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Yesterday came word that Microsoft was talking to Time Warner and News Corp. about potential deals to help it acquire Yahoo. So naturally today comes word that Yahoo is talking to those very same companies about doing similar deals — just without Microsoft, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The whole thing is just ridiculous. We’re back to where we were in February — everyone is talking merger with everyone else.

Time Warner is talking with Yahoo about combining its AOL property with the Internet company. This is the scenario most often brought up and makes at least some semblance of sense. The problem is that Time Warner may now be concerned about Yahoo’s value, which has diminished since the two last talked about this scenario.

Meanwhile, News Corp. is said to be trying to get some sense of what is going on in the Yahoo camp as it mulls over an idea by Microsoft that it join in any takeover and merge MySpace with Yahoo. Microsoft would then take Yahoo’s search business. Tax hits that Yahoo would face over selling off its search business may halt that one.

Microsoft also may just take AOL off of Time Warner’s hands itself.

I wonder if and when any of these deals actually take place, if any of the companies involved are actually going to remember who is getting what.

The Yahoo annual shareholder meeting is set for August 1st. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn will launch his hostile takeover bid at that time. That should at least be good theater.

Already, Yahoo’s leadership is said to be willing to hand over two seats on its board to Icahn — but he wants four, according to BoomTown’s Kara Swisher. If that isn’t emblematic of this whole situation, I’m not sure what is.

If I told you that Microsoft was talking about buying Yahoo and asked you to pick a month that this discussion was taking place, would you pick: a) January 2007 b) January 2008 c) May 2008 or d) Right now?

Wrong. The correct answer is e) All of the above.

Yes, shockingly enough, Microsoft is still trying to buy at least a piece of Yahoo. It is now said to be seeking other partners to make a deal work, according to the Wall Street Journal.

If you’re sick of hearing about this, I feel for you, I really do. I think everyone is sick of hearing about it at this point — including Microsoft and Yahoo. They’re like two boxers in the final round of a 12-round fight that can barely lift their arms anymore, let alone give anyone a good show.

The latest round involves Microsoft talking with Time Warner and News Corp., among others about breaking off pieces of Yahoo to make this work. Presumably, Microsoft would take Yahoo’s search business while Time Warner or News Corp. would combine one of its entities with the rest of Yahoo to form — well, something.

Yahoo’s stock is tanking; almost back to the sub-$20 pre-original Microsoft offer levels. Its executives are leaving at a pace that can nicely be described as ‘brisk,’ but perhaps more accurately as ‘rapid.’

Remember when Yahoo was the promising Internet company of the future? Writing all of this now I just feel dirty.

I suppose Microsoft could take Yahoo Search while striking a deal with Time Warner to merge AOL and Yahoo. Time Warner is thought to be trying to sell AOL as we speak. But just about any way you slice it, all of these dealings are a mess.

Let’s just say out loud what we all know: One way or another, eventually, Microsoft is going to end up with Yahoo Search. It may have to carve up Yahoo with the help of Carl Icahn and others in the process, but it’s going to happen.

Microsoft wants to be relevant in the search business, and while buying a company like Powerset may help it a little bit longer term, if it doesn’t make a move to buy the only other major player, Yahoo, chief rival Google is going to devour them.

The Wall Street Journal piece on this ordeal comes highly recommended. It includes great soap operatic tidbits such as:

“We’re done,” he told Mr. Yang, according to a person who was present. At first it wasn’t clear whether Mr. Ballmer meant they had accepted the $37 offer or rejected it.

When Mr. Ballmer explained that Microsoft was withdrawing its offer, Mr. Yang’s face fell, according to a person who was present.

Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer, now without founder Bill Gates who officially retired last week, may feel even more pressure to get this deal done. Gates’ company has been left in his hands. Watch Ballmer’s heartfelt goodbye to his friend below.

[photo: flickr/webhamster]

Here’s the latest action:

Dow Jones has its worst June since Depression: U.S. stocks tumbled on Friday and sent the Dow Jones Industrial Average to its worst June performance since the Great Depression. Record oil prices, credit-market write downs and the the economic slump spooked everybody. Goldman Sachs told investors to sell GM stock, sparking a sell-off as crude prices rose again. The broader S&P 500 index fell 2.9 percent on Friday. The Dow is at its lowest since September 2006. It has fallen 9.4 percent so far this month, its worst June since an 18 percent drop in 1930.

Rupert ready for another bite: Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. and Permira Advisors made a $970 million bid to buy NDS Group, a provider of digital technology for pay-TV services. NDS Group said it would evaluate the $60 a share offer, which is 21 percent above Friday’s closing price of $49.70.

Take that, VMware: Microsoft unveiled its long-awaited virtualization technology to compete against VMware. Its Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V product has been in the works since 2003, when Microsoft acquired Connectix, which made software to run both Windows and the Mac OS on the same computer.

