Sometimes the titles just write themselves. On Tuesday Virgin America and Loopt partnered to offer people two-for-one tickets to Cancun or Los Cabos from California. All you had to do was check in on Loopt at SFO, LAX or one of a variety of taco trucks in San Francisco and Los Angeles in a four hour window.

So how did it go? Loopt says 1,300 people checked in to a single taco truck in San Francisco, and 80% of those people have already bought tickets on Virgin America for flights. It was Virgin’s fifth highest revenue day ever, says Loopt (we’re confirming with Virgin).

Great news for Europeans and those few U.S. users of music streaming service Spotify. Sonos, creator of the super cool (my descripton) S5 music player, is announcing today that users will soon be able to listen to streaming Spotify music through their Sonos devices. That means users will now be able to listen to music files stored on any computer in their home as well as Spotify, Rhapsody, Napster, Deezer, Pandora and other services.

U.S. users still have to wait for Spotify to launch here, of course, or find another way to access the service. On the upside, Sonos says their iPad controller app will be hitting iTunes sometime soon. So they’ve got that going for them, which is nice.

I’m done digging on this story and I’m just going to come out and say it. Facebook revenue estimates have been all over the place for 2010 – from less than a billion ranging up to nearly $2 billion. eMarketer recently estimated $1.28 billion, for example.

I haven’t poked around on the Facebook CFO’s laptop for a while now (those were the days!), so I don’t have anything better to report. Except this – fairly senior Facebook employees are telling their friends that the company will hit and just exceed $2 billion in revenue this year. Part of this is just talking to friends. And part of it is recruiting.

Right or wrong, it’s a consistent message over the last several weeks that has come from half a dozen or more second hand sources. And it’s always the same message – “my friend at Facebook just told me they were going to have more than $2 billion in 2010 revenue.”

Facebook is in what’s called a recruiting sweet spot right now. Out of control growth in users and revenue and a nearly certain IPO run in the near future. That’s when employee growth expands at the greatest rate for a company as it grows from hundreds to thousands and then tens of thousands of employees. And with low priced private stock as currency, companies in that position can generally get anyone they want.

Yahoo of course does more than its fair share of feeding the beast, but they’re everyone’s favorite recruiting pool right now. But plenty of Googler’s are heading to Facebook, too – LinkedIn is tracking 118 of them to date. For some Googlers, it’s paying off just to go get an offer from Facebook and then tell their employer – a counter offer is almost sure to come, and it may be stratospheric.

One recent Googler, we’ve confirmed, was recently offered a counter offer he couldn’t refuse (except he did). He was offered a 15% raise on his $150,000 mid level developer salary, quadruple the stock benefits and…wait for it…a $500,000 cash bonus to stay for a year. He took the Facebook offer anyway.

Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian will be taking a position at early stage venture firm Y Combinator, we’ve confirmed.

Ohanian left Reddit, one of the first Y Combinator startups, in 2009. He’s not returning to do another startup, like cofounder Steve Huffman did earlier this year with Hipmunk. Rather, he’ll be taking a position with Y Combinator itself.

His new position, based in New York, will be Y Combinator’s Ambassador to the East where he will be meeting with East coast applicants and generally representing Y Combinator.

There’s always something cool coming out of Y Combinator, but even so Greplin stands out from the crowd. It’s a personal search engine for all that data you keep locked away in the cloud. If you’ve used desktop search like spotlight, you’ll get Greplin right away. It’s like spotlight for your cloud data.

It’s dead simple to use. Sign up and authorize any number of social services for Greplin to index – I signed into Facebook, Twitter and Google Voice to start. After a few minutes of indexing time Greplin then presents you with a Google-like search box. Run a query and find the public and private data you’ve locked away on those sites. Tweets, including DMs, are shown, as well as Facebook messages and Google Voice voicemail transcriptions and SMS. You can also index Gmail, Dropbox, LinkedIn and a bunch of other services.

After you use it for the first time you’ll understand that you’ll never not use it again. And there are nice touches like showing real time results as you type. And Greplin only uses OAuth and other APIs for authorization, so they never see your third party site credentials.

Digg has hired Amazon exec Matt Williams to be their new CEO, we’ve confirmed. This ends a months-long process that began with the ouster of former CEO Jay Adelson in April. Founder Kevin Rose has run the company since then.

Williams has been with Amazon for more than a decade – since 1999. He is currently the GM of Consumer Payments. But he has held a variety of jobs – GM Webstore, Director Tech Alliances, Director Community & Cross-Merchandising and Director, Auctions and Marketplace.

If you live in San Francisco and you haven’t tried UberCab yet, do it. The service, which we first covered in July, eliminates everything bad about a taxi experience. In my order, that’s flagging one down, finding the cash to pay, and being in a sometimes disgusting car.

UberCab contracts with black car services – mostly Towncars and Escalades. There’s a lot of unused inventory in those businesses and they are happy to work with someone who eats up that inventory. As a user you download an iPhone app (I have it on my iPad) and add your credit card information (that’s the last time you ever have to deal with that). When you want a car to pick you up you hit a button. The app knows where you are and finds a car and driver nearby. The driver accepts via his/her own iPhone app, and you then get to watch them come to you on a map with a pretty darn good estimate of the number of minutes it will take for them to get there. When they arrive you get in the car and tell the driver where you want to go. When you get there you see the charges and accept them, which are then billed to your credit card, tip included. A receipt is emailed to you. And then each side gets to rate the other – I love the fact that the driver rates the passenger, too. Makes for good tips and a happy overall transaction. Watch a demo video here.

When I tried UberCab a few days ago I had to wait just 5 minutes for the car to arrive (a big Mercedes), and the overall experience was way better than a taxi.

I think I liked Google Voice better back when it was hard to get an invitation. Back then it worked most of the time, and the infrequent outages were tolerable given how useful the service is overall. But over the last week the service has become spotty at best, and unusable at times. Given that I ported my phone number to Google I don’t have much choice but to soldier on in the short term – but Google needs to figure this out fast or they’ll lose me as a user.

What happened? In June Google Voice opened up for anyone to use, and there was clearly a surge of new people trying out the service. For the most part it weathered that storm. But last week Google launched Google Voice for Gmail, allowing users to make and receive calls right from the browser. It’s awesome. Truly useful. 1 million calls were made from Gmail in 24 hours.

Uh oh. That’s when the trouble started. About 30% of my inbound calls have the caller muted – they can hear me but I can’t hear them. And outbound calls are worse. In the last 24 hours at least 75% of them failed completely. Either it never starts ringing, or it rings a couple of times and then dies. In fact, I called Google PR to give them a heads up on this story and that call failed too. As did a second attempt.

I see a decision engine linked to an innovative ecommerce strategy. But at least one person in the office simply described it as “fabulous.” Either way, Send The Trend, a site that sells women’s accessories, launched moments ago and is worth taking a look at. In a nutshell, the site takes you through a very short survey of what kind of accessories you may want, and it then recommends five different accessories for you (bracelets, rings, scarves, etc.). You can then buy any of the items for $30.

“We simplify the discovery process of finding the season’s best accessories & serve you five customized options based on your style survey,” says the company. The survey takes all of 45 seconds. You are asked things like your favorite brands/retail stores (are you JCrew or H&M?), favorite celebrity look (Reese Witherspoon or Sarah Jessica Parker?), office v. casual, etc. And then you’re presented with the goods.

I selected a nice set of Lily Pink Earrings, which I think work perfectly with my jeans/tshirt office uniform. Want to avoid all that? You can, just use the search feature to find what you want. Everything is $30.

Cisco has made an offer to acquire Skype before they complete their IPO process, says one of our more reliable sources. We have not been able to confirm this rumor one way or another via other sources, which isn’t surprising. A company in lock down during the IPO process is usually even more tight lipped than normal.

But if true this would be one very big acquisition. Skype insiders are hoping for an out of the gate valuation of $5 billion or so, we’ve heard. Presumably Cisco would have to bidding in that range to make it interesting.

Google was also rumored to be sniffing around Skype, but antitrust concerns may have persuaded them not to make an actual offer.

This isn’t tech related, other than the fact that I’m writing this post 20,000 or so feet in the air thanks to Gogo on Virgin Flight VX746 from San Francisco to Seattle. But if I’m going to rightly trash Delta for their atrocious behavior on a recent set of flights then it is only fair that I give a high five when I see an airline fail to fail its customers.

Virgin and Southwest Airlines tend to have happier employees, and that translates to a much better customer experience. I’ve found Jet Blue and Alaska to also be decent, but with occasional flaws. None of them are perfect, but it sure feels nice to be on a flight where common empathy isn’t nonexistent.

Case in point – I had just boarded the flight with my carry on luggage (the luggage that Delta says is too big, but Virgin seems not to mind). I was just about last on again, and even up in first class the luggage racks were mostly full. A women in coach with a violin came up and asked a flight attendant if she could find space for her instrument. Because the last thing you want to do is put an extremely fragile violin into the vagaries of the mysteriously brutal checked luggage system.

Success in Silicon Valley, most would agree, is more merit driven than almost any other place in the world. It doesn’t matter how old you are, what sex you are, what politics you support or what color you are. If your idea rocks and you can execute, you can change the world and/or get really, stinking rich.

