The 13-page CID includes 39 different requests for documents ranging from those setting forth Google’s policies and procedures for calculating AdWords prices and minimum bids to minutes and agendas from search quality team meetings and records of the “black listing” or “white listing” of specific Web sites. Also requested: Documents that “describe, analyze, or discuss competition for advertisers from Bing and Yahoo” and others concerning the strategy for e-commerce services like Froogle and Google Shopping.

It’s an extraordinarily thorough set of demands and shows the Texas AG to be reviewing not just Google’s ranking of search results and setting of advertising prices, but questioning whether the company favors its own businesses and advertisers in results. Has Google complied with them? That’s not yet clear, though company spokesman Adam Kovacevich says discussions with Abbott’s office continue.

“Since we started Google we have worked hard to do the right thing by our users and our industry, and while there’s always going to be room for improvement, we’re committed to competing fair and square,” he said. “We’re continuing to work with the Texas attorney general’s office to answer their questions and understand any concerns.”

Texas_GOOG_CID –

Criterion specializes in classic movies from the canon of great directors–Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard, Federico Fellini, etc.–and has about 800 titles digitized so far, many of which are also available via Hulu competitor Netflix. [UPDATE: I'm told that this will be an exclusive deal, and that the Criterion titles that Netflix does offer will expire this year].

Hulu Plus subscribers will initially get access to 150 Criterion films, including “The 400 Blows,” “Rashomon” and “Breathless.” Hulu says the movies will run without ad interruptions, but may feature ads before the films start; the free Hulu.com service will offer a handful of Criterion titles, which will run with ads.

Hulu, owned by Comcast’s NBC, Disney’s ABC and News. Corp.’s Fox (News Corp. also owns this Web site), introduced the Hulu Plus pay service last year. Hulu CEO Jason Kilar says the $7.99-per-month offering is on track to reach one million subscribers in 2011.

Twitter doesn’t have a formal rate card, but ad industry sources say the going price for a one-day promoted trends purchase has settled between $70,000 and $80,000, after starting out as high as $100,000 a day.

Now Twitter has started telling buyers the coming price hike will consistently push the ads into the $100,000 to $120,000 range.

Promoted trends give an advertiser a chance to essentially purchase a small sliver of Twitter’s site, by inserting their message at the top of the “trends” section of users’ pages. For now, Twitter sells only one per day, and has been selling the slot out with some frequency.

And promoted trends could become even more valuable for Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and his company if they start carving the ads up into different geographies, giving them the ability to sell more than one per day.

If, say, Twitter could sell at least two different promoted trends, in two different territories each week, at $100,000 a pop, those ads alone could generate $20.8 million a year. Play around with those assumptions, and you can quite easily bite off a big chunk of the $100 million-plus ad revenue estimates we’ve seen floated.

Ad buyers also tell me Twitter has been bullish about its “Promoted Accounts” product, which it rolled out toward the end of last year.

When I first wrote about the concept last summer, and described it as a way to let marketers (or anyone) “buy” followers, the concept upset some Twitter traditionalists.

But they’re going to have to get over it, because it’s exactly what Twitter is selling: It prices the ads, which show up on users “Who to follow” list, on a “cost per follow” basis. Buyers pay between $1 to $3 for every new account that follows them.

The one Twitter ad product I haven’t heard buyers talk that much about is the first one Twitter rolled out. “Promoted Tweets” were supposed to work like Google’s AdWords–”organic” tweets, tied to keywords, that showed up in search results, and later in users’ regular streams.

That seemed like a promising tactic at first. But I’ve never seen a promoted tweet “in the wild”; the only time I’ve seen them is when they’re attached to the promoted trends.

But perhaps I’m just missing them. If you’ve bought one, or if you see one, please pass drop me a line (peter@allthingsd.com) and let me know.

BroadVision today announced Clearvale Express, which it describes as a free and streamlined version of Clearvale Enterprise, its cloud-based business collaboration platform. It was created in part at the suggestion of Softbank, the Japanese telecom concern that is a partner on the product and will resell it in Asian markets.

Above, that’s an ad for Clearvale Express evoking the old “Pepsi challenge” ads from the early 1980s. In this case, Chatter is being portrayed as “Coke,” the established player being challenged by the upstart, which is silly because Chatter is a relatively new player in an increasingly crowded social enterprise market, though Salesforce is clearly the biggest among the new entrants.

Bashing Salesforce is suddenly trendy. On Sunday, Yammer and Socialcast were spotted buying text ads on Google using the word “chatter” in hopes of catching the odd Google user responding to the pair of TV ads for Chatter.com that aired during the Super Bowl.

