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By Jerry Dicolo, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal

Google Inc.’s (GOOG) chief executive said Wednesday he expects the company will soon reach a conclusion to negotiations with the Chinese government regarding the fate of its China business.

“We are in active negotiations with the Chinese government,” Eric Schmidt told reporters at a media summit in Abu Dhabi. Google has decided not to publicize the status of the negotiations, he said, but “something will happen soon.”

Google said two months ago it would stop self-censoring its Chinese search engine and may shutter its offices in China following a major cyber-attack the company said it traced back to the country. The U.S. search giant has offered few details on the progress of talks between it and Chinese officials.

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Longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur Steve Perlman has been ferreting away on a new cloud gaming service called OnLive for a while now.

Finally, it’s got a due date to go live–June 17 at the E3 conference in Los Angeles.

As in OnLive will be live, but it’s not live yet.

Get it?

Perlman announced the launch of the potentially innovative service, which plans to offer high-quality games on any computer or smartphone without a dedicated console unit, in a keynote at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco today.

That includes 3D, since all the rendering is done in the cloud and brought down via streaming to OnLive’s software.

Whether it will be twitchy enough for the ADHD set of gamers will be the big question.

In any case, OnLive will cost almost $15 a month as a service with game prices on top of that. Movies and other community or social networking features are also presumably possible.

Well, here is the press release and I will be talking to the always entertaining Perlman–creator of WebTV and more–later this week about it all.

Until then, here’s the press release:

OnLive to Launch Consumer Game Service on June 17, 2010

San Francisco, CA–March 10, 2010–OnLive, Inc., the pioneer of on-demand, instant-play video games, today announced that the PC and Mac® versions of its game service will begin rolling out to consumers on June 17, 2010 during the E3 2010 show. The OnLive® Game Service is a revolutionary, on-demand video game platform capable of delivering the latest and most advanced games instantly via a broadband connection on virtually any PC or Mac, via a small browser plug-in, or on an HDTV, via OnLive’s MicroConsole™ TV Adapter. The OnLive Game Service enables an entirely new way to discover, explore, purchase and experience video game content. Additionally, the game service offers instant access to purchase or rent new release games on an à la carte basis from many of the world’s leading publishers including Electronic Arts, Ubisoft®, 2K Games, THQ and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment.

“This marks a huge milestone for both OnLive and the interactive entertainment landscape as a whole, changing the way that video games are developed, marketed, accessed and played,” said Steve Perlman, Founder and CEO of OnLive. “We are opening the door to incredible experiences for gamers and enormous opportunities for developers and publishers.”

Starting on June 17, 2010, the OnLive Game Service will be available to early registrants throughout the 48 contiguous United States. The initial offering will be supported by a $14.95 monthly service fee, which will provide access to an ever-increasing library of high-end, new-release, instant-play game content without the need to purchase expensive PC gaming or console systems.

Loyalty programs, such as multi-month pricing, and special offers will be announced by the start of E3. For starters, OnLive is announcing an exclusive, pre-registration offer, wherein the first 25,000 qualified registrants will have their OnLive service fee waived for the first three months. For important details regarding the OnLive Pre-registration special offer visit www.onlive.com/special1.

The OnLive Game Service will include standard online game service features such as gamer tags, user profiles, friends, and chat. In addition, an evolving slate of OnLive-exclusive features will include state-of-the-art 3D graphics performance; instant-play free game demos; multiplayer across PC, Mac and TV platforms; Brag Clips™ video capture and posting; massive spectating; always-updated games; cloud-saved games–pause and instantly resume from anywhere, even on a different platform; and much more. Individual game titles will be available for purchase or rental on an à la carte basis, with specific game pricing announced prior to the consumer launch event at E3.

“The OnLive Game Service creates a new opportunity for consumers to play the latest games without spending hundreds of dollars on a hardware system to make it happen,” said Mike McGarvey, COO of OnLive. “As a Mac user myself, I’m excited about the opportunity to help bring high-end gaming to this new and significant market.”

