The bare facts are these, according to this lengthy analysis by Bloomberg News: Since 1953, the U.S. has imported more energy-producing resources than it has exported. The main reason is that the U.S. doesn’t have a lot of domestic oil production and has always relied on imports from other countries, many of them countries in the troubled Middle East. In a political context, the phrase “energy independence” is usually associated with pie-in-the-sky notions of being free from the odious burden of foreign policy entanglements in that region.

But now, Bloomberg says, the idea is no longer so pie-in-the-sky: Last year, the U.S. produced about 81 percent of its energy, up from a recent low of 70 percent in 2005. What gives? A boost in domestic oil production, more efficient cars, stricter mileage standards, ethanol in our gasoline and a significant surge in U.S. production of natural gas. In fact, if this keeps up, the U.S. is on track to be the biggest energy producer in the world within eight years.

Does that sound like something of an opportunity? You’d better believe it. Insight Venture Partners, the New York-based venture capital and private equity firm that has in the past invested in tech properties like Twitter, Tumblr, LivingSocial and FlipBoard, is leading a massive $165 million investment in a Texas-based oil and gas database company called Drilling Info.

Essentially, what the company does is provide a lot of incredibly specialized information about where energy resources like gas and oil wells are located, what its characteristics are, how long a site is likely to be productive, and so on. The database is offered via the cloud as a software-as-service product. “It really focuses on giving energy companies the data they need to make smarter decisions about where and how they spend their production resources,” Deven Parekh, managing director at Insight, told me. The database tracks information like depletion curves — a measure of how long a well can continue producing oil — and environmental information, seismic data and so on.

Offering it as an SAAS product just makes it easier to manage and maintain. Once upon a time, database companies would send out CDs with software and data updates. Using the cloud makes it easier to keep the data current, and to save on costs.

Parekh told me that Drilling Info has about 3,000 customers in the U.S. and worldwide; and while he wouldn’t disclose its annual revenue, he said it’s in the tens of millions each year. Its customers produce about 90 percent of the oil and gas produced in the U.S. A lot of its demand is coming from companies working on so-called “unconventional exploration” for oil and gas resources, and there’s also significant international interest, too. For example, there are more companies working on methods for getting hard-to-reach oil in shale reserves.

Parekh says the moment has come for some serious investment in energy production technologies. “Everyone pays attention to all the innovation going on at Apple and Google, but what they tend not to appreciate is how much innovation is taking place in the energy industry,” he said. “We don’t talk about it every day, but there’s so much going on.”

Battery Ventures and Eastern Advisors Private Fund are also investing, and at least part of the funding round is going toward earlier shareholders. The capital will be used to expand its customer footprint, but also to possibly make some acquisitions.

Note: Initially the headline on this story said it was Index Ventures, not Insight, making the investment. I’ve since corrected it, though the initial erroneous headline is still making the rounds on Twitter. Sorry about that.

The Priceonomics Web site, which officially launched on Dec. 21, is aimed at helping sellers and buyers determine the best price for used bikes, cars, phones, TVs and other items, so no one gets ripped off.

But rather than explaining what it does in a press release, Priceonomics wrote an entertaining blog post, entitled “Adventures in Aeron Chair Arbitrage,” detailing its experiments with selling the expensive Herman Miller office furniture in San Francisco.

Trials included finding buyers among its start-up incubator classmates, finding the chairs on Craigslist, borrowing a girlfriend’s car to get them, negotiating a lower price, lugging the chairs back to the office, and then almost losing the sale in the end, when the seller’s $1,800 check didn’t go through.

Priceonomics concludes that a business based on hauling used furniture around won’t scale but that there is a need for a centralized location for pricing information.

From its blog post:

“It’s unlikely Priceonomics could build a massively successful business arbitraging used goods if we have to take possession of them. However, it was clear that having our price guides were really helpful for identifying what were the good deals on Craigslist and how much to pay for them. So for now, we’ll just stick to building better price guides to help other people buy things on Craiglist, eBay, and other emerging marketplaces like Zaarly and TaskRabbit.”

Priceonomics may be on to something here.

Not too long ago, one way to determine the fair value of an item on the Internet was through an online auction. EBay became wildly popular as an easy way for total strangers to agree on a price for an item. More recently, auctions have become less relevant, and even eBay is decreasing the alliance of used items on its site.

