If you thought things were going to quiet down with Yahoo now that it has installed new CEO Scott Thompson in place, think again!

That’s because of a very unusual — well, to be fair, unusual for most companies, but not for perpetually storm-tossed Yahoo — confluence of important events about to take place all at once over the next six weeks.

And, like a very dicey game of corporate Jenga, each has the ability to upend and impact the other significantly, either for the good or, well, for the bad.

Here are the four horsemen of the possible Yahapocalypse, all riding into town very soon:

Q4 Results: Yahoo will report its fourth quarter earnings on January 24th, after the markets close. While sources said the company has managed to turn around what was looking like a first-class disaster, it’s still not going to be a pretty picture when it comes to advertising growth, consumer engagement and other key metrics.

Simply put, Yahoo needs to show investors a fast-growing business. Instead, sources said the Q4 results will likely come in at the bottom of the expected range, which should be unimpressive, even though this has been business as usual at Yahoo for some time.

If Google and others have strong reports, of course, it will make the situation worse.

Along with goosing its ad business again, Yahoo needs to spur innovation and intro some cool new products in new arenas to make Silicon Valley and others perk up.

Proxy Fight?: Weak results will give a nice lift to potential efforts by activist investor Daniel Loeb of Third Point — a major Yahoo shareholder — to wage a proxy fight for control of the company. He’s already here in Silicon Valley this week searching for possible board members for an alternate slate of directors.

As I wrote earlier today, the earliest nominations for directors can be submitted is February 24. Loeb then has a month after that to submit a competing roster.

Worse for Yahoo, many of Yahoo’s major investors are mulling backing Loeb if he initiates a battle for control of the company.

There’s no doubt that Loeb is and means to be a thorn in Yahoo’s side — he already made a lot of noise about its consideration of partial investments from private equity firms, due to low share prices — until major changes take place at the company.

And by major, Loeb’s intent seems to be along these baseball lines: Throw the bums out!

Board in Flux: Speaking of the board, it’s not the pretty picture of solidarity as you might think.

Actually, no one in their right mind thinks that. This board is about as dysfunctional as they come. (It’s like that group on “American Horror Story,” minus the bald dwarf in the basement.)

Right now, several sources report, various factions are jockeying over which board members go and which stay. The Wall Street Journal reported last week on a formal search for new board members to replace outgoing ones, but it’s much more complex than just that.

While some departures seem most obvious — longtime board members Vyomesh Joshi, Arthur Kern and Gary Wilson — the really interesting part will be the possible exit of Chairman Roy Bostock.

While it now is more of a when rather than an if, many sources report, how it goes down is the key part of the move. And who will be the chairman then will be the big conundrum — either an internal candidate, such as David Kenny, or a fresh-eyed outsider.

Another question mark: Whether co-founder Jerry Yang could also move along off the board with Bostock. While Internet company founders usually stick on boards, it’s not a given, especially with all the turmoil at Yahoo, some of which is related to Yang.

For now, make no mistake, Bostock is still in charge of the board and Yang is the only real power behind that power, despite the recent influence of director Brad Smith.

But, with all the pressure by shareholders, some sources suggest that it might finally be time for some significant change at the board level, starting with the pair most associated with all its troubles.

Or, um, not.

If there is going to be any action at all, expect it before February 24th — when Loeb can start making real trouble.

Asian Solution: A lot of the above hinges on whether Bostock and Yang can deliver the promise of a deal with its long disgruntled Asian partners, Alibaba Group and SoftBank.

The trio is now engaged on negotiations about a tax-free deal, in which Yahoo would sell back some of its stakes in its Asian properties and get money and other operating assets in return.

While it’s good news that the talks are finally proceeding with some level of normal functionality, it’s still a complex situation and one with a lot of outstanding questions.

Most important: Which operating assets will be bought in the deal to hand over to Yahoo? And also, what will the valuations be?

Sources close to the situation said that the talks remain slow-going and frustrating — “The stop-and-go of all time,” joked one person involved. But they are moving forward, which is no small thing when it comes to these three.

That’s critical for Yahoo, which can ill afford to disappoint shareholders if no lucrative, cash-rich deal happens in Asia. And, it needs to happen before Loeb can act on a proxy fight too, since a successful end to its Asian issues will negate his momentum dramatically.

Oh Yeah, Running the Core Business Stuff: As usual, a full and fraught month for Yahoo and its directors, who have other things to do, I assume.

But not me and not new CEO Thompson. By the way, the former eBay exec will presumably be very busy doing some significant rejiggering of the core Yahoo business in the meantime.

Could that mean a new product direction for Yahoo, for example, around data? Could it mean a passel of new execs? Could it mean layoffs?

Or, could it mean Thompson will finally solve the ultimate sword-in-the-stone question: What is Yahoo?

And that, in the end, will be the real victory.

The potential acquisition of ATI Technologies Inc., a Canadian graphics company, by chip maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc. was so secret that the project was at first code-named “Supernova,” and then “Go Big,” said Anil Kumar, a former McKinsey & Co. consultant who advised AMD on the deal. In discussions, AMD was referred to as “Los Angeles” and ATI was called “San Antonio,” he said.

But for months before the deal was announced in July 2006, Mr. Kumar testified, he had been discussing AMD’s plans with Mr. Rajaratnam. Mr. Kumar has testified that Mr. Rajaratnam had been paying him $500,000 a year for inside information, which was reinvested in Galleon through an account in India under his housekeeper’s name.

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And while a search for Meyer’s replacement is underway, I’m told it could easily extend into the summer.

It didn’t take long for rumors about “takeover chatter” concerning AMD to emerge, and briefly yesterday, Dell was mentioned as a possible buyer. AMD shares traded up 4 percent for part of the day but closed down 3 cents during the regular session. Dell more or less shot down the rumor. During its earnings conference call, CEO Michael Dell, answering a question on acquisitions, said, “…we’re looking for relatively smaller sized ingredient acquisitions where we can leverage them with our substantial customer access and distribution.” With AMD currently trading at a valuation north of $6 billion with about $2.2 billion in long-term debt, it’s not the kind of target that would qualify as “smaller sized.”