OnLive also confirmed ongoing platform support from the world’s largest and most influential game publishers. While launch titles will be announced prior to E3 in Los Angeles, a few of the anticipated games include Mass Effect 2™, Dragon Age Origins™, Assassin’s Creed® II, Prince of Persia The Forgotten Sands™, Borderlands™ and Metro 2033™. OnLive will soon be announcing the availability of its MicroConsole TV Adapter which will bring the OnLive Game Service directly to consumers’ television sets for the first time. An announcement about expected availability will be made later in the year.

OnLive’s digital distribution model, instant-play capability and revolutionary video compression technology offers gamers of all skill levels the ability to experience the newest, most advanced, always-updated games with no downloading, no hardware upgrades, and virtually instant response time. As a result, consumers can enjoy more games more rapidly and with lower overall up-front investment than ever before.

By Nitrozac and Snaggy

Another sign that Google is serious about wringing more money out of YouTube: It is adding ads to the video’s mobile site.

Another sign that mobile ads are still in their infancy: Google isn’t using its favorite video ad format on the YouTube ads.

Boot up your Apple (AAPL) iPhone or Android handset to m.youtube.com today and you’ll start seeing ads like these:

But while you may see banner ads on YouTube’s mobile home, search and browse pages, you won’t see ads on the clips themselves.

Those will come eventually, Shishir Mehrotra, YouTube’s director of monetization, told Advertising Age, but in the near term, it’s too difficult for the company to pull off. That’s because there are too many handsets, with different standards and requirements, to support.

That’s a bummer for the Google (GOOG) unit, since it is particularly fond of the “overlay” ads that run on the bottom third of many of its clips. Then again, mobile is still a tiny market opportunity for YouTube: The company says it serves “tens of millions of views per day,” which sounds like a lot until you consider that the main site is serving a billion views daily.

Note that YouTube doesn’t seem to be advertising yet on its specialized iPhone app. Wonder what to make of that…

By Eric Savitz, Blogger and Columnist, Barron’s, Tech Trader Daily

The price of Palm (PALM) handsets just keeps dropping.

Last time I checked, in late February, you could get yourself a Pre or Pre Plus for just $69.99 with a two-year contract through Wal-Mart (WMT).

But that was light years ago in the rapidly eroding world Palm finds itself in.

• On Amazon.com (AMZN), you can now get the Palm Pre Plus for $39.99 with a two-year Verizon Wireless contract.
• On Wal-Mart.com, the same phone will run you just $29.99.

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Yesterday, the monthly search market share numbers from comScore (SCOR) were released, showing Microsoft (MSFT) Bing up, Yahoo (YHOO) down and Google (GOOG) maintaining its dominance.

In today’s release by Experian Hitwise, Bing is up again, from 9.37 percent to 9.7 percent, while Yahoo is flat at 14.57 percent, and Google gave up a scooch of share to fall to 70.95 percent from 71.49 percent.

This time it appears to be the vertical searches–such as autos and health–helping Bing, which has been its strategy to differentiate itself from the Google juggernaut.

Here is that table, which you can click on to make larger:

By Amy Schatz and Shira Ovide, Reporters, The Wall Street Journal

Cable operators want Washington to prohibit broadcasters from yanking channels during fee negotiations, a move that might help consumers avoid missing their favorite TV shows but would change the balance of power in price negotiations between station owners and cable companies.

A group of pay-TV operators, including Time Warner Cable Inc. (TWC), Dish Network (DISH) and Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ), filed a petition Tuesday asking the Federal Communications Commission to change its rules to require arbitration and prevent broadcasters from pulling their signals during fee negotiations. The issue also could come up at a Capitol Hill hearing Thursday.

Several TV providers also sent a letter to influential members of Congress Tuesday, asking them to “carefully examine the circumstances that have resulted in the current imbalance in retransmission consent negotiations.”

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Twitter gets described as a conversation or a cocktail party, but it’s really more like a stage play. A few people do all the talking, and everyone else watches and listens.

