What's the common thread among the current field of technology and media startups? No chutzpah (to put it politely), according to a consensus of experts in attendance for the TechCrunch50 conference this week. "There were too many people building safe businesses, too many companies just trying to make existing things slightly better, and too many people wanting to be the next Mint.com, not the next Google." Mint, of course, is the money management tools provider that just sold -- hastily, some would argue -- to rival Intuit for $170 million. "Nothing against Mint, but Silicon Valley wasn't built …

Now that Rupert Murdoch has made up his mind about online publishing, and the notion that advertising can't support it, you'd think the industry's fate was sealed. Not at all, says Google chief exec Eric Schmidt, who, despite lacking Murdoch's menacing bravado, is arguably as influential. Speaking to a group of British broadcasting execs on Thursday, Schmidt said publishers of general news would find it quite hard to charge for content online due to the surplus of sources available. "In general these models have not worked for general public consumption because there are enough …

While Google's hold on "traditional" search will take longer the loosen, Microsoft is hoping its new search engine, Bing, will soon dominate the nascent world of mobile search. In that vein, Bing returns slightly fewer results per search but slightly more data per result, while its results are location- and geo-aware. Charles Songhurst, Microsoft's general manager for corporate strategy, says the software giant has "internalized a lot of what Google has been saying" in recent years regarding mobile search, and its bright future.

Blogger Jason Kottke makes the case that every single device-making company should be shaking in its boots over Apple's iPhone, and its increasingly ubiquitous application marketplace. "Space in backpacks, pockets, and purses is a finite resource, as is money (obviously)," he says. "As a result, many are opting to carry only the iPhone with them when they might have toted several devices around." He might be right, but we don't know how we'd get through the day without our scientific calculators.

Forget about Skype. Free of charge, Twitter users will soon be able to make short phone calls for free with the help of JaJah -- an Internet telephony company that lets users make VoIP calls using their landline or cell phone. It just launched a beta version of the Twitter calling service dubbed @call. The service apparently works whether users are using Twitter directly via its site, or are logged on using a third-party client like Seesmic. We thought part of Twitter's appeal was its singleness purpose, but such easy access to an Internet telephony service could appeal to many …

Nearly a third -- 31% -- of cell phone-owning consumer now browse the mobile Web at least once a month, according to new data from research firm Yankee Group. Consuming general news and weather, along with searching for specific data are the most popular activities among users. However, of roughly 2 million mobile Web domains, most fail to make the grade. Indeed, most mobile sites earning an average consumer score of 52 on a scale of 1 to 100. In the minority, Google.com, Google.com/m/news, Yahoo.com and MLB.com all scored above 70 on Yankee Group's Mobile Web Report Card.

The original founders of Skype are in the suing mood, and they're looking at the investment group that just agreed to buy the Internet telephony company from eBay for $1.9 billion. Lawyers for Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom have issued a writ for copyright infringement against the new investors, including private equity firm Silver Lake Partners, and venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Index Ventures. After the pair left Skype, they're claiming, eBay execs began to alter the code used in the technology on which the service is based in breach of the license.

Guess Twitter's worth! Everybody's doing it, and valuations for the micro-blogging service are all over the board. Just months ago, a figure of $250 million was called "staggering." More recently, Buddy Media head Michael Lazerow recommended that Microsoft or Google shell out $2 billion for the company, while blogger Robert Scoble previously pegged it at a whopping $5-10 billion. Now, it appears that a group of investors have arrived at the respectable sum of $1 billion, and -- of critical importance -- they're willing to put their money where their mouths are. Multiple sources …

Facebook has launched a new applications feature that lets users test whatever new tools it has in the oven. Similar to Google Labs, Facebook Prototypes, lets them try out new features that are "not quite ready for prime time, are a bit esoteric, or don't quite fit," according to the leading social network. From enhanced event emails to photo tag search, there are five new features currently available, most of which were apparently developed during a recent Facebook Hackathon -- an all-night coding session where Facebook engineers flesh out pet project they can get to the during business …

Betting that consumers are about to start spending again, Bank of America analyst Justin Post has upgraded Amazon shares today to Buy from Neutral. Indeed, Post believes there is as much as a 24% upside to the current share price over the next year. That's because, in his opinion, e-commerce will continue to grow its share of applicable retail sales -- 7.6% in '09 growing to 9.5% in '12.The sector should therefore return to double-digit growth after this year -- 14% in 2010 and 11% in 2011. While not quite as bullish as Post's estimate of $28.5 million …