Bloomberg is reporting that Apple (AAPL) is “in talks to acquire online music service Lala, according to two people familiar with the matter.”

The shoe fits. Back when Lala launched I described it as an iTunes in the cloud — something that we believe Apple will inevitably launch. Apple is certainly building a lot of data center capacity for something. Lala is already one of two companies powering full-song streaming for Google's (GOOG) new music search (the other one is MySpace Music via its iLike acquisition). Lala already has all the streaming licenses in place with the major music companies and a team which can help Apple create a killer streaming version of iTunes.

The results are in: Bing, Yahoo (YHOO), and Google (GOOG) have all released their top search trends for 2009. We’ve been following them over the last few days, and decided we’d put them side by side to see if any interesting patterns emerged. Note that Bing’s results are US only (and Yahoo’s exclude other English-speaking properties) so we’re including Google’s US results for the most apples-to-apples comparison.

Before we draw any conclusions, it’s important to note that the methods employed are neither consistent between search engines, nor are they scientific to begin with. Aside from the obvious removal of porn and other NSFW related queries, the search engines generally ignore items that are always popular in favor of more timely keywords. I’ve included the methods used by each company below, but the theme here is “really vague”.

Now this is cool. Some of the hype over Google Wave has died down over the last few weeks, in no small part because most people have absolutely no idea how to use it (no, the 80 minute long video demo doesn’t help). Now it looks like the Wave team has another idea up their sleeves to show people the power of Wave: they’re using it to recreate famous documents.

This time they’re reconstructed the Declaration of Independence, complete with edits and comments from the founding fathers. My US History is a bit fuzzy, but there are plenty of obvious jokes nestled in here, and I’m sure the Googlers have included a few more subtle ones as well. Unfortunately, it looks like you’ll have to have a Wave account if you want to witness the creation of one of the United States’ most important documents. But we’ve tried to grab a few of the key moments in the screenshots below.

YouTube has just announced that it has partnered with Univision, the United States’ most popular Spanish language network, to bring a selection of its content to the world’s most popular video site. The agreement includes rights both to short clips and full length content.

Videos will be drawn from the Univision network, TeleFutura, and Galavision, and will also include footage from special events. Content will be rolled out over the course of the next few months. This is the first time Univision content will be available on the web outside of the network’s own properties, though this is a nonexclusive deal (don’t be surprised if we see similar content pop up on Hulu, TV.com, or other media portals soon).

I’ve spent the last week thoroughly enjoying my new Droid, and while I’ve come across some problems, most of my issues have simply been with the fact that Android does things differently than the iPhone — the transition just takes some getting used to. But there’s one big issue that needs far more than a UI tweak: Android Market. If there was a theme common to nearly every Droid review, it was that Android’s app selection just doesn’t cut it compared to the iPhone. I think that consensus is only half the story. These reviewers are finding that Android has a weaker selection of applications than the iPhone not just because some of their favorite apps aren’t there, but because actually browsing the Market just isn’t as enjoyable as what Apple’s iTunes offers. If Android’s Market’s perception as a poor man’s App Store is going to change, this experience needs to improve.

Currently, all Android Market browsing and transactions are done through an application that comes with the phone. This mobile application used to be pretty bad (it didn’t even offer screenshots of the apps), but was finally overhauled in September to be more competitive with the iPhone’s mobile version of the App Store. The new version is a big improvement, but browsing the store from the phone isn’t exactly a good time — you can only see a few apps at once, so scrolling through various lists gets tedious.

Google (GOOG) has just announced that it has acquired AdMob, the mobile ad platform that has been especially popular on the iPhone, for $750 million. This is a big win for the company’s early investors, which include Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners (this is a huge day for Accel — they were also investors in Playfish, which was just acquired by EA). More recent investors include DFJ and Northgate Capital.