But that’s changing, a bit, as the service grows.

Barracuda Labs, a security company that says it has surveyed 19 million Twitter accounts, reports that 73 percent of Twitter users have tweeted 10 or fewer times. And 34 percent of users have never tweeted at all.

That’s a lot of quiet users, but it’s less than before: Barracuda says those numbers are down from 79 percent and 37.1 percent, respectively, in June of last year.

Barracuda also notes that Twitter had a huge surge in growth from November 2008 through April 2009, when there was a rush of publicity about celebrities who tweet (Oprah Winfrey, Martha Stewart, Ashton Kutcher vs. CNN, etc.). The company claims that nearly half of all Twitter accounts were created in that period.

But even high-profile Twitterers don’t tweet that much. Most of the messaging on the service, Barracuda says, comes from users with about 1,000 followers (see chart below; click to enlarge).

All of this makes for fun data points to snack on. But for Twitter’s managers and investors, the usage numbers underscore a key question the company needs to resolve: Is it a communications utility a la Facebook or is it a media company?

The Twitter guys have resisted the second notion, but that’s sure what the company looks like from the outside–because it distributes content created by a small number of people for a large number of people.

If done right, that can still be a very good business, especially if you don’t have to pay anyone to create the content.

But a service with a largely passive user base also loses out on some opportunities. Twitter’s plan to ape Google’s (GOOG) search advertising, for instance, won’t be nearly so robust if most of its users aren’t making tweets and searching for them.

Earlier this week, BoomTown visited MySpace HQ in Beverly Hills, Calif., to interview its new co-presidents, Michael Jones and Jason Hirschhorn, and get a look-see at its evolving revival plans to stop the social networking ship from sinking further.

Thus, I got a tour of a storyboard-like room at MySpace, where the team is trying to formulate the “discover and be discovered” motto it is now using, which is pretty much its old motto restated.

Can the old become new again?

In fact, a lot of the plan does sound a lot like shades of the past at MySpace, focusing on a younger, artistic demo with a heavy dose of pop culture.

Jazzed up, of course, with the latest social networking hooks, a cleaner user page redesign, topics pages, a focus on sharing content of all kinds, especially music, games and entertainment, and more.

That includes a new Today on MySpace, or TOM, to greet new users, rather than the famous analog Tom Anderson, co-founder and former first friend to all. Get it?

It is all part of a very slow-moving effort to turn MySpace into a socially-charged entertainment hub, which is now being led by Hirschhorn and Jones.

They took over management immediately after News Corp. (NWS) execs suddenly fired CEO Owen Van Natta last month.

The pair reported to Van Natta, and now they essentially share his job to revive MySpace, which has lost ground to fast-growing and more innovative sites such as Facebook.

Still, it is not a small enterprise, with upward of 100 million monthly visitors and just above $350 million in annual revenue.

Here’s a video of the tour I did in which the pair describe some of what they have been up to, which seems to center, most of all, on turning back the clock and returning to MySpace’s roots.

Is a proper retread–which is completely dependent on keeping talent and executing well–enough to stem the losses if there are enough newfangled features to make it all feel fresh?

Or not?

Time will tell, but here’s a sneak peek:

[ See post to watch video ]

By Pui-Wing Tam, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal

Norwest Venture Partners late last year closed a huge new venture-capital fund of $1.2 billion, nearly double the size of the Silicon Valley venture firm’s last fund in 2006 that was $650 million. Now NVP is starting to put a chunk of that money to work.

NVP is investing $35 million into New York-based data warehousing and business intelligence firm 1010data, making it the first growth equity investment out of NVP’s new fund. Jon Kossow, who joined NVP as a partner last year to grow its growth equity practice–which essentially means the firm will be investing in mature companies that already have products and customers, instead of just young start-ups–will join 1010data’s board.