Palm stock heads to bottom: Palm’s stock fell eight percent Friday a day after the company reported a worse-than-expected loss for its fourth fiscal quarter. The company dropped $43.4 million, compared with a profit a year earlier. Revenue was down 26 percent to $296.2 million. It also expects to lose money in the current quarter. Plam’s Treo continues to lose ground to Research In Motion’s Blackberry and Apple’s iPhone.

Attention, K-Mart shoppers: Microsoft may have something up its sleeve for the E3 trade show starting July 14. The company is rumored to be cutting the price of its Xbox 360 Premium unit from $349 to $299. The latest rumor comes from a purported K-Mart ad. It’s been a long time since Microsoft last cut its game console prices by $50 in August, 2007. The price cuts say a lot. It shows Microsoft is the aggressor in driving down prices, putting pressure on both Sony and Nintendo to do the same. It also says that Microsoft sees a need to cut prices, perhaps because of slowing sales of its consoles. And the fact that it isn’t cutting $100 shows that the company isn’t crazy and doesn’t want to lose lots of money on each console sold.

Sony promises a big overhaul, new PlayStation 3 video downloading: Sony has been restructuring for three years but now CEO Howard Stringer is proposing an aggressive strategy built around video downloading and products that can talk to each other across the Internet. Video downloading will be part of products ranging from TVs to the PlayStation 3.

iPhone will debut in Canada with underwhelming prices: Rogers unveiled some not-so-popular prices for Apple’s Jesus phone for its scheduled debut in a couple of weeks.

Google speeds Blackberry search results: Google said that it has improved the speed of its mobile search results pages for Blackberry web browsers.

Having just moved into a new apartment, I was without cable television for a few weeks. So what did I do to watch some of the network shows such as The Office that I’m addicted to? I turned to Hulu, the streaming video service that was started last year by NBC Universal and News Corp. (owners of Fox). Given some new usage numbers just released, it appears others are tuning into Hulu with me.

Nielsen Net Ratings numbers (by way of TechCrunch) show that Hulu streamed over 63 million videos in April. The average user watched over two hours of video in the month. These are both very good numbers. In fact, they make Hulu the leader among all network sites in videos streamed and engagement time for the month.

While many were skeptical about Hulu when it was announced, it has since won over many of its critics. Remember, Hulu came about shortly after NBC announced its intention to pull its content from iTunes, the most popular online video store. NBC also pulled its content from YouTube. To many, Hulu seemed like an ill-advised experiment to stick it to Apple and Google. Instead, NBC has been able to create a worthwhile service with a killer feature: free premium content.

Big Facebook profile changes are coming, sure to impact developers — Facebook has been experimenting with a ground-up redesign of its user interface for months, that it hopes will improve communication among users. Now, the company is providing Facebook application developers with more details on the changes — and how those changes are going to affect applications. The new home page will have a tabbed interface for news feed, personal info, photos, and something tentatively called “boxes.” The “box” tab will house Facebook applications (see screenshot, above), although the apps will also appear in various forms within the other tabbed sections. Perhaps most significantly, the news feeds themselves will include a new range of ways for applications to share stories with Facebook users who haven’t already added the application. If you’re interested in the many, many changes happening, see this detailed post by Justin Smith of the blog Inside Facebook and application company Watercooler. The official preview site here.

Meanwhile, Facebook is seeing an overall drop in the number of new applications that grow quickly, and a probably-related drop in the number of developers working on the platform — even as the site continues to grow around the world. So these profile changes are part of a far-reaching initiative by Facebook to make the site more usable; the company has previously, for example, placed ever-more restrictive measures on app developers, to try to curb abusive practices like spam-emailing users. All in all, these changes will likely benefit Facebook users, the company, and the higher-quality applications, as another top Facebook app developer, Jesse Farmer notes here. The open question about the profile redesign is how Facebook is going to manage explaining the changes to its users.

News Corp. earnings report: MySpace, FIM miss revenue targets — News Corp. executives admitted yesterday that they weren’t monetizing MySpace and other social networking properties like they’d aimed to — bringing in $900 million in revenue versus $1 billion. Surprisingly, quarterly revenue actually declined from $233 million to $210 million. A number of pundits have jumped on this news to surmise that social networks may never monetize very well, as you can read over on Techmeme. But overall, monetization has actually been improving across a number of fronts at MySpace, as Silicon Alley Insider details, even if it’s not as fast as News Corp. chief executive Rupert Murdoch wanted. For example, MySpace is actually earning 49 percent more money per-user compared to last year even as the user base continues to grow, partially through efforts like better-targeted ads. And many forget that monetizing social networks is not just about banner ads. We’ve covered companies that are creating new ways of doing things like distributing music or creating sports communities — companies that are helping to drive ticket sales for live events, apparel sales and other non-banner-ad forms of making money. Basically, social networks are in the process of becoming businesses and there are lots of unexplored opportunities. Here’s another one: Online video, which benefit greatly through being distributed on social networks, also have the opportunity to make money, as blog HipMojo notes.

