John got to cover the outset of an epic conflict this week. It has all the marks of a mega-hit. It’s about property, philosophy and most important, resources that both parties need in order to survive. It’s a shame the Oscar deadline has already passed, because the coming battle between Apple and HTC might have challenged a particular blue blockbuster in the category “best use of technology in a screenplay.” They do seem to share the same basic plot structure, anyway. Shortly after reporting on Apple’s (AAPL) opening salvo at HTC, John stepped back to offer some perspective on the conflict and guessed that maybe, just maybe, Apple was really firing at Google (GOOG), as the Android based devices are the subject of Apple’s legal scrum with HTC. Who doesn’t love a good proxy war? It was an Apple-a-day this week at Digital Daily, as John rounded things out with a post about the on-again-off-again release date for iPad. The iPad certainly cometh, but the confusion as to when led to some serious chatter in the blogosphere. Read John’s post. He’s got it all figured out.

BoomTown wasted no time getting back in the groove after returning from meeting all the Mexi-geeks in Monterrey. Upon arriving back in soggy San Francisco, she descended upon the AAAA. This year’s advertising agency confab was all about the social, Kara reported. Weekend Update wonders if Kara was forced to watch preroll video ads about Lipitor and Kiva before she was allowed to change interviewees. That’s the ultimate social advertising. Midweek, Kara posted about a viral video that gets the distinction of being the only Oprah product ever consumed willingly by Weekend Updaters. The short piece on Roger Ebert getting his own voice back seems like the best possible application of technology to better a life, and it’s just darn cool. Kara finished the week with a post about Google’s purchase of DocVerse. The move represents a shot right at the heart of Microsoft’s (MSFT) flagship software package, and is just another weapon in the arms race for what may be a coming war in the cloud.

MediaMemo was on the case of the missing comedy this week, when Peter reported that Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart had left the Hulu lineup. Their shows represent only a small fraction of the total Hulu content monster. A small, hilarious viewer-drawing, ad-selling fraction. Peter moved on to a quick update on the semi-empire that is the Huffington Post. Arianna is doing well, with somewhere in the neighborhood of 28 million unique visitors in January according to comScore (SCOR). The “get huge” model may work for start-ups out here in Silicon Valley, but everyone in the media world is waiting to see if she can monetize that monster. Toward the end of the week, Peter talked with Jeff Smith of Smule about why he won’t be developing mobile games for Android anytime soon. Maybe Google has more to fight with than just Apple.

The Mossberg contingent was in overdrive this week and treated us all not only to the normal triad of great posts but to a Mossblog as well. Personal Technology pushed into a new frontier, as Walt wrote about the emerging market for wireless computer-to-TV video transfer. He tested two separate systems, Wi-Di and PlayOn which both aim to put video from your computer on to an enabled TV. Both worked as advertised, though each has drawbacks, in either technology or content limitations. Walt tells it like it is, and Weekend Update has a feeling that he’ll be telling us more about these technologies as they mature in the consumer space. The Mossblog this week has some informative video of Walt discussing Internet video displayed on TV. He appeared on the WSJ’s Digits show to talk about wireless display technology, but said we hadn’t reached a tipping point yet, partly because we hadn’t reached the necessary market penetration. Mossberg’s Mailbox had even more questions in it about Quicken for Mac this week, and the news was much the same as in last week’s column: The new Quicken for Mac isn’t up to par with the version, so think hard before you buy. Katie offered analysis of yet another 3-D device that may be coming to a lap near you. She reviewed two laptops, one from Asus and one from Acer, both with 3-D display technology. She had good things to say about the devices as solid laptops in their own right, but she’s still not sold on the glasses.

Get your popcorn ready, throw on your 3-D glasses, and wait for the lights to dim. The new week is about to start.

Kara was full-tilt geek this week with an early post from TED’s viral video division. It seems Bill Gates told the assembled geekerati his one true wish. Wanna know what it is? We guess you’ll have to watch the video to find out. Kara then gave us some perspective on Yahoo (YHOO) playing social catch-up with its recent Twitter deal. Everyone may be muttering “too little, too late,” but it could be worse. The Internet giant could have tried to release its own social network. Kara then jetted off to sunny Mexico to give a keynote at SISCTI, Mexico’s major infotech conference. We’re hoping she brings us back a sombrero.

