At the MTV Europe Music Awards Thursday, MTV Networks CEO Judy McGrath told Reuters that new media will also be the future at MTV. McGrath said she sees MTV Networks as the growth engine for the new, slimmer Viacom, developing new channels outside the U.S. that will be integrated with Internet firms the company will buy. "With the explosion of new platforms, I can see a whole vista of places to grow in front of us," she said. By the end of the year, Viacom, Inc. is planning to split its faster growing cable and film unit, which includes MTV, …

In more convergence news, Comcast Corp., Time Warner Cable, and Cox Communications Wednesday announced a partnership with Sprint Nextel to develop wireless apps that will allow users to watch TV on their mobile phones. The deal also means these companies could potentially offer TV, Internet, home phone and wireless service on one bill, which would make for intense competition between cable operators and bigger phone companies like SBC Corp. and Verizon Communications, as they all try to offer consumers multiple services from a single provider. Sprint and Comcast also hope to offer services like DVR programming via wireless phones by …

At a time when traditional media companies continue to scoop up smaller, but growing, Internet firms, iVillage, a publisher of several women's community sites, is considering putting itself up for sale. The New York-based company has hired investment bank JPMorgan Chase to explore a possible deal that iVillage hopes will fetch $700 million. The publisher's properties include iVillage.com, Women.com, Ast-rology.com, and gURL.com. Last year the company reported net earnings of $2.75 million on sales of $66.9 million. News Corp. and Viacom are among potential buyers.

The past six months have seen a flurry of M&A activity within the Internet sphere not seen since the bubble days, and most of the companies being bought lack established revenue models, a la 1999. Many of those being acquired these days are blogs, Internet telephony companies and social networking sites, with some big companies like AOL, Google, Yahoo!, News Corp., Microsoft and eBay swooping in to pick up some relatively unknown quantities. Mark Glaser of the Online Journalism Review sits down to talk with investment banker Tolman Geffs and Jim Pitkow, vice president of VeriSign, about the Internet's Bubble …

Yahoo! unveiled a major upgrade to its Maps service by integrating local search results and making its map display larger. The new interface is more visual, beginning with a map of a user's default location rather than an empty search box. When users enter a location, the map zooms right to it. Entering a second address displays driving directions beneath the query, then rescales the map and draws a line that illustrates the route. When doing local searches, users don't need to enter an address, as searches will be contained to the area displayed on the map. Businesses are then …

Social network providers are beginning to realize that their valuable user bases provide convenient launching pads for new and established brands. According to The Wall Street Journal, MySpace.com has recognized this and taken it a step further by deciding to launch its own record label. Called MySpace Records, the new venture debuts today with Vivendi Universal SA as its first major partner; its Interscope Record label is home to Eminem, Gwen Stefani, Black Eyed Peas, Weezer and U2. Interscope has used MySpace.com before as a launching pad for its clients' albums in the past, creating profiles with promotions and free …

Peer to peer file sharing networks have struggled to reinvent themselves following the Supreme Court's unanimous landmark ruling against Grokster earlier this year. File swapping network iMesh has now relaunched itself, according to a Wired report. The New York-based company is now charging its users 99 cents per download, or $6.95 a month for unlimited access to its full database of content. As part of a promotion, the company is offering three free months of access to its music catalog, which includes 15 million or so tracks from the Gnutella database that are either unclaimed or unprotected by copyright law. …

Two days after announcing that it would continue scanning library books after a three-month hiatus, Google said it had finished adding the first major round of full texts to its Google Print database: some 10,000 works from four major libraries that are no longer under copyright. The additions come from the libraries of the University of Michigan, Harvard University, Stanford University, and the New York Public Library, which, along with Oxford University, agreed last year to let Google make searchable all or most of the content in their libraries. Google has come under fire from publishers and authors about the …

In other VoIP news, Microsoft Wednesday acquired a Swiss technology firm whose services will help the software giant build a VoIP platform for its Microsoft Office Live Communications Server and Microsoft Office 12 applications, both due next year. Zurich-based Media-streams.com is Microsoft's second VoIP-related purchase after acquiring Teleo in August. Teleo's services, which have already been incorporated into MSN, are aimed at consumers, while Media-streams' applications cater to businesses. For example, Microsoft plans to enable corporate clients to right-click on the name of someone they just received an e-mail from and allow them to call that person.

Cnet reports that voice over Internet providers have formed a new organization aimed at promoting the use of Internet telephony. Google, Earthlink, Sonus Networks, Pulver.com and eBay subsidiary Skype are all founding members of the Internet Voice Campaign. The group hopes to dispel myths and fears about VoIP service, such as privacy, call quality, and emergency support, which have kept people from adopting the service. VoIP involves the transfer of audio data over the Internet in the same way data is sent through e-mail and Web browsing. Each of these applications is based on the same infrastructure, the Internet Protoco--which …