BusinessWeek does a little arithmetic and deduces that Google and Microsoft are paying Twitter roughly 3¢ for every 1,000 tweets they crawl -- "a pittance in the world of online advertising." Indeed, top media sites often get $10 or $20 per thousand page views, while remnant inventory -- leftover Web pages that get sold through ad networks -- goes for 50¢ to $1 per thousand. The independent deals, reached late last year between Twitter and the search engines, were together worth $25 million, yet put "almost no value" on Twitter's data, according to Donnovan Andrews, vice-president of strategic …

Nexus One, the first Google-branded smartphone, was destined to have its detractors, but you'd necessarily expect they'd be from the family of science-fiction author Philip K. Dick. Yet, the family says the device's name infringes on one of Dick's most famous novels, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?," which served as the basis for the 1982 cult film "Blade Runner" -- the story follows a bounty hunter chasing androids known as Nexus-6 models. Isa Dick Hackett, Dick's daughter and the chief executive of Electric Shepherd Productions -- an arm of the Dick estate devoted to adapting the late …

Cliqset -- an online identity platform similar to Facebook's FriendFeed, which lets users merge social information, including status updates, location, and photos onto one platform -- has launched a new version that includes increased sharing capabilities, and organizational tools to separate streams. The new version features widespread file sharing functionality -- music, podcasts, PDFs, and Microsoft Office documents -- while users can share the various types of files with other Cliqset users as part of real-time activity streams. Users can also now organize content from the people they're following into real-time 'streams' of information, allowing users to filter the noise …

From the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas, digital video file format provider DivX just debuted a software platform for streaming video from the Internet to a user's TV. At launch, LG plans to add the DivX TV service to its Blu-ray players, digital TVs and other devices equipped with its NetCast Entertainment Access software. The company's last attempt to bring the Web to the TV screen required set-top boxes, which relied on a PC to convert online video into a format a TV could handle. By contrast, the new platform is embedded into multipurpose devices and grabs content …

Web sites that report news and deliver other content at the neighborhood, or "hyperlocal" level, are attracting the attention of big media and tech companies. The clearest example came in December with Google's failed attempt to acquire Yelp for a reported $550 million. Successful deals last year included MSNBC.com's acquisition of EveryBlock.com for an undisclosed amount, and AOL's purchases of Patch Media and Going.com. Hyperlocal startups are also attracting funding as in the case of Outside.in, which pulls together neighborhood blogs and other local content, and closed a $7 million Series B round of funding last month led …

Thanks to Facebook's recent privacy changes, marketers can now take a list of, say, 1,000 email addresses -- collected legally or illegally -- and glean each email owner's full name, friends, gender, age, interests, location, job and education level. The "hack," first publicized by blogger Max Klein, repurposes a Facebook feature that lets people find their friends on Facebook by scanning through email addresses in their contact list. Given Facebook's ubiquity and most people's reliance on a single email address, Wired's Epicenter blog says the so-called "harvest" could be quite rich. Indeed, using a simple scraping tool, a …

Facebook's first CTO, Adam D'Angelo is taking the wraps off of his new startup. Dubbed Quora, the company is a basically a real-time enabled Question & Answer site -- a self-described "continually improving collection of questions and answers." ReadWriteWeb, which likens Quora to Aardvark -- a social Q&A service founded by ex-Googlers and rumored to be in Google's acquisition sights -- admits that "it's a pleasure to use." But, is Quora the next Facebook? "Probably not," according to ReadWriteWeb, "but it does look pretty fabulous." Still in closed beta, the site is built on Tornado, the real-time infrastructure …

In what The Times' Bits Blog is calling "one of Steve Ballmer's riskiest trade-show moves in years," Microsoft's chief executive late Wednesday is expected to unveil a "slate-type" device made by Hewlett-Packard, which would beat rival Apple and its highly-anticipated tablet to the punch. "This product better be good because Apple is expected to unveil its take on the slate/tablet form factor later this month," Bits writes, adding: "If history holds, Apple will issue a product that surprises people in a few ways and that stands out from the crowd ... So the last thing Mr. …

Reuters is reporting that Baidu, China's premier search engine, has tapped Providence Equity Partners to launch an online video channel in China. Stateside, U.S.-based Providence is best known as an investor in Hulu, the premium video hub jointly owned by NBC Universal, News Corp, and Disney. The new channel is expected to show licensed content, and is set to debut in the first quarter. It marks Baidu's latest foray into China's nascent online video market. Providence and Baidu are now expected to create a fund to buy licensed content to show on the channel. China's Youku, which operates …

MSNBC said Tuesday that it is buying the BreakingNews.com URL from a company called PV Media Group. The deal follows its purchase of @breakingnews and its 1.4 million followers in November, while the two companies were not connected. This summer, @breakingnews debuted an iPhone app, which now has over 1.5 million followers on Twitter. "Not everyone wants news surrounded by commentary or features," Charlie Tillinghast, president of the MSNBC Digital Network, said regarding the acquisition. Meanwhile, MSNBC Spokesperson Gina Stikes tells ReadWriteWeb that "MSNBC has acquired the URL only," so the fate of BreakingNews.com's staff is unclear.