Fuel cells coming soon to your GPS device? — MTI Micro has introduced a methanol-based fuel cell prototype, essentially a new and longer-lasting form of battery, for GPS devices.

Comcast may introduce a new fee system targeting people who habitually download large files — More here.

Email organizer Zaplets technology bought by email startup Xobni — Zaplets was developed in 2000 to turn long strings of back-and-forth emails into single emails, with the most recent information being displayed most prominently on each message (which sounds not unlike Gmail to me). Zaplets’ parent company, FireDrop had raised more than $100 million, with venture investors including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. It went bust, some of the patents ended up with an “enterprise process management” company called MetricStream — and have now been bought by email analysis startup Xobni. Zaplets’s problem was that it was ahead of its time, Xobni chief executive Jeff Bonforte tells Techcrunch. So, look for Zaplet technology in Xobni.

MeeVee bought, finally — The Burlingame, Calif. company offers a sort-of TV Guide-style site for online videos. But gaining only around 1.1 million monthly active users after raising $27 million since it was founded in 2000, MeeVee decided last month to try to sell. It has reportedly succeeded, selling to Live Universe for an undisclosed price.

1. WSJ Digital Network hires Microsoft for ads
2. Paramount Pictures, live in virtual world Habbo
3. Tim Draper raising fund for entertainment startups
4. MPAA downplay claim of movie piracy at colleges
5. Southern Cross first Aussie VC firm to open Silicon Valley office
6. How to find private photos on SmugMug
7. Redpoint Ventures does well with Fraud Sciences
8. Sprint and Clearwire revive WiMAX plan
9. VCs showed best returns of 2007 in Q2

Wall Street Journal Digital Network hires Microsoft for ads — The Wall Street Journal Online, Barrons.com, MarketWatch.com, AllThingsD.com and other sites will have their contextual and paid search advertising ads provided exclusively by Microsoft’s adCenter. Strange that The Wall Street Journal isn’t using the advertising services of its parent company News Corp., which has also been experimenting with contextual advertising that makes use of Myspace user data (our coverage). Ashkan Karbasfrooshan’s explanation is that this is actually being orchestrated by News Corp’s Murdoch. By recruiting Microsoft, he’s playing the software giant off against Google. You’ll recall Google has already cut a $900 million deal to serve ads on News Corp’s other properties, Myspace and other Fox Interactive Media sites. So why not keep the two giants honest, creating a little competition for News Corp.’s business?. Meanwhile, Microsoft also places ads on Myspace rival Facebook.

More than 20 million unique users visit the Journal’s network of sites per month, generating monthly 330 million page views. Microsoft now claims to have one of the largest vertical ad networks focused on financial readers. Other properties it runs ads on include MSN Money, CNBC.com and EDGAR Online.

Paramount Pictures, live in virtual world Habbo — Habbo (sample, left), formerly Habbo Hotel, has won “merchandising rights” to sell virtual goods to its users in North America, that feature items from the movies Mean Girls, the forthcoming The Spiderwick Chronicles and Beowulf. Habbo’s eight million monthly visitors will be able to buy virtual clothes, virtual furniture and other accessories (press release here). Paramount is the latest movie studio to start inserting its content into a virtual world. Sony and Time Warner have been doing the same thing. Both of those studios have had their movies and other content playing in the background of virtual rooms in virtual world Gaia Online (they also both invested in that company).

Tim Draper is reportedly still raising a fund to focus on entertainment startups — Or so recent reports suggest. We heard the same thing back in August.

MPAA admits movie piracy by college students not as bad as previously claimed — The Motion Picture of Association of America has come clean. The MPAA’s 2007 study will show that motion picture industry losses due to college students pirating movies amount to 15 percent. That’s down from the MPAA’s 2005 number of 44 percent, which the MPAA now says was due to an “isolated error.”  For a brutal breakdown of this announcement, read this.

Southern Cross Venture Partners is the first Aussie VC firm to open up an office in Silicon Valley — The Australia-based firm has already made investments in four companies of Australian origin: Xerocoat, Mantara, M&MD and UIactive. It closed a $150 million (AUD$170m) fund in the middle of last year. It plans to deepen relationships with US VCs, to help fund startups that begin life in Australia and New Zealand, and introduce them to the US market. The firm’s new office is in downtown Palo Alto, so I’ll be keeping my ears tuned to overhear Aussie-accented conversations while I write articles at Coupa Cafe.

How to find private photos on SmugMug — Is the popular photo-sharing site keeping your private photos private? Google Blogoscoped and others have discovered it’s not, apparently. Read here for more.

