Online jukebox Lala hooks up with Facebook and Google. Together, can they mount a serious challenge to Apple?

Lala's Nguyen aims to challenge Apple's iTunes. Photo: Lala

Apple rules music retail for now: iTunes passed Wal-Mart (WMT) last year to become the top-grossing music store in the world. But that doesn’t mean things will stay that way.

The latest challenge to iTunes comes from Bill Nguyen, the serial entrepreneur who founded Lala.com.

Palo Alto-based Lala is an online jukebox with 8 million songs; you can buy the rights to stream a radio-quality version of any song for 10 cents or download a higher-quality version for 99 cents. He says he’s averaging about $67 per year from paying customers.

By itself, Lala poses no threat to the iTunes juggernaut. But now it’s teaming up with Google (GOOG) and Facebook, arguably the two hottest properties online. Late today Google is expected to announce a partnership with Lala that should drive massive amounts of new traffic to the service.

And just last week, Lala announced that it will team up with Facebook and its 300 million users to push a new form of music distribution: song gifting. Soon, Facebook’s legions of social networkers will be able to do more than chat, update and poke — they’ll be able to buy each other songs, right within Facebook’s payment system.

We caught up with Nguyen soon after the Facebook announcement to ask about his vision for digital music, and why he dares to take on iTunes and Apple (AAPL).

Fortune: What’s the elevator pitch on Lala. What business are you in? More

At least one company is making money off of social networking. The game developer behind 'FarmVille' and 'Mafia Wars' has seen its web-based games take off – and deliver profits.

Mark Pincus, founder and CEO of Zynga

On any given day 500,000 tractors are sold on the Internet. But don't start buying stock in John Deere or Caterpillar just yet. These are $20 "virtual" tractors that belong to the 50 million players of FarmVille, the largest and fastest-growing social game on the Internet.

Social games are free online applications accessed through sites such as MySpace and Facebook. If you've spent any time on either site you're probably familiar with titles such as FarmVille, Mafia Wars, and Caf World. All three games, which rank among the top five games played daily on Facebook, were developed by San Francisco-based Zynga, one of the tech sector's most talked-about companies these days.

Behind the buzz: Annual revenue at the two-year-old firm is likely to surpass $100 million this year, prompting speculation that the company — backed by the likes of LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman and PayPal cofounder-turned-investor Peter Thiel — will soon go public. The software company also has managed to do something that other hot online brands such as Twitter and Facebook have not: Zynga has found a way to make social networking profitable.

Zynga was founded in 2007 by Mark Pincus, 43, who also started social-networking site Tribe.net and software company SupportSoft (SPRT), which eventually went public. (The name Zynga is a misspelled tribute to his deceased American bulldog, Zinga.) While many of his Web 3.0 peers rely on advertising and sponsorship for revenue, Pincus makes its money by getting gamers to buy virtual goods, like tractor fuel or land in the case of FarmVille, that enable players to build bigger farms at a faster rate.

By developing games on social networks, Zynga is able to capitalize on the viral nature of the platform. (Zynga estimates it has 70 million monthly unique visitors.) Gamers can invite friends to join them in the game, and they can send updates on their progress to their friends, stoking interest. More

To battle back against Facebook, MySpace tunes into more online music

MySpace, the once and would-be king of social media, is increasingly turning

Van Natta's MySpace is doubling down on music. Photo: MySpace

toward music to combat a dominant Facebook, and keep its 125 million users coming back.

On Wednesday in San Francisco at the Web 2.0 Summit, MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta announced the launch of two new music products for the online site – one for the fans, the other for the bands. More

Forget the dollar and the yen. People value their cold, hard content.

By Pete Steege, product marketing manager, Seagate Technology

Steege looks at information as legal tender. Photo: Seagate

Earlier this year there was a bit of buzz that the US dollar was at risk of being dethroned as the world's default currency. I'm not a financial expert, so I can't weigh in with any authority on the US dollar's continued hegemony vs. other monetary currencies. But I do think the there is a new global currency looming on the financial horizon that will change how we transact business. The new legal tender: information.

Driven by the content Gang of Five (Google (GOOG), Facebook, Microsoft (MSFT), Apple (AAPL), and TiVo (TIVO) ) and their peers, our day-to-day lives have turned irreversibly digital. We collect television shows and movies instead of just watching them. We download songs instead of just listening to them. We don't talk on the phone so much as we manage our messages.

Along the way, information has become a consumable. More than that, information is a commodity that we increasingly equate with a specific dollar value. How much does a movie DVD cost? It depends on who's selling it and whether or not it is on sale. Not so with online content. A digital song is $1, (well, more like $1.29)  a movie is $10, an ebook is $10, more or less.

This convergence of the value of digital content affects consumers' other possessions and purchases as well. For example, how much a personal computer is worth to its owner depends more on what is stored on it than what was paid for it. Two thousand songs stored on the hard drive? It's worth at least $2,000. More

Photo books are replacing 4x6 prints as the most important products in the printing business. Photo: Shutterfly.

Photo site offers lens into the post-print world.

At lunch on a recent afternoon in Silicon Valley, Shutterfly CEO Jeffrey Housenbold is remarkably upbeat, considering the miserable year the overall photo business is having.

Almost any way you slice it, people are making fewer glossy prints in a rough economy. The numbers are off for at-home printing (down 2%), photo-counter printing (down 6%) and kiosk printing (down 12%), according to the Photo Marketing Association. The only big growth category? The under-the-table printing that people do for free at work. (That’s up 42%.)

Fortunately for Housenbold the photo recession hasn’t hit online photo finishers like Shutterfly (SFLY) as hard as some other parts of the industry. In fact, Shutterfly and rivals like Eastman Kodak’s (EK) Kodak Gallery and Hewlett-Packard’s (HPQ) Snapfish are still growing – partly because they’ve embraced ideas like photo books, social networks and smartphones to push their business beyond the old-fashioned glossy print. More

Technology isn't a cure-all for getting employees to talk to each other. In fact, it can be the enemy.

By Scott Raskin, CEO, Mindjet

Raskin: Employees need to get leave their cubicles and desks, literally or virtually. Photo: Mindjet

How do you harness the creativity of your workforce? In this age of Twitter, Facebook and other so-called Web 2.0 tools, technology seems like an obvious way to get employees to collaborate.  Ditto your suppliers, customers and other interested parties.

But collaboration, high-tech or otherwise, isn’t so easy to manage. Renowned business strategist Gary Hamel is one of many business leaders to comment on the challenges of sparking workforce creativity. In his book Leading the Revolution, Hamel dedicates a chapter to Design Rules for Innovation. He notes that a company’s intent on generating sustained wealth must create “an open market for ideas…a dynamic internal market for ideas within the organization.”

In essence, Hamel calls for a return of the collaboration that once stood as the cornerstone of innovation in Western culture – a culture that predated Tweets and status updates.

But what are we talking about when we describe this sought-after collaboration “renaissance”? More

The Semantic Web promises to make data and applications smarter.

By James Hendler, assistant dean for information technology, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Hendler: The semantic web is here. Photo: RPI

What do web giant Google (GOOG), the New York Times (NYT), the pharmaceutical leader UCB, and web startups Garlik and Bintro have in common?

They are among the approximately two hundred companies that have announced, this month alone, details of how they will be enhancing their businesses by using the emerging technology of the Semantic Web.  They join a rapidly growing list of companies already using this new Web stuff.  So what is it, and why haven’t we heard more about it?

You’ve likely heard of what’s known as Web 2.0 thanks to social media companies such as Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia. The Semantic Web, on the other hand, tends to play “below the hood,” making applications, search and social networks better rather than replacing them altogether. (It is sort of the online equivalent of the BASF motto: The Semantic Web doesn’t make online tools. It makes online tools better.) More

User-generated video goes mobile – and live

Ramu Sunkara was at home in Silicon Valley three years ago, chatting with a friend in Moscow, when inspiration struck. He didn’t just want to hear about his friend

Sunkara: inspired by a Moscow snow frolic. Photo: Qik

playing in the snow with his kids. He wanted to see it, live.

Now he can. Soon after that phone conversation, Sunkara and two friends started Qik (pronounced "quick"), a company whose software lets cell phones broadcast video live to the Internet.

Today, Qik and other mobile video services are still in their infancy. But consumers finally have an excuse to try them, now that they have access to 3G networks and a new crop of video-equipped smartphones. According to Nielsen VideoCensus, Qik has so far attracted just a tiny audience, though its popularity seems to have spiked recently. Since its iPhone app began working over 3G networks in August, viewers have stayed on the site six times longer.

"When we launched, only two phones were capable of doing live video," says Sunkara, Qik's CEO. "Now practically every new phone can."

Cell phone video in general is a fast-growing category. Google (GOOG) says that YouTube's cell phone video uploads increased fivefold just a week after the release of the latest video-capable iPhones (AAPL). Facebook has begun adding video capture to its cell phone apps. And sites like Ustream and Flixwagon are experimenting in the same live mobile video niche where Qik is making a name for itself. More

Think you can create the next Twitter or Facebook? Good luck with that.

Markson: Building an online business has many offline challenges. Photo: Blekko

By Mike Markson, co-founder, Blekko

Many a consumer looks at an “overnight sensation” such as Twitter or Facebook and muses: “That service is so simple — I could do that.”  If only it were true.

It turns out that starting a business on the web is hard.   Very hard.  And I’m not talking about the technology – although that part is hard, too.   I’m talking about the business part: building a user base and finding a way to make money. Those are really hard problems.

Whether you’re a start-up or an established company, here are the hard truths you must face if you want to build a successful online media property.
More

Social networking site elbows in on LinkedIn's job-finding franchise.

When it comes to finding a new job, they say it’s all about who you know. With the rise of online social networks that has never been truer.

Today, 42% of adults in the U.S. with Internet access maintain a profile on a social networking site, up from 20% in 2007, according to Forrester Research. And in an economy where almost one-tenth of the population is unemployed, more job-seekers are likely to look for opportunities online.

Meanwhile existing members of social networks may take the time to fill in more of their job history in their profiles.

Recruiters have been scouring professionally-oriented social network LinkedIn for qualified candidates for years now. More than 40% of Fortune 100 companies pay to use the site to find talent among its 46 million members.

But social networks are still evolving as places to hire and be hired, and Facebook, with its 250 million members, is gaining ground. More