Facebook has been looking for a new round of funding for several months now, but it's not getting any interest at the $15 billion valuation set by Microsoft in 2007. Rather, Michael Arrington hears that the company is now hoping to attract investors at the much-reduced valuation of $4 billion. However, according to one of his sources, General Atlantic recently submitted a term sheet at "around a $2 billion" valuation. Will Facebook accept the offer? "They may be forced to," says Arrington, who points out that due to ridiculous growth, Facebook is burning as much as $20 million a month …

Twitter could emerge as a major player in local search, argues Steve Espinosa of Local Search News. The simple question "What are you doing?" is inherently local, whether local to you or to someone else, he says. The obvious example is tweeting about going out to dinner. There are tons of results of people talking about local restaurants on Twitter; Espinosa thinks the microblogging service should create business pages for restaurants and other local establishments, so people can see what Twitter users are saying about that restaurant or local business in real time. These Twitter business pages, if they were …

Microsoft has combined Live Search Products and Live Search Cashback, TechCrunch reports. The integration allows users to access Cashback on the shopping comparison site. Cashback, for those who aren't familiar, is a program that gives discounts to users who click through and buy products from the ads they're shown. The "drastic and seemingly desperate" ploy to lure searchers to Live Search hasn't worked, however, as Live Search's share of the U.S. market continues to hover at around 9%, which is what it was before Microsoft launched the initiative. Google's share, meanwhile, is 62%. Cashback has helped Live Search's bottom line, …

Whereas entertainment sites like NBC and News Corp.'s Hulu have yet to make their first dollar, CBS is making a tidy profit selling online sports to advertisers. The recently completed golf Masters and the NCAA Basketball Tournament, which CBS broadcast over the Web as well as on TV, were both a resounding success, BusinessWeek says. The 63-game March Madness tournament, for example, reached 7.5 million college basketball fans on digitally connected devices, raking in $30 million from advertisers like AT&T and Coca-Cola. CBS claims it turned a profit on both online broadcasts. The obvious takeaway here is that major sporting …

A new venture called Journalism Online believes that online news outlets need to start charging subscription fees for their content. The company, which is "backed by some heavy hitters," says Ars Technica's Nate Anderson, aims to be the one-stop subscription site for quality journalism on the Web. Can it save journalism? "We have formed Journalism Online, because we think this is a special moment in time when there is an urgent need for a business model that allows quality journalism to be the beneficiary of the Internet's efficient delivery mechanism rather than its victim," said cofounder Steven Brill. "We believe …

EBay is planning an initial public offering for Skype, the Internet telephony unit the online auctioneer acquired for $2.6 billion in 2005. The planned IPO will take place in the first half of 2010, eBay said yesterday. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. will lead the underwriting. According to Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Jeffrey Lindsay, the eBay-Skype union has been a "marriage made in hell." In an interview, Lindsay said, "The only problem with Skype is it's part of EBay...They will make more money from spinning it out than they ever could by keeping it." How much will eBay make? Paul Bard, …

More layoffs are coming to Yahoo, and another reorg, too, notes Kara Swisher, who says that "even more top-level managers are either leaving or being moved around." The New York Times had the initial scoop, saying that the layoffs would be announced during the company's earnings call Tuesday. Analysts expect these earnings to be weak; hence, the layoffs. However, Yahoo sources tell Swisher that management is bracing for cuts that may top 500, which could mean that CEO Carol Bartz is planning to either shut down or sell off whole business units. Some said the new round of cuts …