Redpoint Ventures cashes out Fraud Sciences six months after investing in it — EBay is buying Fraud Sciences for $169 million, which had received $8 million in funding from Redpoint, BRM Capital and undisclosed investors last year. It tracks online buyers to pin-point suspicious behavior, and is supposed to be particularly good at detecting fraudulent overseas transactions, a particular pain point for Paypal.

Sprint and Clearwire revive plan to build high-speed wireless network using WiMAX — The mobile carrier and the internet service provider are looking at forming a joint venture that could include Intel, Google and even retailer Best Buy, The Wall Street Journal reports.

VCs showed best returns of 2007 in Q2 — That’s according to the latest private equity performance index put together by Thomson Financial and the National Venture Capital Association. Take a look at this table for more details.

A rumor surfaced last week, in Techcrunch UK, that News Corp. is looking at buying business networking site LinkedIn.

A well-placed source has confirmed with us that these talks are serious. LinkedIn has declined to comment.

News Corp.’s strategy, from what we understand: Somehow integrate LinkedIn’s network with the Wall Street Journal as well as its other newspapers around the world, hopefully figuring out how to recoup News Corp.’s newspapers’ declining classified ad revenue in the process.

The driving force behind the deal is Jeremy Philips, according to our source. Philips is a rising star in the media conglomerate. At age 33, he is already an executive vice president under News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch, who our source says he is very close with.

Philips focuses on acquisitions and general strategy, and is overseeing internet investments, according to this article from last year. He operates separately from Fox Interactive Media — he has established a group called NIM, or News (Corp) Interactive Media, our source says.

Here’s the action that you missed over Thanksgiving break:

1. Silicon Valley becoming mobile innovation hub
2. Why Google bought Jaiku
3. LinkedIn drawing suitors?
4. IAC to spend $100M in China
5. NeoEdge launches ad network for casual games
6. Feds may subsidize broadband access

Silicon Valley becoming mobile innovation hub — Despite the U.S. being the laughing stock of the world for its backward mobile networks, Silicon Valley is becoming a center for mobile innovation anyway. Nokia, the large Finnish mobile phone maker, is boosting its activities in Silicon Valley, because of the action here. Nokia’s head of research here, Bob Iannucci, has even been promoted to Nokia’s chief technology officer. The Mercury News has a good story about the emergence of the valley’s strength in mobile, from Apple’s iPhone phenom to Google’s launch of its Android platform, to the surprising number of Finnish companies — BBS, Codenomicon, EB, Navicron and Tracker — that have established offices in the region. After its move to the valley, Nokia bought an intriguing company called Pixto, which lets consumers point a camera phone at an object — a building, an automobile, or a product in a store window — and with a single click call up Web data linked to the image. It uses GPS and image-matching algorithms to recognize the subject. The Mercury News argues Silicon Valley has become more important with globalization, not less.

Why Google bought Jaiku — Speaking of cool Finnish companies getting sucked by Silicon Valley, you’ll recall the Jaiku was recently bought by Google. Jaiku is like Twitter, in that it lets people post short messages about what they are doing. So why did Google chose Jaiku, instead of the homegrown San Francisco company, Twitter. Jonathan Mulholland says its because Jaiku offers location awareness, and that this fits in with its designs for its Android platform:

…when posting status updates Jaiku has the ability to capture and share the location information (neighbourhood, city, country) of the poster in real time. So in addition to a message post Jaiku can provide real time location awareness of users… And how does Jaiku do this? An integral part of the service is a client application for Symbian S60 platform mobile phones. The client uses location APIs within S60 devices to triangulate the handset (and the users) location based on nearby cellular network towers. The Jaiku client was in fact originally conceived as a ’status aware address book’, and as such integrates into compatible S60 phones to the extent that it also shares the phones (and again the users) status availability (General, In Meeting, Outdoor etc). So in addition to a message post AND location awareness you also have deep mobile integration sufficient to identify the status of a user as well…Jaiku potentially gives Google the Holy Grail - time relevant, location based targeting of information, personalised to a very high degree. Google + Jaiku is not a million miles away from being able to push appropriate advertising to individuals based on their profile, their location and their availability.

LinkedIn growing quickly, attracting suitors — LinkedIn is growing quickly, seeing 189 percent growth over the year through October, faster than the other top ten social networks, according to Nielsen. Now there are rumors that News Corp is looking at buying LinkedIn. Both parties told us “no comment,” though LinkedIn Chairman Reid Hoffman’s response to Techcurnch was one of the most bizarre “no comments” we’ve ever seen.

IAC to create a new business in China — IAC CEO Barry Diller said Saturday that he’ll spend $100 million on a new business in China, and he’ll  also take its search engine, Ask to the fast-growing country. It’s little wonder such initiatives are being taken now that U.S. economy may be slipping into zero growth, or even recession. Diller admits that IAC screwed up eLong, a travel site in China. The initiative will raise IAC’s China investments to $300 million. Details in Wall Street Journal.