There will always be rumors of this sort about the perennial number two in the PC microprocessor business. Those who trade on them don’t get something fundamental about AMD: That it would be a complicated company to buy and to own.

Any deal to acquire AMD will necessarily include a third party: Intel. For decades Intel and AMD have operated under a series of patent cross-license agreements that give AMD access to the crown jewels of Intel’s intellectual property, including the x86 instruction set. These patents are on the technology that make a PC a PC, and they are fundamental to the success, or failure, of both companies.

When AMD first sought to spin off its manufacturing operations into the company that became GlobalFoundries, Intel asserted that AMD couldn’t assign access to these patents to a third party without its say-so. This dispute ultimately got the two companies talking and resulted in what I like to call the Treaty of Maui, the settlement of a sweeping antitrust dispute in 2009, a story I reported at the time for BusinessWeek.

There are, however, some limits governing Intel’s conduct in this scenario. When it settled an antitrust case against it last year, Intel agreed to hold off on suing any company that buys one of its competitors for a year, in order to hold “good faith negotiations” over the terms of that patent cross-license agreement. What this all means is that any company that first concludes a deal to buy AMD will then have to pivot and face the possibility of lengthy negotiations with Intel that could, if not successful, end in a costly and distracting patent lawsuit.

Intel may turn out to be willing to play ball, and cut a reasonable deal with any new owner, but the fact remains that every so often the cross-license arrangement has to be renewed. And that’s not to say a determined buyer couldn’t ultimately cut through all this and get a deal done. Dell has $15 billion in cash and could conceivably get a deal done, and being an AMD customer could arguably benefit from owning AMD over the long term, but it has signaled that it’s not interested, and probably never was in the first place.

There are other considerations: AMD is 20 percent owned by the Mubadala Development Company, the investment arm of the Arab Emirate of Abu Dhabi, which changes the potential deal dynamic a bit. Then there’s the big question concerning the wisdom of competing with Intel. As AMD’s prior CEOs will tell you, simply grappling with Intel in the marketplace is a dangerous, thankless job.

But the complication of the Intel cross-license agreement alone should be enough to give any company mulling an AMD buyout serious pause. At the same time it should serve as food for thought for anyone wanting to trade on the latest AMD buyout rumor. This surely is not the last.

They shouldn’t be.

Pandora has always been up front about the fact that royalties are its biggest expense. And that those fees increase in lockstep with the music service’s popularity.

But while spending half of every dollar it brings in on royalties is a burden, it could be worse. A lot worse.

Prior to the summer of 2009, when Pandora and other Web services negotiated a new royalty deal, Pandora’s music bill was more than 100 percent of its revenues.

Check out this table from Pandora’s S-1, which breaks out each line item in its P&L as a percent of revenue. Notice how brutal the first two quarters of 2009 were. And see how much more tolerable (or at least less awful) they became after July 2009, when Pandora got its new rates (click image to enlarge):

See? Now 50 percent doesn’t look that bad.

And while Pandora’s music fees are hefty, the system that generates those bills is really one of the company’s strengths.

That’s because unlike other music services, from Apple’s iTunes to Spotify, Pandora doesn’t have to negotiate with individual labels and publishers to use their stuff.

Instead, it takes advantage of a U.S. law that created a “compulsory license” for Internet radio. That allows anyone to stream any recorded music they want, as long as they’re willing to pay for it. And as long as they’re functioning as a “Webcaster” and not an on-demand “interactive service.”

The advantages of using the compulsory license are huge. It means Pandora never had to ask the big labels for permission to use their stuff, or pay out giant advances or equity stakes to get a deal done.

While the licenses do come with restrictions–that’s why Pandora doesn’t let listeners request individual songs, and limits the number of times users can skip a song per hour, etc.- they haven’t dissuaded some 80 million people from using the service.

Those licenses don’t exist outside of the U.S., which is one reason Web radio services are such a rarity everywhere else, and why Pandora may struggle with international expansion.

And the fees that Pandora does pay will escalate each year until 2015, when it has to negotiate a new royalty agreement with the music industry.

It’s always possible that the rates will get significantly worse for Webcasters then, and that Pandora ends up in the shape it was in prior to the summer of 2009.

But for the next four years, at least, Pandora thinks it can work with the music bills its users are generating. Now we’ll see if investors agree.

HP has agreed to let Time Warner’s publishing unit provide subscriptions for magazines on the device maker’s new tablet, due out this summer, according to a Time Inc. source.

Time Inc. will initially sell four magazines via the HP device: Sports Illustrated, Time, Fortune and People.

HP is about to show off the new device, built using Palm’s webOS platform, at an event today, so we should get a few more details then.

But for now the deal means that HP is the only tablet maker to give a big publisher the subscription terms it wants. Time Inc. and other publishers had expected to sell subscriptions via Apple’s iPad/iTunes ecosystem last summer, but those plans fell apart, and negotiations haven’t gone far since then. The crucial sticking point was control and access to subscribers’ billing information and other data that are crucial to publishers’ business model.

Publishers are also expecting to work with Google and its Android platform, but have yet to announce anything.

It’s worth noting that this arrangement is between HP and Time Inc., and not Next Issue Media, the joint venture that is also supposed to represent publishers in their discussions with tablet makers.

“They have given us a solution to the Messenger service,” India’s home affairs minister, Palaniappan Chidambaram, said today. “We will insist that they give us the solution for the enterprise service too.”

And RIM will likely insist it can’t. Unless the situation has suddenly changed from last week, when VP Robert Crow reiterated the company’s claim that it cannot decipher the encrypted corporate emails sent over its network. “We can’t give a solution for enterprise services,” he said. “It’s not possible to do so, because the keys of that service are with the corporate enterprises and corporate entity that owns the server.”

