Henry Blodget. Photo: SAI

This has been busy season for celebrity iPhone switching — and I'm not talking about Britney, Ashton or Branjelina. No, these are tech celebrities, the kind of people who tend to dominate Techmeme's list of the most-influential pundits and bloggers.

Om Malik, the New Delhi-born founder and executive editor of GigaOm (No. 17 on the Techmeme Leaderboard), kicked things off back in February when he announced that he was giving up his beloved iPhone. It wasn't Apple's (AAPL) fault, he wrote in My Big iPhone Break-Up. "I love my iPhone. But AT&T's (T) network has failed me." After AT&T dropped him twice during a single phone interview he said "enough is enough" and switched within minutes to T-Mobile (DT) and a Blackberry Curve 8900.

Two weeks ago, Henry Blodget went the other way. In How I Ended My Affair With BlackBerry And Eloped With The iPhone the former high-profile tech analyst and founder of Silicon Alley Insider (Techmeme No. 30) described the breakup in almost embarrassing detail, including the confession that it involved setting foot in an Apple store for the very first time. "It's like entering another world," he wrote — a revelation that sent the newly revived Fake Steve Jobs into paroxisms of disbelief: More

The video-sharing site loses money and has failed to attract quality studio programming. So why does Google continue to pump money into it?

YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley (left) and product manager Salar Kamangar

You would think Google's executive triumvirate — CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page — would be worried about YouTube. Almost three years after they forked over $1.65 billion in stock to acquire the video-sharing site, YouTube last year delivered only an estimated $240 million in revenue and is deeply in the red.

YouTube is the largest video platform in the world. Users upload 20 hours of video to it each minute, at tremendous cost to Google (GOOG). The company doesn't break out YouTube's expenses, but analysts believe it spends tens of millions of dollars each month just on network capacity to host all those videos.

And, oh, what videos! Four years after its inception YouTube remains a repository for "long tail" content that appeals to niche audiences: clips of cats on skateboards, babies laughing, and kids lip-synching. (There are occasional mass-audience moments, like the clip of Susan Boyle on Britain's Got Talent, viewed 71 million times.)

Gallery: See YouTube's greatest hits

But despite Google's repeated efforts, YouTube has failed to create an environment for professional video content, where many advertisers are clamoring to put their money right now. More

Alec Baldwin promotes Hulu in traditional TV spots.

The Web video shakeout has begun. Hulu, a venture of NBC, ABC, and Fox, is growing nicely, aided in part by a slick marketing campaign using, of all things, television ads starring Alec Baldwin. But a slew of smaller sites are starting to reformulate their strategies in the hope of surviving.

Joost, which was started by the founders of Skype Technologies, recently announced it would reinvent itself as a wholesale technology provider for media companies to publish video. The New York City–based outfit was launched amid great expectations in 2006 with $45 million in funding.

Video-sharing site Veoh may also be in trouble. High-profile backers, including ex-Disney (DIS) CEO Michael Eisner and Goldman Sachs (GS), have sunk $99 million into the New York–based site since its 2005 launch. In addition to the usual startups costs, Veoh has been hobbled by an expensive court battle with Vivendi's Universal Music Group over alleged copyright violations.

Back to main story: Google (still) loves YouTube

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz said two months ago that Microsoft would have to cough up “boatloads of money” to get Yahoo’s search business. In the end, it took nothing of the sort.

Apparently, all Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer had to do was let Yahoo (YHOO) take the lead in selling search to premium advertisers, and promise to supply Microsoft’s Bing search technology on the cheap. Under the terms of a 10-year deal announced Wednesday, the software giant will take a slim 12% cut of the search revenue Yahoo makes from its huge network of sites. More

Even with Yahoo deal Microsoft will continue to struggle — and lose money — online.

The anti-climactic deal of the year is now out.  Long after the sizzle faded from Microsoft's (MSFT) failed $40-billion-plus bid for  Yahoo (YHOO), the two companies announced Wednesday they'll do what sympathetic observers urged them to do two years ago. They'll stop competing on search and search-advertising technology, enabling them to combine forces against Google. (GOOG)

Critics frowned on Yahoo (where's the "boatloads" of upfront cash Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz promised she'd extract from Steve Ballmer?) and praised Microsoft, The Wall Street Journal going so far as suggesting the tide may turning in the tired monopolist's favor. Perhaps. Beyond the something-must-be-said-because-they-called-a-press-conference chatter, however, a few points to consider: More

Map: CIA Factbook

Despite heavy advertising and early black market interest, Apple's (AAPL) iPhone is an expensive flop in Russia, according to a reportposted Thursday by Svetlana Gladkova.

Gladkova, Russian editor of the tech blog Profy.com, writes that Russia's three major carriers cut a deal with Apple last year that requires them to sell a total of 3.5 million iPhones over a period of two to three years.

But in the first 6 months after Apple’s phone became officially available, according to CNews Russian, the three carriers — in conjunction with their Russian retail partners  — only managed to sell 250,000.

Now, according to Gladkova, one of the largest of those retailers, Euroset, owes the carrier it was working with, MTS, 279 million rubles — roughly $8.5 million — for iPhones that it can't unload. More

(MSFT) (YHOO) (GOOG)

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer pose for the cameras after doing a search deal. Image: Yahoo

Soon after Yahoo (YHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT) announced their search deal on July 29, I spoke with Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer about the market's negative reaction, the benefit to the bottom line, implications for affiliates, and comparisons to Google's (GOOG) much-maligned ad deal with AOL (TWX). Below is an edited transcript.

The Street seems to have mixed feelings about this deal. Were expectations too high with people expecting boatloads of money up front, or are people misunderstanding how good this is for Yahoo? More

Ive and Jobs. Photo: TMZ.com

The celebrity gossip site TMZ.com has posted what it claims is an iPhone snapshot of Steve Jobs leaving Apple's (AAPL) Cupertino, Calif., campus Wednesday afternoon with Jonathan Ive, senior vice president for industrial design.

That would make it the first photograph of Apple's CEO published since his last public appearance nine months ago — at the unveiling of the aluminum unibody MacBooks in the company's Town Hall meeting rooms on October 14, 2008.

Jobs returned to work part time in June after a five and a half month medical leave, during which he received a liver transplant.

See also: Apple: 'Steve Jobs is back to work'

In a note to clients issued Wednesday morning, Kaufman Bros.'s Shaw Wu reported on some interesting trends from his latest iPhone supply chain checks:

• Expensive iPhones — especially the $299 3GS — are doing better than expected in a tough macroeconomic climate. "Customers," he writes, "have surprisingly opted for higher-end models where they are willing to pay a premium for a faster processor, video recording, more storage, voice control, and other features."
• Apple, expecting a rush on its $99 3G iPhones, underestimated demand for the $199 and $299 models. As a result, there were widespread shortages of nearly all 3GS iPhones through the first weeks of July.
• "This is an interesting and arguably counter-economic trend," he writes, one that should lead to much higher profitability  — perhaps as high as 1,000 basis points.
• Apple has adjusted its production mix and supplies are improving. Wu is currently modeling 6.8 million iPhones for Q4 — nearly equal to Apple's runaway fourth quarter last year (6.89 million iPhones) and up 31% from Q3 (5.21 million). It's a forecast,  he says, that could prove to be conservative.
• He is picking up signs that Apple's suppliers could be gearing up to build 9 million to 10 million units.

Wu recently raised his price target to $184 a share — from $176 — based on 15 times his estimate of Apple's 2010 free cash flow plus net cash holdings worth $34 billion.

Apple shares were down a fraction of point to $159.73 in midday trading Wednesday.