AdMob founder Omar Hamoui sent the following letter to customers:

Friday I detailed my quest to find the throngs of Droid fans who had woken up at the crack of dawn to grab a place in line before Verizon (VZ) unleashed the phone to the masses. Yet despite reports of lines elsewhere, I failed — the Verizon store in Palo Alto was a ghost town, as was the Best Buy (BBY) down the street. Some commenters took my story and similar reports as an indication that the Droid’s launch had bombed, doomed to play out the same fate of the numerous supposed ‘iPhone killers’ before it. It looks like they may be wrong — that store sold over 70 Droids Friday, according to one of its employees.

Saturday I returned to the Verizon store where Friday’s quest began, looking to get my hands on one of the nifty docking stations that turns your Droid into a desktop clock/multimedia station. And while I expected a handful of other customers to be in the store, I was taken aback by just how crowded it was — each of the registers was busy ringing up a customer while others waited their turn, three people were standing in line just to touch the demo Droid unit, and I had to put my name on the list to talk to someone. When I asked one of the employees if they were selling a lot of Droids, his somewhat breathless response was “Yeah, a lot. Over 70 yesterday, we got a shipment of another 100 in today.” Oh, and they were out of both the dock I had come for and spare batteries. Maybe the lack of an early morning line wasn’t so damning after all.

Today is Droid day — an event that I, like many tech bloggers, have been looking forward to for quite some time. Unlike some people, I wasn’t graced with a test Droid last week, so I was forced to go out and get one the old fashioned way: by getting to the store as early as possible, before the precious devices sold out. And while I was concerned about falling prey to a supply shortage, a part of me still hoped there would be many others like me, helping justify my early morning rise. These are my notes as I searched for the unexpectedly elusive Verizon Droid line.

5:30 AM. I woke up this morning to the soothing chimes of my over-priced alarm clock, took a look at the ungodly hour, and immediately sank back into my pillow. It wasn’t until my second alarm (strategically positioned far out of arm’s reach) kicked in that I remembered the task at hand: Droid day.

Google (GOOG) has just debuted a new form of advertising called AdWords Comparison Ads — a special kind of ad that will prompt users to view a list of sponsored products in a structured format. To get started, Google is running the ads for queries related to the mortgage market, though it has plans to eventually expand beyond that. The ads are in a limited rollout for now, with only some users in some states seeing them.

Here’s how Google describes the new ad type:

Earlier Tuesday Sun Microsystems (JAVA) announced that it would be cutting 3,000 members of its workforce, less than a year after the company announced plans to lay off up to 6,000 of its employees. Sun blamed the latest wave of layoffs on delays involved in Oracle’s acquisition of the company, which was annouced last April but is currently being held up by European regulators.

Sun says that it will be eliminating the jobs over the course of the next year in locations worldwide, and that the cuts have already begun. There are reports that there may be even more cuts once the acquisition is complete.

Over the last few weeks there has been an increasing amount of buzz about an unannounced Motorola smartphone due to come out some time between late October and early December. Rumored specs include a powerful OMAP3430 processor, 5 megapixel camera, slideout QWERTY keyboard and touch screen, all housed in a super-compact package and running Android 2.0. A handful of potential names have swirled around, included the Sholes and the Tao, but tonight Verizon (VZ) has made it perfectly clear what the upcoming phone will be called: Droid. And Verizon is positioning it to be a direct threat to the iPhone in a new advertising campaign it launched at the site DroidDoes.com.

Verizon isn’t pulling any punches: it calls out basically every major weakness on the iPhone, from its inability to run background applications to the App Store’s walled garden. The site kicks off with a stream of things that the iPhone can’t do, mimicking the black text-on-white background commonly seen in Apple ads but replacing it with statements like iDon’t run simultaneous apps. After a handful of these, the site kicks you to a page with the heading “DroidDoes”, with a banner rotating through a number of the Droid’s features that include Android 2.0, background tasks, and video recording support. Some of the differences mentioned, like the Droid’s inclusion of a physical keyboard, are really a matter of personal preference. Others, aren’t. For one, Droid can claim to run on “The Network”, which runs circles around AT&T (T).

