I am reporting today from the Fairmont Olympic Hotel, where OVP Venture Partners is hosting its fifth annual Technology Summit.

We've already heard from Amazon's Werner Vogels on the benefits of cloud computing.

Now, Fritz Lanman, director of online services strategy and M&A at Microsoft, is sharing the stage with former Yahoo executive Ellen Siminoff.

Lanman played a key role in Microsoft's bid for Yahoo, which set up a chance to hear the nitty gritty of the deal.

"We have $44 billion to spend now, so you guys should be pretty excited," said Lanman, who was speaking to a room of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.

But Lanman didn't budge when prodded by moderator Dave Jakubowski to elaborate, saying he was explicitly told by Microsoft bosses Chris Liddell and Kevin Johnson to keep quiet on the deal or face losing his job.

Given that scenario, Jakubowski said he would let Lanman off the hook.

The two executives went on to discuss the best approaches for pitching an idea to a big tech company, new opportunities on the Internet and online advertising techniques.

In her closing remark, Siminoff probably offered the best advice to finding the next $1 billion entrepreneurial idea. "Be lucky and have really good timing," she said.

More to come later.

UPDATE: Since there has been some reader interest in Lanman's comments about Yahoo, I went back to listen to the full text.

Microsoft wanted to do the Yahoo deal because of "massive consolidation" going on in the online advertising space, with Lanman saying "to maximize the benefits of liquidity" there really should only be a few advertising networks. He compared it to the financial markets where there are two major stock exchanges.

As to search, Lanman said that they were "afraid of an emerging power forming a monopoly." (Can anyone say Google?)

"We saw the Yahoo acquisition as a away to accelerate our existing strategy," said Lanman, adding that he didn't have anything more to report.