Everyone is chattering about Web-delivered video this week, but Peter brought some real perspective to all the racket. It looks like Walmart (WMT) is coughing up $100 million for Vudu in its theoretical bid to compete with the iTunes store. That’s a way bigger ticket than had been expected, but it looks like the world’s largest retailer is getting some serious skin in the game. Midweek, Peter brought us a story of triumph from the world of newspapers. It seems that the financial situation at the Washington Post (WPO) was “less bad” last quarter. The bleeding has slowed, but the patient is still in the ICU. Peter rounded things out with a dose of reality for Apple’s (AAPL) otherwise magical rhetoric. Billions of songs, billions of apps and download volume that leaps every quarter do not equal impressive profits, apparently. Don’t feel too bad for Steve though. We all know songs and apps are just fuel for the iFire.

Digital Daily started off the week all aflutter with news that Twitter is pumping out 600 tweets per second. That means if all those tweets are paced end to end, multiplied by 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour and 24 hours in a day, Twitter still isn’t making any money. After a slew of posts early in the week, John tied up Palm coverage with some thoughts on “Project Jumpstart.” It seems Palm (PALM) should be thinking about a different sort of project, maybe one that involves getting bought. Finally, in everyone’s favorite category, John covered some more Apple speculation in the iPad afterglow. It looks like analysts are expecting a refreshed iPhone that will cost less and potentially have some new gesture-based features.

Walt’s column was of particular interest this week, especially if you’ve got finances to deal with or a certain gray-bearded uncle to pay in mid-April. Walt gave the rundown on the latest Mac version of Quicken. The Mac-Quicken relationship has always been tricky, and people (Weekend Updaters included) have used some tricky workarounds to keep using the Windows version of Intuit’s (INTU) popular finance program. Sadly, the latest version for Mac doesn’t really close the gap, and Walt wasn’t too up on making the switch. Mossberg’s Mailbox was full of magicJack mail this week–sort of like the leftovers from last week’s wild VOIParty. It turns out that it’s not the best idea to try to fax over the magicJack, even if it does sort of work for some people some of the time. That settles it. Weekend Update is gonna get one and hook it up to our Clapper-activated file-server.

Finally, Katie brought the cloud down to ground level this week with a review of Pogoplug, a device that lets you host and stream your files from a home hard drive over the Internet to your devices. You can be your own cloud, sort of, and Katie said she liked it just fine. Low-level clouds…maybe we can get the term fog computing to catch on.

Stay safe, be well, and have a look at the some of the stuff coming out of Chile this weekend. This time it was Santiago, but AllThingsD HQ sits on the ring of fire too.

Martha Stewart invited our own Katie Boehret back to her show for a second time this week to share some of her favorite things from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The following is a link to Martha’s site for the video, which isn’t embeddable at this point, but we promise it’s worth the click. Katie kicks things off with Google Goggles.

Whoa! Sorry, we may have gotten just a little over excited about Walt’s Personal Technology column this week. He responded to popular demand and submitted a full review of the magicJack. Yes, that magicJack. No one can ever accuse Walt Mossberg of not being a man of the people. So what did he find? Well, the little plastic USB dongle that ranks up there with rotisseries, Chia pets and The Clapper in the pantheon of hard-sell TV adds actually delivered on its promise. MagicJack connects via USB to a computer, and has a standard land-line telephone jack on the other end. Walt started it up, made some calls, and even tried out the customer service center, which turned out to be efficient and helpful. Among the few drawbacks were the need to use the phone number that comes with the device and the fact that it only works when your computer is on and connected to the Internet. Mossberg’s Mailbox was full to the brim this week with some pretty targeted questions about security, the grim future of the dedicated PDA and e-readers for libraries. As it turns out, running a virtual Windows machine on a Mac can lead to a very real virus if you aren’t careful. Katie’s piece at Mossberg Solution made sense of this week’s biggest question mark. What the heck is Google (GOOG) Buzz? She broke the new social network from Google down to its bare bones and explained some of the controversy surrounding how it decides who’s added to you Buzz list. The new social feature is now built into Gmail, but it seems the exact relationship between your Gmail contacts and Buzz is still being worked out. Katie nails it all with an expertly simple explanation of the service and controversies.