And that followed an attack video put out by Yammer highlighting how Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff loved Yammer at a 2008 TechCrunch event and accusing him of basically copying it. You can see that video below. Then there’s Jive, which used an industry survey to try to make a case that it’s a worthier player in the space than Chatter or anyone else, for that matter.

I’m betting there’s more of this public pile-on ahead, though with luck it will be followed by a round of deal-making. Last year, Gartner estimated the 2011 market opportunity for all these apps at less than $800 million and said that it’s tracking at least 80 vendors, at least 50 of which are based in the cloud. That makes the social enterprise market seem like small potatoes at first until you see Gartner’s prediction that these apps will replace email–Microsoft Outlook and IBM Lotus Notes–as the primary tool for collaboration in businesses for 20 percent of companies within three years.

Combine that with a longer-term shift away from email–by teens, college-age people and younger people entering the workforce–and toward communication via Facebook and things like it, and you’ve got the makings of a fundamental shift in what’s considered normal as workplace technology. No wonder they’re taking swipes at each other. It is, however, already getting old .

It’s a note to the European company’s select group of freeloading American users, letting them know they’re going to have to start paying sooner or later. And it says Spotify is “looking forward” to a U.S. launch in ‘the coming months.”

From: Spotify
Date: February 8, 2011
To: xxx
Subject: Spotify Payment Problem- ACTION REQUIRED!

Hello from Spotify!

You are one of only a few people who has access to a Spotify promotional test account in the USA, and we hope you’re enjoying listening to Spotify through our Premium or Unlimited service.

We are really looking forward to launching the service in full in the USA over the coming months, and hope that you will continue to use the service and be one of our key advocates.

We need to make some small system changes to our payment system for our USA launch, and so in order to make the transition for you as smooth as possible, we have credited your Spotify account with 1 month worth of FREE Spotify Premium/ Unlimited!

In return for this, we ask that you please do the following:

• Visit our website https://www.spotify.com/account/subscription/change-payment/
• Login with your username and password.
• Select a payment method (Card or Paypal) and click ‘Change’
• Click ‘I Accept/ Continue’ to accept the new product in US Dollars
• Provide us with your payment details once more, so that after your FREE
month has expired you will be able to keep listening to music through Spotify.

Your next bill is due to us on ’14/02/12′, so please provide us with your payment details before then, otherwise you will revert back to Spotify Free and if you have Premium you will lose access to Spotify on your mobile. On this date, you will then be billed in Dollars!

Thanks for your help, and please feel free to reply to us directly if you have any
questions!

Obviously this note isn’t anything like a confirmed launch date. In order to do that, Spotify needs U.S. deals with the big music labels, and so far only has Sony signed on.

Industry sources keep telling me a deal with EMI is this close, but they’ve been saying that for weeks now. Which doesn’t mean that it won’t happen. Just that it hasn’t yet.

And no matter what happens with EMI, Spotify can’t go anywhere unless it has Universal Music Group, the world’s largest label, on board. Again, lots of people tell me they’re confident a deal will get done soon, but…

In any case, the note does point out one of the reasons so many plugged-in Americans you know are raving about Spotify, even though the service doesn’t formally exist here–Spotify has quite cleverly been handing out free test accounts to lots and lots of people who might rave about it.

That includes VIPs and their families, all sorts of music industry people and media people, including yours truly.

And if you’re getting Spotify in the U.S., you are indeed getting a really, really good service: Free, unlimited music, anywhere you want it, whenever you want it, without ads.

Which is not what Spotify’s “real” users actually get. The ones who use the free service have a cap on the number of hours they can listen for free, can only listen on their PCs and will encounter a smattering of advertising. To get the real deal–mobile, no ads, no limits–they’ll need to cough up the equivalent of about $13.50 a month.

So far, about a million people are doing just that, people familiar with the company tell me. But how many will go for it if, or when, it gets to the U.S.?

As you may remember, Salesforce bought “bookend” spots that ran immediately before and after the halftime show, and included Will.i.am and the Black Eyed Peas, who were the main musical act of the show itself. Salesforce claimed that the bookend buy on either side of the halftime show was a first, and that it was the first time that an advertiser involved the halftime show entertainment act in a Super Bowl ad.

While the general verdict on the ads themselves has yet to come down, there’s certainly been some grumbling from other social enterprise players, namely Yammer and Socialcast. Both have taken out text ads on Google against the word “chatter,” in some apparent hope of catching the eye of the millions who may have gone from seeing the ad on TV to googling the word “chatter” on their PCs. (I captured a screen-grab of their ads in the image at the right.) “Chatter Isn’t It” starts the ad for Yammer, while the one for Socialcast says “Superbowl Chattering?” Time will tell if they’re successful.

