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Last Tuesday, a life-sized TiVo (TIVO) mascot stood outside of NBC’s headquarters at 30 Rock in Manhattan. He wasn’t dancing or waving, he was just standing there for what appeared to be no reason at all. Some curious passersby gawked, some took pictures, others kept walking. Outside, there was no way of knowing why the TiVo mascot was there.

When Facebook increased the size and prominence of its search bar in the most recent redesign, many took it as a sign that the social network was finally getting serious about search. Well, if that was the intention, it looks as if it’s already working.

Business is about making trade-offs, and the business of developing apps is no different. If you want to have a home in Apple’s (AAPL) App Store and access to the tens of millions of consumers visiting it, you have to adhere to Apple’s sometimes capricious and always changing rules.

Wired.com's Charlie Sorel is skeptical about the appeal of Pixel Qi notebooks but fastens onto the company's curious attempt at converting a portion of the market of notebook owners who already exist. Pixel Qi is marketing a do-it-yourself conversion kit. The CEO claims it's a five-minute operation to pop open your current notebook and put in a Pixel Qi screen.

Google (GOOG) has just offered two new, interesting features to keep you mainlined into its universe of services and occasional advertisements. First the important one: an app store for cloud-based enterprise software.

Richard Wong, a venture capitalist at Accel Partners, recently had a guest post on TechCrunch in which he tried to illustrate how there will be long-term and persistent fragmentation in mobile media technology:

“Apple's done a very nice job that allows people to monetize and commercialize their intellectual property.”

Bland praise indeed for a company whose iPhone redefined the mobile phone and whose App Store is an unqualified success story. But considering it came from Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer, it’s more than noteworthy. It’s like a spring thaw in the tech industry’s 35-year-old cold war.