BoomTown started the week off with a little insider info about Micheal Dearing, the hottest angel investor you’ve never heard of. Dearing, a former eBay (EBAY) exec and current professor at Stanford’s design school, has been inside early on high-profile start-ups like Aardvark, Xoopit and Mixer Labs. Kara shared a meal with the start-up whisperer and got more out of him than most, even if he still kept pretty tight-lipped. Kara also shared some viral video love featuring some hardcore Avatar fans. We can’t tell if these live action Na’vi role players are kidding. Maybe we’ll ask their king, James Cameron, when he joins Kara on stage at the next D conference. Toward the end of the week, Kara posted about what may be the strangest love triangle of the modern era. The Facebook-Snickers-Betty White trifecta is so strange we can barely even comprehend the letters in it. It seems that Facebook users loved the Betty White Super Bowl ad for Snickers so much that they held a social media gun to Lorne Micheals’s head until he got the Golden Girl to host “Saturday Night Live.” The only thing that could unseat the Betty White triangle from weirdest social media moment of ’10 is the much rumored Barry White-KFC-America’s Next Top Model episode we’ve been hearing about. There: Rumor started.

MediaMemo led off the week with Weekend Update’s favorite sort of post. It was yet another beautiful e-mag concept, this time from Condé Nast’s Wired. The mag looked snappy, beautiful and functional–even if no one, besides maybe Stephen Colbert, has a device that can display it yet. Peter also covered the second instance of an emerging trend in the video rental business. It looks like Redbox, the ever-present rental kiosk company, has agreed to go the way of Netflix (NFLX) and keep recently released DVDs out of the rental pool in exchange for a cash break from Warner. Peter rounded things out with a post about Web TV service Hulu and the likelihood of a Hulu player for the iPad. Peter’s post explores the probability that an iPad Hulu would not be a free Hulu. This situation is pretty bounded and specific, but the deeper question is one facing a great many media companies right now. Will users be willing to pay for convenience of displaying a service on the iPad that they can get for free on there home computer, and by extension, will they pay by the app or pay for the content? Weekend Update can’t wait to see how that one shakes out.

Over at Digital Daily, John started early in the week with a quick peek at Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows Phone, the new smartphone operating system from the maker of Windows Mobile and Windows Vista. As it turns out, Windows Phone looks pretty slick. The interface isn’t a shrunken version of the desktop OS, which is a very good thing. Midweek, John scaled a mountain of tweets to report from the very top. It seems that Twitter’s traffic has grown over 1,000 percent since last year, according to comScore’s (SCOR) January report. It may now be impossible to shut the flock up. To button up the week, John covered a decision by the Federal Trade Commission that allows Google to buy and sell power wholesale, just like an energy utility. Google execs insist that the move doesn’t signal their intention to enter the power arena as a utility. They just want to buy power like anyone else. After all, electricity is the raw material of Googling.

We’re so confident that you’ve enjoyed this Weekend Update that if you aren’t 100 percent satisfied, you can send it back for a full refund of your purchase price, no questions asked. You can look for all your favorite AllThingsD accessories next week. John, Peter Kara and Walt will be back to ship top-quality content directly to your door at no extra charge. Top quality, easy to use and in a variety of colors, there’s something for everyone at AllThingsD.

And now back to your regularly scheduled program.

That’s the thesis behind Clicker, a would-be TV Guide for Web video, which has raised an $11 million B round led by JAFCO Ventures, with participation from earlier investors Benchmark Capital and Redpoint Ventures. The funding follows an $8 million round announced last fall that was actually raised in 2008.

I assumed the money would be targeted to build up a sales and marketing team for the 32-person company, which launched in October but has no revenue to speak of. In fact, CEO Jim Lanzone says the money will go in the start-up’s bank account for now.

“We didn’t need the money yet,” he says. “But we had multiple firms interested, and we had the opportunity to pick the best one for us and get it done. It was kind of a no-brainer.”

Clicker is a clever Web video play because it takes advantage of Web video’s popularity without getting clobbered by the cost and copyright problems that have felled start-ups like Joost and Veoh.

