Silicon Valley powerbrokers can stare down old economy CEOs without flinching. But put them in front of celebrities and like anyone else they go a bit gaga. That's lead to poor celebrity backed investments in past years. Like this one

But Michael Arrington , of TechCrunch , and Jason Calacanis , of Mahalo , think it's different this time. And the two guys should know a bit about this culture clash: Arrington is 100% Valley, likely to Twitter on a Friday night about a blog post, while Calacanis lives in LA and is likely to Twitter about a club where he just spotted Lindsay Lohan. So it's no surprise their TechCrunch50 conference will be littered with Hollywood types trying to exploit the Web.

TechTicker has been promised an interview with Ashton Kutcher, but until then, you'll have to be satisfied with Arrington and Calacanis for another clip!

Every five years or so in the Valley there's a lot of hype about mobile being the next big thing. Only it never quite pans out. This is one of those times, and while skeptics are still out there, there are also a lot of believers. Why? The iPhone. It's far less about the glitzy hardware than the software and developers platform that for the first time enables not only Web-like experiences but applications we've never even seen on the Web, thanks to that GPS chip.

Web kingpins Jason Calacanis and Michael Arrington are two of the believers. At their TechCrunch50 conference on Monday, they plan on showing the valley several new companies that prove it.

It's been a few years since Second Life went from hot to over-hyped, but overall investment and interest in virtual worlds is growing. Really. Not only is investment in the category up, as we last reported in April, but it was one of the biggest categories of innovation when Jason Calacanis and Michael Arrington evaluated thousands of companies for their TechCrunch50 competition. Expect examples of new virtual world technology and ideas to demo at the conference next week.

The biggest stunner? It's already a multi-billion business globally.

What happens with two bombastic, larger-than-life Tech personalities join forces? They infuriate some people, delight other people and generally shake up an industry. When Jason Calacanis, of Weblogs and Mahalo fame, and Michael Arrington, of TechCrunch fame decided to launch the TechCrunch40 conference last year, they were hardly subtle about it. Urban Valley legend is that Arrington rudely announced the conference on the floor of the venerable--and competing-- Demo conference where hallowed products like TiVo and the PalmPilot first debuted to the masses. He says he actually blogged about it in pajamas from the hotel room, because he was too bored to even stay at Demo. But either way, the gloves were off.

The conference is back on Sept. 8 and now dubbed TechCrunch50 for the 52 companies debuting at it. (Don't ask.) It's being held the same day as Demo this year and tech folks are choosing sides carefully. For a two-year-old conference, TechCrunch certainly has some big-name loyalists. Among its panel of experts are Marissa Mayer of Google, Marc Andreessen of Netscape, Opsware and Ning fame, Mark Cuban, Chad Hurley of YouTube, and some of the Valley's most powerful investors. Not bad.

Center stage are the startups. Both Calacanis and Arrington are known for rubbing some people the wrong way, but even critics admit these are two guys obsessed with helping fledgling entrepreneurs. They don't charge companies to present and spend hours with each one, helping founders hone their pitches. They require that the VCs sponsoring the event give the entrepreneurs a private audience. And they award the winning company $50,000. Most notable: This isn't the insider crowd. The bulk of the startups are outside of the Valley game, with one-quarter of them coming from outside the U.S. If they've stepped on toes and bruised industry egos in the last two years, Arrington and Calacanis shrug that they're doing it for entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs are the life blood of the Valley and the greater tech economy.

We snagged the entrepreneurs just before the conference kicks off Monday Sept. 8, to tell us what to expect and why they picked such a nasty fight. TechTicker will be on scene for much of the conference too, so stay tuned.

From Silicon Alley Insider, Sept. 4, 2008:

Not to be outdone by whatever iTunes/iPod services Apple's (AAPL) Steve Jobs could be planning to announce next week, Amazon has rolled out its new Amazon Video on Demand video streaming service. After a quick test, we think it's the best competition iTunes has seen yet.

Amazon's new video service picks up where its old one, Unbox, left off -- it now works on Macs, for example, and video starts streaming instantly. We just tried it out on a few free episodes of 30 Rock, and it works well: Good -- not great -- video quality and a user interface that, while cluttered, should be familiar to any Amazon shopper.

How does Amazon's streaming service compare with iTunes, Hulu, and Netflix streaming? Like Apple's iTunes, Amazon's service will offer rentals for $3 to $4 and movie purchases for $10 to $15. Most TV episodes seem to cost $2; season packs are also available.

Unlike iTunes, Amazon offers NBC shows -- some of the same episodes you'll be able to watch at Hulu for free, but without the commercials. And its library of 40,000 movies and TV shows blows Netflix's sorry selection out of the water. Also nice, but not a game changer: It'll stream to some Sony TVs and TiVo devices, as well as Windows Media Center extender devices, like Microsoft's Xbox 360.

As the dust settles after the much ballyhooed launch of Google's Chrome browser, two fundamental questions remain:

• Can Chrome, or any other browser, break Internet Explorer's near 75% grip on browser market share?
• Is Chrome really "more than a simple Web browser [but] a platform for running Web applications," as Google claims?

These issues are intertwined because without critical mass, it will be very difficult for Chrome to become the hub of a Web-based cloud computing model that obviates the need for Windows (or Mac OS for that matter) - as many assume is Google's true goal.

In the accompanying video, I discuss these and related issues with Walt Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal's personal technology columnist and co-executive editor of AllThingsD.com. (Click here for part one of the interview, a "straight" review of Chrome, and here for part two, which deals with browser privacy issues.)

Mossberg is generally upbeat about Chrome and agrees it has the potential to be a platform for running Web-based applications. That, in turn, could prove to be a long-term threat to Microsoft's cash cows: Office and Windows. But he notes Microsoft is not sitting still, calling IE 8 a "major improvement" to the now-dominant browser.

Barring some yet-to-be-announced deal with a major PC maker to have Chrome preinstalled on computers, "it's going to be tough" for Google to crack IE's stranglehold on the browser market, Mossberg says.

In the accompanying video, I discuss these and related issues with Walt Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal's personal technology columnist and co-executive editor of AllThingsD.com. (Click here for part one of the interview, a "straight" review of Chrome, and here for part two, which deals with privacy issues.)

Mossberg is generally upbeat about Chrome and agrees it has the potential to be a platform for running Web-based applications. That, in turn, could prove to be a long-term threat to Microsoft's cash cows: Office and Windows. But he notes Microsoft is not sitting still, calling IE 8.0 a "major improvement" to the now-dominant browser.

Barring some yet-to-be-announced deal with a major PC maker to have Chrome preinstalled on computers, "it's going to be tough" for Google to crack IE's stranglehold on the browser market, Mossberg says.

In response to Google's release of Chrome, Microsoft declared: "people will choose Internet Explorer 8 for the way it puts the services they want right at their fingertips...and, more than any other browsing technology, puts them in control of their personal data online."

This latter point is more than just empty rhetoric, according to Walt Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal's personal technology columnist and co-executive editor of AllThingsD.com.

The latest beta version of Internet Explorer is a "step forward in privacy protection," Mossberg says, citing IE 8's ability to prevent Web sites from collecting your personal data. That level of protection is something neither Chrome nor existing browsers like Firefox and Safari can match, while other concerns about Chrome and privacy have already emerged.

For all the hoopla over Chrome, "the second beta version of IE8 is the best edition of Internet Explorer in years," Mossberg declares in his review. "It is packed with new features of its own, some of which are similar to those in Chrome, and some of which, in my view, top Chrome's features."

For these and other reasons, Google may struggle to crack Microsoft's grip on the browser market share, as we discuss in more detail in part 3. (Click here for part one of my interview with Mossberg.)

The reviews of Google's new browser Chrome keep coming, but none are as influential or intensive as Walt Mossberg's. The Wall Street Journal's personal technology columnist and co-executive editor of AllThingsD.com conducted an exclusive, extended hands-on test of Chrome prior to Tuesday's public unveiling of the beta version.

"Chrome is a smart, innovative browser that, in many common scenarios, will make using the Web faster, easier and less frustrating," Mossberg writes.

In the accompanying video, Mossberg discusses some of Chrome's best features, including it's stripped down interface, "Omnibox" feature, intuitive browsing, tab-to-search function, and other architectural changes.

Mossberg and I also discuss some of Chrome's shortcomings, including the lack of some basic browsing features, which Mossberg writes makes this first beta version "rough around the edges."

And stay tuned for part two of my interview with Mossberg, where we address some of the following questions:

• How does Chrome stack up vs. the competition, most notably Microsoft's Internet Explorer but also Mozilla's Firefox?
• Can Chrome take serious market share from IE without being pre-installed on PCs?
• Is Chrome really more than a browser, as Google (and others) claim?

It hasn't been a great year for software stocks, and more troubling the sexy upstarts like Salesforce.com, Netsuite and VMWare seem to be hurting worse than incumbents like SAP and Oracle. What does this say about the future of what was once one of the great golden geese of tech investing?

Joining me in studio to discuss is Terry Garnett of venture buyout firm Garnett & Helfrich. Garnett has played this game from nearly every angle. He worked for Oracle for four years, reporting to chief executive Larry Ellison. He invested in young startups when he worked for venture firm Venrock. Now, at his own firm, he seeks to carve out orphaned product lines from bloated software companies.

Garnett is a believer in much touted waves like software as a service, open source and cloud computing. He just doesn't think it yields many great businesses. His advice on how private and public investors should play this sector on the video.

From All Things Digital, Sept. 2, 2008:

Google has introduced a new Web browser, called Chrome, aimed at wresting dominance of the browser market from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. The move takes the Google-Microsoft rivalry to a whole new level. If Google succeeds, it will be a big deal, with major ramifications for the future of the Web.

But just how good is Chrome? How does it differ from IE and from less popular, but still important, browsers like Mozilla’s Firefox and Apple’s Safari?

Google’s Chrome browser displays thumbnails of a user’s most-visited pages when a new tab is opened, rather than a blank page.

I’ve been testing Chrome for about a week, trying out all its features, and using it side by side with Microsoft’s latest iteration of IE, which came out just last week.

My verdict: Chrome is a smart, innovative browser that, in many common scenarios, will make using the Web faster, easier and less frustrating. But this first version—which is just a beta, or test, release—is rough around the edges and lacks some common browser features Google plans to add later. These omissions include a way to manage bookmarks, a command for emailing links and pages directly from the browser, and even a progress bar to show how much of a Web page has loaded.

[Read Walt's full review after the jump. And for more of AllThingsD's Chrome coverage, see:

• Liveblogging From the Google Chrome Launch: Hello, Larry! (Wake Up, Sergey!)
• That’s No Browser, It’s a Web Desktop
• Chrome: Worthy, Largely Unexciting?]