Alas, the Foursquare conference, hosted by the Quadrangle PE fund, is an invitation-only affair. And the event, which kicks off tomorrow, is closed to the press except for reporters onstage to interview the stars. And those conversations don’t get released to the public.

That’s a particular bummer this time. Because the Quadrangle guys–who have had a rough year–had the foresight to get a lineup that includes GE (GE) CEO Jeff Immelt, who appears to be in the final stages of selling NBC Universal to Comcast (CMCSA) CEO Brian Roberts, who will also be onstage. Sure would be nice to hear what they say.

Another panel that piques my interest, if only because of the title: “Are Popularity and Profitability Correlated?” It features Twitter’s Stone, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley. And would-be moguls are represented by a start-up pitch panel that includes Dennis Crowley of Foursquare, the superbuzzy mobile service whose name has nothing to do with Quadrangle’s conference.

So once again, here’s the complete list of those you won’t be hearing from this week as they gather at the Plaza in Manhattan. Unless, perhaps, one of my more ambitious colleagues sneaks in–I’m thinking of you, Bobby MacMillan–and gets us a first-hand account.

2009 SPEAKERS
EMILIO AZCÁRRAGA President, Board of Directors and CEO, Grupo Televisa
DENNIS CROWLEY Co-Founder, foursquare
BARRY DILLER Chairman and CEO, IAC; Chairman, Expedia, Inc. and Ticketmaster Entertainment, Inc.
BRIAN DUNN CEO, Best Buy
CHARLES FORMAN Founder, OMGPOP
REED HASTINGS Founder, Chairman and CEO, Netflix
REID HOFFMAN Executive Chairman and Founder, LinkedIn Corporation
CHAD HURLEY CEO and Co-Founder, YouTube
JEFF IMMELT Chairman and CEO, GE
PAUL JACOBS Chairman and CEO, Qualcomm Incorporated
OLLI-PEKKA KALLASVUO President and CEO, Nokia
JASON KILAR CEO, Hulu
LESLIE MOONVES President and CEO, CBS Corporation
ANNE MULCAHY Chairman, Xerox Corporation
JAMES MURDOCH Chairman and Chief Executive, Europe & Asia, News Corporation
BRIAN PHILLIPS CEO and Co-Founder, Thread
DAN PORTER CEO, OMGPOP
BRIAN ROBERTS Chairman and CEO, Comcast Corporation
PAUL SAGAN President and CEO, Akamai
ERIC SCHMIDT Chairman and CEO, Google
IVAN SEIDENBERG Chairman and CEO, Verizon Communications
BIZ STONE Co-Founder, Twitter
HOWARD STRINGER Chairman, CEO and President, Sony Corporation
BEN VERWAAYEN CEO, Alcatel-Lucent
DAVID ZASLAV President and CEO, Discovery Communications

MODERATORS
MARC ANDREESSEN General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz
KEN AULETTA Author and Writer, “Annals of Communications”, The New Yorker
MARIA BARTIROMO Anchor, Closing Bell; Host & Managing Editor, Wall Street Journal Report, CNBC
JAMES CITRIN Co-Leader, Board & CEO Practice, North America, Spencer Stuart
DAVID FABER Anchor, Reporter, CNBC
MICHAEL HUBER Co-President and Managing Principal, Quadrangle Group
BECKY QUICK Co-Anchor, Squawk Box, CNBC
GEOFFREY SANDS Director & Leader, Global Media, Entertainment & Information Practice, McKinsey & Co.
JOSHUA L. STEINER Co-President and Managing Principal, Quadrangle Group
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS Anchor, This Week; Chief Washington Correspondent, ABC News

Hence, Sony’s announcement that it’s making a big bet on…3-D TVs. CEO Howard Stringer is using the IFA Technology Show in Berlin to announce that Sony will make 3-D Bravia sets.

And 3-D Vaio laptops. And 3-D PlayStation3s. And 3-D Blu-ray DVD players.

No plans for a 3-D Walkman, though. (But wait!)

This is a recurring theme for Sony, by the way: Stringer also talked up 3-D in January at the Consumer Electronics Show. I still wonder about the actual demand for this; I sampled some new-fangled 3-D at CES and left underwhelmed. But the stuff I saw–a live broadcast of the college football championship game–was, admittedly, an experiment.

In any case, even if you believe Stringer’s assertion that consumers really love the new 3-D experience, there are some big hurdles before Sony (SNE) or anyone else in home electronics can capitalize on it. For instance:

• A looming format war, the same thing that kept Blu-ray from taking a running start at the DVD market.
• Ginormous prices: Sony hasn’t said how much its 3-D-enabled TV sets will cost, but the ones that rival LG go for something like $5,500.

That’s something Sony hasn’t seen since Hollywood producers Jon Peters and Peter Gruber managed to incinerate the company’s balance sheet in the mid-90s. Variety:

This contrasts with the $2.2 billion operating profit Sony predicted in October.