NeoEdge launches ad network for casual games –Mountain View, Calif.-based startup NeoEdge, officially launches its ad network for casual games this week, according to GigaOm, but the company doesn’t make clear how its offerings are any different from competitors. We mentioned the company raised $3 million back in June.

Feds may subsidize broadband access — Policy makers overseeing the federal Universal Service Fund have recommended that it be used to offset costs of deploying broadband Internet services in rural areas of the U.S., according to the WSJ. This is something Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama’s campaign also supports (see our coverage here ).

It’s official: MySpace, seeking to defend its status as the leading social network, will open up its platform to third-party developers over the next couple of months.

The news was confirmed tonight at Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, where News Corporation’s Rupert Murdoch and MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe were featured guests.

Like rival Facebook’s move six months ago, MySpace’s move will let developers build applications within MySpace and make money from them.

The full significance of this move — and of social networking platforms in general — is hard to tell. Despite the hype generated lately about the Facebook platform, few of the 6,000 or so applications are remarkable or particularly innovative. On the other hand, the applications are drawing traffic: Facebook’s platform applications see 14 million unique visitors a month, with 88 million visits for an average visit time of 4:30 minutes, according to Compete. We’ve heard estimates that the applications account for anywhere between two and 20 percent of Facebook’s overall traffic, something we’ve been trying to confirm.

MySpace, which still leads Facebook in overall users by a wide margin, was expected to make the move to embrace developers — as a way to ensure its leadership position.

However, MySpace has already let users install widgets from third parties. The difference is, now these widget-makers have the opportunity to build more complete applications for their existing MySpace users. Successful Facebook application developers will also have the opportunity to push their wares to MySpace.

RockYou and Slide, the leading widget providers on MySpace and application leaders on Facebook, both said that they have been waiting hungrily to push applications across MySpace and all the other social networks that plan to offer developer platforms — such as Hi5, Bebo and Tagged.

Even though Facebook’s open-platform move instigated the development of these rival platforms, Facebook’s has been a technical work in progress, with glitches still being regularly reported by developers.

News Corp.’s MySpace is opting for a slower approach, hoping to avoid some of the same problems.

In the next couple of weeks, the company says, it will release a directory of widgets already on its site.

Then, within the next couple of months, it will launch a platform that gives developers deeper access to MySpace data. Like Facebook, MySpace will offer application programming interfaces to its user data, so developers can build applications that run within MySpace. It will offer its own markup language for designing application user interfaces, and will let developers include Flash, Javascript and iFrames elements — also similar to what Facebook already offers. MySpace users will be able to share their profile information, activity on the site, lists of friends, and other personal data with developers’ third-party applications.

Asked by an audience member if MySpace planned to be more open than Facebook, DeWolfe smiled and said, “yes.”

It will initially offer third-party applications to only a subset of around two million MySpace users.

Next up: Google, which on Nov. 5 is expected to do something similar, starting with its social network, Orkut.
Separately, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch confirmed that MySpace co-founders DeWolfe and Anderson have signed a contract to work for MySpace for two years. There’s been speculation the pair are making $30 million over that time.
Asked by interviewer John Battelle what he thought of Silicon Valley culture, Murdoch responded: “In many ways it’s the most exciting place on earth, the center of innovation.”
In response to the rumors that Facebook is possibly raising money at up to a $15 billion valuation from Microsoft, Murdoch said it would mean Newscorp is “totally underpriced.” Facebook is known to be making much money, with reports putting revenue at $150 million this year, mostly from a sweet revenue deal with Microsoft. Newscorp has a $70 billion market value and will make $5 billion if the economy holds up, Murdoch said. More coverage here.
[Mark Coker, who covered the Murdoch talk at the Web 2.0 Summit, contributed to this report.]

1) LGC Wireless to be acquired by telecom components company
2) Rumors abound that News Corp. is buying RockYou for hundreds of millions of dollars
3) Myspace + Skype: newly-joined parts of the “Web 2.0 address book”
4) Apple finally decides to return developers’ love
5) Treemo, another mobile and online content sharing service, raises 2.5 million
6) LiveScribe, a near-magical pen for taking written and audio notes at the same time, raises $22 million

LGC Wireless to be acquired by telecom components company — LGC Wireless, which sells technology that improves spotty wireless coverage in garages or in thick-walled buildings, will announce the purchase by the end of the month, we’re told by sources. LGC’s offering always made a lot of sense, because coverage from the main carriers like Sprint, Verizon and others have been poor in many shielded areas. Problem is, the carriers balked at paying for the company’s services, seeing it as a needless expense: Most consumers seem to simply sigh and put up with crappy service. LGC kept plugging away though, and nine years and $93 million in venture backing later, it is finally getting bought by a large, unnamed telecom components company.