So what, then? That’s not yet clear, but we may know more shortly. Said Chidambaram, “I think a decision [about the future of RIM in India] will be taken today by the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Telecom Ministry.”

How do you say “deadline extension” in Hindi?

Oh, to be misquoted!

Last week, a lot of folks on Twitter and elsewhere thought I had called Groupon co-founder and CEO Andrew Mason a “corporate douche bag” onstage in an interview gone badly awry.

While such a comment is not beyond me, the fact of the matter is that he called himself that.

At the DLD conference put on by Burda Media in Munich, Germany, I interviewed Mason, along with Foursquare co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley, about local online markets that they both now dominate online.

During the session, I pressed Mason about his aborted acquisition negotiations with Google, as well as future IPO plans for the Chicago-based social buying service.

When he demurred, I let it go, but then the ever-voluable Mason decided to explain himself.

“I used to watch people doing like what I just did on TV and be like, ‘What a corporate douche bag, I’m never going to be like that.’ And here I’m doing it. You made me do it!”

I didn’t, but thanks for the credit, Andrew!

After I pressed him on the Google talks, he tried the kiss-and-not-tell excuse.

“It’s very personal between the companies. You’re exploring each other and then everybody wants us to do that out in the open. We don’t have all the answers yet. We’re figuring things out. “

Thus, putting words in his mouth, I concluded:

“Sorry to put words in your mouth, but you’re basically saying ‘We’re a fucked-up group of people behind the scenes, but please invest in our IPO.’”

Mason’s answer: “Yes!”

I’m glad I cleared that up!

In any case, here’s the full video of one of the more enjoyable interviews I have done in awhile:

At a very first glance, some of the new rules imposed by the feds might seem like they require the new company to offer up programming to any online player that wants to pay up.

And technically, they do. But the new rules have plenty of conditions and limits. So the bottom line is you’re not much more likely to get access to “30 Rock” via YouTube, or CNBC via iTunes, then you were before.

The new FCC and DOJ rules do give, say, Google the ability to buy access to some of NBC U shows or channels. But it would require Comcast’s competitors to do the same thing, first.

That is: Unless the people who are reluctant to put their stuff online because they don’t want to upset Comcast go ahead and put their stuff online, Comcast doesn’t have to, either. So it’s theoretically possible, but not probable.

And if it happens, it will happen haltingly. If Viacom sells someone online access to its MTV lineup of reality shows, that might require Comcast to offer up its reality show lineup on Bravo. But it wouldn’t entitle an online outlet to the police procedurals on USA.

The government also gives the option to, say, Netflix, to set up shop as another cable operator, and buy access to all of NBC Universal’s programming. But it would have to buy all of it–just like Time Warner Cable and Cablevision do when they make a carriage deal for NBC U’s shows.

And again, Comcast wouldn’t have to do that unless its peers did. Which means that if Netflix really wanted to set up shop as a direct competitor of the cable guys, it can do so. But it would have to operate exactly like the cable guys, just like the satellite guys did when they entered the market a couple of decades ago.

So if Netflix, or Apple or whoever really wants to offer a full suite of cable programming, at cable prices, it could. But that would be very, very expensive: Analyst Rich Greenfield estimates that the bill for NBC U’s programming alone would run a new entrant $1 billion a year.

Just as, or even more, important, is that those kind of bundled, take-it-or-leave-it deals are exactly the kind of thing that the cord-cutting crowd complains about.

They don’t want to have to pay for USA and Bravo and Syfy and MSNBC–they want to pick and choose channels, or shows. And pay a lot less.

“I don’t think cord-cutting was a major focus” of negotiations, Comcast EVP David Cohen said during a press conference this afternoon. And that may be true!

But the net result reads very much as if Comcast wanted to make sure the government didn’t force it to break its business model. And if that was the case, it got what it wanted.

But it’s hard not to make news when you turn down a $6 billion buyout offer from Google.

Meanwhile, Tim O’Shaughnessy, CEO and co-founder of LivingSocial.com, has remained relatively quiet. As the head of the second-largest company in the local, group-buying space, it wasn’t because he didn’t have anything to talk about.

Just about 24 hours before Groupon’s rejection leaked out, LivingSocial announced it had secured $175 million from Amazon, and $183 million in total new investments. In that same release, the Washington, D.C.-based company confirmed that it was booking revenues of more than $1 million a day on average and is projected to book well over $500 million in revenue in 2011.

To be sure, Groupon and LivingSocial are pulling away from the pack when it comes to defining the nascent daily-deals market. O’Shaughnessy, who claims that the two have 90 percent market share combined, said: “I think the idea conceptually that you can buy things online and go interact with merchants in offline is starting to take hold and be widespread. But it’s really been less than two years…It’s definitely the first couple of innings right now.”

Here’s our interview with O’Shaughnessy:

eMoney: Give me an update on where your business is today.

O’Shaughnessy: As of yesterday [Dec. 16], we were in 136 markets. We launched five new markets yesterday. We tend to do them in batches, and five or eight will go out at once. Overall, we’ve been averaging a market a day.

What about up-to-date figures on uniques?

We are at more than 10 million, or I think the last number we said publicly was 12 million. That’s primarily Canada and the U.S. that are signed up for the daily deal. We are in five countries today. [LivingSocial is in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Ireland and Australia.]

What’s the competition like internationally?

Groupon has been acquisitive, and they’ve become established in lots of places. The U.S. is the most mature by a large margin, and there’s some countries with a few players that have established themselves, and finally, there’s some countries out there that’s a fairly green-field environment.

It’s fairly established that Groupon is No. 1, and LivingSocial is No. 2. But there’s a huge debate about who is No. 3?

There’s a pretty big gap. One of the things I’ve said is that it’s a pretty easy business to get into. All you have to do is know how to process a payment, and have a brother-in-law that has a restaurant that is willing to participate. But it’s a hard business to scale.

