Tonight, an hour-long special on the topic will air at 9 pm ET on Bloomberg TV (and will be streamed live on Bloomberg’s Web site), featuring Yuri Milner, CEO of Digital Sky Technologies and one of the key investors who helped put together that deal. Unfortunately, while Bloomberg’s press release listed Milner as a “guest,” it neglected to mention that he won’t be an actual live guest (as initially reported here). Instead, clips from a Milner interview last year will be interspersed with current commentary from writers David Kirkpatrick, Paul Kedrosky and Bill Cohan, and marketing professor Scott Galloway.

Goldman has reportedly given its clients limited information and only until the end of the week to pony up a minimum of $2 million to invest in Facebook. One Goldman customer told Reuters he felt like he was being expected to invest on “blind faith.”

BoomTown’s Kara Swisher yesterday described the Goldman-Facebook deal as “sneaky,” “elite” and “opaque.”

Here’s the promo for the Bloomberg program:

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

That’s what Michael Birch is doing, by signing on as an advisor to Bebo, the social network he co-founded in 2005, and investing an undisclosed amount of cash back into the business.

The irony, of course, is that the reason Birch has cash on hand to invest in Bebo is that he sold the company for $850 million to AOL in 2008, at the height of the Web bubble. AOL ended up writing down the entire purchase, and sold it to Criterion Capital last summer for a few million dollars and a tax write-off.

Now Criterion CEO Adam Levin says he can make something out of the business, though reports are bubbling through the tech world that he’s already trying to flip the thing.

I’ve been told he’s looking to sell for $25 million, but for the record, a PR rep says that “we are not actively marketing Bebo for a sale.” Noted! (But if, say, Google wanted to pick up a piece to help jumpstart its social efforts…)

I’m Tricia Duryee, one of the latest additions to All Things Digital. You may know me from the three years I spent at mocoNews, where I wrote about the mobile industry, or before that, as a technology reporter at the Seattle Times. Going forward, I will write about e-commerce and gaming, as well as all sorts of financial machinations.

As you might expect, I will be reporting on some of the more traditional companies in the space, such as Amazon, Walmart, Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony.

But there will also be strong emphasis on a handful of start-ups that are currently doing their best to upset the status quo. In this bucket, I see three categories emerging: Virtual goods, social-and-group-buying companies and mobile payments.

The dollars are really starting to ring up in these areas, even after such a short period of time. In just three years, Zynga has signed up 320 million registered users, has hired 1,300 employees and is estimated to have $500 million in 2010 revenues with a roughly $5 billion private-market valuation.

Likewise, the two-year-old Groupon is being sought by Google, which BoomTown’s Kara Swisher reports may offer up to $6 billion to get a foothold in the social-buying business and gain a local sales force across the country.

And finally, mobile will be an increasingly hot topic as consumers use their devices for every part of this value chain–from discovering deals to researching recommendations to substituting their wallet for a phone. Among other topics, there’s a flurry of contenders challenging Visa and MasterCard for its merchant fees, which were estimated to have totaled $7 billion in the U.S. over the past year.

Generally, when I think of this coverage area, I see one central theme: How will people make money, and how will consumers pay? Will games be purchased, or will they be ad-supported? Or, will consumers buy one virtual tractor at a time?

The debate reminds me of what Zynga’s CEO and founder, Mark Pincus, said at a recent event, where Kleiner Perkins announced a new fund dedicated to social.

Said Pincus:

“We are massively under-invested across the board in the ‘user-pay economy.’ There’s been this wrong assumption for first-generation Web services that it has to be free with ads. We believe in a model that is supported by users. That’s not just games and virtual goods. There’s a lot of newly created valuable digital goods and services products.”

What will these new services and products be? Will these new models be sustainable? How will they evolve over time? As I look at how it all adds up, I’ll be relying on a lot of you to tell me the important stories that illustrate how we’ve gotten here and where we are going.

And I’ll be wasting no time, as I immediately jump into one of the busiest times of the years–the holiday shopping season!

Online, of course.

[Photo Credit: donebythehandsofabrokenartist]

He thinks SecondMarket–best known for its facilitation of trading of private tech company stock–is a way to bring back a human touch. SecondMarket doesn’t necessarily replace an IPO.

But for companies like Facebook, LinkedIn and eSolar, SecondMarket trading slots into a pre-IPO dead zone driven by the longer average time to a public offering–now something like 8.8 years.

“Private to public in the past was like a light switch,” Silbert said at a Startup2Startup dinner in Palo Alto, Calif., last night. “It should be more of a dial.”

So, SecondMarket has facilitated $261 million worth of shares exchanged this year for 40 companies, compared to $96 million for all of last year driven primarily by Facebook, Zynga and LinkedIn.