Rumors abound that News Corp. is buying RockYou for hundreds of millions of dollars – Last night, Valleywag posted an anonymous tip that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. will buy top widget-maker RockYou for the bubbly purchase price of $800 million — considering the company is still developing its revenue model. Today, an apparently different anonymous tipster told Facebook-focused blog AllFacebook a similar rumor but with a lower price: A mere “$300 and $500 million, with earnouts that could push the $600 to $650 million range.” We asked RockYou and the company flatly denied the rumors, saying only that the tipsters must “have us confused with a different company.” Murdoch will be presenting at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco later today. We’ll see what he has to say about any possible acquisitions, as well as any news about the rumored Myspace developer platform.

Myspace + Skype: newly-joined parts of the “Web 2.0 address book” – The social network subsidiary of News Corp. and the internet calling subsidiary of eBay will introduce a feature in November to let Myspace users make Skype calls through Myspace’s instant-messaging feature.

This pairing of social information and a popular communications service is the tip of the proverbial iceberg, according to Tim O’Reilly. He thinks that social networks will grow into a “social network operating system” that combines social information about you and your friends together with all of your contact information from across email, phone and IM.

This, remember, is also the original vision behind Facebook’s developer platform — the thousands of toy-like widgets on Facebook right now are just another small chunk of the iceberg’s tip.

Apple finally decides to return developers’ love — Since the iPhone release earlier this year, developers have hacked, cracked and otherwise abused the phone’s software platform in every way imaginable, despite repeated cautions from Apple that the phone’s firmware shouldn’t be tampered with. In many cases, the result of installing outside applications has been an unusable iPhone.

The company has finally decided to respond to strident pleas and threats from legions of unhappy developers by releasing a software developer’s kit (SDK) next February. The SDK, which will give developers easier access and more information to create new applications, should encourage innovation and even some startups based on the iPhone platform.

Now, to connect your social information on Facebook with your contact information in your iPhone.

Treemo, another mobile and online content sharing service, raises 2.5 million – PaidContent has more on the Seattle company.

LiveScribe, a near-magical pen for taking both written and audio notes at the same time, raises $22 million – The funding was led by VantagePoint Venture Partners, reports PEHub. Our previous coverage of the company is here; check out the video, below, to see more.

ILike, by far the most popular music application on Facebook, has started overtaking MySpace in sheer number of fans registered for some top music artists.

The young Seattle company is being coy on specifics, but consider this: Artists like Nickelback, Modest Mouse and Kayne West now have many more fans/friends on iLike than they do on the giant network MySpace. Name an artist, and there’s almost a 50-50 chance they’ll be more popular on iLike.

While iLike is nowhere near as popular as MySpace in traffic, the surge is significant because it shows how quickly Facebook’s platform — with its viral force among 40 million, mostly young people — can propel forward a young company like iLike. After all, iLike’s Facebook application only launched in May.

ILike currently has nearly eight million total users on Facebook, around ten percent of whom use the application daily.

VentureBeat randomly selected eleven musicians that have led the charts recently or are otherwise popular, noted their Myspace numbers, and got then requested the comparable data from iLike’s fan numbers. See below for a comparison chart, which iLike put together for us. You’ll see that in 5 of the 11 cases, iLike has more fans.

Many of these artists have had extensive Myspace-branded promotions within Myspace and on TV, in part aided by Myspace’s parent media conglomerate, News Corp; artists’ profiles on ILike’s Facebook site have not had the same benefits, Partovi notes.

Admittedly, this is a small data sample. However the types of artists that are more popular on iLike, versus MySpace, appear to align with what social researcher Danah Boyd wrote in a controversial essay from late June about socio-economic differences between Facebook and Myspace users. First, here’s what Boyd said:

The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other “good” kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college… They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors classes..

MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, “burnouts,” “alternative kids,” “art fags,” punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn’t play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn’t go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. These are the teens who plan to go into the military immediately after schools. Teens who are really into music or in a band are also on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.

The mainstream rock bands on the list — Nickelback, Third Eye Blind, Matchbox Twenty and, for better or worse, Modest Mouse — tend to have fans that fit Boyd’s stereotype of Facebook users, and all have far more users on iLike.

Universally popular diva Beyonce is also equally popular between the two sites.

Hip hop stars Timbaland, Fergie, Rihanna are much bigger on Myspace. So is Colbie Caillat, the folkish singer who made it big through Myspace, and country singer Carrie Underwood.

Notably, though, rapper/producer Kanye West has a far larger following on Facebook; many critics and fans say his albums have become increasingly mainstream.

Gangster rapper Young Jeezy is the biggest anomaly, if Boyd’s stereotypes prove to fit overall — then again, mainstream rap mogul Jay-Z has signed Jeezy to his record label.

ILike, of course, would like to take every fan and musician from Myspace. By providing what for many Facebook users is their only music application, iLike is helping to make Facebook compete again Myspace music. At the same time, it is benefiting from Facebook’s overall growth versus Myspace.