We have a competitive spreadsheet with 200 names on it, and if you do a couple of filters on how many deals someone has run, starting with 100, the vast majority drop off. And then if you up it to 500, you are up to the top two. It’s a pretty big drop-off.

Six months ago, we [Groupon and LivingSocial] collectively had 90 percent market share, and last month that was still true.

In that time, the market got bigger, and some others have grown for sure, but our market share has grown quite a bit. The signal-to-noise ratio is off, relative to who is doing what.

Is that what gives you confidence?

That’s one data point to look at, but what gives me confidence is what I see and I know we do every day. The degree of effort that goes into it and how many things can go wrong when you are managing merchant relationships, that’s what gives me the confidence.

What about the critics who say there’s no loyalty in this business–a consumer will always go with the provider who has the best deal for the business they want to visit.

There’s some loyalty that’s there, and I think people buy through us pretty regularly. They know that it’s going to be a merchant that’s vetted, and we work really hard at that. We are a good solid legit company that’s able to deliver. People place value on that. The brand matters, and enhancing user trust is an important thing.

What about the critics who say the margin will erode over time?

I think that the erosion of margins is just like any single other business if you stop innovating and do the same thing over and over. If we continue to innovate and provide additional value to merchants, the value per dollar increases. I don’t tend to be hugely concerned about the margin front.

The conduit has been 50 percent off a service, but there’s additional value we can provide to merchant communities and consumer communities. Overall, we aren’t not going to do the same thing over and over.

Can you give me an example?

We’ve started working with merchants in completely different ways, and sometimes we are going and operating events. We just did something called “tubbing and tasting,” where we worked with three merchants.

You could pick 10 to 12 Saturdays, and you’d meet in Midtown Manhattan, where a coach bus would take you to a snow hill, where you’d go snow tubbing. At the lodge, there was a bonfire and s’mores, and a beer tasting with a bunch of microbrews.

In that circumstance, we worked with three merchants–a coach company, a ski mountain and a brewery–in an entirely different way than how they associate with folks. I think it cost $60 and it sold out virtually every Saturday in January and February. I don’t see anyone else doing that, by finding unique hand-picked, curated ways to work with local businesses.

So, how will you be working with Amazon?

Right now, our first step is focusing on getting the relationship from a financial perspective locked down, and we’ll figure it out at a later point.

I assume the funding will go toward expansion?

We will be very aggressive on additional market launches as we build up our brand and user base. It’s very much a global game, and this is a global opportunity. We’ve gone from one country to five, and we’ll likely continue to expand globally.

A lot of this year was laying a foundation and the building blocks, and adding more value for the merchants, like LivingSocial Escapes. It’s on fire right now. It’s a weekend getaway, or a “staycation.” They are curated packages that are within a short driving distance from where you live. We also have LivingSocial Family Edition, which has things parents can do with their kids.

Your plans include tripling your employee count next year to 1,800 and more than doubling the number of cities you are in to 300?

We will continue to be pretty aggressive. Earlier this year, we were in six markets and we added 130 markets this year. We are a little more mature and one would hope that means we could move faster next year. We were around 30 employees, and over 600 now. It’s been a pretty crazy ramp-up.

The timing of your investment was so closely timed to Groupon-Google’s negotiations.

I’m a firm believer that we can’t control what other people do. Obviously, the deal we did with Amazon takes time to put together. We had decided awhile ago, if we want to become the biggest player in local commerce, we should be aligned with the biggest e-commerce company. That’s a lot of [what was] driving it. The timing was very coincidental.

So, no regrets?

No, not at all. We are thrilled and excited and expect to gain more market share over the coming year.

“We are hearing that Verizon…may be willing to pay for exclusivity to itself and AT&T. For these reasons, Verizon could be more willing to give in to Apple’s terms,” Wu said in a note to clients this morning, adding that the iPhone’s continued success has undoubtedly given Apple the upper hand in its negotiations with the carrier. “Apple is back in the driver’s seat with a record 14.1 million iPhone shipments in the September quarter helping AT&T gain share against Verizon over the last two quarters as Android starts to lose some of its luster (at least at Verizon). In addition, our sources indicate that Verizon does not believe the pending launch of BlackBerry 6 on its network is likely to have a material impact.”

An interesting bit of speculation. If Apple were to win concessions from Verizon and AT&T to keep the iPhone exclusive to those carriers, it might be able to drastically expand the device’s distribution in the States and keep its margins in line at the same time. As Wu writes, “This is important as many, including ourselves, have been concerned that Verzion iPhone economics could be less favorable given the strength of Android and higher cost of components, particularly those associated with CDMA.”

That said, with Google’s Android OS gaining market share so quickly it might be a better move strategically to sacrifice a bit of margin to bring the iPhone to more carriers and temper its rival’s growth.

Negotiations between the two companies heated up over the past week but Groupon’s board, many of whom are investors, was divided on whether to accept Google’s offer.

The company continued to consider remaining independent and pursuing an IPO in the future, people familiar with the matter have said.

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Now that Amazon’s $175 million investment in social buying service LivingSocial has been confirmed, all eyes will inevitably be turning to Google, as it nudges closer to completing a blockbuster acquisition deal with the category leader, Groupon.

But, according to several sources, the Google-Groupon hookup still has roughly a half-dozen issues remaining.

Previously, BoomTown’s Kara Swisher reported that Google has offered $5.3 billion for Groupon, which, with earnouts, would rise to $6 billion.

A deal of that size would be Google’s largest acquisition yet, so attention to details is warranted. Of course, negotiations could collapse at any time, but sources said the deal is currently on track.

Perhaps a major investment by Amazon, like today’s, might help clinch it.

The next order of business will be to examine whether these hefty price tags are all worth it.

Half-jokingly, LivingSocial’s two-week-old CFO John Bax said today at Business Insider’s Ignition event that valuations are not overinflated: “I think [Google is] getting a steal, I think they are underpaying…[Groupon] should hold out for $12 billion or $18 billion.”

LivingSocial has said it is currently booking an average of more than $1 million a day and is projected to ring in more than $500 million in revenue in 2011. Meanwhile, Groupon has raised about $170 million in venture funding, and is booking roughly $50 million in monthly sales, according to some estimates.

But, if the space is truly a golden opportunity, why aren’t others rushing in? So far, we haven’t heard about these deals becoming a competitive bidding process, and Microsoft and eBay have been silent on the matter.

Today, eBay made a comparatively small purchase of Milo, which catalogs the availability of millions of products in local stores so that they can be searchable by consumers online.

The General Services Administration–which oversees government procurement–will soon become the first major federal office to move to cloud-based email and calendar apps on an agency-wide basis. And it’s chosen Google Apps to do it.

A hard-won victory for Google, which beat out Microsoft for the $6.7 million five-year contract, leaving the folks up in Redmond more than a little peeved to see Office’s ubiquity in government threatened in this way.

“We are disappointed in the GSA’s internal e-mail decision,” the company said in a post to its “Why Microsoft” blog, adding that it is nonetheless “gratified that so many federal, state & local governments have chosen Microsoft to meet their business needs.”

You can almost hear the gritting teeth, can’t you? The horror of 15,000 GSA employees all using Gmail….

So again, a coup for Google, which has been working hard to push its cloud computing suite of messaging and collaboration apps to the government.

Interestingly, sources close to the negotiations tell me that the RFP (Request for Proposal) for the GSA contract was amended midway through the process to allow for offshoring of government data outside the United states–as an accommodation for Google.

Which is odd, because you’d think that if the United States government is embracing cloud computing, it would prefer the clouds in which its data is stored to be within its own borders. That Google requested and was granted the option to store GSA data offshore isn’t necessarily troubling (it must meet GSA security requirements regardless), but it is…interesting.

Google wouldn’t tell me the reason for its request, although I’ve heard it may have something to do with how the company segregates data and apps geographically. It was, however, quick to insist that it isn’t planning to offshore any U.S. government data entrusted to it–at least, currently.

Said spokesman Andrew Kovacs, “The government’s starting with Gmail and Calendar, and their data will be stored in a segregated system located in the continental United States that is exclusively for our government customers.”

Now, on to real news: There is no official news about the streaming music service’s attempt to land on U.S. shores. Spotify has yet to land a single U.S. label deal, even though it continues to insist that it will get things settled in time for a 2010 launch.

But the company has made progress with the labels in recent weeks, according to multiple sources. That’s in part because it is now willing to hand over real money, either in the form of advances or as guarantees spread throughout the life of a multiple-year contract.

How much money? Depends on who you talk to: One source thinks Spotify is now offering “tens of millions” to the labels to get a U.S. deal done; another person familiar with negotiations thinks Spotify will eventually end up spending $100 million to get the big four labels–or at least three of them–in line for a launch.

But money alone won’t get Spotify into the U.S. Or put another way: The amount of money will depend in part on the real sticking point in the negotiations–the amount of free music that Spotify users can listen to before they need to become paying subscribers.

In Europe, where Spotify has been a very big success, listeners can stream an unlimited amount of music, on demand, without ever paying a cent. But in the U.S., rival streaming services like Rhapsody, MOG and Napster generally only offer a very brief trial period of a few days before requiring that a pay wall go up.

For the past two years, Spotify has insisted that free, unlimited streaming is the only way the service will work, because that’s Spotify’s most effective marketing technique. Subscribers who do pay up get benefits like ad-free music, and the ability to port their songs to mobile devices like iPhones.

But the labels, most notably Warner Music Group, have insisted that unlimited free streams only serve to strip away their product’s remaining value–if you can listen for free on Spotify, why would you ever buy another CD or iTunes single?

“[Spotify executives] are perennially underestimating label resistance to the free stuff,” says an industry source familiar with the discussions. “And it seems the checks are either not big enough or the labels really won’t give on free.”

Until that gap gets solved–either via compromise or cash–Spotify can’t come to the U.S.

The company had recently been discussing a mid-November launch date, but unless things move quickly, that can’t happen. And even people who are optimistic about the company’s chances concede it may not get it done in time for a pre-Christmas launch, which would force things back to 2011. Spotify declined to comment.

Among the four labels, Sony appears closest to a deal, sources say–a pact is “essentially signable,” according to one source, though another insists there is nothing “executable.” Sony declined to comment. In order to launch, though, Spotify will also need Universal Music Group, the world’s biggest music company, and either Warner or EMI Music Group.

EARLIER:
One new twist in the Cablevision-News Corp. fight: News Corp. has cut off Cablevision subscribers’ access to its shows on Hulu, the video site joint venture, as well as on its own Fox.com.

Here’s a screenshot from Fortune.com columnist Seth Weintraub, taken this afternoon when he tried to watch a Fox show on the site, which is co-owned by News Corp., Disney’s ABC and GE’s NBC Universal:

News Corp.’s comment, via Fox Networks PR guy Scott Grogin: “Fox.com and Fox content on hulu is unavailable to Cablevision subscribers.”

And here’s Hulu PR rep Elisa Schreiber:

Unfortunately, we were put in a position of needing to block Fox content on Hulu in order to remain neutral during contract negotiations between Fox and Cablevision. This only includes Fox content. All other Hulu content is accessible to Cablevision internet subscribers. We regret the impact on Cablevision customers and look forward to returning Fox content to those users as soon as possible.

This is an important escalation from News Corp. (which owns this Web site) in its fight to extract more dollars from its cable partners.

In the past, cable subscribers who couldn’t get Fox shows during fee disputes were still able to watch some of them via Hulu. I know that News Corp. has discussed shutting off access to the site during past fee fights, but as far as I know this is the first time they’ve actually done it.

It’s also a logical move, at least from News Corp.’s perspective.