That’s due in large part to today’s free flow of information on the Internet, which makes pricing more transparent. After all, you can just Google it.

Still, determining the price of an item can be time-consuming. To get a good sense of the fair value, you have to cross-check prices on a handful of sites — if not a dozen.

Priceonomics’ price guide promises to help users easily find out if they are getting a good deal, by comparing items across eBay, Craigslist and even full-priced retailers that might be offering a deal.

So, how much is a second-hand Aeron chair worth?

In the end, Priceonomics says, the chairs resell for $400 to $600 in San Francisco. The company was able to acquire four, for $375 each; it then turned around and unloaded them for $1,800, representing a $300 profit.

Earlier this year, it started selling discounted hotel rooms, and today it is announcing that it will offer deals on auto and home insurance.

The online retailer is now focused on four main categories: Shopping — which includes everything from books to clothing and home and garden — discounted cars, vacations and now insurance.

In March, O.co entered travel by hiring its own dedicated sales team. This time it’s partnering with Answer Financial, which is one of the largest auto and home insurance agencies in the U.S., in order to offer insurance.

O.co said consumers will be able to compare quotes from as many as 20 insurance providers and will be able to save an average of $468 a year on auto policies.

While other insurance sites offer to compare rates, O.co’s CEO Patrick Byrne said you can’t trust the companies to show rates lower than their own.

“This is a niche that I don’t think has been done by any large shopping site,” he said.

In January, it introduced the domain name O.co, which initially served as a shortcut to its regular Web site. During an introductory period, customers who shopped at O.co received free shipping.

Byrne said the reason behind the name is to have a more recognizable brand across the 90 countries in which it operates. The plan was for the domain name to change permanently internationally, and only to experiment with the shortcut domestically.

Now, it intends to accelerate the shift from Overstock.com to O.co in the U.S. as well.

“We saw more of a pick-up than we had anticipated. Today, a significant portion of our business is finding us from O.co,” he said.

Byrne expects to launch one more category in the next couple of months.

As I wrote in April, YouTube is adding movies from big studios including Time Warner’s Warner Bros., Sony and Comcast’s Universal to existing service, which has previously had a limited selection of titles from small studios.

For now, the YouTube movie store appears to be a work in progress: Google says it will rent newish movies like Inception, The King’s Speech, Little Fockers from the store, but so far I can’t find any of them. Same goes for new old titles like Caddyshack, which are also MIA.

Once YouTube gets this thing ready for prime time, though, it’s going to look very similar to what consumers can already get from competitors like Apple and Amazon: The ability to rent a movie that they can watch anytime over a 30-day period, except that once they start watching it they’ll have 24 hours before it evaporates. Pricing should be comparable to YouTube’s peers — $3.99 for new movies $2.99 for older ones.

Beyond that, the only wrinkles of note here:

• As I reported last month, the movies will be streamed, not downloaded. So presumably you’ll need a live Web connection to watch them, unlike Apple’s videos, which reside on your device for the duration of the rental.
• It’s unclear whether consumers will have to sign up for Google Checkout or some other Google-specific e-commerce platform to rent the movies; a FAQ sent out by Google only mentions that “the service accepts all major credit cards.”. Not linking the service to a Google account may make things slightly easier for consumers, since it’s an extra step they won’t have to take. On the other hand, you’d think Google would be very interested in establishing a credit card relationship with their customers, like Amazon, Apple and Netflix do.

By all accounts, this is an intermediate, incremental step for Google, which has had movie rentals for a year but hasn’t had much to show for it. Now it has the backing of some big studios, but is missing others, including News Corp.’s Fox (News Corp. also owns this Web site), Viacom’s Paramount and Disney.

Even if YouTube does bring on more partners — Paramount seems like a particularly long shot, given the ongoing Viacom/YouTube lawsuit, but the rest could show up one day — that will just bring Google up to par with other online a la carte movie rental outlets, which haven’t gained much traction yet.

Nothing wrong with that, but that doesn’t seem to be the end game for either Google or the studios. Google seems interested in building up YouTube, period. And if making video rentals available as part of the huge swell of content that lives on the site helps, then great.

The movies will also work on Google TV, which can use any help it can get. So that’s good, too.

At least part of Hollywood, meanwhile, seems to believe it can keep its DVD business alive by launching a locker/cloud system that would give disc owners the right to watch their movies whenever they want, on different devices . They’re also gung ho about anything that isn’t a Netflix all-you-can-eat subscription plans.

