If you ask people in Silicon Valley about the dismal job market they'll laugh and say, "What's 'job market'? A new mobile social networking app?" then pull a quick 360 on a Segway powered by seaweed smoothies.

The anointing of Yammer as the winner of TechCrunch50 has raised questions about how the startup-launch conference operates. Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch, has made much of the fact that he and fellow event organizer Jason Calacanis don't charge startups to present at the show, as established rival Demo does. But people who attended the show are saying behind his back that the contest was rigged in favor of a pet startup of Arrington's with ties to one of the event's sponsors.Yammer is a business-friendly copy of Twitter. It's an offshoot of Geni, a Web-based genealogy site started by former PayPal COO David Sacks, which raised $100 million in venture capital last year. TechCrunch50's prize panel, composed of Arrington and a few TechCrunch insiders (shown here, in a spy photo taken at the event), passed over more promising startups like FitBit, the maker of a wellness-monitoring gadget. Quality aside, a sense of fairness might have led Arrington to give Yammer the skip: Neither Sacks nor Geni needed the $50,000 prize. Arrington's crush on Geni has been obvious since before its launch. (Most recently, he claimed Geni had close to a million visitors a month in August; according to a link to Compete.com Arrington himself included in his writeup, it's actually 400,000, a fraction of the audience enjoyed by established genealogy sites like Ancestry.com and MyHeritage.) The problem with events like this is no one is unconflicted. But Sacks is in particularly deep: His former boss at PayPal, Peter Thiel, now runs VC firm Founders Fund, one of TechCrunch50's sponsors. Arrington has long been rumored to favor startups backed by the VCs who sponsor his event. He brags that he doesn't charge startups directly to appear on stage. But he seems to like to have them in his pocket, one way or another.

Twitter was an offshoot of Odeo, an otherwise unpromising podcasting startup. Yammer, a Twitter clone launched at the TechCrunch50 conference, even copied the origin myth; it sprang from the loins of Geni, the $100 million genealogical website started by former PayPal executive David Sacks. Like Facebook, users sign up with their work email address as a way of verifying that they're employed by a company. Yammer's positioned as a tool for coworkers to keep track of each other's status, with features missing in Twitter such as threaded comments, tags, and messages longer than 140 characters. Even more interesting: In a panel following the demonstration of the site, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff said he's interested in buying the whole thing. At last, something resembling an exit for Geni.

David Sacks, the former COO of PayPal turned first Hollywood producer and now CEO of Geni.com, seems to be enjoying himself. Even if, we suspect, he's not following his own advice about Twitter and alcohol.

Kevin Rose takes up 62 out of 294 pages in Sarah Lacy's Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good, her new book about Web 2.0. That's less than I expected, since Rose was the coverboy for the BusinessWeek story, co-written by Lacy, which launched her book. From the look of the index, not much time is spent on the women Rose is said to have "plowed through", as his friend Alex Albrecht once put it:

After the success of former PayPal COO David Sacks's Thank You for Smoking, Hollywood has renewed its efforts to tap the swollen bank accounts of Silicon Valley's newly wealthy entrepreneurs. But the come-on I've just received is more unusual than most such attempts. The movie in question? A film adaptation of James B. Stewart's DisneyWar, a savage portrait of former Disney CEO Michael Eisner. Eisner drew many enemies in the Valley during his reign at the media company, so there might plausibly be some willing to fund a cinematic poke at him.