“A month ago, if I told anybody we could unseat MySpace in music, they’d say I was crazy,” Partovi told us in May, only a few days after launching iLike’s Facebook application. “Today, it seems not only possible, but actually like it’s on track to happen unless we screw it up,” he said then. ILike has been the most popular music application on Facebook since it launched in late May.

Ilike’s closest competitor on Facebook, an application called Audio that let users upload and share entire tracks of songs, was removed by Facebook in July. Facebook said Audio was violating its terms of service, specifically, the parts of it concerning copyrighted materials. Audio keeps promising us that it will return, but has yet to relaunch.

Ilike’s user base is essentially a big address book of fans, complete with each users’ musical preferences, that musicians can tap into to promote concerts, album releases, and anything else.

Its Facebook application lets you choose audio clips of songs and put them on your Facebook profile, as well as buy songs through iTunes or Amazon. It separately offers a game where you can compete against friends to see who can name the most artists or songs from hearing snippets of tracks.

It also shows which of your favorite musicians are on tour, the locations of their shows, and which friends are planning to go.

ILike has additional means to beat its competitors. The company itself actually began as a music “discovery” service that used a downloadable plugin for iTunes to give you recommendations for songs you might like, based on what other users with similar tastes were also listening to. It still offers this service, and the company tells us it plans to integrate it with the Facebook application soon.

ILike also owns GarageBand.com, a site that features independent musicians.

Ticketmaster is an iLike investor, and provides iLike users information with about events where their favorite bands are playing, and then tries to sell them tickets.

Here’s the latest action:

Murdoch appears to have enough Bancroft family support for purchase –The jury is still officially out, but the NYT is saying it looks like Dow Jones and its jewel, the Wall Street Journal, will indeed to go to Murdoch’s News Corp.

Hakia’s Scoop Bar — Hakia, one of the new search engines trying to take on Google by using “semantic” technology, has released a so-called Scoop Bar, which takes you more directly to the text you’re looking for in results. When you select a result at Google, you get taken the page and that’s all. Hakia’s feature automatically scrolls down to where the good stuff is and highlights it. (Via Pandia).

Hitachi’s new search — The company has developed a search technology that can find images similar to a specified image from millions of images and video data in one second.

Wikia buys Grub — Wikia, the company that wants to draw on user participation to create a search engine that rivals Google, has taken another step. It is buying Grub, an screensaver users can download and which exploits their idle computer CPU time to crawl the Web. Search Engine Watch has a good story on this, explaining how the Grub open source technology works. GigaOm has an informative post too.

Yahoo Search Assist — These are the days of new search engine features. Yahoo now has a feature called Search Assist, which seeks to detect when you are hesitating about what search term to use, and then offers up alternative queries. It goes beyond guessing what word you’re typing. It offers up terms that are also conceptually related to the search query you’re using. There’s a good review at SearchEngineLand.

Live Search’s new commands for search — Microsoft has unveiled new short commands for image search. If you’re looking for images of Jimmy Hendrix for example, you can add “filter:face” to select only images of Hendrix’ face. There’s also “filter:bw” for black and white images, and “filter:portrait.”

Google enterprise — This software lets companies and other groups view their global data and imagery. Companies are using it, Google says, for things like designing new buildings, exploring for energy and responding to emergencies.

Cisco may have acquired Click.TV? — Cisco may have acquired a video annotation and deep tagging service called Click.TV which shut down last month, according to Techcrunch. A Cisco spokesman responded: We do not comment on rumors.

Google is promoting its Checkout more aggressively on its site — Details here.

PG&E to buy electricity from one of the world’s largest solar plants — Enough to power 400,000 homes, the power comes from a deal with Solel Solar Systems of Israel, which is building a 553-megawatt plant in California’s Mojave desert.

Here’s the latest (updated) action:

The solar-powered motorbike from SunRed in Spain — Read the little story about how the company hopes to make a prototype soon, and needs venture capital to do so.

Marchex launches huge Web site — The public company said it has launched more than 100,000 local and vertical Web sites, publishing more than one billion pages of content for hoping to bait people surfing online. These are third-rate sites, originally filled with advertising, but now hosting more than 15 million business listings in sundry categories. Marchex also scrapes the Web for reviews and other content to place in these sites. The sites include www.cuisine.com, www.locksmiths.com, www.remodeling.com, and www.bayareahotels.com. Marchex paid Yun Ye of Name Development $164 million for 100,000 sites. Marchex says 30 million unique visitors monthly land on its sites by typing in domain names, willingly or unwittingly. This is very similar to the strategy of Demand Media, another opportunist land-grab company we’ve covered. (More at the NYT).