The 1010data investment is NVP’s first growth equity deal in a U.S. company since late 2007; in some previous U.S. growth equity deals, NVP was a passive investor and didn’t join the companies’ boards. The deal is just the latest sign of how NVP is diversifying its investment strategy and becoming more stage-independent. Last year, NVP also did a flurry of growth equity deals in India, for instance.

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On Monday night, Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley posted a Flickr photo of a BlackBerry screen featured on the latest episode of the red-hot television potboiler, “Gossip Girl.”

The text message on the screen (which I took a picture of here) reads, “Elizabeth Fisher just checked in at the Algonquin Hotel.”

Wrote Crowley in the image title, which he also posted on Twitter: “Checkins on Gossip Girl? No mention of foursquare, but hey, still pretty hot.”

Not hot at all, actually, because there have been zero checkins on Foursquare in the scandalous lives of Manhattan’s elite as yet!

If you watched the show, you also would know they are too busy hooking up in an endless round-robin, with an occasional Belgian prince drug dealer thrown into the mix, to claim domain mastery of Geisha or Henri Bendel.

(If you don’t believe me, see a clip from this episode, titled “The Hurt Locket,” below, in which Blair Waldorf is dressed up like a porn version of “Anna Karenina.”)

But way to try to ride Serena van der Woodsen’s hip Prada coattails, Dennis.

In fact, the note–which was sent to billionaire playboy Chuck Bass, who is searching for his possibly-not-dead-in-childbirth-for-which-he-has-blamed-himself-mercilessly mother, after running into a suspicious lady at his father’s gravesite on the first anniversary of his tragic car-accident death, who was carrying flowers and then dropped a locket with an engraved “E,” for Elizabeth, which was also his mother’s name…you get the idea–was from Bass’s private investigator, simply telling him she had checked into the hotel.

As in, “Gimme a key and extra towels.” And not as in: Trying to be Mayor of the Algonquin Hotel.

None of the characters on “Gossip Girl” would try to be mayor of anything, since they own the town.

Which is also pretty clear if you watched the show–which just returned from a painfully long hiatus–as closely as BoomTown does.

And who am I, besides a keeper of the “Gossip Girl” integrity?

That’s a secret I’ll never tell.

You know you love me.

XOXO

Enjoy:

Terra Firma, the private equity fund that owns EMI Music Group, has brought in a new CEO for the music label. Elio Leoni-Sceti is out; Charles Allen, the former CEO of British broadcaster ITV replaces him.

Leoni-Sceti came to the company in July 2008, a move that raised plenty of eyebrows as he had zero experience in the music business. His background was marketing packaged goods like Woolite and French’s Mustard.

But in retrospect it doesn’t really matter who Terra Firma brought in to run the company; the investment group’s big mistake was paying too much for EMI, using too much debt, in 2007.

At this point, the real question for EMI isn’t who runs it, but who owns it. There’s a decent chance that Terra Firma will breach a banking covenant in coming months and that control of EMI will go to Citigroup (C), which owns most of the label’s debt.

The conventional wisdom is that part or all of  EMI will end up in the hands of longtime rival Warner Music Group (WMG) sooner or later.

Release:

CHARLES ALLEN BECOMES EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN OF EMI MUSIC LONDON, 10 MARCH 2010 — EMI Music announces the appointment of Charles Allen as its Executive Chairman.

Charles has been non-executive Chairman of EMI Music since January 2009, chairing its Board and supporting the transformation of the business. Elio Leoni-Sceti, EMI Music’s Chief Executive, who has successfully led EMI Music through the first phase of its operational turnaround, will be leaving the company on March 31st 2010.

Over the past two and a half years, EMI Music has become a stronger and growing company, with a talented senior team, significant creative success and a more rigorous approach to marketing and operations. This has resulted in increased sales, improved market share and industry-leading EBITDA margins.

Charles said: “Elio has done a great job. I have thoroughly enjoyed working with him; he is a very talented executive and we all wish him well in the future. Our goals for EMI Music remain the same. I will support and guide the group’s strong team, keep EMI’s focus on creativity and superb A&R, and deliver a digital platform. This is a great business – our task is to ensure it has a great future.”

