Former Facebook exec Owen Van Natta will take the CEO job at a music discovery site called Playlist, a move that had been speculated last week, after he did not end up taking another position as head of MySpace Music.

Van Natta’s arrival at Playlist was not the only news for the Palo Alto, Calif.-based start-up–former AOL exec Bob Pittman’s Pilot Investment Group is also investing an undisclosed amount of money in Playlist, and Pittman will join its board.

The site, which has been called Project Playlist, had previously raised several million dollars. The new round of funding super-sized that, sources said, hovering at about $18 million.

“Discovery around music is exploding on the Internet,” said Van Natta to BoomTown, in an interview this afternoon, giving it as his main reason for joining Playlist.

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Germany’s Hubert Burda Media threw a big luncheon in Palo Alto yesterday, which was stuffed full with Silicon Valley types. It was hosted by the company’s Steffi Czerny and Maria Burda, the wife of CEO and owner Hubert Burda, as well as well-known Israeli investor Yossi Vardi.

Burda runs an annual digital conference in Munich, called DLD (Digital, Life, Design), even though the media giant is best known for its old-line magazines about fashion, cooking and crafts.

So here’s the video!

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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 3 of 4 of an interview Walt Mossberg did with the Gates Foundation’s Melinda Gates.

In this video, Melinda Gates talks about the best ways to fix the broken parts of the public high school educational system in the U.S.

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Ah, more pointless eye candy from BoomTown’s good friends at Facebook!
Not satisfied to just entertain the masses with inane Vampires and SuperPokes, the social-networking site unleashed Lexicon on users this week.
It’s kind of like Google Zeitgeist except… well, it is exactly the same concept, all part of Facebook’s admiration of Google (GOOG) things, like, [...]

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I stopped on by Google’s Zeitgeist yesterday to say hello to Washington Post CEO and Chairman Don Graham, who was attending the search giant’s annual confab of powermongers, where they talk about big issues and mostly engage in Olympic schmoozing.

I had used my old boss Graham to make a point about the immature nature of Facebook apps in a post Tuesday. (He had sent me a digital “Hot Potato” that prompted my diatribe, so I wanted to make sure he knew it was not personal that I was not tossing it back or wherever one was supposed to toss one.)

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Yesterday, we slapped around VC Fred Wilson in our ongoing efforts to overtake him in our increasingly annoying journey to extract donors and dollars from geeks for a charity called DonorsChoose.org.

It’s working! We’re now hovering near $10,000 with 35 donors and solidly in the No. 2 slot, although Wilson does march on like Sherman to [...]

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