SecondMarket works directly with these companies to set the terms of their own market on its system: For example, who can buy shares and when, if and when they can resell them, and whether insider trading is prohibited.

While outside investors obviously don’t have the same level of financial insight into a company as they would in the public markets, SecondMarket’s inventory consists of closely watched companies. Plus, it’s set up to attract very interested and agreeable investors, Silbert claimed. SecondMarket’s fees are quite high: Two to four percent of a transaction, with an average of $1 million to $1.5 million spent per deal.

As SecondMarket is evolving alongside the companies in its marketplace, here are some trends Silbert said he is seeing:

• Some participating companies use SecondMarket to reduce their number of shareholders so they have the breathing room to award more common stock to new people without triggering the SEC’s reporting obligations for companies with 500 shareholders.
• Rather than adopting conventional trading hours, some companies are setting specific time periods when their shares can be sold. SecondMarket is encouraging companies to set up a Dutch auction, where everybody who participates clears the same price.
• Silbert said that as a rule of thumb, the 40 companies currently trading on SecondMarket have raised Series C funding, have a valuation of at least $150 million, have more than 50 shareholders and have high growth. He said he sees an opportunity for investors to create funds to invest across the board. “Of the 40 companies, every single one of them has gone up in a pretty significant way. There’s a lot of money to be made here. Right now it’s just for accredited investors, but this is where the returns are.”
• Some companies are offering employees “hypothecation” plans: Funding loans to exercise options so employees can set themselves up to pay long-term capital gains instead of regular income. Silbert jokingly described this as a way to “basically screw the IRS.”

“Ongoing economic uncertainty has kept many limited partners and venture capital firms on the fundraising sidelines in 2010 and this hesitation is likely to continue for the remainder of the year,” NVCA President Mark Heesen said in a statement.

Certainly looks that way. Consider the chart below (click to enlarge).

Quite the downward trend, yeah? What is it that Sequoia Capital partner Michael Moritz often says? “The best time to invest is when people are cowering under their desks.” Hmm. Something like that…

A German investment group has purchased the company’s assets and has installed a new CEO, Michael Bogatzki. Here’s his introduction to Sellaband’s artists and users, who have pledged more than $3 million toward various projects to date. Check out the comments, though–some Sellaband fans/investors are awfully grumpy.

“We’re open for business in making strategic acquisitions both large and small,” Schmidt said. “Because of what we’ve seen, we have the confidence to be optimistic about our future and we’re going to invest as a result.”

And what sort of acquisitions is Google (GOOG) looking to make? Smaller strategic acquisitions mostly. Buyouts the size of YouTube or DoubleClick will be, according to Schmidt “quite infrequent.”

The Google CEO’s latest comments echo remarks he made earlier this month and back in September when he first said the company had begun seriously looking at acquisitions again. “Acquisitions are back on again at Google and we are doing our normal maneuvers, which is small companies,” he said. “My estimate would be one-a-month acquisitions and these are largely in lieu of hiring. There may be larger acquisitions, but they really are unpredictable.”

So what’s the M&A outlook? What will Google acquire next? Dynamic ad optimization start-up Teracent, perhaps? The oft-rumored Twitter? Or something else entirely?

On Thursday, Big Blue said it plans to invest $100 million over the next five years in mobile computing efforts, specifically emerging market mobility, mobile enterprise enablement and enterprise-to-end-user mobile experience. “Mobility and the associated analytics will change virtually every enterprise business process,” said Paul Bloom, chief technologist, IBM Telecom Research. “It will change the relationship between enterprises and their customers, their employees and their partners, enabling them to do business in more intelligent, efficient ways.”

A smart move for IBM, I think. With innovation in the mobile sector so focused on the everyday consumer, there’s certainly room for more corporate computing initiatives. And IBM (IBM) has the market heft and reputation to spur adoption there–particularly if it manages to develop some strong authentication and security measures.

On Thursday, Big Blue said it plans to invest $100 million over the next five years in mobile computing efforts, specifically emerging market mobility, mobile enterprise enablement and enterprise-to-end-user mobile experience. “Mobility and the associated analytics will change virtually every enterprise business process,” said Paul Bloom, chief technologist, IBM Telecom Research. “It will change the relationship between enterprises and their customers, their employees and their partners, enabling them to do business in more intelligent, efficient ways.”

A smart move for IBM, I think. With innovation in the mobile sector so focused on the everyday consumer, there’s certainly room for more corporate computing initiatives. And IBM (IBM) has the market heft and reputation to spur adoption there–particularly if it manages to develop some strong authentication and security measures.