As a response to the new rates set by the Copyright Royalty Board in D.C., Yahoo! has decided to turn off their online radio service, LAUNCHcast for the day. Unfortunately not all online radio stations are participating in today’s protest. I went and checked out one of the radio stations on my iTunes application and it was playing as normal. I seriously doubt that this is going to have any effect but it surely has created buzz in the blogosphere. The rate increases are pretty ridiculous. Royalty costs will increase 300 percent for large webcasters and nearly 1,200 percent for smaller operations. According to CNSNews, Live365 will experience an increase in royalties of a whopping $4.2 million. Many have called for the rate hikes to be appealed but there is no sign of any turnaround. It will be interesting to see if Yahoo’s actions make any difference.

According to Techcrunch Google is acquiring GrandCentral. If you don’t already know what GrandCentral is, it is a free service that allows you to use one number for all of your phone numbers. It will automatically forward calls to your any of your other phones that you specify and has value-added features. This includes a feature that automatically emails you an mp3 file of your conversation directly to your email as soon as you get done with a conversation. There are a bunch of other cool features as well. Bottom line, their service is really slick and it is not surprising to hear that they have been acquired.

According to the Techcrunch article, the company raised less than $6 million in venture capital, so any buyout is most likely greater than $30 million. While they hadn’t been generating revenue yet, their technology is far superior to competing offerings. If you want to have a single phone number for all of your communication, go check out GrandCentral. I guess Google is looking to go head on with Skype, and the purchase of GrandCentral will definitely help them get there. So who won’t Google go after?

According to the Wall Street Journal the domain Business.com could fetch up to $400 million now that it is on the auction block. Two of the predicted bidders are the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.  Seriously … this is insane! Save yourself the $400 million and go grab Facebook for $3 billion and you’ll get a much greater return on investment. To be honest though, this auction is not just on the domain. The auction includes an existing business that is bringing in $15 million yearly EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization). At a deal of $350 million, this company would be getting bought out for 24 times cash flow. Not bad for an internet startup!

According to the Times of London, Myspace has been in talks with Yahoo! to discuss a swap of Myspace for a 25 percent stake in Yahoo! This is impeccable timing given Facebook’s recent platform release. If this is true, this would value Myspace at just over $12 billion. Is this swap likely to occur? Probably not. Yahoo! should save its money and go for a much cheaper Facebook.

Honestly, I am surprised that Myspace thinks they have such a high value. My guess is that this is more of a negotiating tactic than anything else. Even if Myspace exited at a $6 billion it would still be one hell of a return on their $570 million investment. This is a good sign that Myspace doesn’t have the development capacity to adapt and make a comparable platform to Facebook. Sucks for them! Anyone that decides to buy Myspace is not going to get much growth on their investment unless they can buy at a significant discount. This is a sign of a slow shift in the social network superpowers.

This one was a long-time coming. Many had already been speculating that Terry Semel would be replaced as the CEO of Yahoo! Well yesterday it happened. Who replaced him? Jerry Yang, one of the Yahoo! co-founders. I have to be honest, I’m not quite sure that this is the right direction. Yahoo! needs a total shakeup and this is not it. Typically start-ups have their executives replaced as soon as they get big. Conversely, a similar thing happened recently at Dell when Mr. Dell himself decided to take the helm again. Jerry Yang gives Semel much praise in his blog post.

Yahoo! has been in a rut recently with the unsuccessful launch of Panama. While all of the revenue generated by the new advertising system has yet to be realized, Yahoo has lost a large portion of their top executives to the competition. Also, Facebook has just taken a jab at Yahoo!, who has continued to be the dominant web portal. Had Mark Zuckerberg decided to spill the beans to Yahoo! about their new platform, I wonder if they would have received an offer greater than the $1 billion they were previously offered. Regardless, the web portal business is still an intensely competitive market and while Yahoo! has been shaken up in the past couple years, they are still at the forefront. It will be interesting to see where this leads!

Listpic, the site I covered back in January was banned yesterday from accessing Craigstlist feeds. Listpic enabled users to browse through Craigslist by pictures rather than text. It was highly popular and yesterday Craigslist pulled the plug. There is now a forum for users to complain about Craigslist’s decision. Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, said that the site was slowing down the site. I’m a bit skeptical of this but from a competitive standpoint, it makes sense that Listpic was banned. Conversely, Listpic helped increase the usefulness and visibility of Craigslist. Not sure if we’ll see the site come back up anytime soon, but this is a good example of the risk involved when basing your business on the backbone of another business. They can pull the plug at any moment!

Today I launched a new blog at AllFacebook.com. It is the new unofficial Facebook blog. I will be covering the release of new applications as well as news related to Facebook and analysis. Also I will be featuring individual’s stories of their interaction with Facebook. If you would like to contribute to the blog please feel free to email me or emails our submission address allfacebook [at] gmail.com. I am currently looking for bloggers that would like to contribute to the blog so please get in touch if you would like to write for us.

Why did I launch the blog? Well if you have been reading this blog recently, I have written at least 5 things in the past week related to Facebook. Facebook has just transformed the business of web applications and online marketing and there is plenty to write about it. So head on over to the site to read more.