I’m doubtful that can work. Because beyond kids’ movies, which get watched hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times (I know the name of every character in Cars – try me!) most consumers don’t want to watch a movie multiple times. It’s not like a music collection, which does make quite a bit of sense in the cloud.

But the studios seem to like this idea, and at least some of them are convinced Google can help them do it — or, at least, provide leverage with other potential cloud partners, like Apple or Facebook. Watch for more developments in this vein.

And while you’re waiting, you can try renting a movie from YouTube.

Meted out by France’s Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés, or CNIL, the sanction is the agency’s highest ever and the first penalty levied against Google for data collection practices that have drawn complaints from dozens of countries.

According to the CNIL, though Google pledged to erase all the private data it collected, it “has not refrained from using the data identifying Wi-Fi access points of individuals without their knowledge.” Worse, the company continues to collect data on Wi-Fi access points via smartphones accessing its Latitude service, without clearly disclosing that to Latitude users. And, as it has done in other countries, Google refused to grant access to software used to harvest and store the information or an interview with the “rogue engineer” it claims is responsible for the whole debacle.

Google, of course, continues to play the penitent. “As we have said before, we are profoundly sorry for having mistakenly collected payload data from unencrypted WiFi networks,” Google’s Global Privacy Counsel Peter Fleischer said in yet another variation of the same statement the company has been issuing for nearly a year now.

PREVIOUSLY

• Lawmakers Would Like a Word With Google’s “Rogue” WiSpy Engineer
• Connecticut Won’t Press for Google WiSpy Data, Looks to Settle
• Well, Hell, If I Knew All I Had to Do Was Seize the Hard Drives…
• Look, Sergey, a Christmas Card From the Connecticut AG! Wait…
• Google Street View Privacy Debacle Far From Over
• FTC Closes Google Street View Probe
• Google CEO Apologizes for Street View Schmidtstorm
• Google CEO’s Advice to the Street-View Shy: The Video
• Schmidt: Don’t Like Google Street View Photographing Your House? Then Move.
• Mr. Schmidt, There’s an Inspector Lestrade on Line One
• State AGs to Probe Google’s “Deeply Disturbing Invasion” of Wi-Fi Data
• No Harm, Big Foul: Google Intercepted Passwords and Email Extracts
• Germany Questions Google’s Data “Mistake”
• Google Street View Cars Collected Wi-Fi User Data for Three Years

“Google has played an enormous role in advancing the Internet as we know it today, but Americans have a right to know the relative facts of its Wi-Fi data collection activity known to U.S. consumers, regardless of whether the FCC finds a technical violation of the law,” the letter reads, noting that a handful of probes by state attorneys general has yet to yield access to the consumer data Google harvested or an interview with the “rogue engineer” the company claims is responsible for collecting and storing it.

“Nine months after Google first admitted to collecting this data, we still don’t have answers as to how this privacy breach was allowed to take place and how many Americans were affected, let alone a credible assurance that it will not happen again,” it continues. “The lack of progress in this investigation is concerning, particularly in light of the progress made by authorities in other countries.”

And that’s a valid, and troubling, point. South Korea recently analyzed the harvested consumer data; why can’t the United States do the same? And how is it possible that the FTC concluded its investigation into this matter without talking to that rogue engineer?

“A serious inquiry into this matter requires a hearing from the engineer that Google claims is responsible for the data collecting activity. Google’s Street View Vehicles captured and stored over 600 gigabytes of data. It is difficult to understand how just one individual could have been responsible for a data collection operation of this scale.”

PREVIOUSLY

• Connecticut Won’t Press for Google WiSpy Data, Looks to Settle
• Well, Hell, If I Knew All I Had to Do Was Seize the Hard Drives…
• Look, Sergey, a Christmas Card From the Connecticut AG! Wait…
• Google Street View Privacy Debacle Far From Over
• FTC Closes Google Street View Probe
• Google CEO Apologizes for Street View Schmidtstorm
• Google CEO’s Advice to the Street-View Shy: The Video
• Schmidt: Don’t Like Google Street View Photographing Your House? Then Move.
• Mr. Schmidt, There’s an Inspector Lestrade on Line One
• State AGs to Probe Google’s “Deeply Disturbing Invasion” of Wi-Fi Data
• No Harm, Big Foul: Google Intercepted Passwords and Email Extracts
• Germany Questions Google’s Data “Mistake”
• Google Street View Cars Collected Wi-Fi User Data for Three Years

“Computers are really here to make us happier,” Schmidt said, promising these devices will give people more time with friends and family, not less.

