While New York-based Foursquare steals much of the headlines nowadays when it comes to the topic of location-based mobile platforms due to its remarkable growth (over 1 million members in a little over a year) and potential for real-world location-based marketing, there is an increasingly visible West Coast based startup that is quietly taking the mobile world by storm with a growth curve that actually leaves Foursquare in the dust. The company’s name is Booyah.

Everyone’s favorite online personalized radio service, Pandora, has been on a tear recently. First, it was announced that the company that narrowly escaped death a number of times since its founding in 2000 is estimated to earn $100 million in revenue this year, then Ford announces that it is planning to be the first auto manufacturer to integrate the service into its cars and, most recently, it was made known that Pandora is partnering with Facebook for social music.

What exactly is AOL Seed? A recently revealed skunkworks project developed by AOL for its next phase of evolution as an independent company? A new model of distributed online content sourcing and development optimized for the digital age? A way for the unknown amateur journalist and photographer in many of us to get published and paid?

So what do you do after serving as CIO to arguably the world’s most important tech company? Write a book and start a brand new company of course. That’s essentially the storyline behind our next SXSW interview; we had the pleasure of cornering Dr. Douglas Merrill, former CIO of Google, at SXSW last month and spoke to him about the panel discussion he was highlighted on as well as his future plans to take over the world. It’s not easy being brilliant.