Facebook is gearing up for an industry-rocking announcement Wednesday, and all signs point to a Foursquare-like location-based check-in service. "A multitude of sources indicate that Facebook will finally be rolling out its own geo-location offering," reports BoomTown's Kara Swisher. "Foursquare might want to stock up on the Mylanta." "Despite their burgeoning popularity, it's unclear whether smaller location services would remain popular if Facebook (with its 500 million-strong membership) got into location sharing," writes Computerworld. "However, recent rumors suggest Facebook's location feature would somehow integrate with existing location services." …

HBO is standing in the way of Netflix's plan to offer a broad slate of streaming movies, reports Bloomberg. HBO co-President Eric Kessler tells Bloomberg that the pay-television channel -- home to shows including the "The Sopranos" and "True Blood" -- holds cable and Internet rights to films from Warner Bros., Twentieth Century Fox and Universal Pictures, and is unlikely to make a deal with Netflix. "There is value in exclusivity," Kessler says. Consumers "are willing to pay a premium for high quality, exclusive content." Last week, Netflix agreed to pay the Epix cable channel more than …

Yahoo is hoping to buy mom-centric social network CafeMom for roughly $100 million, sources tell BoomTown. The move would be "aimed at turbocharging its often meandering strategy in the important women's space," BoomTown writes. Yahoo and CafeMom have reportedly been engaged in discussions for weeks. CafeMom, sources say, has so far held out for a higher price of closer to $200 million or more. Meanwhile, other companies, including Disney, have reported expressed interest in the New York-based social net. Owned by CMI Marketing, CafeMom made its initial debut as ClubMom back in the Web 1.0 days. CMI, …

Google CEO Eric Schmidt thinks 18-year-olds will one day be able to change their names to safely distance themselves from the online record of their adolescent foibles. That's according to an interview published this weekend in The Wall Street Journal, and then dissected by ReadWriteWeb. "I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time," Schmidt tells The Journal. "That seems... crazy," concludes ReadWriteWeb. "Maybe he was simply observing that such policies were likely to take shape in the future. But if they do, the company he …

Before the year's out, Apple could unveil an iPad with a 7-inch touchscreen (an iPhone?), says PCWorld, citing a report in a major Taiwanese newspaper. "This is the second report of an iPad 2 sighting in Taiwan, and it comes from the island's Chinese-language Economic Daily News financial newspaper, which was among the first to correctly report that Apple was making a tablet when other news sources said it would be a netbook," PCWorld report. The Economic Daily reports that Taiwanese companies have won a number of component contracts for the iPad 2. Chimei Innolux will supply …

Business Insider suggests paying attention to Shopkick, a San Francisco-based startup that is being positioned as a Foursquare for shoppers. The company has "the combination of early deals, big-name backers, and buzz that makes it worth watching," according to Business Insider. Its new iPhone app, which is launching this week, is "right at the interesting junction of mobile apps, location-based services, and commerce." Insists Business Insider: "Someone is going to make money here someday, and Shopkick is one of the most ambitious, interesting attempts we've seen." Initial Shopkick partners include nationwide chains like Best Buy, American Eagle …

For Foursquare to grow, the company needs more sites to use its application-programming interface, the company's co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley recently told GigaOm. That will allow it to build an ecosystem around Foursquare's data. Furthermore, "The more apps are built on its API, the easier it is for Foursquare to grow faster, which in turn would allow the company to start monetizing its efforts to bridge physical and digital worlds," GigaOm writes. "Foursquare (and others like it) can essentially bring a cost-per-action business model to the real world, perhaps either supplanting or complementing traditional forms of …

Google is very close to acquiring Like.com for more than $100 million, multiple sources tell TechCrunch. "What we can't quite figure out is why Google is buying Like.com," writes TechCrunch's Michael Arrington. "It doesn't fit neatly into mobile or their new social strategy like so many of their recent acquisitions. Like.com does have real visual search technology though. Perhaps Google, which has experimented with visual search, likes what it sees." In late 2005 Google was reportedly close to acquiring a company called Riya, a maker of image facial recognition and tagging technology. Then, last year, Riya shifted …

Potentially putting the next great tech startup at risk, venture capitalists and angel investors are increasingly at each others' throats, reports TechCrunch's Michael Arrington. The culprits? "Declining returns, too much capital and the disruptive force of a new breed of angel investors." According to Arrington, "It used to be that angels worked with venture funds, doing the very early rounds and then handing things off when a company did well." However, "The last several years have seen the rise of the cheap startup. Internet startups can use open source software and new scripting languages to ship products fast and …

In a sure sign of trouble for the credit card companies, Apple has hired an expert in near-field communications to be its new product manager for mobile commerce. "This is big news, in ways you may not immediately grasp," writes Fast Company. "Propelled by Apple's cachet and iPhone's appeal, wireless payment tech may now be about to sweep over the world." The new hire Benjamin Vigier, has been working in NFC for a number of years flash memory firm Sandisk and Bouygues Telecom in France, among other companies. At mFoundry, a mobile payments firm, he was responsible …