For the most part I’ve sat on the sidelines over the years during the endless debates about how we need to do more to encourage more women to start companies. What I mean by “sat on the sidelines” is this – until today I haven’t really said what I felt. Now I’m going to.

Here’s why. Yet another article, this time in the Wall Street Journal, takes a shot at us and others for not doing enough to help women in tech. Says Rachel Sklar, a perennial TechCrunch critic:

One of the big problems with drug and prostitution transactions is that they tend to involve a lot of cash, and cash is hard to launder. Taking credit card payments has never been easier via Square, which lets anyone swipe credit cards with their iPhone.

Sure, it leaves one heck of a paper trail, but you have to wonder if at least a few of those person to person transactions aren’t being done via that sexy startup. I certainly have.

Last fall Zynga sued rival gaming developer Playdom (recently acquired by Disney) for an array of issues including misappropriation of trade secrets, breach of contract, and breach of the duty of loyalty.

In short Zynga accused Playdom of stealing its confidential ‘Zynga Playbook‘.

The case continues, but the drama has reached its peak. The court today held one former Zynga and Playdom employee, Raymond Holmes, in contempt and sentenced him to ten days in county jail and a $4,000 fine. Fortunately for Holmes, Judge Mark Pierce then suspended the sentence. That means Holmes won’t do the time unless he continues to, well, piss off Judge Pierce. The full order is embedded below.

Just three months ago everyone was happy. Lithium Technologies, which has a suite of social CRM solutions, picked up Scout Labs for a reported (by us) $20 million. Minor Ventures, which incubated Scout Labs, was able to take a nice, if small, liquidity event.

Things aren’t so happy now.

On May 22 this year 300 hackers converged in New York at TechCrunch Disrupt for a day and half long hack day before the conference itself started. At least one of the projects created at the hack day has now become an actual business, and has raised an angel round of funding from top tier investors.

GroupMe launches today. What is it? It’s a dead simple way to create a private SMS group with your friends. Just go to the site and type in your mobile number (U.S. phones only at this point). You’ll then get a text message from a unique phone number assigned to your new group that says “You just created a new group on GroupMe! Now add some friends by replying #add with your friends’ names and numbers.”

To add another person just add them via text message and they’re part of the group. Any text messages any member send go to all other members. And there are a variety of commands to mute groups, change topics, list other members, etc.

We were excited when we got our hands on an unlaunched version of Google Voice for the desktop, which let users make and receive calls via a soft phone on their computer. We hear that software is still on ice, though, and won’t be launched any time soon. But it probably doesn’t matter – today Google Voice is being integrated right into the browser via Gmail. It’s amazingly good – I know because I’ve been testing it for the last few days.

Just download the Google Talk plugin for your browser and you can then make calls to any U.S. or Canadian phone number. And if you already use Google Voice you can make those calls anywhere else, too, for a very low per minute charge. The feature is fully integrated into Google Voice, which means you can set Google Voice to receive calls in Gmail, and use your Google Voice contact book. Dialing a phone number works just like a normal phone. Just click “Call phone” at the top of your chat list and dial a number or enter a contact’s name.

Call quality is very, very good – comparable to Skype. See video below of test calls we performed. And more screenshots below:

Just in from WeedMaps (think Yelp for Pot) CEO/owner Justin Hartfield: an email letting us know that Tim Draper at Draper Fisher Jurvetson isn’t going to invest in his startup. That’s ok, says Hartfield. He’ll just keep “growing organically” for now. Har!

Email is below. Just because it’s awesome. Also, we have no idea if Tim really sent this email or ever even met with WeedMaps. But we like to think he did.

Our experimental Hack Day at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York a couple of months ago was wildly successful – more developers than you can shake a stick at showed up, drank redbull and pizza (care of sponsors). A number of projects were featured on stage in front of a live audience of nearly 2,000 people, and tens of thousands more watched on the live stream. And at least one project has become an actual startup and received funding (more on that later).

So we’re going to make this a regular part of TechCrunch Disrupt. For the day and a half before the regular schedule begins on September 27, 300 developers will be admitted to the event to run amok and create something out of nothing. The marathon 24-hour hack will run Saturday to Sunday, September 25th – 26th. After a lightning round of demos and judging Sunday afternoon, the winning teams will present onstage at Disrupt on Wednesday, September 29th. This is a great opportunity to share the spotlight alongside the top startups chosen from Disrupt’s Startup Battlefield.

The event is being organized by Daniel Raffel and Tarikh Korula – the same team of hacker experts that pulled off our New York Disrupt Hack Day. Participants will conceptualize, create and present their projects/apps/hacks in 24hrs. Anything goes as long as it’s created onsite.