The Nikkei said the loss could balloon to $2 billion, depending on how successful Sony is in cutting inventory in the January-March quarter.

If the Nikkei forecast comes to pass, it will be Sony’s first loss in 14 years, when it took a one-time charge for its pictures division.

Black ink has turned red because of lower-than-expected sales of Sony’s flat-panel TVs and other products, primarily in the U.S. market, while the rapid strengthening of the yen has devastated the bottom lines of all Japanese export industries.”

Upside? Sony (SNE) still makes really cool stuff. Last year at All Things Digital, Stringer showed off a super-thin, super-expensive TV that used organic light-emitting diodes. Last week at CES, the company was showing off a different application for OLED: flexible screens.

Here’s a Sony rep telling you about the technology, but not doing a good job of showing it off:

And here’s video from Obsessable, which actually displays the goods:

At Sony’s keynote presentation yesterday, CEO Howard Stringer devoted a good chunk of his presentation to the wonders of the technology and showed off a 3-D short from Disney’s (DIS) Pixar. And last night a few hundred of us got another demo–a broadcast of the Florida/Oklahoma BCS championship game, on a giant screen, live, in 3-D.

This sounded great in theory. A brace of companies, including Cinedigm, 3ality, Carmike Cinemas (CKEC), News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox and Sony (SNE), partnered up to create a special 3-D broadcast that went out to a handful of movie theaters across the U.S. (News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones and this Web site.) And they’d like to replicate this a dozen times a year for other special occasions: Other big sports events, concerts and the like.

This stuff is still a bit rough around the edges. The 3-D cameras seem to have a hard time keeping up with high-speed action like a pass, some images didn’t seem to focus that well, and the broadcast, which was created separately from the show everyone else in the country saw, seemed to be several cameras short–not enough overhead shots of the action, etc. But that’s OK: CES is usually stuffed with vaporware that never makes it to market, so we’re willing to cut an actual product some slack.

The bigger question is whether the 3-D experience will be amazing enough to convince people to pay money to watch a big game at a theater instead of their living rooms or at a sports bar. I’m not convinced, but I’m willing to give it another shot.

Here’s some video footage from the event; I can’t show you what the broadcast looked like because my not-so trusty Flip Mino doesn’t have any kind of flash. And there’s not much point in watching a clip of a 3-D broadcast in 2-D anyway, right? Instead, I chatted with Cinedigm CEO Bud Mayo, recent Carmike investor Mark Cuban (more from him later), and Nate Westheimer, a New York-based tech guy around town who filled in as my volunteer cameraman and one-man focus group.

[Image Credit: Life/Google]

Introduced by an entertainingly giddy and sardonic Tom Hanks, who happens to star in a new Sony (SNE) movie (“Angels and Demons,” a prequel to “The Da Vinci Code”), but still made fun of his employer (“They write the lies, but I tell the truth”), Stringer showed up to show off cool stuff.

Highlights included a superthin and flexible OLED screen, a Chumby-like Internet-connected TV screen, and a series of 3-D clips. (We’ll be seeing a lot of 3-D this week).

We also got appearances from dueling animation kingpins. Disney (DIS) animation guru John Lasseter showed up to sing the praises of Blu-ray and show off a clip of “Up,” the next Pixar movie. And so did Dreamworks Animation’s (DWA) Jeffrey Katzenberg, who came to talk up the possibilities of 3-D (See? Told you. More to come.) and show off a clip of “Monsters vs. Aliens.”

The oddest Sony product: Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Oprah Winfrey-endorsed doctor who is about to have his own Sony-produced TV show. He offered health tips and measured Stringer’s waist–40 inches, or 39 if Stringer really sucked in his gut.

But to his credit, Stringer didn’t promise a cure-all for the consumer electronic industry ills: “I wish I could tell you that I’m recession-proof.”

(By the way, the image here is from Stringer’s 2008 appearance at The D Conference, but from what I can see, he’s dropped a few pounds since then. I’ll update with something more current if possible.)

The difference: Back then, when Stringer fired 10,000 workers, he was trying to restructure Sony (SNE) so that it could focus its diffuse product line and compete with an array of rivals, from Apple (AAPL) to Samsung. But now he’s just cutting because the world’s economy is in miserable shape.

That has to be frustrating for Stringer (and miserable for the people he fires), because not too long ago, it seemed like his turnaround efforts had borne fruit: Sony had won a costly and risky format war over the next-generation DVD format, its PS3 game player was beginning to get some traction, and the company was making encouraging advances in the TV market. But unless people have money to buy those TVs and Blu-ray discs, that won’t matter.

You can ask Sony employees yourself about this at the Consumer Electronics Show next month–if you can find them. I’m told that while Sony, unlike many others, is keeping a large presence at the electronic convention’s show floor, many of the people who used to fly out to Las Vegas for the event are staying put this year. My guess: You won’t hear many of them complaining.

Here’s Stringer speaking with All Things Digital’s Walt Mossberg in May at this year’s D6: