Deal for AdMob accelerates scramble for a whopping $416 million in revenue.

As was trumpeted across the Internet Monday, Google (GOOG) is buying mobile display advertising startup AdMob for $750 million in (increasingly) precious Google stock. Wall Street digested the news and sent Google stock up almost $11.

Citi analyst Mark Mahaney says the deal “makes sense, because Google is moving aggressively to take advantage of the strong growth opportunity in mobile, which is fueled by smartphones.” Sandeep Aggarwal at Collins Stewart likes the deal, arguing “mobile advertising will be a $4 billion revenue opportunity by 2012-2013.”

Over my dead BlackBerry. More

A storied financier of startups expands — but its new businesses have yet to take root.

A year ago, when venture capital firm Sequoia Capital ordered its portfolio companies to slash costs in the face of a sick economy, even healthy businesses, such as LinkedIn and Zappos.com, complied.

As word of the edict spread, many non-Sequoia startups also trimmed their budgets — a testament to the venture firm's influence in Silicon Valley and beyond. In its 35 years in business Sequoia had nurtured the likes of Atari, Apple (AAPL), Cisco (CSCO), Yahoo (YHOO), and Google (GOOG). If it was bracing for the worst, the situation must be serious.

But just as Sequoia was commanding its upstarts to contract, the firm was plotting an ambitious expansion of its own. Throughout 2008 and into this year Sequoia tried entering entirely new businesses, hiring professional investors to build a hedge fund, as well as an asset-management group that would mimic the wealth-preservation approach popularized by major university endowments. More

The state of the state? "A train wreck," says one official.

If the world’s eighth-largest economy were a member of the proper religious order, it’d be time to call in a priest to administer last rites.

Name almost any serious malady and the state of California has it: the nation’s highest marginal tax rate coupled with an abysmal public education system; the most home foreclosures; a free-falling commercial real estate sector; lame-duck governor with no legislative support and a disdain for an annual budget process that he refers to as kabuki theater; unemployment somewhere between the official number of 12% and the whisper number of 18%; a 20% drop in year-over-year revenue; municipalities that have either declared bankruptcy (Vallejo) or are on the verge (Los Angeles); and a black-box permitting process that scares away business investment even while every week, 3,000 more taxpayers migrate to greener pastures.

Californians may be a can-do lot, but faced with all that evidence and much more, the political and economic leaders who spoke at the Milken Institute’s annual “State of the State” conference held yesterday at the Beverly Hilton could hardly have been more dour. “It’s a train wreck, and it’s getting worse,” said Bill Lockyer, California State Treasurer. Added former Assembly speaker Bob Hertzberg, now co-chair of governance reform group California Forward, “A high-speed train wreck.” More

After the Vista debacle, Microsoft changed the way it makes software. The result – Windows 7 – is winning raves. Can a new operating system (and a new attitude) help the company take on Google?

With Microsoft's founder and chairman, Bill Gates, trotting the globe in a quest to abolish diseases, his handpicked successor, CEO Steve Ballmer, has had most of a decade to move the company beyond its two biggest cash cows, the Windows operating system and the Office productivity suite. So far, not so good.

The company's web forays, such as MSN, have only highlighted the dominance of Google and Yahoo. In software for smartphones, there is Apple, RIM (RIMM), and everybody else. MP3 players? Microsoft's Zune hardly merits a mention. And even the core franchise has suffered. In the face of slowing PC sales and the economic pall, Microsoft's fiscal 2009 revenue actually contracted, to $58.4 billion from more than $60 billion in fiscal 2008 — and the company missed its earnings estimate by more than $1 billion.

Fresh Coat of Paint: Artist Ricardo Richey, commissioned by Fortune, spray-paints a street-smartversion of Microsoft'sname and Window's logo on a San Francisco wall.

But the biggest failure under Ballmer's tenure was self-inflicted. Vista was meant to be a wholesale reimagining of Windows, the brand name for Microsoft's operating systems dating back to the early 1980s. Every so often the company unveils a new OS, blandly named for the year of the release (Windows 95, Windows 98) or a geeky abbreviation (Windows XP is short for Windows Experience). Vista had a marketing-friendly moniker, a fancy user interface, new security architecture, a better file-storage system, and much more. More

Shaw is the latest non-technologist to ascend at Intel. Photo: Intel.

