Yahoo exec Brad Garlinghouse–famous for his controversial “Peanut Butter Manifesto,” which correctly chided the Internet giant for becoming so lugubrious several years ago–is taking a job at AOL very similar to the one he left at Yahoo last year.

Garlinghouse, who will remain on the West Coast, will be named president of Internet and mobile communications at AOL, putting him in charge of the New York-based Time Warner online unit’s powerful email and instant-messaging properties, including ICQ and AIM.

He will also be, said AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, its “CEO of Silicon Valley for us.”

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Last night, “The News Hour With Jim Lehrer” aired a piece on “how technology companies are innovating amid the recession by designing popular new smart phone applications.”

BoomTown was to talk about how perhaps not all of the 65,000 apps being created by legions of third-party developers for the Apple iPhone will result in gold, diamonds and unicorns raining down on entrepreneurs.

Oddly enough, I somehow went all Jules Verne at the end and started talking about screens on coffee tables, so I am obviously just as bad.

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Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave what he just had to know would be a much quoted comment to the Nikkei today, explicitly saying that the company had “begun seriously looking into acquisitions again.”

Music to the beleaguered mergers and acquisitions market, to be sure, especially after a recent uptick from other big companies pulling out their wallets again as the impact of the econalypse subsides.

According to sources, Google is working on at least a half-dozen acquisition deals, most of which are small start-ups in the online advertising and cloud-computing arenas.

That would be welcome news for many.

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As a new weekly feature, BoomTown is calling all those who make cool graphs about tech to send them to me pronto.

I am–truth be told–a secret stats fanatic. A bargraphaholic. A closet pie-charter.

(I also love pie.)

Thus, here are a few comparing some stats about development for the iPhone from Apple and the Android from Google, from Flurry Analytics.

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BoomTown is certainly going to be one of the many-so-many who will immediately fork over whatever it takes to get my mitts on the upcoming tablet device from Apple.

And that’s why, according to a new report from Piper Jaffray Senior Research Analyst Gene Munster–who is monk-like in his devotion to writing down every scrap he can about whatever Apple HQ in Cupertino, Calif., deigns to release–it’s going to be raining money down on the company, just like manna from heaven.

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While Microsoft COO Kevin Turner did a kind of modified cheerleading act at Microsoft’s annual Financial Analyst Meeting, Entertainment and Devices President Robbie Bach played the teenage boy and Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie the voice from the future.

It included Bach playing ball with Microsoft’s new motion-sensing, controllerless Project Natal and Mundie introducing a very creepy digital assistant with more than a passing resemblance to HAL from “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

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While in Southern California last week, BoomTown sat down with Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs to have a chat about the booming market for smart phones and, well, smart everything.

With all the swirl around iPhones from Apple, the Palm Pre, the various new BlackBerrys from Research in Motion and whatever else gets cooked up by Amazon, Google and others in the critical smart and mobile device market, it’s interesting to hear what Jacobs has to say–especially since his company is going to be one of the ones to benefit from such an explosion.

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In a recent onstage interview, Palm’s major investor, Roger McNamee, and I got into a minor tussle over the mirror on the back of the just-launched Pre smartphone and his assertion that ladies in particular would love it.

Take that, reflectively-challenged Apple iPhone!

In any case, Palm is certainly not backing away from the female demographic with its latest commercial, which features an unusually pale woman with a sing-song and vaguely creepy voice.

It feels a lot like an ad for a new shampoo that promises lustrous locks.

All the better to look good in a mirror, presumably.

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It’s not often these days that you get any kind of public offering in the market for tech companies–so a lot of people in Silicon Valley and elsewhere are looking at the fall spinoff of AOL very carefully.

That’s because, even though AOL is widely considered to be an also-ran by Silicon Valley, many are very interested in serving on its 10-12 member board.

Thus, AOL, with Time Warner’s top execs’ involvement, sources said, has compiled a list of about 70 possible candidates–picked, suggested and self-nominated–and is now proceeding to vet them and begin the process of asking people to serve.

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As the final posting of the onstage interviews at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference, here is one of the sessions that generated a lot of news: The first major interview about the Palm Pre with Elevation Managing Director Roger McNamee and Palm Chairman and CEO Jon Rubinstein.

The pair are trying to remake Palm in a bet-the-company move to recover the Silicon Valley icon’s long-lost glory via innovation.

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Here at All Things Digital, we are always fussing away on our site, making a variety of improvements regularly to make the experience better for our readers.

In that vein, we have recently added two new features over the last weeks, which deserve a look-see: Topic pages and job listings.

Check them out.

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Last week, after much delay, longtime Internet exec Julius Genachowski was confirmed by the Senate as the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.

It is an important role for the future development of the Web, of course, although it took a dog’s age into the new Democratic administration to approve him.

Hopefully, he and the other commissioners can soon get to work on a wide range of major digital issues, such as a national broadband plan that does not cost Americans a fortune.

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As President and CEO of Nokia, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo runs the world’s largest mobile phone maker, a hard won and enviable position. But new rivals like Apple and Research in Motion are gaining market share with innovative touchscreens and apps, features that Nokia has been late to the smartphone party with.

Kallasvuo talks about all this and more in an interview with Walt Mossberg at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference.

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Onstage in an interview at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference, Eve Ensler shed much-needed light on the dire situation in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

Ensler’s aim is to end the use of rape as a weapon of war there, in part as a consequence of the region’s coltan trade. Coltan, or columbite tantalite, is a mineral essential to the manufacture of a wide array of consumer electronics, such as mobile phones and laptops.

It is well worth hearing about exactly how some of our everyday gadgets come to us at a terrible price.

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Next up on the seventh D: All Things Digital conference program was an onstage interview that Walt Mossberg did with AT&T Chairman, CEO and President Randall Stephenson.

Stephenson was queried about a lot of topics, including the status of the Apple iPhone deal, the company’s network glitches, the economy and competitors like the new Pre from Palm, and more.

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