Schmidt, who gave up the CEO role last month, said that nearly all devices will get more interesting when they connect to the Internet. A music player that doesn’t connect to the network isn’t very interesting, he said, perhaps opening the door to the announcement of a long-talked-about, cloud-based Google music service.

The talk is just geting started. Mobilized got a really good seat in the front row, just two seats over from Andy Rubin, and has live updates below.

5:59 pm: Schmidt talking about things phones should be able to do, such as figure out better traffic routes and bridge language barriers. “You really can do magic,” he says, pointing to Google Translate, which lets you speak one language and have a language you don’t speak returned. “That’s done in a twentieth of a second or what have you,” he says.

6:01 pm: Brings out colleague to show an application on “an interesting new device.”

6:03 pm: The device is the Motorola Xoom tablet and the program is “Movie Studio,” an app built from the ground up for creating and editing movies on tablets.

He has a few images and videos from around Barcelona.

He creates a movie onstage and shows how it can easily be shared on YouTube. (This looks like iMovie and Windows Live Movie Maker so far–both of which also let you edit movies and share directly to YouTube.)

6:07 pm: Upload goes slowly, though, as Schmidt notes it is the problem of doing a demo at a mobile network convention where everyone is hammering the networks.

6:09 pm: The goal of many of Google’s products, Schmidt says, is to do tasks quickly so that people can get back to being human. “We ultimately believe that speed matters,” Schmidt says. Google Instant, he says, can save two to five seconds per search.

Search is also becoming more personal. With permission, users can get more information. Next up, he says, is autonomous search as information comes up as one walks or drives, and is driven by location.

“That’s just the beginning of a large number of new apps that use that infrastructure to make a big difference,” Schmidt says.

Schmidt says how much info to share will be up to the user, but those that opt in can get much richer results.

There’s also a trend, he says, to returning more structured data, such as travel.

6:12 pm: Stat time: 120 million people using Chrome, up three times from a year ago.

YouTube revenue doubled in 2010. Now just being able to monetize professional content at a rate that starts to make sense for content partners.

6:18 pm: Computer science can help all kinds of things, Schmidt says. With phones and tablets, “You never forget everything” which is precisely what phones are good at.

If you choose, you can remember the hotels you stayed in and the people you met, etc., “Humans forget,” he says.

Computers are also preventing people from ever getting lost. When I was a boy growing up in Europe “I was always lost,” Schmidt says.

Translation may not prevent war, but should at a minimum increase dialogue, Schmidt says.

6:18 pm: “Even better you are never lonely,” he sats, because computers can point you to nearby friends or connect you to distant ones.

You are never bored, Schmidt says. You are never out of ideas because we can always suggest what you can do next.

Other changes, include the self-driving cars that Google has been working on.

“It’s obvious that cars should drive (themselves),” he says, adding that there will be a “kill switch” in case there are bugs. And it will take time, he says.

“This is coming. It will be decades, I suspect–not a year.”

He also says these innovations will scale to the masses.

“It’s a future for the masses, not the elites,” he says.

6:21 pm: With that, on to Q&A.

6:23 pm: Talking about targeted broadcast quality ads as next frontier.

“Who wants to see an ad that is not relavent to them,” Schmidt says. And that leads to revenue, which Schmidt points out is the whole point of advertising in the first place.

6:24 pm: Question on Android fragmentation saying there is frustration among phone makers and developers.

“We hear some of this,” Schmidt says. “You’ve stated the problem more strongly than I would have, but I will take that as feedback.”

6:26 pm: Question about role of Google in financial services.

Schmidt quips that Larry Page and Sergey Brin periodically suggest that Google issue Google Bucks as its own currency, but Schmidt says he always points out the regulatory issues.

On a serious front, he talks about the power of near-field communications as a means to turn real-world transactions into electronic ones.

“In that are very large businesses,” he says.

(Google built NFC into its Nexus S device.)

6:29 pm: Are you interested in Twitter?

“We love Twitter and I like to tweet,” Schmidt says, eliciting laughter from the crowd.

6:31 pm: Why so many operating systems?