The back-and-forth between AT&T (T), Google (GOOG), and the FCC over Google Voice’s blocking of some rural telephone numbers continues, and it’s getting even nastier. AT&T’s latest letter to the FCC attempts to undermine Google’s recent argument that it’s blocking exorbitantly expensive calls to some numbers in part because they are associated with sex lines. In fact, AT&T says, some of the numbers being blocked include an ambulance service, church, Benedictine nuns, doctors, and more. Oh, and that’s not AT&T’s only problem with Google — it also thinks that the FCC should consider regulating the search giant on the web as well.

The letter (which we’ve embedded below) is long, first detailing in depth AT&T’s problems with Google Voice, which it says should be held to the same rules as AT&T and other tradional carriers are. The letter then goes on a lengthy argument making the case that if the FCC fails to regulate Google now, the search giant could use its “gatekeeper control” over the Internet to block access to applications:

As the most popular video site on the planet, YouTube has a lot of content to present to users at any given time (the site says that 20 hours of footage are uploaded every minute). That poses a challenge to premium content owners and other content creators looking to attract attention, which is why YouTube also offers a premium ‘Promoted Videos’ feature that lets you pay to expose your video to other users. And now, it’s making it easier to launch a Promoted Video campaign: users will now be able to manage their Promoted Videos directly from the AdWords platform.

AdWords is Google’s (GOOG) bread-and-butter ad platform that plenty of brands and businesses already use to place their ads outside of YouTube, so this will help streamline the purchase process. It’s not all about convenience either — advertisers will also be able to use AdWords campaign tools, which are more robust than what YouTube offers.

Over the last few weeks Google (GOOG) has apparently started rolling out a new set of advertising formats on its search results page, introducing product listings that include price and other details in the Sponsored Links sidebar. For example, a query for “shoes” is displaying a list of different shoe models, their prices, and retailers directly within the search results, as opposed to the the more general text links we’ve grown accustomed to, which lack such information. Google is also apparently testing these ads with photos alongside the product listings for some queries.

In the last few months there’s been a lot of news about Google Voice: it’s been blocked from the iPhone (though Apple (AAPL) says it’s still ‘pondering‘ it) and has been the focal point of not one, but two FCC inquiries. But up until now it hasn’t been very easy to actually sign up for the service — you’ve been able to request an invite for some time now, but there’s an unspecified waiting period as Google works through its list. That’s going to change soon, as Google has just announced that it will be distributing invites to people already on Google Voice, which they can hand out to their friends.

Google is starting to hand out the invites beginning Tuesday, though not everyone will get theirs immediately (each person will get three invites to start with). Using an invite is straightforward: you enter the Email address of the friend or family member you want to invite, they’ll get a note from you, and they can immediately gain access to the service.

Head on over to YouTube right now and there’s a minor change that’s sure to catch your eye: the site’s unmistakeable logo has been modified to include a new “1BN” banner, with the words “1 billion views per day!” beneath it. It’s obviously a huge milestone for the site, but it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise — back in June we reported that YouTube was seeing over 1.2 billion views a day, and it’s likely above that by now.

So why the spiffy new banner now? Turns out, it was three years ago to the day that Google (GOOG) acquired YouTube for a whopping $1.65 billion.

Last week doubleTwist, the media management software company with DVD Jon as its CTO, released a remake of Apple’s classic 1984 commercial featuring none other than Steve Jobs as a malevolent dictator. The commercial closed with a promise. “On October 6th, doubleTwist brings you Choice“.

Wednesday, doubleTwist has revealed what it means by that: doubleTwist now includes an integrated Music Store, powered by Amazon’s MP3 Store. But unlike iTunes, this app will let you transfer your files to non-Apple devices. The store includes Amazon’s (AMZN) catalog of over 5 million songs, allowing users to purchase songs either as albums or individual tracks (there’s also plenty of free songs available). From a design standpoint, it’s clear that iTunes served as a big inspiration — if you’ve ever used the iTunes Store before, it will take you all of thirty seconds to figure out how to use this one.