Lehman Brothers analyst Anthony DiClemente published an "alarmingly bearish" report on the entertainment sector yesterday morning, Wired says, in which he claimed that the TV and film businesses would face a massive downturn in the next two years. Their model is broken, he said: Once captive TV and movie audiences are splintering thanks to file-sharing, digital distribution and the rise of Web-based services like social networks. DiClemente claimed these factors are eating into media companies' profits, which may never return. "We believe the feature film and TV content businesses are on the verge of structural changes that appear to impact …

CNET says that rumors in the blogosphere have it that T-Mobile USA will launch a Google Android phone alongside its nationwide 3G wireless network launch later this year. On Monday, several blogs reported that that 3G service would hit 20-plus U.S. markets on Oct. 1 and that the HTC Dream smartphone would be one of the first handsets to leverage the 3G network. Many believe the HTC Dream will also be the first handset to use Google's mobile operating system, Android. Other T-Mobile Android phones rumored to be released this year are the Sony Ericsson Z780, a high-end Samsung camera …

Google, needing to do something to curb demand for its child day care, recently upped its charges from $1,425 per month to nearly $2,500, an annual increase of $24,000, to nearly $57,000 per year. Understandably irate, parents fought back, using Google's weekly ask-the-executive meetings to complain about the massive rate increase. They conducted surveys showing that most parents with children in Google day care would have to find less expensive services elsewhere. It didn't work. While Google is reducing the increase slightly, it still plans to roll out the higher price over the next five quarters. The New York …

In early 2007, Chris Hughes, one of the four founders of Facebook, left the social networking world to work on Barack Obama's new media campaign. Ironically, The New York Times says the change brought him closer to, not farther away from, social networking. In fact, social networks like MySpace and Facebook have helped Obama's campaign revolutionize the use of the Web as a campaign fundraising tool, as Obama raised more than two million donations of less than $200 each. The center of that movement has been My.BarackObama.com, an interactive community site for Obama supporters. As the candidate himself said in …

The Internet's biggest players are finding it nearly impossible to unseat Craigslist at the top of the online classifieds pile. Even so, analysts describe the space as in flux, as a variety of vertical classifieds providers (Yahoo Autos, CareerBuilders, Zillow) flood the market, stealing traffic from the bigger players. "Classifieds is a field in turmoil," Peter Zollman, founding principal of Classified Intelligence, a consulting firm that specializes in online classifieds, told ClickZ. Microsoft, for one, recently announced that it would discontinue its classifieds site, Windows Live Expo, effective July 31. Apparently, the site didn't gain enough traffic to be measured …

It may not have the same irresistible draw as search, but advertisers are spending money on social media, according to the San Francisco Chronicle in an article detailing the social media marketing efforts of a few big brands. More and more, advertisers "are finding that the social media networks are too big to ignore," claims Ian Schafer, CEO and founder of the agency Deep Focus, which has created Facebook campaigns for HBO, Coca-Cola and New Line Cinema. For example, Sears Holdings Corp. in March rolled out a prom-dress campaign asking high school girls to share their favorite dresses with friends …

Over the last several weeks, all the Yahoo focus has been squarely on the company's flagging stock price and the looming proxy battle with billionaire corporate raider Carl Icahn. However, prior to the fateful Aug. 1 shareholder meeting, Kara Swisher says there's a bigger story on the horizon: Yahoo's second quarter earnings report on July 22, which will say much about the future of several top Yahoo execs, including CEO Jerry Yang and President Sue Decker. Swisher thinks it's "highly unlikely" the quarter will be a disaster, but more importantly, she says, the company simply cannot afford bad results given …