Vacation rentals are big business. HomeAway, which owns a dozen or so vacation home listing sites, just raised $250 million in a venture round that values the company at more than $1 billion.

But listings are spread across lots of sites – what the industry needed was a good central search engine for all those vacation home rentals. It’s also a pain to do lots of searches on different sites because you have to enter where and when you want to go, making it a lot more complicated that a standard search engine query.

AOL’s EVP of Products and Marketing Kevin Conroy is leaving to take a new position at Univision.

This isn’t much of a surprise – we speculated on his future back in July when he announced (internally) the shuttering of four of his products (Xdrive, AOL Pictures, Bluestring and MyMobile). That still left him with AOL Mail, MYAOL, the AOL client, Userplane and Truveo, among others. But each of those products seemed to be a better fit in a different organization.

CEO Randy Falco’s memo to AOLers:

Today’s keynote presentation by Phil Schiller has been widely regarded as a relatively lackluster affair. That isn’t to say it went badly – I’m genuinely excited about some of the new software updates. But the Macworld keynote in years past has been home to some very major product announcements, including the Macbook Air, the MacBook Pro, and perhaps most notably, the first iPhone. Investors have learned to expect big things from Apple every January, and for at least the last four years their reactions to the keynote have weighed heavily on Apple’s stock price.

Except for this year. And that’s no accident.

Pandora Radio, the personalized internet radio service that has remained among the most popular iPhone apps on the iTunes App Store since its inception in July (and that I’ve previously called the iPhone’s killer app), will be releasing its most significant update yet later today.

Dubbed Pandora 2.0, the application will now include artist biographies, streaming samples for songs you’ve bookmarked, and perhaps most notably, the ability to create a station using a single song (much as you would using the iTunes Genius features). Other features in the new release include a CoverFlow-like view for song history, the ability to share stations with friends using Email, and a song progress bar (which has long been annoyingly absent).

12 inch Netbooks are coming. Dell has the Inspiron Mini 12, Samsung will unveil its 12 inch netbook model to the U.S. shortly, and more are coming. And Intel isn’t happy about this at all.

In fact, the whole Netbook market may be making them nervous. Despite the fact that they power most of these devices with their new Atom chip that handles some PC chores well and uses a lot less power (so batteries are smaller and last longer). Intel sees Netbooks as devices for people who can’t afford normal laptops, or as second devices. But it’s clear that a lot of people are buying them instead of normal dual core machines, despite their very serious limitations.

That means that for the most part, every Netbook sold is one less Dual Core that Intel can sell at a higher price and higher margin. Which explains exactly why the company has been publicly criticizing the performance of the machines. “If you’ve ever used a Netbook and used a 10-inch screen size–it’s fine for an hour. It’s not something you’re going to use day in and day out,” said Intel VP Stu Pann at an event last year.

MixedInk, a document editing site that allows large groups to democratically create a single collaborative document, has launched its service to the public. The service fuses concepts from Digg and popular wiki sites to create a unique document creation tool that is ideal for groups far larger than you’d normally encounter in the workplace. In conjunction with today’s public launch, the site has also partnered with Slate to create a community-written inauguration speech for President Obama, which will be published on the site in two weeks.

ResizeImage is the simplest and most usable tool I’ve seen to handle quick image resizing and cropping. It’s not as useful as Skitch, which a downloadable application for Macs only, but it works in a pinch.

Nearly two years ago, Steve Jobs published an open letter to the music industry calling for the death of DRM (digital rights management). He convinced EMI to ditch DRM back in April, 2007, but the three other major music labels held out. Until today. Now all the songs on iTunes are DRM-free, or soon will be.

And, with that, the DRM era of digital music finally can be put to rest. But it looks like the labels prevailed in sticking it to consumers on one last point.

Artiklz is debuting its conversation search engine to the public today, and it’s definitely worth taking a look. What the service does is aggregate comments from the more popular blogging and commenting platforms as well as a number of services including Digg, Reddit, FriendFeed, Delicious, etc. and make them available through a single search engine.

This is very similar to what companies like Crunchies finalist BackType and also uberVU are all about, and I definitely see the need for this type of service: regardless of one’s interests or line of work, dedicated comment search engines make it easy for users to find out what the content and tone of conversations across social media really are. I like the fact that you no longer need to visit every web service that has comments separately in order to find out what’s being said, but that you can go to a single place, do a simple search and find out.

I just downloaded the Slumdog Millionaire soundrack for $8.99 and it came automatically in Plus format. The files themselves are considerably bigger than the average previous iTunes download and the quality is quite nice. Most importantly, however, there is now a “create MP3 version” selection when you right click on the song.