Elio added: “EMI is a wonderful business with a great team and new creative and operational momentum. My job here is now done and it is time for me to move on. It has been a pleasure to work with Charles and so many other talented and committed people. I look forward to seeing the company go on to further success in the future.”

Here is a new Funny or Die comedy video of reality TV show star Heidi Montag spoofing her plastic surgery-addled obsession with silicone.

It is sort of funny and sort of creepy and even a little sad. Nonetheless, Montag and her even odder husband, Spencer Pratt, are certainly game to make themselves the subject of mockery.

Here’s the video:

Heidi Montag Says No to Plastic from Heidi Montag

By Mike Shields, Senior Editor, Mediaweek

The audience for casual games appears to have bought, well, the farm.

Traditional gaming sites are bleeding users, as millions of Web gamers shift their time to social games, such as the massively popular FarmVille. That, coupled with an increasing desire among advertisers to move beyond old-school banner ads, has put the advertising market for online gaming very much in play, said analysts and buyers.

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By Jane Martinson, Reporter, guardian.co.uk

Maurice Levy, the head of one of the world’s biggest marketing groups, Publicis, said today that newspapers must wean themselves from an over-dependence on advertising to survive the digital age.

Speaking to MediaGuardian.co.uk at the start of the inaugural Abu Dhabi media summit, Levy, Publicis’s chairman and chief executive, added that it is “not enough to have a big audience on the internet”, with media companies needing to find a mix between free and paid-for online content to survive in the digital era.

“The future of analogue media will not be supported by advertising alone.

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By Laura McGann, Assistant Editor, Nieman Journalism Lab

Even on the web, sometimes actions really do speak louder than words.

The technology site Ars Technica has a tech-savvy group of readers, of which about 40 percent have installed ad-blocking software in their web browsers. That’s a plugin that allows you to avoid seeing most ads on a site.

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By Joe Clark, Contributor, A List Apart

The internet did not replace television, which did not replace cinema, which did not replace books. E-books aren’t going to replace books either. E-books are books, merely with a different form.

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By Alan Mutter, Managing Partner, Tapit Partners

While sales have fallen an average of 27.4% at newspaper companies in the last two years, profits have plunged 1.7 times faster, according to an analysis of the financial statements of the publicly held publishers.

The average 45.9% dive in profitability at the publicly traded newspaper companies since 2007 represents not only serious financial challenges for the companies but also threatens the quality of the journalism that such major publishers as Gannett (GCI), McClatchy (MNI) and the New York Times Co. (NYT) may be able to produce in the future.

News staffs and news holes already have undergone significant contraction as publishers sought to preserve profits since advertising sales began shrinking in 2006.

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By James R. Hagerty, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal

Just in time for the spring house-hunting season, smart-phone applications that provide information to home buyers are proliferating.

Real-estate firms have long vied to have the most engaging Web site to attract people searching for homes. Now they also feel compelled to have an “app” for Apple Inc.’s (AAPL) iPhone and other smart phones. Rather than being moneymakers–brokers tend to offer their apps for free–the apps are seen as a tool to make the home-buying process easier.

“I don’t think it’s driving revenue for us, but it’s making customers happier,” says Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin Corp., a Seattle-based broker that operates in nine states.

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By Jessica E. Vascellaro, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal

Facebook Inc. is holding a major developer conference in San Francisco next month. The packed agenda includes technology to better bridge the Web site with the rest of the Internet, people familiar with the matter say.

The software is called the Open Graph API, which Facebook said late last year it planned to release during the second quarter of this year. Using the technology, Web sites can adopt elements of the pages business build on Facebook, like a box that allows people to become a “fan” of your site.

But Facebook’s plan is far broader than helping people build Web sites. By getting sites to adopt the technology, Facebook hopes to make it even easier for users to share information from the Web on Facebook and to have that information associated with their Facebook identity.

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