In the meantime, in case you missed them, here are the TV ads for Chatter.com. Judge for yourself if you think they’ll help Salesforce.com persuade companies to sign on to using it for collaboration.

No, not the tech industry. The ad industry.

Verizon is attacking AT&T, AT&T is attacking Verizon, and T-Mobile is attacking both of them. Only Sprint is staying out of the fray, taking its mother’s advice that if it doesn’t have anything nice to say, it should perhaps just say nothing at all.

Among the more recent attack ads was one from Verizon touting the sound quality of its iPhone. Now, AT&T is firing back at Verizon with an ad touting the benefits of talking and surfing the Web at the same time, which is apparently very important for procrastinators. (That said, Mobilized is a huge procrastinator and rarely ever talks and surfs at the same time.)

The ad comes on the heels of Verizon’s announcement earlier Friday that it had sold out of the iPhones it had available for pre-order on Thursday. The iPhone goes on sale for all customers, including would-be switchers, next Thursday.

In any case, here’s the ad:

T-Mobile has a fraction of that market share and no iPhone to speak of. Instead, T-Mobile USA is trying to operate as a feisty underdog. It’s a role that Humm said he not only relishes, but one that is also a natural fit for his company, which was born with the 2001 acquisition of VoiceStream, a scrappy regional carrier.

“The organization is going back to its roots,” he said in an interview last week. “VoiceStream and later T-Mobile really started in the market as a challenger. They started with big buckets of minutes at the time and later with unlimited minutes. These are things which, in a sense, are coming back now.”

While Verizon and AT&T are shifting away from unlimited plans and Sprint is hiking the cost for smartphone data rates, T-Mobile says it plans to offer lower rates in an effort to win back market share. From its $10 entry-level data rates to unlimited family plans that can save hundreds of dollars per year, Humm said the company is putting its money where its mouth is.

“We are a very good value,” Humm said.

But before Humm can win over customers, he knows he must start with the company’s own employees, some of whom became disenchanted as their company saw itself slow to move to faster networks and embrace the latest technologies.

Humm is currently traveling around the U.S., spending each Wednesday through Friday from now until April meeting with workers in different key markets.

“In the beginning of the week I pick up my job slip from my assistant,” he said. “[I learn] ‘Where do I have to fly this week?’” Last week he stopped in San Francisco, San Jose and Los Angeles. This week he is due in Texas.

In each city, Humm outlines the plan and shows off the company’s combative ads, which feature a young man as the iPhone, hobbled by the slow speed of its networks. T-Mobile, meanwhile, is a beautiful young woman, riding fast and free on T-Mobile’s network. So far, he said, the message has resonated with the company’s employees.

There is more to do than just cut prices. In the absence of an iPhone, T-Mobile needs to do a better job of embracing Android, he said. And that doesn’t necessarily mean doing a lot of customization work, as it and others have tried to do, or spending a fortune building its own brand, as Verizon has done. Humm said that T-Mobile can have a good Android strategy, in part by just being open and quickly adopting the work done by Google and others.

“It is key for us to maintain the strong relationship we have with Google and to be very fast with Google, testing and then launching improved operating systems,” Humm said. “I don’t think it is our most important duty to really tailor all the things in a complicated way.”

One of the areas for improvement in the market is just staying current with Google, both with new updates and in offering timely upgrades for existing customers. The company is in the process of launching a new program called Reinvent, Humm said, that will do just that.

T-Mobile is also working aggressively to speed up its networks. Although it lacks the spectrum to immediately move to an all-new technology like the Long-Term Evolution network being adopted by Verizon and planned by AT&T, T-Mobile is working quickly to roll out faster versions of its existing network. That solution may only be a stop-gap, but it can offer some pretty good speeds for the next couple of years, anyway.

The company also wants to embrace new categories of devices, such as tablets. The company plans to have a 7-inch Dell Streak very soon, to be followed by a Honeycomb-based tablet from LG.

“I do not see a reason why a customer should not have two devices minimum,” Humm said. However, that is tricky when doing so requires two separate data plans and tablets require customers to plunk down $500 or $600 on top of whatever they paid for their smartphone. Lowering the up-front and monthly costs is key to broad adoption of multiple cellular-equipped devices, Humm said.

And it’s not that Humm wouldn’t like one of the options to be an iPhone.

“We never said that we would not like to have an iPhone,” he said. “We think the iPhone is a great and iconic device.”

He notes that the company has been very clear to go after the companies offering the iPhone and their networks, rather than against the iPhone itself.

