Mr. Calacanis. (Photo: flickr.com/photos/joi)

Three months ago, the Transom broke some news to Jason Calacanis, former publisher of the New York-based dot-com bust chronicle Silicon Alley Reporter. Mr. Calacanis was sitting in the corner of a South By Southwest party, contemplating whether he could use the edge of a table to open a Heineken, when we told him his former employee Josh Topolsky had just quit as editor of the popular AOL-owned tech blog Engadget. “What?!” Mr. Calacanis said, lunging for his BlackBerry: “Hey @joshuatopolsky,” he tweeted. “I have a blank check here with your name on it. Let me know where to send it.” He sat back and took a smug swig; a server had opened the bottle. “I love making public offers,” he said. “It’s win-win. If they take it, I win. If they don’t take it, I win because it’s baller.”

Mr. Topolsky didn’t bite. Instead he and at least five Engadget bloggers signed on to a new venture backed by Jim Bankoff, who while at AOL coordinated the purchase of Engadget and its associated blog network, from Mr. Calacanis.

Mr. Calacanis was in town for a tech conference last week (not the Webbys—“I can’t believe that’s still going on”) and we met him again in a corner, this one at the W in Midtown, where his beverage, coffee, presented a different challenge, a fly. “I was like, oh my God, do not worry about it. Do you know how many flies are in this bagel? I don’t care,” he told the Transom, stirring.

“It really is a major red flag for AOL that you can’t keep a group of five or six bloggers happy,” he said. “Like velociraptors, the most dangerous dinosaur that ripped people up in Jurassic Park? If you have like a pack of those that work for you, you don’t have to tell them, go kill that. All of a sudden they’re just like, ‘What? There’s something there?’ They pounce. They just go kill it. You just have to keep them fed, that’s it. If you don’t fuck with it, they’ll do an amazing job… Of course they left because of meddling. They wouldn’t say it publicly but they told me AOL was meddling too much.”

We asked if there were any bloggers he wanted to offer a job via the Transom.

“I’m actually keen on landing Erick or MG from TechCrunch,” Mr. Calacanis said, citing another tech blog which recently sold to AOL. “I’m fairly certain they owned less than two and one percent respectively of TechCrunch when it sold. I’d offer them much more than that and get them their big pay day.”

Blogging is “largely dead” though, he said.

The Wall Street Journal had a story recently that said texting was dead, we noted. Mr. Calacanis agreed.

Is anything else dead? we asked.

He cocked his head, thinking. “Mm, not sure,” he said.

Over the weekend Miller announced his departure by blog post, noting that, "I’d love to be able to keep doing this forever, but unfortunately Engadget is owned by AOL, and AOL has proved an unwilling partner in this site’s evolution."

With the recent acquisition of the Huffington Post, it's clear CEO Tim Armstrong is trying to sharpen the focus of AOL during its transformation to a media company. But the relentless drive towards profit doesn't sit well with editorial staffers like Miller.

"As detailed in the 'AOL Way,' and borne out in personal experience, AOL sees content as a commodity it can sell ads against. That might make good business sense (though I doubt it), but it doesn’t promote good journalism or even good entertainment, and it doesn’t allow an ambitious team like the one I know and love at Engadget to thrive," wrote Miller. 

On Sunday Associate Editor Ross Miller announced his departure from Engadget as well, citing the AOL way as a catalyst. Josh Topolsky, editor-in-chief, tweeted this out in response. 

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper

Verizon even set aside a limited quantity of iPhones for existing customers, and orders will be shipped to arrive on or before Feb. 10, an interesting PR move since bringing the iPhone to the carrier is expected to attract customers sick of AT&T dropping their calls. Classy, Verizon.

The iPhone 4 will be available for non-Verizon customers on Feb. 10, priced at $199.99 for the 16 GB iPhone 4 or $299.99 for the 32 GB iPhone 4 with a new two-year customer agreement. A data plan is $29.99 a month.

Early reviews of the Verizon iPhone say the call quality is crisp, but the data conntection is much slower and the phone can't handle as much data and voice action at the same time as its AT&T counterpart.

"While it isn't all rainbows and flowers (the data speed issues or the voice / data considerations could be a dealbreaker for some), it does kind of feel like Apple and Verizon did the impossible: they made the best smartphone in America just a little bit better," Engadget's Joshua Topolsky, who lives in Brooklyn, wrote after testing the device. David Pogue at The New York Times ran around New York and other cities with the Verizon and AT&T iPhones and was impressed.

There is still fear that the AT&T diaspora could affect call quality for current Verizon customers. We won't know if that's true for another two weeks.

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries

The pilot was apparently successful, because AT&T has expanded the area of Wi-Fi coverage in Times Square and is adding more by Rockefeller Center and St. Patrick's Cathedral. Those hot spots for AT&T customers will be coming in the next few days, according to a press release posted by Engadget, in time for New Year's Eve.

The expanded hot spots will add data network capacity in high traffic areas. AT&T customers with qualifying data plans get unlimited access to AT&T hot spots at no additional cost.

The quality of voice calls and coverage on AT&T has vastly improved over the last year in Manhattan, as have 3G download speeds.

In January, AT&T acknowledged its Manhattan network was subpar. But now, with the help of Luke Wilson, it's back to bravado.

"AT&T today delivers the nation's fastest mobile broadband experience nationwide as well as the nation's largest Wi-Fi network, giving customers the best combination of speed and coverage," the press release says. We'll know when eight million people try to tweet on New Year's, won't we?

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries