In a series of interviews at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, TechCrunch's Michael Arrington speaks with LinkedIn founder and CEO Reid Hoffman. He begins the interview by asking Hoffman whether he's ever considered merging with Facebook (Arrington points out that Hoffman is good friends with most of the Facebook execs at Davos). The answer is a flat "no" as Hoffman insists that professional and personal networks should not be linked. Because of this, he says, both companies need to stay separate brands. Meanwhile, Arrington notes that LinkedIn "continues to grow like a weed," adding that the company …

Somehow, Yahoo executive moves always seem to leak their way into the press. Once again, it was Kara Swisher who broke the news, this time that Yahoo's chief communications officer Jill Nash would be leaving the company. Following that revelation, irate CEO Carol Bartz wrote a memo to Yahoo staff putting a bounty on the head of the whistleblower. Within minutes, this news was also leaked to The Wall Street Journal. "Maybe we should have a weekly bounty on such people," Bartz wrote. "I will throw in the first thousand dollars." In the memo, Bartz also blasted employees …

Rumors of a Skype sale have been hovering around eBay for more than a year. PaidContent's Rafat Ali posts the results of a Cowen and Company research note in which the analysts size up potential acquirers of the Internet telephony firm. These include Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and Facebook. According to the note, Microsoft is the highest probability acquirer, because, as Ali says, the software giant could "integrate (Skype's) communications features with its planned consumer Web-based software products." Google, which the note characterizes as a medium-probability acquirer, would also seek to combine Skype's communications features with its Gmail email client. …

Yahoo's business didn't collapse in the fourth quarter of 2008, but guidance for the first quarter of '09 was pretty awful: Revenues are expected to fall 10% as the market for display ads softens further. Meanwhile, the vast lead in display that Yahoo holds over bitter rival Google is turning out to be "less formidable than it used to be," writes Advertising Age Michael Learmonth. According to researcher Advertising Perceptions, Google is now perceived to be Yahoo's equal in many key areas of display. The research firm's Advertiser Intelligence poll of 1,212 ad agency and marketing execs found that in …

The blogosphere has been blogging and twittering about GDrive, a new online storage service from Google that will apparently come bundled with Google Pack, the company's downloadable software that includes products like Picasa and Google Earth. GigaOm's Om Malik opines that Google's entry into "what is essentially a commodity business" with ad revenues that would "represent little more than a drop in Google's overall business bucket," is more about reaching out to corporate customers than day-to-day consumers. Like Google Apps and Gmail before it, Malik thinks that Google is taking this one to the general public before its corporate customers. …

In an Ad Age report, Facebook executives reveal that the world's largest social network is still focused on growth, not monetization. "Lots of companies our size have decided somewhere along the line that they'll turn on the monetization and slap banners up," says VP of Sales, Mike Murphy. "That's not what we're trying to do." Rival MySpace may smaller in size, but at $1 billion, it books about three times as much ad revenue as Facebook. Just last week, Jeff Berman, MySpace's president of sales and marketing, said the News Corp. site had set it sights on the seven-figure …

Twitter's revenue-generating model is likely coming in April, Twitter founder and CEO Evan Williams reveals in a San Francisco Chronicle report. "We don't like to make too big a deal of it," he said. "We don't want to rush it." The Chronicle points out that Twitter's leaders frequently face the question of money at conferences and from users. Williams and others often reply that startups take at least two years to get their business model together. Twitter was developed in 2006. Twitter has 24 employees housed in a loft-like office in San Francisco's South of Market area. The company …

Apple's iPhone is absolutely owning the smartphone gaming space, according to a new comScore study. According to the study, the 8 GB iPhone 3G headed the list of smartphones used for mobile downloads in November 2008. Whereas in November 2007, not a single smartphone appeared in the top 10 list of phones used for mobile downloads, the study found that six of the top 10 of those phones are now smartphones. During that period, smartphone owners who downloaded games nearly tripled from 734,000 to nearly 3 million, with 34.2% of iPhone owners claiming that they downloaded a game during the …