Clicker doesn’t have to pay to produce or stream Web video because it doesn’t make or host its own clips, though it will run embedded clips from other services. And it doesn’t have copyright problems because it only indexes professionally produced stuff. (Here’s Katie Boehret’s review from last November.)

The service doesn’t have significant traffic yet–comScore (SCOR) reports 226,000 unique visitors in January, though Lanzone says his internal numbers show 750,000–but it is getting a warm reception from the traditional TV business, which likes the idea of central hub for “legitimate” content.

And the industry needs one if it’s going to get users to embrace its “TV Everywhere” strategy. Again, viewers shouldn’t care if they’re watching “The Pacific” on Time Warner’s (TWX) HBO Go or via Comcast’s (CMCSA) Fancast–they just want to find the show.

Boomtown was in the front row when game exec Dan Rosensweig left the stage at Guitar Hero to take over as CEO of Chegg, the Web’s top textbook renter. Rosensweig had only been strumming along at Guitar Hero since March, so the move was unexpected. Kara did the full-disclosure dance with AOL’s earnings report. Hit her post for all sorts of great source documents from the new republic of Aol. (AOL). She closed out the week with a thinky piece on Facebook and what it could do in the news aggregation biz. With nigh 400 million users, the number of traded links just to Rick Astley music must be staggering. This one is worth the read.

From deep in his snow-covered technology bunker, Walt let fly a Personal Technology column on two tiny new laptops with a lot to offer. Dell’s (DELL) M11x, the latest release from its Alienware line, is a move to pack lots of power into a tiny package. Sony’s (SNE) Vaio X on the other hand, is all about the lightness. The Dell got high marks for performance, even if the battery life wasn’t as killer as the graphics. The Sony, however, received a rare Mossberg superlative. Being the lightest laptop Walt has ever tested does come with some drawbacks, of course. Chief among them was measly battery life. Mossberg’s Mailbox was short but potent this week. Walt gave some quick clarification to an iPad question and reassured readers that YouTube will be available on the device, even if Flash won’t. He then gave some no-nonsense advice about dumping the older IE6 in favor of a newer, safer, and more supported browser. Katie got to do a little online shopping this week in her review of Flit.com, a Web service that allows you to search multiple stores at once and aims to streamline the shopping experience. She liked the novel way Flit deals you out to store’s Web sites but lets you see their offerings before you click over. No word on if whether or not she bought those black heels she was looking for.

John brought some great news to Google Nexus One users with a post early this week about a meaty software upgrade. Just like that, Google (GOOG) flipped the switch on multitouch functionality in the device. We can now add pinch-zoom to the list of Googleable words. It seems that 12 percent of Americans had something in common with Monster.com (MWW) this week; they were both looking for job listings. Monster purchased Yahoo’s HotJobs for $225 million cash. We drove by earlier today, and Carol Bartz still has Yahoo (YHOO) Games and Yahoo Shopping out on the lawn next to the “for sale” sign. John rounded out the week with a little crystal ball-gazing about the future of Apple and TV. The speculation is centered around Apple’s (AAPL) recent moves in the TV space and how the iPad might play a role. We can add TV to the list of things the iPad might be.

MediaMemo always gets to cover those wonderfully chewy stories where the tech sector and the mediascape bump and grind. This week Peter opened up with a post about YouTube’s most recent foray into legitimate movies. The Google-owned video giant offered up paid views of Sundance films and considered the effort an overall success. One of the big what-ifs of 2009 was actually more of a “when,” as in, “when will Hulu start costing money?” Peter reported that a Disney (DIS) exec said the decision hasn’t yet been made. Weekend Update will be stocking up on old episodes of “The A-Team” and “Another World” in case Hulu finally puts up the wall. Peter rounded out the week with the answer to a question that’s been on our minds for some time now; will we live in a world with a publicly traded porn Web site. When investors didn’t seem to be hot for FriendFinder Networks, the company canceled its pending IPO. Weekend Update supposes that porn will just have to remain the Web’s biggest nonindustry.

Put on your rain slickers or snow shoes, depending on where you live, and enjoy the winter weekend. Or, you could stay indoors and play some Guitar Hero, futz with a new laptop, hunt for a job, shop for some shoes online and watch TV at Hulu. That’s what we’ve been doing.

We’ve all seen it, that spiro-graphed, color-splotched invitation to Apple’s Jan. 27 event at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco. Weekend Update isn’t on the inside, but we hear rumors that Jobs will storm the stage dressed as Moses, carrying the new tablet, which will be made of stone, under his robes. Apparently, that’s where it’s been hiding all along. Either that, or Weekend Update is going a little nuts from “tablet fatigue.”

Before we got to rumors, plans and all important educated guesses, AllThingsD spent the week doing reporting about real companies with products you can actually buy.

Walt’s column wasn’t exactly its normal, gadgety self this week. Maybe he’s saving his strength. Instead of the newest thing that won’t be leaving your pocket, he covered a service that claims to help you remember everything. Evernote, with its adorable little elephant logo, aims to be a sort of digital filing cabinet in the cloud, allowing you to save information, images, notes and just about anything else that can be digitized. Walt had good things to say all around, even if the available apps didn’t give every device the same functionality. Weekend Update liked the auto text-recognition feature that makes pictures of text searchable. We’ll never carry a business card home again. Neither rain nor snow nor tablet rumors can keep Walt from his appointed rounds at Mossberg’s Mailbox, and this week he grabbed a couple questions about e-readers, Microsoft’s (MSFT) Internet Explorer 8 and the right laptop for the young and litigious. Walt cleared up the myth that e-books can’t highlight text (even if they don’t do it in color yet), and then moved on to a question about what IE8 refers to as “accelerators.” Before tying up the mailbag strings for anther week, he also gave counsel to a future counselor. He recommended a moderately priced Windows 7 laptop or a Macbook for the incoming law student, though he suggested it would be a good idea to check with the school and current students for specific needs. Weekend Update thinks that last bit is extra good advice. Katie was busy this week testing the latest Bluetooth earpiece from Aliph’s Jawbone line. The Jawbone Icon is the first earpiece to run with a software package that allows the addition of apps just for the earpiece. Overall Katie thought the Icon represented a step forward for Bluetooth earpieces but hopes for upgrades to the app suite will bring more robust features. Oh yeah, and she was glad that they finally got rid of those tricky hidden control buttons.

At MediaMemo, Peter gave us the continued saga of e-magazines and the world’s slowest moving electronic construction project. It looks like the Time Inc. e-mag prototypes won’t be part of Wednesday’s Apple (AAPL) event even though there was a lot of hullabaloo over the company’s Sports Illustrated prototype. Condé Nast, on the other hand, has declared its GQ mag-as-app tests a success. No word yet on who will be three-quarters naked on the first 10-inch screen edition. Completing the out-with-the-print, in-with-the-electronic trifecta was Peter’s post about the New York Times pay-wall announcement. The Times claims it will erect a metered wall in 2011, which seems like an awfully long time in the shifting sands of the Web. Outside partners may be playing a factor, and some speculate that the 2011 date is just a declaration that New York Times Company (NYT) will be waiting-and-seeing. Peter doesn’t see what that would accomplish and cites experts who assert that a year isn’t an unreasonable amount of time to build a complex pay wall with necessary features.

Digital Daily was on the ball this week with John’s signature hard-hitting hilarity. His early report proved correct when sources suggested that the EU’s approval of the pending Oracle (ORCL)-Sun (JAVA) acquisition was nigh. Not to leave the tablet news out in the cold, John asked some important questions about a future tablet’s data consumption habits, and thinks it might end up in a class of its own. A big, beautiful screen means big, beautiful images and video, which mean gloriously huge file sizes. Hooray for Wi-Fi. To round out the week, John covered a story about Google (GOOG) co-founders Larry and Sergey planning to sell about $5.5 billion in stock over five years. We’re not sure whether the proper term is “cashing out” or “cashing in,” but they are going to be doing a lot of one or the other. The stock sale will remove them as a two-man majority voting block, but their remaining 47 percent will assure that their velvety duet will continue to ring clearly at board meetings.

