That’s how much an unnamed bidder has ponied up, via a Microsoft charity auction, for a look-see at Gates’s place. After the tour of the 48,000-square-foot complex, which is located outside Seattle on the shores of Lake Washington, the winner gets to nosh on some appetizers, TechFlash reports.

A year ago, the same tour, of the same house, fetched just $8,600. Go figure.

All of that is out of your price range? I understand. Here, for us proles, is a free, “virtual” tour of the place:

[Image credit: Tiktik]

Now that Bill Gates isn’t running Microsoft day to day, he is primarily focused on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is tackling big hairy problems like malaria. But apparently he still has enough time to moonlight as a blogger.

Check out Gawker Media’s Gizmodo, which features a post penned by Gates reminiscing about Microsoft (MSFT) in the good old days, way back in 1979 (the photo below is actually from 1978). Apparently, Gates submitted the 490-word item without prompting from the Gizmodo guys; I’m trying to find out if Gawker owner Nick Denton will be cutting Gates a check.

Oprah is already on record as a Kindle fan. Jon Stewart–not so much.

“The Daily Show” host let Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on his show last night to pitch the Kindle 2.0, which started shipping yesterday. And while Bezos is an enthusiastic salesman, I think the clip below is pretty indicative of the Kindle’s strengths and weaknesses as a mass-market device.

That is: For some folks, the ability to download books over the air, store a gazillion titles on a single device and have a “freaky” voice read them aloud to you are compelling reasons to shell out $359 for the gadget. For skeptics like Stewart, it’s hard to see how Amazon (AMZN) has improved upon the ink-and-paper book, which uses technology that has worked pretty well for several hundred years.

But if you’ve got five minutes, this is a pretty entertaining back-and-forth.

One aside: I particularly enjoyed Stewart’s befuddled reaction when Bezos mentions “DRM,” the digital lock-and-key system that supposedly enrages consumers.

And since we’re talking about Seattle-based tech CEOs visiting “The Daily Show,” let’s take a couple seconds to recall Bill Gates’s 2007 interview, when he was pitching Vista. Best way to describe that one: Buggy.

What does it look like when one of the world’s richest men unleashes a box full of mosquitoes at a high-end conference? That’s what Microsoft (MSFT) founder Bill Gates did at the TED gathering earlier this week in a much-discussed stunt.

And now you can see for yourself:

Less exciting than it sounded, right? Here’s the thing: The mosquito bit is just the publicity-generating part of Gates’s talk, which is a thoughtful discussion of the problems the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is focused on, and the methods the nonprofit is using to try to solve them.

Modest title: “How I’m Trying To Change The World Now.”

You can see the complete speech here, and it will require 20 minutes of your time. But it’s free, and worthwhile.

The video comes from TED’s–that’s the Technology, Entertainment, Design conference, by the way–“TedTalks” page, which is slowly releasing clips of this week’s conference for those of who couldn’t make it to Long Beach this year.

I’m looking forward to seeing Elizabeth “Eat Pray Love” Gilbert’s presentation, which seemed to generate lots of buzz; you can see what various Twitterers (including our own Walt Mossberg) had to say about the conference here.

So this is kind of like that: Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim may invest “hundreds of millions” in the paper via what amounts to a high-interest loan. Slim, a telecom magnate whom Forbes pegged as the second richest man in the world last year, is looking at buying a slug of preferred stock in the New York Times (NYT), The Wall Street Journal reports.

If the deal goes through, it will give the Times some breathing room to deal with its cash crunch–it has $46 million in cash and more than $1 billion in debt, with a $400 million revolver that winds down in May. But it won’t solve its core problem– print ad dollars are disappearing and it hasn’t figured out how to replace them on the Web.

The breathing room will be expensive, too. But the paper doesn’t have many options at this point. WSJ:

For the Sulzberger family, which controls the Times through super-voting shares, the advantage of such a move would be that it would give the company capital without forcing them to relinquish control or dilute other shareholders. The downside is that the cost of such capital is generally very high.

When Goldman Sachs Group Inc needed $5 billion in September, for example, it found a willing investor in Warren Buffett but only after agreeing to pay a 10% dividend on perpetual preferred shares. Yet with credit tight, especially for companies like the Times that have poor credit ratings, many lenders have few options but to accept onerous terms.

Mr. Slim, who is said to be worth $60 billion, already had a 6.4% stake as of the end of September. The value of the investment has dropped by more than half…since then and is now worth about $60 million. At the time of the investment, a spokesman for Mr. Slim said the 68-year-old billionaire simply saw an opportunity for a piece of a ‘great’ company at an ‘attractive’ price and had no plans to take a role in its management or board.”

The Times declined to comment on the report to me, but Reuters has followed up with a story of its own confirming the basics of the WSJ account.

First, Microsoft tried ads starring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates. Next it tried ads starring anonymous Windows fans.

Now, the next step? Why advertising starring anonymous Windows fans–created by anonymous Windows fans–of course.

MediaMemo likes the new batch, which are cobbled together from video clips that Windows users uploaded themselves.

But then again, MediaMemo has liked all of the ads that hotshot agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky has created for Microsoft (MSFT), and thinks that all of the blogosphere carping and cheering about the ads is a bit silly.

It’s also exactly what Crispin wanted us to do in the first place.

Anyway, see for yourself–and tell me what you think in the comments section (you’ll need to register to do so).

Full-length version:

Mini version: