I was heading out the door of the chummy TechCrunch 4th Anniversary barbecue in Palo Alto last night, when I ran into tech gadfly Fred Davis. Hadn’t seen Fred in many years and it was great to catch up, particularly, as always with Fred, he had some new cutting edge venture to talk about.

Fred Davis of Grabbit Photo: David Needle

Fred always seems ready to roll the dice on a new idea. Among other ventures, he was involved at the start of Wired, CNET and AskJeeves. The last time we connected, following the dotcom bust, he was promoting Dig IT, an ambitious consumer magazine about digital technology that was going to leverage the Internet for managing a new subscription model. Never went anywhere — good, pre-Digg — name though!

Now he and co-founder/CEO Peter Karnig, are getting set to launch Grabbit, the “next thing after Twitter” for managing your digital life. Karnig was a co-founder of Five Across, purchased by Cisco in 2007, and also worked at Next, the startup founded by Steve Jobs in the ’80s after he left Apple.

A killer revenue model

So what is Grabbit? Davis and Karnig are keeping the details under wraps for now, though Davis did say he has “a killer secret revenue model. This isn’t like Twitter, we’ll be generating revenue from day one.”

He says Grabbit is going to let users manage the streams of content on the Web and “skim the cream of stuff you want.”

I pushed for more detail but didn’t get very far. “It’s like a program guide for your online world,” said Horning, who added it’ll be a great service for mobile users.

As of today, I noticed Grabbit has a bit more detail at its Web site that talks about a “personalized Grabbit Stream will let you grab the most important stuff from all your streams and have it delivered to you anytime, anywhere - on your phone, on the web, or on your TV.”

An alpha release is set for next month, followed by a public beta in August. Stay tuned, and remember you read it here first. Heck, I scooped TechCrunch at their own party?