Boomtown led off with some viral video for the ages. Jimmy Fallon one-upped the “pants on the ground” video by performing the sarcastic ballad as Neil Young. We’re not sure the audience caught that it was Jimmy right way, in part, because Young was making the TV rounds about that time, and in part, because Fallon does a surprisingly good Neal impression. Kara asked her readers to vote on the new tablet’s name, making “iPad” her own prediction. Kara has an eerie way of getting this stuff right so Weekend Update is gonna go ahead and get that tattoo this weekend. Kara finished the week with a quick post about her trip to Sundance and all the geektastic happenings there. Kara’s Winnebago, which we call “Operation Rolling Thunder,” was crammed full of wife, kids, mom, dog, and maybe a few stowaway Bay Area indie filmmakers who tied themselves to the undercarriage. Read the post; there’s never a dull moment on a Swisher expedition.

AllTingsD is back on Monday with some great new stuff to feed that techie habit. And don’t forget to set your homepages here Tuesday (as if they weren’t already) to see live photos and blogging from Apple’s big unveiling. We’ll see you there, and will be sure to let you know if Jobs does, in fact, part the Bay in his walk from Marin to San Francisco that morning.

BoomTown just could not wait for Carol Bartz’s one-year anniversary at Yahoo (YHOO) to roll around so that the judging could commence. Kara and Carol have a famously sordid history, possibly involving both K-Fed and Brangelina. Even with all that history, Kara was pretty complimentary, giving Bartz an A- in the management category and a C+ for financials. It looks like we’ll be able to tune in for the next few days and catch this ongoing judgefest. Kara moved on from the report card to a quick post declaring her love of network TV drama, and not the “Law and Order” kind. The fight over at NBC for late-night supremacy has been more hilarious than Leno or Conan. Maybe the solution is just to put some network execs on screen in that slot. Kara finished out the week with a conversation with recently departed RealNetworks (RNKW) CEO Rob Glaser. No, he isn’t dead, but he has decided to step down to look into other opportunities. Near as we can tell, they may have something to do with woolly mammoths.

Digital Daily was abuzz this week with the headline story of Google Labs adding yet another feature to Gmail. The new foreign policy tab enables Google (GOOG) to make better publicized international relations decisions than the Federal Government (and do so 20 percent faster if you’re running Chrome). Of course, it wasn’t all Google rattling China’s cage this week. John covered the party over at Intel (INTC) after the chip maker announced a blowout Q4. Finally, readers got a taste of capitalism at its best. Now you can get either America’s best network or America’s best smartphone (not both, of course) at a significant price cut. Thanks to pressure from Verizon (VZ), AT&T (T) dropped rates on certain calling plans.

Peter hit us with lots of video news this week, starting early with the potential partnership between Vudu and Wal-Mart (WMT). The world’s largest retailer seems to be thinking about getting into the Web TV business, or as it calls it, opening a supercenter in your house. Some might be watching for a rerun of the megaretailer’s failed shot at competing with Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes for music sales, but the Web TV space is wide open, so far. Also on the home entertainment front, Peter reported that it looks like Netflix (NFLX) may get a one-up from Nintendo fairly shortly if it can finalize a deal to add the Japanese game giant’s systems to the list of places you can stream its digital video content. Peter rounded things out with a little foreshadowing that YouTube, the Web video 800-pound gorilla, may be edging its way out of the red. Since acquisition, YouTube has never turned a profit, and Google execs have been muttering that they expect that to change shortly. What’s different this week? An industry analyst finally agrees.

If a moment of Mossberg just isn’t enough for you, then you are in luck this week as team Walt and Katie went all the way with three new installments of gadget wisdom. In Personal Technology, Walt reviewed the Sony Reader Daily Edition. While the big improvement to Sony’s (SNE) previous e-reader offering is the addition of wireless connectivity for remote download of articles and books (think Amazon Kindle’s “Whispernet”), Sony also upped the ante in form factor and interface. Overall, Walt was positive and felt the device was a strong offering. Mossberg’s Mailbox was overflowing this week with all kinds of questions from the Nexus One crowd. Walt picked three gems and clarified some points on measly app storage capacity, cell company coverage maps and the nitty-gritty on synching data between the phones and computers. Katie donned her gaiters and bravely waded into the weeds of search technology to shed some light on a major emerging trend—visual search. Both Google and Microsoft’s (MSFT) Bing are offering ways to search for things you can’t recall the name of, doing so by comparing images until you get that aha! moment. This stuff is complicated, but head on over to Katie’s article to figure out how it is going to change the search landscape.

