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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Oh dear, I always forget that the camera is turned on 24/7 these days, knows all and sees all and then sticks it on YouTube.

Like this moment for me that came during a speech I gave last week at the Software & Information Industry Association’s NetGain conference in San Francisco, which was titled, “How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Tweet: What Interactivity Really Means for Real Businesses.”

In 140 words or fewer, I insult Amazon’s Kindle, Apple and even myself for being a Steve Jobs fanboy.

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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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Facebook, which has been very busy ferreting away to get a presence on all the big cellphone makers, is in talks with mobile handset giant Nokia about integrating the hot social-networking site on its phones.

Its deals like this–as well as building its popular Facebook app for smartphones like the BlackBerry from Research in Motion and the iPhone from Apple–that are spurring huge market share growth in the arena by Facebook.

And there are more deals to come, with cellphone makers like Palm and Motorola, as the smartphone market keeps heating up.

Too bad for fast-growing Facebook and others that there’s no money to be made yet.

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A billion dollar investment in digital technologies, struck between a handful of Hollywood studios and a consortium of big theater chains, got little notice earlier this week.

Under terms of the deal, the entertainment companies agreed to help defray the costs of rolling out more advanced digital technologies in 20,000 theaters, which will eventually lead to being able to see more movies in technologies like 3-D.

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We’re posting all the interviews from the sixth D: All Things Digital conference that took place in late May.

Here’s Part 1 of 4 of an interview Walt Mossberg did with Sony Chairman and CEO Sir Howard Stringer. The consumer electronics giant has been under enormous pressure to innovate and compete better in all its many businesses, and still has not proved it can knit them all together into a cogent whole.

In this video, Stringer talks about how the consumer electronics giant has been recovering from recent troubled times, the challenges of the television business, what’s next for screen technology (think thin) and the prospects for Sony’s huge PlayStation franchise.

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