Silicon Valley legend and now VC Marc Andreessen was making the interview rounds after the settlement between the litigation-addled co-founders of Skype and all the various people they were suing was announced this morning.

In an interview with BoomTown, when asked about the aggressive legal tactics of Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis that resulted in them finally seizing a stake in the Internet telephony giant by suing him and many other Silicon Valley players, Andreessen said:

“We did not take it personally. It’s a clean sheet of paper.”

Well, it is actually a torn, stained and very worn out piece of paper, but bygones!

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Way back in the fall of 2001, BoomTown attended a keynote speech at the now-defunct Comdex show in Las Vegas, where Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates continued to bang the drum for one of his long-running obsessions: The tablet computer.

It is an obsession he has never given up.

So it is ironic that all the hype has suddenly and firmly coalesced around the particulars of the tablet that Apple has developed–a device being spearheaded by CEO Steve Jobs and likely to arrive in the coming months.

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Last night, onstage at Lincoln Center in Manhattan, my most excellent partner, Walt Mossberg, interviewed well-known techno musician Moby about music and entertainment in the digital age.

The wide-ranging talk was part of an ongoing cultural festival series organized by The Wall Street Journal, called Summer Scoops Live.

Here are some video clips of the event and more.

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BoomTown is wearing all-black today, in profound mourning for the prospect of no Paula Abdul on “American Idol” next season.

“With sadness in my heart, I’ve decided not to return,” tweeted Abdul yesterday, bidding goodbye, natch, on Twitter.

Here is a cool video look at her and co-judge Simon Cowell and one of her appearance at the D: All Things Digital conference. (I kid you not!)

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What’s next for AOL?

Reviving the “You’ve Got Mail!” motto?

Or: “The Future. Now Available.”–set to music from “The Jetsons”?

What about: “So easy to use, no wonder it’s #1!”

Or maybe, it should just use a nice loooooooong busy signal as its calling card again?

Well, it could happen, now that new CEO Tim Armstrong has fallen prey to the siren call of the AOL brand name, after years of seeing the company wander in the anything-but-the-AOL wilderness.

Thus, he’s decided to try to welcome the prodigal brand back home, even as he prepares to spin it off in November from Time Warner.

Uh-oh.

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That would be Walt Mossberg and his well-known Personal Technology and Mossberg Mailbox columns–as well as BoomTown, John Paczkowski’s Digital Daily, Peter Kafka’s MediaMemo, Katherine Boehret’s Mossberg Solution and video and pictures from our famous D: All Things Digital conferences.

Today, All Things Digital is introducing its very own app for Apple’s iPhone and the iPod touch, offering all the posts and columns you get on this Web site–including news, product reviews, analysis and video–from our crack team.

Just smaller and cuter.

So download us and take us along everywhere you go–ATD really enjoys long walks on the beach.

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BoomTown went down to Silicon Valley’s most exclusive country club–also known as Stanford University–where Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer took to the stage for a talk at Memorial Auditorium for the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar.

Ballmer–who went to and then dropped out of Stanford Business School for a job at the fledgling Microsoft–was in an ebullient mood and even joked about problems with the Windows Vista operating system.

Party on, Steve!

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Incredibly, this is the seventh year of the D: All Things Digital conference.

We feel very lucky to get here, especially in the midst of what our own site’s Digital Daily scribe, John Paczkowski, has so perfectly dubbed the “econalypse.”

Ironically, Walt Mossberg and I planned to launch the very first conference in the middle of the last major downturn for tech, in 2001. But, in the carnage of the Web 1.0 meltdown, we actually held off for two years, with our first D gathering taking place in 2003.

Well, we’re still going–making the same long-term bet that the digital revolution will keep rolling as we did at D1. Here’s our lineup for D7.

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This weekend on Twitter, someone paid BoomTown a compliment of a sort: “I read you because you are a solid fact-based reporter with a Miss Cleo intuition ”

Yipes, because of being fact-based and since I had brought her up in an originating tweet, I had to point out that the well-known-via-infomercials Psychic Friends Network shaman turned out to be a bit of a fraud, although she’s always entertaining, with her jaunty Jamaican accent (she was not, of course, from there).

Nonetheless, it got me thinking about how I would predict what would result from all the deal-making that is suddenly in the air, after six months of ennui from the current economic downturn.

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Last week, BoomTown traveled to Long Beach, Calif., to attend the TED conference, a longtime gathering of digerati and others who have come to love its eclectic and outward-looking program.

The four-day TED2009, titled “The Great Unveiling,” included Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates unleashing a small swarm of mosquitoes in the hall, a long list of varied speakers and a whole lot of schmoozing.

Here is my belated video of the event, including my kids trying to steal a futuristic car.

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Many years ago in the midst of the Web 1.0 boom, when working as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, BoomTown redubbed an annual dinner that book agent John Brockman threw at the TED conference.

It was jokingly called the “Millionaires’ Dinner,” but I renamed it the “Billionaires’ Dinner.”

That was due to the frothy fortunes that had been made at the time by the Internet pioneers, from Amazon to AOL to eBay. Get it?!?

Well, despite the economic meltdown, there were still a lot of billionaires in attendance at Brockman’s most recent dinner last Thursday in Long Beach. But he recounted to me that the proceedings were a lot more focused on the serious times we are in, as was the whole digerati-packed conference held last week.

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The well-known Technology, Entertainment, Design conference–better known to its techie fans as TED–will make its move from Monterey to Long Beach starting tomorrow night and will be celebrating its 25th anniversary.

TED2009 is called “The Great Unveiling,” with its eclectic speaker roster including: Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, neurological anthropologist Oliver Sacks, writer Elizabeth Gilbert, tree researcher Nalani Nadkarni and Web political phenom Nate Silver.

But I am perhaps even more intrigued by the introduction this year of the TED Fellows program, whose participants have been picked because of the “world-changing potential of their work.”

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With a new administration coming into power, it makes a lot of sense for Microsoft to launch its new “Microsoft on the Issues” blog this week.

But, so far, with only two posts and few comments, it’s a tad dry–and, by that, I actually mean dull–and in desperate need of some spicy sauce to jazz up the joint.

Here are some modest BoomTown suggestions for livelier posts (including a Ballmer “BOMB-er” blog).

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With Macworld out of the way, a chunk of the crack All Things Digital squad is now winging its way both east and west to the annual gadgetopocalypse in Las Vegas, a.k.a. the Consumer Electronics Show.

Despite the fact that the show is feeling the pinch of the economy and that there are really no big products to speak of, CES is still one of the biggest and most important gatherings of the tech year.

Las Vegas turns into a geek moshpit every year, as legions of vendors, buyers, press and others converge to be overwhelmed for days by noise, long lines for cabs, keynotes, demos and more (like the Pussycat Dolls).

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BoomTown is not saying it’s going to be like watching grass grow.

But 2009 is not exactly getting off to a rousing start this week–with two underwhelming blockbuster tech events taking place that already have more of an air of whimper than of bang to them.

That would be the Consumer Electronics Show, the annual egregious gadgetfest in Las Vegas, and the final appearance by Apple at Macworld.

Of course, while CES tries to fend off the spate of no-one-is-going-to-CES stories–well, I am!–the absence of his digital Holiness and Apple CEO Steve Jobs at Macworld has really generated most of the glumness.

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