It’s an annual tradition. Every year at Macworld, Apple releases a smattering of stats that gives a peek at how its business is doing. At this year’s Philnote (Phil Schiller gave the speech instead of Steve Jobs), which was Apple’s last Macworld appearance, the stats were few and far between. A few morsels for the information-starved Apple faithful (and investors). But here they are:

Google Trends, which shows hot queries on Google at any given time, is sporting a nasty item at no. 2 today: a plane flying into two towers.

In July a swastika appeared on Google Trends, leading to endless debate on whether it was an ugly symbol or not. Later that month the site was attacked again. 4Chan was the culprit last time, we’ll see if they’re again responsible.

Here’s the statement Google released last time this happened:

Apple’s Phil Schiller announced at the Steveless keynote at Macworld today (CrunchGear is liveblogging it) that a new version of iPhoto will include facial recognition software. The feature, called Faces, lets you put a name to face, then it tries to find other images with the same face and lets you confirm whether the software got it right. I really hopes this works, because I simply don’t have time to tag the 7,000 images in my iPhoto, 5,000 of which are probably one of my sons. iPhoto will also automatically generate albums that contain photos of the faces you select. Facial recognition is a hard problem to solve. I’ll believe it when I see it.

iPhoto is also adding a feature called Places, which lets you geotag photos or uses the GPS coordinates if they are available. There is a map view now that shows where you’ve taken all of your photos with pins on a map (powered by Google Maps). It is also finally supporting Flickr and Facebook uploading (hopefully, with automatic resizing).

MacRumors has long been one of my favorite sources for Mac-related gossip (largely because the site has generally avoided overly sensational articles that were clearly wrong), but today it has been having a few issues with its Macworld Livestream.

At 9:24 AM the stream issued an alarming announcement that “Steve Jobs just died”. Moments later this was corrected, with a statement that the MacRumors team didn’t know how it had gotten into the feed. There was quiet for a few minutes. And then things took a turn for the worst, as members of what appears to be the 4chan image-board began flooding the feed with bizarre comments.

Welcome to our live coverage of Phil Schiller’s MacWorld 2009 keynote. We are hoping and praying that the server holds out so we’re not trying any special tricks this time – just good old fashioned blog posting. Click through to begin reading.

Who needs cable TV? Move Networks, which powers the Web video streaming for ABC, Fox, the Discovery Channel, and Animal Planet, streamed 180 million hours of premium video last year, 100 million of which it claims was in high-definition (at a resolution of 720p). With YouTube turning on an HD viewing option in December, and adding an HD section (as did Hulu), you can expect that 100 million hours to be dwarfed this year across all the major Web video services.

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

Macbook Wheel, including the Hummingbird battery which can power the computer for a full 19 minutes. So simple. So perfect. I love The Onion.

Seems like widget distribution startup Clearspring is another victim of the economic meltdown forced to make some tough decisions. We heard rumors floating that the company laid off about 20% of its staff in early December, and we’ve now confirmed with Clearspring that several people have in fact been let go, although they’re not sharing the exact amount of firings. CEO Homan Radfar says:

Late in Q4 last year, we decided to reduce our workforce. Even though we had a great year with tremendous growth, the economic uncertainties caused us to lay off colleagues. I am sad to part with them

Worse, the company has to find a replacement for President and COO Jay Rappaport, who joined the company in April 2007 and brought a lot of experience in-house as the ex-President of Vonage and former COO of AOL. We’ve added Clearspring to our Layoff Tracker.

Video recommendation engine ffwd has just released its completed API to developers, allowing them to incorporate some of the service’s core functionality into their sites.

Using the API, developers will be able to make calls to ffwd for video content, and will also be able to incorporate ffwd user profiles and news feed items into their sites. In conjunction with the release, ffwd has also announced that Boxee, the widely acclaimed media hub that runs on devices like the Apple TV, will be incorporating its service in future releases using the API. Developers interested in using the API can apply here, and will be able to use it for free for now (though it will eventually have an as-of-yet undetermined licensing fee).

With the launch of Skype integration, Truphone’s mobile VoIP service is fast becoming a unified client for other VOIP and messaging services. As well as the ability to make low-cost calls over Wi-Fi or GSM networks and send cheap SMS, it is now supporting Skype and other messaging services via its application for the iPhone or iTouch. The software comes out on Jan. 12, at which point you’ll be able to make and receive Skype calls and IM to other Skype users. Truphone has also added full two-way instant messaging over MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger and Google Talk on the iPod touch as of now and on Jan. 12 for the iPhone. Admittedly you can already use Fring or Nimbuzz iPhone apps to access Skype, but neither of these also integrate VOIP or GSM voice calls as seamlessly. Truphone has already added Twitter integration.