If it’s trying to increase the pain felt by Cablevision and its subscribers, it may as well use every tool it has. And in the past, the Web has been used against programmers like Fox in these fights: Last year, when Time Warner Cable was fighting with News Corp., it prepared a video showing customers how to find their favorite shows on sites like Hulu.

But while the move is certain to rile up the digerati (astonished industry executive to me, over the phone, just now: “That is crazy!) I’m not sure how much real impact it will have in the fight.

News Corp.’s most valuable weapon is access to the Phillies-Giants playoff game tonight, and the New York Giants-Detroit Lions game tomorrow.

Both are scheduled to air on Fox, and many of Cablevision’s three million subscribers who live in the New York area will holler loudly if they can’t see them. But they wouldn’t be able to see them on Hulu or Fox.com, anyway.

Instead, those sites are used to show reruns of Fox broadcast shows. That means Cablevision subs can’t see Sunday night’s episode of “The Simpsons” on Monday, but that’s not the same kind of impact.

The companies, which include Google Inc., Apple Inc., Intel Corp., Adobe Systems Inc., Intuit Inc. and Walt Disney Co. unit Pixar Animation, are in the final stages of negotiations with the government, according to people familiar with the matter.

The talks are still fluid, these people said, with some companies more willing to settle to avoid an antitrust case than others. If negotiations falter, both sides could be headed for a defining court battle that could help decide the legality of such arrangements throughout the U.S. economy.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The gist: The two sides continue to make the same arguments they’ve made in the past. Viacom (VIA) says Google’s (GOOG) video site intentionally violated its copyrights. And YouTube says it is protected by federal law and that Viacom didn’t care about copyright violations until business negotiations broke down.

Don’t believe me? Feel free to check it out for yourself: The two sides have helpfully arranged most of their documents here and here. It’s cheaper than Ambien.

Or you can just enjoy this representative excerpt from YouTube’s filing, in which it argues that the court shouldn’t read anything into the fact that its employees referred to Viacom as “copyright bastards” and “a-holes” during chat sessions (click to enlarge the text, in all its PG-13 glory):

Have a great weekend!

One problem: That service is supposed to feature content from publications other than those owned by Murdoch. And sources familiar with News Corp.’s plans tell me Murdoch has yet to sign partners on to the venture.

News Corp. officials do say Murdoch is hopeful about bringing on Gannett (GCI), the publisher behind USA Today and 82 smaller papers. A person familiar with talks between the companies described them as “late stage.” A spokeswoman for News Corp. (NWS), which owns this Web site, declined to comment; Gannett officials didn’t respond to a request for comment.

And it’s possible that Murdoch’s lieutenants, led by digital boss Jon Miller, have other deals in the works that they’re close to closing.

That’s certainly what Murdoch hinted at in the prepared remarks he delivered at the start of his May 4 earnings call:

Today, we are in final discussions with a number of publishers, device makers and technology companies…and we will soon develop an innovative subscription model that will deliver digital content to consumers…wherever and whenever they want it.

Later, in response to a reporter’s question about the subscription plan, Murdoch went further, announcing that his company would be “giving a press conference in about three to four weeks which we hope will have some important announcements in.”

But that would be a more effective press conference if Murdoch could announce that he has convinced other big publishers to embrace his model. Right now, at least, he can’t say that.

This might seem like a classic example of Murdoch going off script during an earnings call, which happens with some frequency. But in this case, News Corp. officials have been working on a similar timetable behind the scenes. For instance, I’m told that they have been casting about for a public relations agency to help promote the plan and have been telling prospective candidates about their proposed schedule.

So it seems that Murdoch may have been intentionally placing his cart pre-horse in hopes that doing so would speed negotiations along. Can’t wait to see if he’s right.

“Business is business,” the publication wrote. “But when it involves political tricks, business will come to an end soon. The more Google politicizes the issue, the less room it leaves for itself for further negotiations. And netizens here, who are known for their inclination for novelties, will simply move on to other search engines if Google pulls out of a large and growing market. The US company will be the biggest loser in all of this.”

China Daily’s editorial echoed a similar piece published a day earlier by China’s official Xinhua News Agency. It, too, accused Google (GOOG) of acting as a foreign-policy arm of the U.S. government.
The company is “politicizing” its threatened withdrawal from the country, Xinhua said, adding that accusations that Beijing had supported a hacker attack against the company are “groundless.”

“It is a great pity that the Google case told us the company’s aim of entering the Chinese market seems not for commercial reasons but to act as a tool to penetrate into the Chinese culture as well as into Chinese people’s values,” Xinhua wrote. “It is ridiculous and arrogant for an American company to attempt to change China’s laws. The country doesn’t need a politicized Google or Google’s politics.”

And then there was this from Sing Tao Daily: “I’m not sure if Google knows that its arrogance can easily remind the Chinese people of the ‘big powers’ that cracked open China’s door by warships and cannons in the 19th century….The only difference was military weapons in the past and Internet service today.”

Clearly, tensions between Google and China are escalating, and quickly. At this point, Google’s closure of its Chinese search engine seems more an inevitability than anything else.

Over the weekend, Vice Minister Miao Wei of China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology told Xinhua, the state-run news agency, that “[Google] never informed the ministry that it was planning to withdraw from China, [nor has it] filed reports over alleged Internet regulation and cyberattacks to the ministry or requests for negotiations.”

Odd to hear, considering Google’s rather definitive Jan. 12 announcement that it will stop censoring its Chinese search site and may withdraw from the country altogether. More so given the comments of another MIIT minister just a day earlier. On Friday, Li Yizhong told reporters attending the National People’s Congress that the ministry is in talks with Google about its plans to operate an unfiltered search engine in China.

Sources close to the situation confirm that this is the case: Google (GOOG) has been in private talks with Beijing, though not formally. Of course, though nearly two months have passed since Google first said it would stop censoring search results in China, queries to Google.cn continue to return censored results.