Thanks for reading this week. Weekend Update wishes everyone as much good luck as we had making it out of CES Las Vegas alive.

Oh yeah, and a quick note to Siegfried: We may have one of your tigers, and also Roy.

Only a few days ago, the AllThingsDigital team left home freshly pressed, pockets full of cash (or at least as full as journalists’ pockets get these days) and ready to take on the geek horde at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Walt, Kara, Katie, John and Peter had big plans, but in the end, even a copy of Eric Boyd’s “How to Count Cards Like an MIT Freshman” could not save them. They did do a heck of a lot of reporting on CES though. At least they could bring back some news, if not new Ferraris from the dealership at the Wynn.

BoomTown is no stranger to Vegas, so Kara got settled in quick and spent day one hopping up and down The Strip to see presentations and fiddle with gadgets of all sorts. She caught up with Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer after he rocked his keynote just a little too hard and the power went out. I guess maybe he shouldn’t have turned that tablet prototype all the way up to 11. Kara caught the scoop on Electus’s Ben Silverman and his new deal with Yahoo. It seems the Internet portal has brought him on to “produce content” for its new you-centric efforts. Yahoo (YHOO) is hanging its hopes on Silverman, who had success in his early career producing for TV. Kara even got the other side of the deal, catching up with Jimmy Pitaro, who heads Yahoo’s Vertical Audiences Experience, and SVP of North American Revenue Joanne Bradford. Kara hasn’t actually made it back to the City by the Bay yet, so we’ll keep you posted on when she resurfaces. Vegas can be a cruel mistress.

John was a CES coverage juggernaut this week, filing post after post or indispensable, up-to-the-minute CES nerdery. Early in the festivities, Intel (INTC) opened the door on its newest family of Core processors. With model names like i3 and i5 and with a feature called “Turbo,” you know they have to be good. The real story is that the release of these chips puts Intel a solid year ahead of expected releases from AMD (AMD). Though there were no reported sightings of an iSlate, John did deliver a little nugget from the CES rumor mill about their manufacture. Analysts are expecting the device to have an aluminum chassis when it may or may not be shown to the world at an unconfirmed Apple event Jan. 27. John was our correspondent in the audience at AllThingsDigital‘s Mini D event at CES. While there were posts aplenty, it was comments from Palm (PALM) CEO Jon Rubinstein that have been making the rounds on the Internet. Everyone was a little surprised when Rubinstein claimed never to have used an iPhone. Weekend Update has used a Pixi and we might just believe him.

Peter was in full effect at CES this week, trolling around CES with his sizable entourage. Okay, maybe the MediaMemo groupies aren’t that numerous, but Peter was a reporting rockstar nonetheless. In advance of his onstage interview with Netflix (NFLX) CEO Reed Hastings, Peter wrote about the deal inked between the rental giant and Warner Bros that would delay availability of new DVD releases by Netflix in exchange for more streamable content from the studio. In a quick breather from CES news, Peter reported that Google’s (GOOG) Eric Schmidt and some other Technorati were en route to dinner with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the State Department. No word on which reality TV stars would be crashing that party. MediaMemo rounded out the week with a post about Hearst’s effort to save its sinking ship. It turns out that when the ship is in trouble, you turn to a Skiff for help. The newspaper giant has reportedly plowed $35 million into the nautically-named e-reader, and Peter brought us a sneak peek.

Our very own Mr. and Ms. CES (Walt and Katie) may come home with blisters and a bad case of “qwerty thumb” after handling so many new gadgets this week. The Personal Technology column was all about Google’s Nexus One, the latest super-smartphone from everyone’s favorite search giant. Walt’s review was a mixed bag for the Nexus One, which got high marks for advancing the Android platform, for forcing the other super smartphone giants to up the ante on their cameras and for some of it’s cool Google-connected features. He wasn’t as upbeat on the menu-driven interface of the phone and had qualms about the four hard-wired buttons. The battery life for some features also wasn’t as competitive as it might have been.