In addition to launching the blog I am offering new Facebook application development services through my company, Capital Interactive. If your company is in need of coming up with a strategy for launching a branding campaign through Facebook and social media channels in general then please get in touch with me at nick [at] thewebpreneur.com. We will be providing a complete service for helping you make a significant online presence.

Today, Google is announcing a new technology called Google Gears. The technology enables web applications to work both online and offline. One of the first applications of Google Gears that I have seen is its integration with Google Reader. Previously, you could only read your feeds while you were online. For those that are constantly on the go and not necessarily connected to the net, there is now a way for viewing all of your feeds while offline. This is a pretty big blow for all the competing feed readers. The number one complaint that I heard from other avid feed reader users was that they couldn’t view their feeds while on a plane. Well soon enough you will be able to.

Similar features will soon be added to Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Spreadsheets, and Google Docs. All I can say is this is a huge step for web applications. This seems to compete directly with Adobe’s much hyped Apollo that also enables both online and offline functionality. Additionally, Google Gears is open source which means developers are free to build applications of their own at no cost (only time). This is a first step toward seamless integration between the online and offline worlds.

According to the Los Angeles Times, CBS is buying Last.fm for $280 million dollars. When I first heard this I was somewhat surprised because I was expecting a record label to snap it up sometime soon. According to a CBS executive, Last.fm is being purchased for its community, not just its well know audio (and now video) scrobbler. I find that a little strange considering the data that they hold would be extremely valuable to any record label. Imagine if you were able to track all of your customers usage habits. That would be valuable to just about any company.

If you are unaware of Last.fm, then you should definitely check it out. Last.fm provides users with a small piece of software that enables their site to track what music and videos you are watching. Ultimately they have some of the most advanced software for tracking attention data. As you listen to more music the software can make suggestions for other songs that you would like based on the vast amount of data that they store. I saw them speak at the Future of Web Apps conference earlier this year and they had some pretty impressive data (download the presentation here). Users of Last.fm listen to over 15 million track a day, spanning 10 million artists, and 70 million tracks. Pretty impressive stats. Congrats to Last.fm!

Facebook has officially launched a new platform to take on all other social networks. This is beyond the scope of any other social network on the web. They are providing developers unrestricted access to their accessing and updating Facebook data.Some of you might remember that I mentioned something about Facebook music. Well, while it hasn’t been officially announced I have a feeling that it is going to be launched via their new development platform.

MySpace has forced developers to work within their own horribly configured system that accepts non-semantic HTML. Now developers can choose a better social network to develop their applications for clients, Facebook. Unfortunately though developers will still need to develop for Myspace for the time being since there are still users on Myspace that aren’t on Facebook. I have a feeling this will soon change if all goes according to plan for Facebook.

Facebook is aiming to become the social networking platform for everyone. Rather than closing off to the world they are granting access to everyone. Get ready for Facebook music, Facebook calendars, Facebook docs, Facebook email, and anything else that is currently offered on the web. Imagine if Google opened up their development platform so that anyone could develop apps for all users are currently using Gmail. It’s that big.

Update
Apparently many of the applications are already featured. You can view all of them by going to http://apps.facebook.com/apps. There is already a 30 boxes calendar, Scribd app that lets you share documents with your friends, iLike music application, and a Twitter add on!

Last week the New York Post suddenly became popular with tech enthusiasts. On Tuesday, they published an article covering Microsoft’s potential buyout of 24/7 Real Media. Personally, I didn’t see many follow-ups to this story and am not sure if this ever materialized. Then on Friday they published an article stating Microsoft’s intention to buy out Yahoo for $50 billion dollars. This rumor pushed Yahoo’s stock up over 30 percent. By the end of Friday the rumors were squashed. Brian Dudley sums up my initial reaction perfectly:

You can’t just drop a bombshell that jerks around 80,000 Microsoft and Yahoo! employees, rocks Wall Street and then fizzles before the day is over.

By posting the story on Friday, the New York Post has instantly lost all credibility with me. Honestly, I never viewed the New York Post as a viable news source anyways, and then last week they “broke” two tech related stories. Not a bad week, except that they were primarily lies! I definitely won’t be turning to the New York Post as a primary news source any time soon.

Earlier today News Corp. announced a $60 per share buyout offer of Dow Jones. Aside from wishing I had owned stock in Dow Jones, I’m not quite sure that I’m the biggest fan of a buyout by News Corp. Ownership of Dow Jones by News Corp. would extend Fox media’s global dominance. Fox News is know for it’s historically conservative slant and while the Wall Street Journal and other Dow Jones publications are not the most liberal, I’ve always been a fan of their objective journalism.

The Wall Street Journal has speculated that other news companies including the New York Times and the Washington Post could both end up placing competing bids. This wouldn’t come as much of a surprise given both companies existing web presence. Will the Bancroft family (the current majority stakeholders) accept Murdoch’s bid? Perhaps, given that the family has already reduced their stake in the company by over 50 percent over the past 20 years. This will surely be an interesting story as events unfold.

Update: The Bancroft family will vote against the News Corp bid. The employees also issued a statement:

The staff, from top to bottom, opposes a Rupert Murdoch takeover of Dow Jones & Co. The massive premium Mr. Murdoch is offering suggests only one recourse to make the acquisition profitable: gutting the enterprise and slashing the staff that make it the leading financial news organization.

I agree with this move. The only thing I wonder though is will we see their stock tank today? My guess is yes.