“The potential of the iPhone is by no means realized on the network it is running,” Humm said, adding that things won’t improve when it comes to Verizon because it will run only on that carrier’s older CDMA network.

As for when or if the iPhone might ever come to T-Mobile USA, though, Humm has no answers.

“It really is a question to ask Apple,” he said.

Speaking to reporters at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, today, the outgoing Google CEO said Google has far more profound concerns than the social network that Goldman Sachs recently valued at $50 billion–Microsoft, for example.

“Microsoft has more cash, more engineers, more global reach,” he said. “We see competition from Microsoft every day.”

Evidently the same is not true of Facebook. “[Facebook has] clearly stated they don’t want to get into the search business,” Schmidt continued. “Facebook users tend to use Google search. Facebook’s ads business does not displace our advertising. I’m somewhat perplexed by the obsession because I don’t think the facts support it. Things are going great for Google….Facebook usage is a net positive for us.“

Of course this being Eric “false denial” Schmidt we’re talking about, this could be the best evidence yet that Google really is worried about Facebook.

That was one of several points stressed by Microsoft Chief Privacy Officer Brendon Lynch, who sat down with Mobilized ahead of his appearance at a Churchill Club event Wednesday night focused on location-based services.

Among the company’s recommendations is that consumers think twice before taking actions such as broadcasting their location when they are alone or sharing geo-tagged photos of their home or children.

Microsoft did some research in December that found that three in five consumers are aware of location-based services and roughly half say they have used such a service, with one in 10 of those surveyed saying they use such services on a daily basis.

While the most common reported usages were for things like navigation, traffic and weather, about 18 percent of respondents said they were using a service like Foursquare, Facebook or Google Latitude that broadcasts their location.

The software maker is releasing the results later on Wednesday ahead of Friday’s commemoration of Data Privacy Day. This year, the company decided to focus its efforts on location-based services.

“This is a high-stakes, high-value data element,” Lynch said.

Lynch also noted that people sharing location with their social network might want to review just how wide that network is.

“I actually believe [sharing of] location data is a situation which probably should cause people to really go review that list,” he said.

And while there is a responsibility on consumers to be more aware, Lynch said, those building services and products also need to do their part.

“You can build it into the experience to actually make people aware that this is going to happen and they have a role to play in the choice,” he said.

Microsoft’s research found that privacy concerns are a barrier for some to adopting location-based services, particularly in the U.S. About half of overall survey respondents said they would be more comfortable with such services if they had more information on just who was seeing the information being shared.

The company also found that while 94 percent of consumers find location-based services to be valuable, they weren’t terribly willing to pay, and those who were often weren’t willing to pay more than $10 for such services. That seems to indicate more promise for advertising-funded services, especially since nearly half of those who have seen a location-based mobile ad have taken action on the ad–vastly higher than the response rates seen on traditional online ads.

Actually, no need to: The not-at-all bashful entrepreneur has been working hard to make sure we’re all aware of what he’s calling “the Mahalo 4.0 launch/pivot.”

So there will be no shortage of places to read about this today. And if you want to hear Calacanis pitch his pivot himself, you can do that too, via a livestream of the DLD conference, where he’s presenting right now.

So here’s what you need to know:

• Calacanis, who launched Mahalo in 2007 as a “human-powered search engine,” then turned it into an “answers” site, is now trying to move deeper into the “how to” category dominated by Demand Media. Which just happens to be going public today in a very hot offering that will value the company at more than $1 billion. [Correction: Demand will start trading on Wednesday, January 26]
• The most important part of the move is a new emphasis on video, which Mahalo is creating itself. That’s a different strategy from Demand’s, which relies on a computer to spit out editorial assignments, then hands them out to an army of freelancers.
• Calacanis and Mahalo president Jason Rapp, who came on board last spring, have hired a team of 50 editors, who are now cranking out some 900 videos a week on topics like “How to Cook a Ham.” They plan to have a staff of 100 dedicated to videos by the end of the year.
• Mahalo still relies primarily on Google ads for revenue, which the company won’t disclose. But last week Calacanis said incoming dollars from Google’s YouTube have shot up 9x in the last year.
• Rapp says Mahalo still doesn’t need to raise any more money beyond its initial round, which brought in $20 million from investors like Sequoia, CBS and News Corp. (News Corp. also owns this Web site.)

If you missed Calacanis’s pitch this morning but still want to see people talking about his site, here’s a promo clip the company supplied. It features Calacanis’s employees, but not Calacanis, so it’s a lot less interesting. But you’ll get the idea.

Mahalo 4.0 from Mahalo.com on Vimeo.