If Pell has a way with the ladies, then Thione (left), a devotee of gay beaches, has a way with the guys, according to this photo sent in by a tipster. In the background: Celebrity Cruises' Solstice ship, recently booked for a gay cruise in the Caribbean. To Thione's right: friends Kevin Lucas and Jonathan Deason. Way to go, Lorenzo! Judging by his buff physique, we'd say post-acquisition life has been good to him indeed.

Conference

• Connectivity still an issue. Wifi out on Monday and the major celebs showed up to kowtow to King Arrington and Jason
• There is a secret mutiny going on with startups in the pay-to-play Demo Pit. They gave out poker chips to ticket holders to vote for their favorite startups, there 3 colors one for each day to decide. A single company, through the use of hot and semi naked booth girls has managed to monopolize Day 1's chips (80). The winner of the chips would get a review and extra publicity. So to counter the startup — which does something stupid — there are now alliances going on where other startups are grouping together and sharing their chips so that one company doesn't win. So far about 20 companies are in this coup.

Dinner

• Showed up for Nicole Jordan's dinner party at Lulu's. The bill was like $3k and I had to pay like $100 when I thought the meal was free.
• Calley Nye showed up, brought by Larry Chiang, but very quickly cozied up to Barney Pell of Powerset. They were hugging and cuddling and the guy had his hand on her thigh/knee the entire time.

Party

• Held at club Temple, they intermixed the TC50 crowd with the young kids that just randomly showed up. Music was loud and obnoxious and the crowd was a weird mix of uncomfortable geeks and drunk kids.
• snuck into VIP floor with Mark Cuban and entourage, bought him a beer
• Met [former FuckedCompany blogger] Pud and spoke to him about startups and AdBrite. he's finally very happy with with the way it's working right now.
• Jason calacanis showed up and he was pretty drunk most of the time.

After party

• At the W Hotel bar/lobby with Jason Calacanis, Mark Cuban, Frank Gruber.
• Mark had a gaggle of blondes surrounding him. Most look 18. He kissed and rubbed quite a few them right next to me as I tried to get drinks. One was very upset that Mark wasn't giving her enough attention.
• Jason Calacanis is blizted enough to be stumbling everywhere
• Met a drunk girl that work for Geni/Yammer. She's apparently David Sak's BFF, some major assistant to the producer of Rush Hour or something. Got recruited from LA to handle "book-keeping and HR." says she's under NDA but eventually figured out that she has stock and they're working out a way to sell Yammer, a side project, by the next month.
• Calley showed towards the end of the night and approached Jason Calacanis while his wife was standing next to him but then Mark Cuban.
• As the party ended she's managed to convince him to let her hold his hand while he's hugging and kissing the other blondes.
• When we got kicked she managed to get herself into the front seat of Mark's surburban along with his entourage and left.
• Jason left in a limo at 2:30am with a very disgruntled wife and most likely not able to wake up for TC50 Day 3

We're buying Powerset first and foremost because we're impressed with the people there. Powerset CTO and cofounder Barney Pell is a visionary and incredible evangelist. When he introduced our senior engineers to some of the most senior people at Powerset — Search engineers and computational linguists like Tim Converse, Chad Walters, Scott Prevost, Lorenzo Thione, and Ron Kaplan — we came away impressed by their smarts, their experience, their passion for search, and a shared vision.

Calling someone a "visionary" and "evangelist" is code for "lacking any real skills." Note how Pell gets credit only for introducing the real brains of Powerset's operations, not for "smarts" or "experience." While Microsoft's purchase of Powerset had me doubting their acumen, this deftly coded Pell-dissing blog post makes me think someone up in Redmond has a few neurons firing in the right sequence.

It's not clear how interested Yahoo really is. And it's unlikely Powerset will command a high price, if it sells. The company's core technology, XLE, is licensed from Xerox PARC, and for the rest, it mostly uses open source. But for Yahoo, whose in-house efforts to improve its search haven't made a difference in the marketplace, Powerset may hold enough interesting technology to be worth a look. Or perhaps Yahoo, bleeding engineers, is eager to hire en masse through an acquisition. Alas for Powerset's employees: They'd just be trading a small soap opera for a larger one.

Here's the unfiltered dirt:

It was inevitable that these two ridiculously arrogant, titanic egos would self-destruct. The org chart at Powerset was a dead giveaway: Pell and Newcomb set themselves up as lords of this feudal society with C-level titles and then built a company without VPs in the name of a flat, post-modern organizational style. The truth is they didn't want the peons anywhere near the decision-making or basking in the glamorous, self-aggrandizing PR campaign they launched way too early.