Who rules techland? Increasingly, it isn't the inmates.

In May, when Craig Barrett retired as chairman of Intel (INTC), the choice of his replacement marked a momentous occasion for the granddaddy of the semiconductor industry.

That Jane Shaw became nonexecutive chairman of Intel is a big deal, but not because she is Intel's first outsider to chair the board or because she is the first woman.

What makes her role noteworthy is that she is the first non-technologist in that seat. Yes, she has a science background, with a doctorate in physiology and a career in the pharmaceutical industry. But she's not a technologist in the Silicon Valley sense. More

Apple (AAPL) is up, as are Google (GOOG), Amazon (AMZN) and to a lesser extent Research in Motion's (RIMM) BlackBerry.

Microsoft (MSFT), Dell (DELL) and Yahoo (YHOO) are down.

Such are the high-tech highlights of the 2009 edition of Interbrand's annual listing of the top 100 "best global brands."

Google (up 25%) is the big winner, followed closely by Amazon (up 22%). Dell (down 12%) was the biggest loser.

Apple, whose name is now valued by Interbrand at $15.443 billion, up $1.6 billion (12%) from last year, jumped four places to break into the top 20 for the first time.

"The recession won’t take a bite out of this Apple," wrote Interbrand, employing a metaphor that's not exactly brand new. "Declining Mac sales and fears for the company’s future without brand visionary Steve Jobs, were outweighed by record high iPod sales, doubling sales for the iPod Touch, and all-time high market share for Mac OS software. Price might be a barrier for cost-conscious consumers, but Apple responded quickly with high margin, low-priced products like the US $99 iPhone and a new, voice-activated iPod Shuffle."

Below the fold: The tech results in bar graph form.

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The Yahoo CEO offers candid views on life post-retirement — and dealing with activist shareholders

Bartz has no regrets about joining Yahoo. Photo: Yahoo

At Fortune's Most Powerful Women conference in Carlsbad, Calif., Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz didn't talk much tech but didn't disappoint.

In characteristically blunt language that was peppered with not-quite-explicit words like "friggin' " and "damn" (she declined to talk about the way she talks, telling interviewer Andy Serwer: "I don't think it's that interesting, personally") Bartz recalled her her nearly nine-month tenure at one of the Internet's pioneering brands.

She ticked off the questions her friends asked her when she made the decision to come out of retirement (she was CEO of Autodesk (ADSK) for 14 years) to take the helm at struggling Yahoo.

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Social networking site elbows in on LinkedIn's job-finding franchise.

When it comes to finding a new job, they say it’s all about who you know. With the rise of online social networks that has never been truer.

Today, 42% of adults in the U.S. with Internet access maintain a profile on a social networking site, up from 20% in 2007, according to Forrester Research. And in an economy where almost one-tenth of the population is unemployed, more job-seekers are likely to look for opportunities online.

Meanwhile existing members of social networks may take the time to fill in more of their job history in their profiles.

Recruiters have been scouring professionally-oriented social network LinkedIn for qualified candidates for years now. More than 40% of Fortune 100 companies pay to use the site to find talent among its 46 million members.

But social networks are still evolving as places to hire and be hired, and Facebook, with its 250 million members, is gaining ground. More

Microsoft, Yahoo and others band against Google – using familar tactics.

By Jia Lynn Yang, writer

With its friendly, helpful image and total dominance in search, Google (GOOG) makes it all look so easy. Meanwhile its enemies are just sweating harder to take it down.

There are reports today  that Microsoft (MSFT), Yahoo (YHOO), Amazon (AMZN) and others are banding together to block a settlement Google made last fall with authors and publishers for its Book Search service—the same settlement that’s being scrutinized by the antitrust cops over at the Justice Department.

The Open Book Alliance, as the coalition is called, is simply the latest chapter in a war against Google that’s increasingly being fought in DC rather than California. More

Alibaba.com expands staff, launches ad campaign in a bid to sell wares to American small businesses.

You might not be in the market for mass quantities of biodegradable flower pots or fly masks for horses, but chances are there’s someone out there who is. Both are for sale–along with hydraulic briquette presses and canned sweet corn in bulk–on Alibaba.com.

Never heard of Alibaba? More