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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If you want to get Hollywood movie studio types irked, mention Google. And if you want them steamed, bringing up Netflix will usually work.

But if you want to see the tops of their heads blow off, Redbox is just the ticket.

Except not to their movies, it seems, if the major movie studio execs have their way in an ever-growing legal battle with the DVD-rental kiosk company.

A typical consumer named Louie Swisher, though, begs to differ.

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While John Hughes has almost nothing to do with the Internet, BoomTown–who is of a certain age–was saddened to hear about the premature passing of this director supreme of suburban teen angst movies of the 1980s.

He died yesterday of a heart attack at 59 years old.

His hit films included “The Breakfast Club,” “Sixteen Candles” and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” He wrote “The Breakfast Club” and “Sixteen Candles,” as well as “Pretty in Pink,” “Some Kind of Wonderful,” “Home Alone” and tons of others.

Here are some great clips online.

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When Time Warner reports its second -quarter earnings tomorrow morning, before the markets open, most Wall Street analysts are not expecting much from the media giant, as it continues to slog toward a rejiggering of itself.

Time Warner–which owns assets like the Warner Bros. movie studio, the AOL online unit, the HBO and Turner cable networks and Time Inc. magazines–is expected to earn 37 cents per share, compared to 72 cents a year ago, according to a poll of analysts from Thomson Reuters.

Revenue is expected to be $6.97 billion, down from $11.56 billion in the same quarter last year. This drop is mostly due to the March spinoff of its cable unit, Time Warner Cable.

But AOL and its magazine unit are expected to continue to drag on Time Warner’s financial performance.

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And there it was in Yahoo’s second-quarter earnings call yesterday, when–as the first question–an analyst asked Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz what she thought about Bing, the new and innovative search offering from Microsoft.

“I think actually Bing is a good product,” said Bartz. “I think they’ve done a good job. I think Microsoft should be given kudos for Bing.”

It was a politic thing to say, to be sure, especially with Microsoft and Yahoo still zeroing in on a search and online advertising partnership deal, as has been previously reported by BoomTown.

Sources I have spoken to over the past two days say the deal is still on good footing and could be struck very soon, even as early as tomorrow, although it is still not a certainty–especially given the bumpy history between Yahoo and Microsoft.

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Yesterday, shares of Netflix got their semiregular rocket boost–with its stock up more than five percent to close at just over $42–from rumors that Amazon was interested in acquiring Netflix.

Oh, it’s a seemingly dreamy match–the top online retailer snapping up the upstart U.S. mail-order DVD movie and television show service.

But there are some serious issues in an Amazon-Netflix marriage, so those interested in seeing the independent company in the embrace of a larger one might want to consider a more suitable and very interested candidate: Microsoft.

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How much is BoomTown and everyone else in Silicon Valley trying to nab a copy of Ben Mezrich’s likely-to-be-entirely-made-up-but-who-cares tale of dirty doings at Facebook?

Muchety-much! But, so far I have come up peanuts in grabbing an early copy of the work of “fact”-ion–titled “The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal”–which is set to come out July 14, along with a movie later.

Facebook is not pleased, of course, and will likely be challenging Mezrich’s work as specious dreck, but here’s my own list of 10 completely made-up, utterly fabricated, just-call-me-Jayson-Blair facts that should be in the book.

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This week’s viral video is for filmmaker Michael Moore’s latest, which takes direct aim at the banking bailout.

Called “Save Our CEOs,” the teaser notes: “This time it’s personal.”

Well, Moore is always personal, so slapping around Wall Street and the politicians responsible for the econalypse should be interesting, to say the least.

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We launch the seventh D: All Things Digital conference in Carlsbad, Calif., today, after a long weekend of preparations and way too many meetings, as you can see in the video below.

(Including packing the mountain of swag bags for attendees, upon which one of my kids sits in this photo.)

The conference kicks off with an evening interview tonight with Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams.

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Incredibly, the seventh D: All Things Digital conference begins tomorrow night, after a year of preparation, as we raced to the finish line this past weekend.

Here is a video I did as we get ready, including: my mother being perplexed by Twitter (which will be fodder for a good question for co-founders Evan Williams and BIz Stone on opening night of D7 tomorrow); my assistant, Ed, getting threaded; our first D commercial by my friend and also new Fox star Jane Lynch of “Glee” (incredibly, we realized that she and I now both work for Rupert Murdoch); and a short primer on this year’s show by my terrific partner, Walt Mossberg.

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Big, giant and prolonged sigh–as well as a cranky-old-lady shake of the fist–to our distant cousins over at the Fox television network who dinged BoomTown’s favorite sci-fi show, “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles,” today.

I am officially in a Summer Glau funk, with major gadget withdrawal.

Loosely based on the movie franchise, the show garnered a passionate fan base online and off, but not enough to merit being renewed. It’s ironic since the latest film in the cyborg-versus-man epic, “Terminator Salvation,” will open this Thursday.

But one of the TV show’s stars is fighting back online. All hail the Resistance!

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While getting ready for the spate of interviews at our seventh D: All Things Digital conference in just seven days, BoomTown has been doing a lot of research on the people taking the stage.

Some interviews will be quite serious (Eve Ensler, talking about the dire situation in the Congo) and some possibly funny (Mark Cuban, who simply defies definition).

But this picture that Twitter founder and CEO Evan Williams posted today on his Flickr page is easily the most unusual bit of research I have come across.

It is aptly titled, “This doesn’t seem awkward at all.”

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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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With bootleg copies ripped on the Internet or not and with an $87 million opening weekend for “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” it looks like the nerdiest summer movie season ever is off the races.

Hollywood, caught in the digital maelstrom, certainly is fine and dandy making bank by co-opting all the techie themes, gadgets and special effects, with a slate of movies over the next months that are like catnip to geeks of all kinds.

Including BoomTown, for example, which plans to fork over a lot of dough to pay for all the techtastic entertainment that those old media moguls can dish out before they collapse.

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What’s in a name?

Well, a lot, actually, and BoomTown supposes it would be just like those Pacific Northwest types at Microsoft to name the new version of its search service “Bing,” presumably after the cherry that is a big product in the company’s home state.

That moniker is one of many being bandied about in a group the software giant could be considering for the big relaunch of its search service, which it has been prepping.

But Microsoft should forget the fruity metaphor, also rename its MSN online service “Bada” and use this motto: “Bada Bing, Bada Boom, Notta Bada Algorithm!”

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