As I noted here a month ago, “we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results” is about as definitive a statement as they come. Is Google going to follow through or not? Why all the mystery and dawdling?

Could it be that Google is now backing off its initial threat? Because, as Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz suggested last week, that threat seems increasingly empty the longer this thing drags out. “It looked to me like it was more of a statement than an action,” she told CNBC. “If they wanted to pull out, they should have pulled out.”

Reached for comment, Google offered none beyond this now typical refrain: “Thanks for reaching out, but as you might suspect, we will not be commenting on any discussions with the Chinese Government.”

PREVIOUSLY:

• Chinese Scientists Recalibrate Google’s Evil Scale
• Chinese Schools Tied to Attacks on Google? Where’d You Read That, Mad Magazine?
• World War WAN: Google Hack Traced to Schools in China
• Nearly a Month After Debut, Google’s “New” Approach to China Still a Lot Like the Old One
• Google CEO: Ask Not What Google Can Do for China–Ask What China Can Do for Google
• China on “Google Farce”: Our Internet Is Open
• China to Google: No Worries, We Were Planning to Clone Those Android Phones Anyway
• U.S. State Department to Complain to China About Google Hack. Not That China’s Going to Listen.
• Microsoft: “Don’t Be Evil” Is Google’s Motto, Not Ours
• What’s the Chinese Word for Bing? Google Threatens to Leave China.

In his memo, Hustinx criticizes the secrecy of the talks from which ACTA arose and worries that as an international treaty to fight digital piracy, the agreement is in danger of running afoul of European Union privacy and data protection law requirements.

“Privacy and data protection must be taken into account from the very beginning of the negotiations, not when the schemes and procedures have been defined and agreed and it is therefore too late to find alternative, privacy compliant solutions,” Hustinx wrote.

“While intellectual property is important to society and must be protected,” he added, “it should not be placed above individuals’ fundamental rights to privacy, data protection, and other rights such as presumption of innocence, effective judicial protection and freedom of expression.”

Evidently, that’s exactly where IP has been placed in the current draft of ACTA, which seems to be designed to encourage ISPs to monitor their customers’ Internet use for illegal file-sharing and potentially, to blackball repeat offenders on their networks.

“Insofar as the current draft of ACTA includes or at least indirectly pushes for three strikes Internet disconnection policies, ACTA would profoundly restrict the fundamental rights and freedoms of European citizens, most notably the protection of personal data and privacy,” Hustinx wrote.

“The EDPS takes the view that three strikes Internet disconnection policies are not necessary to achieve the purpose of enforcing intellectual property rights,” he concluded. “The EDPS is convinced that alternative, less intrusive solutions exist or, at least, that the envisaged policies can be performed in a less intrusive manner or at a more limited scope, notably through the form of targeted ad hoc monitoring.”

“As a company deeply involved in the digitization of education and business information, we were as interested as anyone in the launch of the new device, although we were never part of the launch event and never in a position to confirm details about the device ahead of time,” Steven Weiss, VP of Corporate Communications for The McGraw-Hill Companies said in a statement given to Digital Daily.

“On Tuesday afternoon Mr. McGraw appeared on CNBC in a wide ranging interview to discuss our earnings announcement and growth projections for 2010. His speculative comments about Apple’s pending launch, which he shared earlier in the day in a call with investors, were simply intended to suggest that if the new device were to use iPhone applications, many of our education products would be compatible with the technology and could be made easily available on it.”

Concluding, Weiss wrote, “Unfortunately, it seems that many mistakenly interpreted his comments as being more specific to yesterday’s announcement. It is also important to note that only the products of trade publishers were featured in the launch event. Our digital education programs are not in that category and were never part of those negotiations.”

It would seem, then, that contrary to other reports making the rounds, McGraw-Hill was not abruptly excised from Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs’s presentation yesterday after Terry McGraw’s disclosure on CNBC. And indeed, multiple sources close to the situation say that the CEO was not given a demo of the iPad before its launch and that McGraw-Hill (MHP) was never intended to be part of iPad launch event in San Francisco.

In retrospect, all McGraw really did on CNBC was to recycle and recast some comments made during the company’s Tuesday morning earnings conference call. Reading over those remarks, it seems plausible that he was simply excitedly regurgitating the same collection of rumor and speculation we all were during the run-up to the launch event.
 
“In the near future, you will undoubtedly see a McGraw-Hill e-book for the college market running on an Apple tablet,” McGraw said during the company’s earnings call. “All our titles on CourseSmart, the industry e-book consortium, are already available to students on an iPhone operating system. That’s because CourseSmart developed an iPhone application last summer with support from Apple. The goal was to have core educational content available on the iPhone operating system, which also makes it possible for e-books to run on new Apple devices using that system.”
 
Continuing, McGraw said, “Consider then the Apple tablet computer, which will be introduced shortly. There is a lot of secrecy about the introduction, but many expect that the Apple device will use the iPhone operating system. If that’s the case, we are confident that our CourseSmart e-books should run well right out of the box on any Apple Tablet. Stay tuned.”

Similar to what he told CNBC, right? Thing is, McGraw spoke with quite a bit more certainty during that interview. He said:

“Yes, they’ll make their announcement tomorrow on this one. We have worked with Apple for quite a while. And the Tablet is going to be based on the iPhone operating system and so it will be transferable.”

Those remarks don’t seem entirely speculative to me. Still, what was McGraw saying that we hadn’t already heard before? Maybe he reads the rumor sites too.

Last year’s version featured Time Warner Cable facing off against Viacom (VIA). This year, it’s Time Warner Cable (TWC) versus News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox channel. (Disclosure: News Corp. owns Dow Jones, which owns this Web site).

If you’re looking for a  variation on a theme, note that Fox is trying to get paid for its Fox broadcast channels, which the cable guys traditionally don’t pay for, at least not directly. But big picture, it’s the same pool of money, divvied up by the same companies and funded by the same people–Time Warner Cable customers like me–who don’t really have a say. Nothing new here.