Sometimes these things occur because the teams move so quickly, Schmidt says.

People have been asking when Gingerbread and Honeycomb will come together. Schmidt: You can imagine the follow-on release will start with an “I” and be named after a desert and will combine the best of both, Schmidt says.

These releases occur on roughly a six-month cycle, Schmidt says.

6:33 pm: On Chrome OS, Schmidt says there will be an opportunity to merge that with Android over time, but better to wait for the operating systems to mature and a natural time than to push them together too soon.

6:34 pm: On HTML5, Schmidt imagines that some number of years from now, most apps–mobile and desktop–will be running on HTML5.

6:39 pm: Question on Google’s role in health care.

Phone should be able to, at a minimum, carry medical info. Several percent of queries on Google are health-related.

6:42 pm: Is Facebook with its “Like” button a main competitor?

Today our main competitor is Microsoft. Microsoft has a good product in Bing, he says.

“There’s a couple cases where it might be too good. We discussed that in a blog post.”

They have the cash, the scale and the reach to do good and amazing things.

6:44 pm: On Nokia-Microsoft partnership:

“We would have loved it had they chosen Android,” Schmidt says. “That offer remains open.”

Android would have been a good choice for Nokia, he says.

‘We certainly tried” to get them, he says.

6:46 pm: How do you approach the fact that Android going higher and lower in the market?

Schmidt says that the company tries to show the best in its Nexus line, while putting minimum specifications out there to set the bar for what developers can expect.

6:47 pm: Question on why Google is not more broadly used in the education market?

Schmidt says the company has funded a number of YouTube professors. “We’ve not yet come up with the killer [education] app,” he says.

6:49 pm: Asked about Google’s interest in the PC operating system market, Schmidt says that Google’s answer is Chrome OS. Sometime in the spring you will see a series of PC makers come out with Chrome OS devices. However, he adds they won’t run current PC apps, such as Windows apps.

“It does not run any of your current PC applications so you might think about it,” Schmidt said. That said, he adds there are, in most cases, cloud-based options that are roughly equivalent.

6:52 pm: With that, Schmidt wraps up.

For its new compact Lexus, Toyota Motor Corp. is enlisting people with a strong following on Twitter and other social media to create buzz around its products.

Its new campaign includes online videos that show actress and comedian Whitney Cummings interviewing an array of social-media heavyweights as they take the Lexus CT 200h for a spin around their hometowns. The stars of the campaign include Baratunde Thurston, Web editor of satire website the Onion; Brian Solis, a marketing guru and social-media expert; and Richard Quitevis, or DJ Qbert, a well-known disc jockey.

“If we have people that are active in social media, then they can bring followers with them,” says Dave Nordstrom, Lexus’s vice president of marketing.

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Google earlier this year said that the camera-equipped cars it uses to mark the location of wireless networks and take pictures for its Street View service had for years inadvertently collected data from publicly accessible wireless networks. Google initially said that no significant personal data was collected, but last month admitted that emails and passwords had also been copied.

On Wednesday, U.K. Information Commissioner Christopher Graham, the regulator in charge of data protection, issued a statement saying that, as a result of the “significant breach” of law, his office would audit Google’s data-protection practices in the U.K. and ask the Mountain View, Calif., company to sign an official commitment affirming that such breaches wouldn’t occur again. The U.K. regulator had earlier found that Google didn’t collect meaningful personal details.

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The start-up, which formally is starting its service Monday, hopes to limit the number of spam or low-quality websites that show up for searches in categories such as health, cars and personal finance.

Gaining a significant share in search–a market that generates more than $10 billion in advertising revenue annually in the U.S.–is a long shot. But some Internet analysts have voiced praise for Blekko.com, which has raised $24 million from venture-capital firms and well-known angel investors Ron Conway and Marc Andreessen.

The problem with Google, according to Blekko and some industry analysts, is a proliferation of search results of dubious quality. Sites listed often are filled with content whose source is unclear.

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That post was based on a “Parker Spitzer” show highlight clip that disappeared from CNN.com when the broadcast version of the Schmidt interview was finally published. Sadly, that final cut did not include Schmidt’s helpful suggestion for combating Street View anxiety. An odd omission, considering Google’s admission on the same day as the interview that its Street View cars had intercepted even more payload information from open Wi-Fi connections than originally thought.

In any event, below you’ll find the excerpt and Schmidt’s quote in all its creepy glory.