Venture Capitalist blasts buyout industry — Dixon Doll (left), the co-founder of venture capital firm DCM, next chairman of the National Venture Capital Association, said his group is working hard to fend of a new tax that could affect the VC industry. He blamed the buyout industry for the recent proposal in Congress for such a tax, saying it is “plain and simply because of the unbelievable egos of the guys running the PE firms like Blackstone and KKR,” he said. “They put big targets on their back … calling attention to themselves in a nonflattering way.” (We’ve reported on the lavish parties and $300 stone crab eaten by the Blackstone crowd.) They also don’t create jobs, he said: “It’s ‘Barbarians at the Gate’ all over again,” he said. (Via VentureWire.)

The slow video joint venture between News Corp. and NBC Universal — We’ve reported on this joint effort to answer YouTube. Today (Thursday), they appointed a high-level Amazon.com executive, Jason Kilar, to be chief executive of the venture. He led Amazon’s efforts in video and DVD. It is supposed to launch later this year. However, we were on the conference call today, and the date of launch seems uncertain. This is a very slow project. And each week that goes by, YouTube gets bigger. And strangely, News Corp.’s own MySpace launched MySpace TV today, which will serve to confuse. The venture has 30 employees, Kilar said. The venture — which still has no name — is reportedly trying to raise $100 million on a valuation of $1 billion (Paid Content).

Hollywood veterans launch Film Department — Mark Gill, formerly president of Warner Independent Pictures, and Neil Sacker, a former executive vice president at Miramax, said they’ve formed an independent film company with $200 million in financing from a group of unnamed private investors. (Update: We’ve been told Gill got money from Deutsche Bank). It will be called Film Department (no site yet). It will produce six films a year with budgets between $10 million and $35 million. Sounds almost retro, at a time when there’s so much Web novelty. (Details here.)

Google Gadget Ventures — Google announced a pilot project to support third-party developers of gadgets, the cornucopia of items you can choose for your Google home page. It is offering (1) grants of $5,000 to developers who’ve built gadgets in for Google’s directory that already receive at least 250,000 weekly page views, and (2) seed investments of $100,000 to previous Google Gadget Ventures grant recipients who’d like to build a business around the Google Gadgets platform. More details here. This is a smart way for Google to build an active community around its platform

The exodus continues from Google — Indeed, Google may need to nurture those smart developers sooner than they think. Here’s a good summary in the WSJ about the growing stream of people leaving Google. The Silicon Valley mentality: There’s no point working for a public company, especially if it looks like the stock has hit highs for a while, and when you can go roll the dice at another start-up. By being up in Redmond, Microsoft doesn’t suffer the same walk-across-the-street problem. This will be interesting to watch.

Google Docs & Spreadsheets supports folders — Folders, that’s right. Gmail doesn’t give you folders, but Google Docs does. This, and other updates (details here).

Feedster launches disorienting “Version 2.0″ — We’re having difficulty understanding what this well-funded company does that is different. Odd. We’ll look into it.

Pageflakes turns your home page into a social network — Pageflakes is one of dozens of companies offering you a home page where you can put widgets of information such as email, news, weather and sports. Next month, it launches Blizzard, which lets people subscribe to their friends’ widgets of information, or “pagecasts” as Pageflakes calls them. (Erick Schonfeld has the details).

Webwag, which is similar to Pageflakes, lets you synchronize your widgets with your phone — Details here. We first wrote about this company here.

Yahoo is expected to announce tomorrow that it has agreed to acquire Rivals.com, an Web site focused on college and high school basketball, football and baseball.

The property, priced by unconfirmed reports at about $100 million, will be wrapped into Yahoo Sports, where it competes with ESPN.com, Foxsports.com and others. The New York Times has more details here.

Rivals, of Nashville, TN, had 1.4 million visitors in May, and was the 19th most visited sports site, according to comScore, but its audience has declined 14 percent from a year ago. Rivals.com said it had 185,000 subscribers who pay $100 a year, giving it about $18 million in annual revenue — making this a relatively small transaction.

Rivals had struggled over the years. After the bust in 2001, its assets were sold to AllianceSports, which took over its name. Rivals raised about $80 million in venture capital and other financing from Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, Intel, News Corp. and others.

Here’s the latest action:

News Corp makes $5 billion takeover bid for Dow Jones — If the bid is accepted, the owner of Fox News would own the old, gray business media icon, the Wall Street Journal. What next?

PropertyShark takes property snooping a step further — If you thought Zillow, the housing site that slapped a value on your house, was controversial, take a look at PropertyShark. The four-year old New York company outdoes Zillow on the snoopy factor, displaying owners’ names as well as things like title history, building permits and code violations pertaining to any property (See Mercury News story). It has launched in California, New York and 14 other states.

Google chooses to fight Viacom — Here’s the story about Google’s response to Viacom’s lawsuit for copyright infringement. The Google lawyer says the companies are not engaged in settlement talks, so looks like this is going all the way.

Google’s chief culture officer — See interv