(Photo by AP/Ben Margot)

Our tipster writes:

I heard this really strange thing from a Powerset employee regarding their "other" CEO who must have been fired recently, and that it was for inappropriate behavior between the two executives, and their inability to not get along, because one of them had slept with the other's wife? Can we get any validation on that?

The bowl was slightly chaotic, the audio was lousy, and I'm not sure the buzzer system was working properly. The questions were kind of all over the place. One asked about when Pets.com ceased operations (November 6, 2000). Another asked about the technology which runs the iTunes music store (CDDB or Gracenote, which is really just the music-identification system for ripping CDs; Apple's WebObjects software really runs it). One controversial question: How much did Facebook turn down from Yahoo? John Battelle had the answer as $1 billion. Yahoo executive Garlinghouse debated the veracity of that figure. "You weren't in the room!" bellowed Ron Conway, when Battelle relied on his answer.

The most entertaining piece was how enthusiastically Ron Conway would shout "Bullshit!" if he thought a question or answer was incorrect and how insistent he was that the organizers should provide "Chardonnay next year!" He wasn't alone in that regards. After the show, Jay Adelson made the observation that the participants were far too sober.

About fifteen minutes into the bowl, in walked Google cofounder Sergey Brin, along with Google exec Megan Smith and other guests he had been seen with at dinner earlier that evening. Brin declined to say which team he was cheering for.

While I was standing next to Brin, Powerset CEO Barney Pell came up and reintroduced himself to the Googlionaire — they apparently met a while back. When Pell started to tell Brin how his hyped semantic search startup is now in a beta testing phase, I decided to cause a stir, asking Pell "Didn't the New York Times call you guys a 'Google killer'?" Pell's eyes went wide, and he said something about how reporters will write anything. But all of a sudden, Brin seemed more interested in Pell's spiel. (For the record, I was wrong. Last winter's article on Powerset didn't use that phrase, though other publications have.)

So, how was the crowd? Michael Arrington was there, of course, holding court and greeting well-wishers. TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde overviewed the event. Lots of TechCrunch40 presenters and DemoPit participants showed up, including Powerset CEO Barney Pell, who declined to take credit for his company's vodka giveaway, though he was a fan of the fun schwag.

I asked Pell about his company's participation in TechCrunch40. Powerset has gotten a fair bit of press in the past year. Wasn't the whole purpose of the conference to show off undiscovered companies? Pell told me that the conference organizers had actually come to him and asked Powerset to present. Interesting.

I, unfortunately, missed MC Hammer, though fellow TechCrunch40 "panel of experts" member Sarah Lacy (pictured above, with Arrington) was there. No Jason Calacanis, though. When asked about his partner's whereabouts, Arrington guessed Calacanis skipped the event. Running a conference does tend to tucker people out. So much for his treadmill workouts.

As the night went on, the over business agendas came out. One startup founder talked to me about his desire to sell for "at least $20 million" and started strategizing about potential buyers to target. Another presenting company was a bit more level-headed about the event. When asked about his reaction to being selected as one of the 40 lucky ones, he demurred. "It's not going to make us or break us, but it's nice," he said. Nice. Oooh. That hurts. Somehow I doubt, of all the words Calacanis and Arrington might be hoping to have carved on their tombstones, "nice" was on the list.

–Video by Sarah Meyers

Allison stood out at the schmoozefest for a host of reasons. First of all, a Diane von Furstenberg dress among the blue shirts and khakis? And while Allison has her own blog and website, her career pursuits are not tech-oriented in the slightest — in addition to her gig at Star, she writes a dating column for Time Out New York. She wouldn't know the CEO of a semantic search engine if he patted her on the ass, which, judging from the the picture above, almost happened. (That's Barney Pell of Powerset playing pattycake, by the way.)

In this this video interview of Julia and her friend Meghan Asha, they claim they only attended the event to meet tech boyfriends. Oh, and they want to meet tech guys who can help them program a website, and I'm pretty sure that "help them" means "do it for them."

I'm sure there's more to it than that. Of course Allison's gathering string for a column about hunting for a geek boyfriend. And if she is any indication, people outside of our little sphere are starting to pay attention, again, to the exuberance bubbling underneath Silicon Valley. The women who are about to invade the Valley are not the same gold-diggers as before, only out for that stock-option action. This time, they want the stock-option action and free sysadmin time.

For this, too, we have Arrington to blame.