Katie spent some pre-CES time investigating the so-called mega-zoom digital camera offerings from Nikon, Panasonic (PC) and Casio. These in-between cameras aren’t quite so cumbersome as DSLRs but offer serious zooming capabilities with lots of other pro level features. Katie fell in love with the higher picture quality and flexibility, even if the cameras are a little bulkier than the smartphone she’d been using for her photo needs previously. All in all, though, she gave the class of cameras high marks and said they were a great next step for people looking to take their pictures a little farther.

Weekend Update has to get going. Its our job to prepare the ibuprofen, cold medicine, ice, bandages, crutches and bail money that may be needed by the staff as they make their way back from CES. Stay tuned through the weekend for a few more tech revelations, and please try not to play your stereo too loud if you’re driving near our Eureka Valley HQ in San Francisco this week. Hangovers after a gadget binge are the worst.

You’d never believe it, you never would know, that Christmas had come, at least not by the snow. All the geeks in the Valley were typing away, forced to take a short breather on this year’s Christmas day. So read on for info, this update, dear friends, as Christmas is over and a new year begins.

In time for Christmas, in technology news, Walt opened his column on product reviews. It seems, I am told, that holiday travel, with two screaming children can make brains unravel. So what could one bring, on a holiday trek, to keep little ones smiling and not cause a wreck? In a guest post by Nick–Wingfield’s his name–we saw Apple’s iTouch, the best in the game. He talked PSPs, and Nintendo DS’s, but versatile and thin, iPod touch got the yesses.

At Mossberg Solution, Katie was typing, a fresh new post to help holiday griping. For if through your window, this holiday season, a new Mac has drifted, you might have a reason. The keyboard is different, and programs won’t close, all those whoosits and whatzits, no one really knows. But Katie was there, she did not take a rest, to show you the way to make your new Mac the best. Remember to “Quit,” on that Mac she said, ’cause those little red x’s won’t put the program to bed. And one final thought, if it doesn’t seem rude, Katie recommended a new attitude. You see, on the Mac, once they’ve been detected, to remove those hard drives, they must first be “ejected.”

It was all about BoomTown, this week in the news, as Kara looked at upcoming interviews. She’s worked much too hard and now they’ve said yes, but the lineup is set for our CES. With Hastings and Rubin and Rubinstien all, we’ll get their big scoops at the big techie ball. If tech shows are cold, with their gadgets galore, Kara posted a post about what’s in store. She traveled to Twitter and talked with Biz Stone, who thinked up some thoughts on how tweeting has grown. He pensively pondered, and stroked his cute chin. Some thoughts on the future, he gave with a grin. Kara was waving goodbye, flying off to the sand, to spend time with her family, mai-tai in hand. But before she got buckled and the jet engines roared, she solved a small mystery while climbing aboard. It seems, oh you see, that she’d gotten some news, about MySpace, Flixster and movie reviews. The two have been talking, oh talking some talk, with Rotten Tomatoes along for the walk. So she boarded the jet, all shiny and tall, waving goodbye to BoomTown for some vacation, if small.

At MediaMemo HQ, it was Peter this week, opening the media door and taking a peek. Over at TMZ, they are all talking sports, it seems they are thinking, a new venture of sorts. The connection makes sense, though the idea is small. They might thank Tiger Woods for starting it all. And just when you thought you’d bought all your gifts, Peter covered that thing that’s on every geek’s lists. It seems to Peter, that maybe, perhaps, the new Apple (AAPL) tablet would need big tablet-sized apps. That’s just what he found, when looking this week; some big app developers had given a tweak. They’ve made everything bigger, for what we don’t know, but whatever it is, the screen sure did grow. Peter covered it all, including abuse. There were gremlins, not elves, about, on the loose. While most new tech start-ups were shopping for backers, the biggest of bigs were snorched on by hackers. Amazon (AMZN), Wal-Mart (WMT), and more in the cloud, got hit by bad geeks, doing things not allowed. They recovered it quickly, and locked up their gate, making sure all your packages still wouldn’t be late.

So as you relax, and come down from the Yule, whether frozen at home or splayed out by a pool, Weekend Update is here, as is AllThingsD, to keep you informed when you’ve got places to be. Please leave us your comments, thoughts, queries and questions. We’d even adore your most helpful suggestions. And enjoy those around you, this holiday season. It’s friends, family and loved ones that give our lives reason.