I have noticed one difference. Last year, the Time Warner Cable guys suggested that if Viacom shows really did disappear from customers’ homes, it would be easy enough to find them by going online. And the company promised to help its customers figure out just how to find the likes SpongeBob and Jon Stewart on the Web, if it came to that.

This year, we haven’t heard this particular threat. But for a lot of people, Web TV is a much more plausible alternative than it was 12 months ago. What gives?

Nothing, says TWC spokesman Alexander Dudley. He just hasn’t gotten around to talking about it yet.

“We have plans, if it goes on, to direct customers to specific content” on the Web, Dudley says. One of the reasons it hasn’t come up yet, he adds, is because it’s so obvious–everyone knows that if you want to watch Fox shows on the Web, you go to Hulu, the video site the company owns with GE’s (GE) NBC and Disney’s (DIS) ABC.

“Part of the reason that we find their demands outrageous is because the content is available for free online,” Dudley says. “And if it goes on, we plan to show our customers how to connect their PCs to a TV using an S cable.”

Dudley won’t spell it out, but he’s essentially repeating one of the cable industry’s main criticisms of Hulu: Handing out free TV on the Web devalues the stuff programmers try to sell to the cable guys.

We’ll see. I think that if push really does come to shove, casual Hulu users might discover that the site is no longer the treasure chest of free TV they thought it was.

For starters, there’s broadcast stuff that never gets to Hulu in the first place–like live events. In Fox’s case, that’s a very big deal, since its January schedule includes both NFL football playoffs and the start of “American Idol.”

And when it comes to cable programming like “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” or “Nip/Tuck”–stuff that Time Warner Cable is already paying for–Hulu’s owners have been careful not to put much on the Web in the first place. Go try to watch “Sons of Anarchy,” the FX biker show on Hulu and you’ll end up pretty frustrated.

So here’s a question for Time Warner Cable: Do you really want to send angry customers to Hulu–and then have to deal with them a second time, when they find they still can’t watch their favorite shows, S cable and all?

Another thought: What if Fox simply yanked the programming it supplies to Hulu from Time Warner Cable users? Is that doable–either technically or contractually? I’m lobbing the question to News Corp. and will let you know if I get a response.

Best bet: Just like last year, this year’s fight will likely go up until the Dec. 31 deadline. And then it will get resolved, with the cable guys paying more than they wanted and the network getting less.

Then again, there is dark muttering that is really different this time because both sides have important precedents at stake, etc. I wouldn’t put much stock in that yet–what else are they going to say?–but if it pans out, it will be interesting to see what role Hulu ends up playing.

Say this for Eric Schmidt–he’s keeping his word. This fall, the Google CEO said his company was getting back into M&A, and he has indeed been making a slew of deals at varying price points.

The most recent: The company is in talks to purchase local review site Yelp, at a price that reportedly could top $500 million.

If the deal does go through, Google will have snapped up seven companies since August, for what I estimate is a total of $1.5 billion. That’s about what it dropped in one fell swoop on YouTube, more than three years ago.

Yelp is being repped by George Boutros from Credit Suisse First Boston, a source familiar with the negotiations tells me. The talks were first reported by TechCrunch.

When Google (GOOG) buys a company, it generally wants its technology and the people behind it and is less interested in the existing business itself or the audience it has accumulated.

Interesting to see if this is the case with Yelp, whose main asset appears to be a dedicated community of users who chatter about restaurants, stores, etc., and have churned out some eight million reviews in 30 cities.

Those reviews help draw local advertisers, and that’s a market that Google, along with everyone else on the Web, has been trying to crack for years, with limited success.

The major problem seems to be that local merchants are still most comfortable buying ads in venues they already understand, like Yellow Pages directories. And they like to buy them from humans–not from the self-serve platforms that Web players would like them to use.

I don’t know if Yelp has cracked the code here, either. But perhaps Google thinks the data Yelp generates is valuable enough to justify a big buy.

Of course, Facebook and Microsoft (MSFT) are intensely interested in local advertising too, so they are logical bidders as well.

And normally, you’d include Yahoo (YHOO) in this list, but with a couple of exceptions, the Carol Bartz era has been about selling, not buying. Maybe that will change now that the company has a new M&A boss.

By the way: If Google does get Yelp, bear in mind that the deal will almost certainly generate some kind of regulatory review, as the company’s AdMob already has.

Google’s (GOOG) bid represents a 57 percent premium over On2′s share price before the deal was announced on Aug. 5, but these shareholders claim the company and its video compression IP are worth more and argue that its board should have held out for a more lucrative offer. As one said during an August On2 earnings call, “We have the world class technology and we just sold it for just sixty cents.”

While it’s true that On2′s stock once traded as high as $3.99–back in 2007–that hasn’t been the case lately. And much as the company’s dissident shareholders would like to believe that Google’s demand of exclusivity in the negotiations and “no shop” provisions in the merger agreement prevented On2 from receiving competing buyout offers, that doesn’t seem to the case either. As On2 noted in a merger FAQ issued today, no other companies have inquired about a potential acquisition since the Google deal was announced. From that document:

Did the mid-cap sized publicly traded company in the semiconductor industry referenced in the proxy/prospectus that contacted On2 in late June 2009 express any interest in a transaction with On2 after the merger transaction with Google was announced?

No. On2 did, however, receive an email from such company following the announcement of the Google transaction in which company stated the following: “Congratulations on the transaction. Nice premium to market.”

Well, there you go.

Perhaps, then, On2 is not worth more than what Google proposes to pay for it. Obviously that’s the opinion of the company’s Board of Directors, which is literally begging shareholders to vote in favor of the merger. Said the board: “If the proposed merger with Google is not consummated, On2 may be forced to revert to a business model and strategy that are uncertain given On2’s size and limited resources and for which there can be no assurance On2 will ever achieve or sustain profitability.”