Oh, one last thing for the conspiracy minded. CNN says Google did not ask that Schmidt’s remark be removed from the broadcast version of the show. “Producers routinely make editorial decisions about what sound bites to include in their shows,” a spokesperson told me via email. “In this case, the clip was posted on cnn.com and disseminated to other media outlets and was widely available.”

“My office will lead a multistate investigation–expected to involve a significant number of states–into Google’s deeply disturbing invasion of personal privacy,” Blumenthal said in a statement. “Street View cannot mean Complete View–invading home and business computer networks and vacuuming up personal information and communications. Consumers have a right and a need to know what personal information–which could include emails, web browsing and passwords–Google may have collected, how and why. Google must come clean, explaining how and why it intercepted and saved private information broadcast over personal and business wireless networks.”

Blumenthal says some 30 states have expressed concern over the matter, and he expects a number of them to ultimately join the investigation, which will determine the legality of Google’s collection of data from personal wireless networks.

Google (GOOG), for its part, insists the practice wasn’t illegal–just stupid.

“It’s still too early to say what will happen as a result of this investigation,” the CNIL said. “However, we can already state that…Google did indeed record e-mail access passwords [and] extracts of the content of e-mail messages.”

Now, recording passwords and extracting them are two entirely different matters, and there’s no evidence of the latter. That said, this is still an unfortunate revelation for Google (GOOG), which has sought to downplay the implications of the breach by portraying it as a mistake and the data collected as inconsequential. Indeed, last month CEO Eric Schmidt excused the company for its misstep, saying, “There was no harm, no foul.”

No harm, perhaps, but there was certainly a foul–particularly since it now appears the data collected may have been protected by privacy laws.

Ironically, such data collection is a non-issue for all who actually heed the universal advice to secure their Wi-Fi networks–advice that comes in the documentation of every router and advice that Google itself gives the customers of Google WiFi. The FAQ for the service states: “In order to make our service easily accessible to a large number of WiFi-enabled devices, Google WiFi is an open-access wireless network, and our signal is not encrypted. However, users can achieve a secure connection by using GoogleWiFiSecure if their device supports WPA, WPA2 or 802.1x protocols (most laptops do)….As with any wireless network, users should take certain precautions to secure their online experience from security violations by third parties or unintentional security breaches.”

Plainly, Google feels its transgression falls into the latter category–not illegal, but an unintentional intrusion. As Google’s director of public policy, Pablo Chavez, wrote in a recent letter to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, “As an initial matter, collection of network information broadcast by WiFi routers (such as SSID and MAC address) is used to improve location-based services and is a lawful, established business practice….We believe it does not violate U.S. law to collect payload data from networks that are configured to be openly accessible (i.e., not secured by encryption and thus accessible by any user’s device). We emphasize that being lawful and being the right thing to do are two different things, and that collecting payload data was a mistake for which we are profoundly sorry.”

There are lots of media companies anticipating the tablet–the entire magazine industry, for instance–and Apple (AAPL) will eventually want all of them on board. The wondertablet is supposed to be a showcase for media, after all.

But very few media companies seem to have any kind of real information about the device. And only a small number will have new stuff to show off at next week’s unveiling.

Like who? Here’s a starter list of likely and unlikely suspects:

• The New York Times is a good bet. Executive Editor Bill Keller riled up the Web with a passing reference to an “impending Apple slate” in October, but wouldn’t say more. Last week, I asked Keller again about his paper’s Apple plans, and he stayed mum again. So did Martin Nisenholtz, the paper’s digital boss. “No comment” doesn’t equal “we’re cooking something up,” of course. And I’m not convinced that an Apple demo would be directly tied to an announcement about a new pay wall strategy, as New York Magazine speculated Sunday. But I do expect to see something from the New York Times (NYT) at next week’s launch.
• Don’t expect much from the big music labels. Jobs courted Big Music when he opened up the iTunes store in 2003. But label sources I talked to this month said the company had only recently begun briefing them about the tablet, primarily as a “courtesy.” Recall that Apple already has the labels on board with the “iTunes LP” format, which would lend itself quite nicely to a tablet. One label official told me Apple has expressed an interest in selling higher-quality audio files via iTunes, and I’m sure the labels would be happy to do so if they can charge a premium for them. But that discussion doesn’t seem to be tethered to the tablet.
• Do expect to hear about “enhanced e-books.” In the past, Jobs has been dismissive about dedicated e-readers like the Kindle from Amazon (AMZN) and reading in general–“people don’t read anymore.” He has apparently changed his mind about the latter opinion: The Wall Street Journal confirmed earlier stories yesterday with a report that News Corp.’s (NWS) HarperCollins is negotiating to bring some of its titles to the platform. Presumably other publishers–all of which are eager for viable Kindle competitors–want in, too.
• Video? Duh. But who? The most obvious suspect here for an initial launch would be Disney (DIS) and its affiliates. In part because Jobs is both the company’s largest individual shareholder and a board member. But also because Disney CEO Bob Iger has made a point of trying out new digital distribution strategies. Here’s a nonstretch: Disney’s ESPN is already negotiating with Microsoft (MSFT) to bring some of its programming and games to the Xbox 360. What about something similar for the tablet? UPDATE: ESPN won’t be announcing anything in conjunction with Apple next week, says someone who knows.
• Time Inc. won’t be there, according to people familiar with Time Warner’s publishing unit. The same likely applies to rival Conde Nast.

A crucial point here is that if the tablet works with the iTunes store–and it should–it is most likely that all of the Apple’s existing iTunes media partners will automatically be on the new device from the start whether Jobs showcases them next week or not. That is: If you can buy “Cars” and watch it on your Mac, iPhone or iPod, then you should be able to watch it on your tablet, too.

But we’re in pre-Apple announcement mode now, and simply porting old media to a new device just won’t sate our needs! So consider this report a work in progress, and a speculative one at that. I’ll be updating if and when anything new comes to light.

A group of broadcasters plans to use this week’s Consumer Electronics Show to promote their plans to deliver news, sports, weather and other local content to users on the go. While cellphones are an obvious target, backers of the effort also expect users to receive local programming on laptop computers, portable DVD players and devices in cars.

Results may not come quickly, or easily. Competition for users’ attention is stiff, including an array of on-demand video offerings for mobile devices as well as another mobile broadcasting network that is trying to build a U.S. audience.

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That’s a decline of $29 billion. A nasty drop, but nowhere nearly as gruesome as the 24 percent drop the research outfit predicted at the beginning of the year.

Seems renewed consumer interest in PCs, as well as cars and cellphones, has driven some fairly significant quarter-over-quarter growth. That said, 2009 is still among the worst years for the semiconductor industry since the Great Dark Times of 2001–and the first time the sector posted declines two years running.

The Federal Trade Commission has issued a consumer alert noting that only one Web site, Cars.gov, is the official destination for the Car Allowance Rebate System. Other sites, particularly ones that ask for personal information, should be avoided since they might be a front for identity-theft efforts.

“You do not need a voucher and you are not required to sign up or enroll in this program,” says the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration, which operates the rebate program, in a frequently asked questions page.

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A wise move, since Sirius needs to drive sales and consumers are cutting back on the purchase of new cars, one of the company’s main sources of new subscribers. Indeed, in its latest quarter, Sirius said net subscriber growth slowed markedly, falling to 82,900 from 1.1 million.

It’s an amazing list: “Toy Story,” “A Bug’s Life,” “Toy Story 2,” “Monsters Inc.,” “Finding Nemo,” “The Incredibles,” “Cars,” “Ratatouille” and “Wall-E.”

Nine movies, nine success stories.

Can they make it 10 for 10? The next big release for Pixar, which is coming up in late May, is a movie called “Up.” If you have kids, you’ve likely seen the trailer by now. At the heart of the movie is an old geezer named Carl, who is voiced by Ed Asner; he’s accompanied on some adventures by a 9-year-old Boy Scout sidekick named Russell.

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According to a new report by Forrester Research (FORR), e-commerce sales (beyond travel) are likely to grow 11 percent to $156 billion in 2009. That marks a slowdown from 13 percent growth last year and 18 percent in 2007. The major factor contributing to the pace shift is, of course, declining consumer confidence.

But e-commerce’s slowed pace is still far better than the National Retail Federation’s forecast .5 percent drop in overall retail sales this year.

That means e-commerce is stealing market share from traditional retail–and fast. By Forrester’s estimates, in 2008 e-commerce accounted for five percent of all retail sales (excluding cars, travel and prescription drugs). In 2012, Forrester thinks e-commerce could have an eight percent share.

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