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while O’Reilly’s web 2.0 summit is almost over, PodTech’s John Furrier published a bootlegged video of Eric Schmidt’s keynote given on tuesday:

An overflow crowd waits for the Eric Schmidt Web 2.0 keynote. At $3,500 per conference attendee, and a full plate of sponsors, it looks like they made some serious bank. Speaking of bank, the Google CEO denies rumors of $500 million legal reserve for YouTube, and states that Google will never trap user data.

Michael Arrington gave a comprehensive summary of Launch Pad, the kick-off event giving 13 startups the chance to demo their products to an high-profile audience. contestants included companies like sphere, omnidrive and oDesk.

despite not participating in the summit itself, Riya (formerly known for their face-recognizing image-search engine) managed to do the most-covered product-launch this week: like.com utilizes their technology to find products (currently limited to jewelry, shoes, handbags and watches) based on visual similarity. coverage all over the place.

and finally there’s an interesting sum-up of a talk between John Batelle and Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie on Read/Write Web.

update: Redeye VC links to Mary Meeker’s presentation on the “state of the internet” - 41 slides incredibly stuffed with numbers & stats on business-development on the net.

a very honorable mention goes to Lou Reed, who has been performing on yesterdays post-dinner party, sponsored by AOL (via Webware). bubbly, anyone? …update: here’s the video!

a-list blogger (currently rank 26 at technorati) and evangelist robert scoble earlier today confirmed that he is leaving microsoft. scoble is joining podtech.net, a silicon valley-based podcasting- & videoblogging start-up. amazing how this spawned a gazillion blog-posts today! here are scobles thoughts on the issue, interesting read:

post #1 Correcting the record about microsoft
post #2 The joy on her face

update - netcraft reports:

It’s not often that a hiring announcement knocks a web site offline. But the blogosphere is abuzz with the news that Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble is leaving to take a position at a video blogging start-up. The news has triggered a burst of traffic to Scoble’s new employer, PodTech, whose web site is struggling to handle all that link love. The Podtech.net web site was unavailable for several for part of Sunday and offline again this morning.