By Tim Seymour

Looks like Facebook may have finalized its choice of a local partner as it gears up to create a social networking site in China, and Baidu (BIDU) is the winner.

Sohu (SOHU) is reporting that Mark Zuckerberg and Baidu CEO Robin Li have been talking about putting together a social network and have signed an initial agreement to cooperate.

BIDU is already the Google (GOOG) of China in terms of the web search market. If it can become the Facebook of China as well, look out.

This may be another lost opportunity for GOOG to compete on the global stage, The U.S. search giant has been effectively forced out of China — one of the biggest and fastest-growing web markets — and now

News Corp (NWSA) acquired MySpace.com in July 2005 for $580 million in cash. After some early successes, highlighted by a three year $900 million advertising deal with Google (GOOG), MySpace has fallen out of favor and been eclipsed by Facebook and Twitter. In early 2011, News Corp eliminated half of MySpace's workforce and studied strategic alternatives for the troubled segment.

According to comScore Media, as of June 2010, MySpace had 101 million unique global users. As of February 2011, the number of worldwide users fell to 63 million. This is a staggering drop, but it is still an undeniably large user base. In early 2011, Facebook raised funds through Goldman Sachs that valued the social media site at $50 billion. With 500 million users, this values Facebook at roughly $100/user. Based on this estimate, MySpace's 63 million user accounts could be worth $6.3 billion. Of course, this is a bad

Arbitron (ARB) and Edison Research released a report on Tuesday that bodes well for the future of internet radio and smartphone access to media, but offers mixed results for Sirius XM (SIRI).

The study used a random sample of 2,020 respondents, 12 years of age and older, culled via random digit dialing and from Arbitron Fall 2010 diary keepers. Telephone interviews, which included both landlines and mobile phones, and diary keepers represented 54 and 46 percent of the sample, respectively. Researchers conducted 480 of the interviews with cell phone respondents, according to the Edison website.

To almost nobody's surprise, the study found that smartphone ownership tripled over the last two years. That's just the beginning of the bad news for Sirius XM if you buy into the notion that internet radio and streaming from a smartphone could hurt the satellite radio provider's position.

• Weekly use of all types of online

The Knight Foundation has issued a call to all philanthropic foundations to seriously consider funding efforts to preserver quality journalism and the development of media skills in the new digital frontier. The goal is to get a wider range of funders involved in supporting media and journalism projects, which Knight believes can increase the number of informed citizens and advocates for change.

The foundation has produced a guide to help potential funders to understand.

But there are other reasons for foundations to support the development of digital media initiatives. In the future, every company has to become more of a media company. Now that they can be in much more direct touch with their customers, due to the growth of social media and digital platforms that allow everyone access to much more information, companies are finding that they need to understand how to communicate with their constituencies.

It’s no longer

Excerpt from Raymond James strategist Jeffrey Saut's latest essay (published Monday, April 4th):

...Since the 1980s I have read articles by Shad (Rowe) in Forbes, Fortune, Barron’s, etc. and always found them insightful. Moreover, I have often used his sagacious comments in these missives to emphasize those gleanings in an attempt to help investors profit from them. This morning is no exception.

Shad ... opined why he is a steadfast bull on the American stock market. Said bullishness does not stem from his nature, for a couple of decades ago he enjoyed great success as a “short seller.” Nope, Shad’s bullishness is based on the belief that innovation is thriving in America. He used Google (GOOG) as an example. To wit:

“In the United States, two graduate students have managed to develop a product that led to the creation of the most scalable business model in history. Google is 12

When Google (GOOG) threw down the gauntlet and threatened to quit China early last year, a lot of people figured the Chinese government would come down on the company like a ton of bricks. Surprisingly, that didn’t happen — at least not for a while. Google redirected its Chinese portal to Hong Kong, evading Chinese censors, and despite the occasional hiccup, and a lot of speculation that it might be blocked, its popular Gmail service remained accessible.

But as the old Afghan (no, not Klingon) proverb has it, “Revenge is a dish best served cold.” Over the past few weeks, a series of news reports have emerged that suggest the Chinese government has embarked on a concerted effort to target and punish Google for its transgressions. Consider:

• On March 4, an article on the website of China’s state-published People’s Daily accused Google of being “a tool of the United States

In addition to my own scans and watch lists, I use two main sources to follow options-related news: Daily Seeking Alpha columns by Frederic Ruffy and Andrew Wilkinson. While I get great use out of these sources and have even made money thanks to them, you have to be careful not to chase the stocks or options they mention. Often, by the time you receive an alert or summary, contracts have already had too much volatility and upside priced into the premium. Nevertheless, occasionally, you can find examples to capitalize on. Below I detail options brought to my attention by these sources and how investors might consider playing them - or the underlying security - if at all, during the trading week.

General Motors (GM). In his options brief early Friday, Wilkinson highlighted GM. Despite reporting lower-than-expected sales for March, traders and investors still bid up GM shares. This triggered

I must proudly and openly state the following: If anybody can mute my love of Steve Jobs, it's Jeff Bezos. The Amazon.com (AMZN) CEO clearly considers taking on competitors in just one sector child's play.

In this article, I will review the areas where Bezos and Amazon have taken the offensive. Instead of simply reacting to trends, Amazon either sets them or executes land grabs so strong it effectively replaces the previous trendsetter.

Content Delivery and the Cloud

Amazon's latest salvo against its competition comes as it gets one step up on Apple (AAPL) and Google (GOOG) in the race to the cloud. Because it's been well-publicized, I will just note in summary that Amazon's Cloud Drive gives users the ability to store music and other digital files on the company's servers. Amazon gives you 5GB free and charges what I view as a nominal cost for space over 5GB.

I don't get the idea of music locker services like the one Amazon (AMZN) just announced. If I'm going to stream music from the cloud, why should I continue to buy files and collect them? I've been a Rhapsody subscriber for something like 11 or 12 years and although it has taken a while

Shares of Sina Corporation (SINA) have risen 16.6% since I published a positive article on its Twitter-like service Sina Weibo. Based on my latest analysis, Sina shares have risen too fast in the past several weeks. I remain positive on the long-term future of Sina, especially Sina Weibo, but I believe existing shareholders should now take profits at the current price level. My analysis is as follows:

InterXion (INXN) was the last company in the data center related arena to report earnings last Wednesday.

The company achieved its 17th consecutive quarter of sequential growth in revenue and Adjusted EBITDA, but the market reacted negatively to a decreased Q/Q increase, compared to the last few quarters, and a weaker than expected guidance, that still forecasts a 15% to 17% growth in revenues for 2011 (InterXion grew about 21.4% in 2010).

Analysts were slightly more positive, and mostly reiterated their "Buy" recommendation on the stock. Here is what Piper Jaffray said, as reported by Benzinga:

The company reported in-line to slightly better financials than expected, and management issued solid 2011 guidance, Piper Jaffray writes. The stock was weak Wednesday, providing an attractive buying opportunity for investors.

Similar comments were made by Oppenheimer, that reiterated its "Outperform" rating:

INXN reported its first quarter as a public company. Financial results for

Akamai (AKAM) competes with other content delivry players like InterNAP Network Services (INAP), Limelight Networks (LLNW) and Level 3 (LVLT). Our price estimate for Akamai stands at $37.11, in line with market price.

The 3 Most Important Product Segments for Akamai

1) Media Content Delivery – represents 34% of the company’s value

Akamai offers content delivery services to accelerate and improve the delivery of media content over the internet. Akamai delivers media content like videos on YouTube and song downloads on iTunes in addition to online movie trailers and delivery of social network sites like MySpace.

See the top forecasts for this division

2) Online Shopping Content Delivery – 31%

Akamai offers content delivery services to accelerate and improve the

Akamai’s (AKAM) most important division is its media content delivery, constituting around 34% of its stock value by our estimates. The high value attributed to this division in our analysis comes from expectations of rapid growth in Akamai’s revenue per media customer. As a content delivery company providing web content to its customers, Akamai competes with other players like InterNAP Network Services (INAP), Limelight Networks (LLNW) and Level 3 (LVLT).

Our price estimate for Akamai stands at $37.11, which is roughly in line with market price.

Revenue per Media Customer

We estimate that revenue per media customer for Akamai dropped between 2008 and 2009 (from about $420,000 to 399,000) before recovering to $445,000 in 2010 as the economy stabilized and the internet media space marched forward. We expect this rapid growth to continue and estimate that Akamai’s revenue per media customer could hit $850,000 by the end of our forecast

By Alexia Tsotsis

photo © 2006 Sharon Mollerus | more info (via: Wylio)When the details of the New York Times (NYT) paywall/fence were announced on Thursday, Times PR representatives told press that it would be placing a five article a day limit on Google (GOOG) referrals, and only Google referrals.

This policy has somehow changed over the weekend, as the Times’ Communications Manager Kristin Mason tells me that the five article limit will now extend to “all major search engines.” Apparently the Google-only clause was only specific to the Canadian roll out and

By MG Siegler

Just 10 days ago, we noted that Facebook had hit a new valuation record as shares on the secondary markets surged some 5 percent to $31.50 a share. That auction was through SecondMarket and put the on-paper valuation of the company at roughly $78.75 billion (based on roughly 2.5 billion shares outstanding). Today — again, just 10 days later — we have another Facebook share auction that has closed. And unbelievably, the price now is at $34 a share. That’s an even $85 billion valuation.

I repeat: $85 billion.

It was only three weeks ago that Facebook hit a massive $75 billion valuation. Again, that was through SecondMarket. Today’s new record numbers come by way of SharesPost. In a message to clients, they note that they’ve just completed the auction of 100,000 shares of Class B Common Stock at the $34 price. Those members are now being

With nearly $30 billion in annual revenues last year, Google (GOOG) needs to keep both dominating search and find new billion-dollar businesses fast. Google’s biggest opportunities beyond search are display advertising, video advertising (YouTube), mobile search, and local. And if it ever gets its act together on social, that could be a wild card. Last October, the company pointed out that its display advertising business (including YouTube) and mobile search was already bringing in an additional $3.5 billion in annualized gross revenues.

Citi analyst Mark Mahaney breaks down some of Google’s opportunities for new billion-dollar businesses in a new research report he released this morning. In particular, he focuses on two of Google’s most promising growth opportunities: YouTube and local advertising. According to his estimates, YouTube’s gross revenues hit $825 million in 2010, and will reach $1.3 billion in 2011 and $1.7 billion in 2012. After stripping out revenue share,

Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM) recently announced its FY Q4 2011 earnings in which it mentioned that its Chatter application is gaining traction making the company the largest provider of enterprise social networks in the world. ^[1] Chatter is an application that provides social networking and real-time connection features for enterprises. We believe Salesforce.com could use Chatter to expand its enterprise customer base and up-sell its more valuable cloud-based products like its customer relationship management (CRM) software and Force.com. Salesforce.com competes with SAP (NYSE:SAP), Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and IBM (NYSE:IBM) in the CRM software market.

Below we will take a look at some of the comments made by the management on Chatter during the earnings conference call. We maintain a $116 price estimate for Salesforce.com stock, which is about 6% lower than market price.

Management bullish about Chatter and its prospects

According to management, the Chatter application has gained faster adoption with