Here’s a good way to get your hands on scarce venture capital money: Create a start-up geared around Twitter-like “real-time” sharing and conversations. The newest entrant: Hot Potato, a buzzy start-up that’s supposed to let users converse about a particular event, whether they’re attending it in person or watching from afar. When it’s up and running, that is. The five-man crew doesn’t have users or a product just yet. But it has just raised around $1 million.

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If you’re out of town and on the move and still want to watch your favorite baseball team, Major League Baseball is about to make you a very interesting offer: The ability to watch a game streamed live to your iPhone, for 99 cents a pop. That will make baseball the first pro sports league to sell mobile access to live games on an on-demand, a la carte basis.

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Sure, your iPhone may be cool. But can it turn your oven on, against your will? That feature, apparently, is only available on certain Sony Ericsson models.

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Sarah Jessica Parker isn’t the mystery buyer who plunked down $8.45 million for one of Brooklyn’s most expensive homes, the New York Times explains: It’s the new home of an unnamed Google engineer. If you don’t want to see pictures of the place, do not click on this link.

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What do you do when your job working for a big music label disappears? You go to work for a pirate-friendly file-sharing service that’s being sued by the big music labels.

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Yet another addition to the Twitter ecosystem of companies based on the microblogging service, but that don’t pay it a dime: Pontiflex, which is trying to charge marketers for each Twitter user name it collects.

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Want to watch the season finale of “30 Rock” for free, whenever you want, on a big screen? Go for it, says Hulu–just don’t watch it on a TV.

Confused? Of course. So was I when I checked out Hulu’s new “Desktop” app, launched today as part of the video service’s new “Labs” collection of experimental offerings.

Basically, it’s downloadable software that makes it easier than ever to watch Hulu’s shows and clips in the same way that you’d watch TV–on your sofa, remote in hand. But Hulu wants to make sure you don’t actually think it replaces TV.

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A lot of people couldn’t understand why Guy Hands, the private equity guy who bought EMI in the summer of 2007, was willing to pay so much for the music company. Now he says he agrees with them–his Terra Firma buyout firm has written off half the $3.2 billion he paid for the company. He may have to write off more before he’s done.

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