tells me he will be rolling it out on a city by city basis after the SXSW push is over. Stay tuned, and hydrated.