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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BoomTown is winging it across the country for a Dow Jones event in Chicago–we do our part for the mother ship here at All Things Digital!–so there will not likely be posts today.

That is, unless Yahoo and Microsoft merge, buy Twitter and mount a cavalry attack on the Googleplex.

One can dream!

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Not many online videos have sequels, but the one below–featuring a passel of celebrities, including Tom Cruise, Will Smith, Borat, Leonardo DiCaprio, Julia Roberts and Harrison Ford–is one and even has famed director Steven Spielberg at the helm.

It is a follow-up to a PSA I posted earlier this month, called “Hollywood Declares Themselves,” encouraging young people to vote.

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Now that he’s officially–well, Yahoo has not said so, but it is so–leaving the company this later summer, what say we blame Brad Garlinghouse for all the woes of Yahoo!

After all, Garlinghouse’s infamous “Peanut Butter Manifesto” was the key Ur-moment that one could point to as the one in which the curtains were pulled back at the troubled Internet company to reveal, well, a very sticky mess.

The 2006 internal document, penned by the Yahoo senior vice president, essentially unfairly impugned delicious peanut butter by using it as a metaphor for Yahoo spreading its resources too thinly.

So, as a memorial to the Garlinghouse era, BoomTown decodes the manifesto.

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Break out the sedatives, because Carl Icahn is getting mighty tetchy with Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and the board of directors of the troubled Internet company!

In yet another letter to Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock, the ever-grumpier billionaire investor, who is waging a proxy fight against Yahoo and seeking to oust Yang and crew, he stepped up the volume to Crazy Eddie levels.

It’s almost too juicy to require translation, as the veins practically pop out in Icahn’s letter from all the agita he seems to be experiencing over this botched takeover.

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Until the writers’ strike in Hollywood is over–who knew it would go on this long?–BoomTown has decided to offer periodic suggestions about cool new stuff to watch.

Today, it is this gem from online video comedy site Funny or Die, in which Jerry O’Connell (who knew he was so hilarious?) does a mean and spot-on imitation [...]

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