Press, including us, received an invitation this morning (see ticket image above) inviting them to a Hollywood event next week hosted by music services Lala and iLike. The invitation, titled ?Discover Music!? says announcements will be followed by performances, and that Lala, iLike ?& Others? are hosting. The ?& Others? includes Google, we?ve heard from multiple sources, and the new service will be unveiled. All four major music services are backing the service.

iLike was recently acquired by MySpace, so the new service may involve them as well.

From information we?ve gathered from sources, the new service will be integrated into Google search. Users will be able to stream songs directly from Google via partners iLike and Lala. Additional information around the music query will be provided to users as well (presumably any relevant results from YouTube as well as information already available in Google?s existing music search ? example). One source said that Google will organize music searches in a way very similar to the way they do public company stock searches today.

Users will also be offered the opportunity to purchase songs for download, we?ve confirmed.

Both iLike and Lala provided limited streaming services today. Lala lets users stream a song once, then a user either has to pay or only get a 30 second clip. iLike has some full streaming, some 30 second clips. MySpace Music has full streaming rights from all four major labels.

A number of blogs picked it up and speculated that Google may soon begin to offer users the ability to create customized, printed magazines from Internet content. And print ads included in the magazine would be customized, too.

The speculation doesn?t appear to be far off. The patent, which was filed in May, 2006, points out the flaws in existing print magazines:

Consumers may purchase a variety of publications in various forms, e.g., print form (e.g., newspapers, magazines, books, etc.), electronic form (e.g., electronic newspapers, electronic books (?e-Books?), electronic magazines, etc.), etc. The publishers define the content of such publications, and advertisers define which advertisements (ads) may be seen in the publications. Since consumers have no control over publication content or advertisements, they may purchase a publication that contains at least some content and advertisements that may be of no interest to them.

Publishers often lack insight into the profiles of consumers who purchase their publications, and, accordingly, miss out on subscription and advertisement revenue due to a lack of personalized content and advertisements. Likewise, consumer targeting for advertisers is limited, and there is virtually no standardization for ad sizes (e.g., an ad that is supposed to be a full page may need to be reduced in size to fit within a publication). Accordingly, advertisers sometimes purchase sub-optimal or worthless ad space in an attempt to reach their target markets. Advertisers also have difficulty identifying new prospective market segments to target because they have limited insight into the desires and reactions of consumers.

The solution, Google says, is to give users the ability to search and browse their own content, and receive an electronic or hard copy version of the final product. And that final product will include advertisements highly relevant to the user.

Google also possibly sees the use of kiosks to create and print these documents:

?the customer interface documents may be provided via a kiosk. For example, kiosks containing the customer interface documents may be provided in stores (e.g., Target, supermarkets, retail stores, etc.) in a similar way as picture kiosks are currently provided in such stores.

Of course, this is just a patent at this stage, and Google?s history when dabbling with print stuff is terrible. It could be years, if ever, before Google tries to productize this. But I also wonder how effective this patent would be if established magazines tried to allow users to customize content in a similar way ? Google could step in and claim infringement. Their hope, of course, would be to license the patent and supply all the advertisements.

While we have yet to use it, what looks nice about it is that you can not only browse by sections, but also by sources, keywords, and most importantly by elements such as ?most popular? and ?recommended.? The visual representation probably won?t revolutionize Google News? often sub-par performance, but the better filters could.

The URL currently takes you to a Google log-in page, but when you sign-in you?re greeted with:

Please visit this page from any computer on the corporate network to automatically enable access for your account.

Which means this remains internal to Google right now. But look for it soon. Click on the image below for a slightly larger version.

The paid 411 market is so dead. I?m betting these free alternatives take at least 50% market share within a couple of years.

The deal was, as we wrote late last week, in the later stages of negotiation. The two companies had agreed on a price ? around $550 million plus earnouts ? and were working through the final details of the acquisition.

Then something happened that made Yelp reconsider the deal. Over the weekend they notified Google that they were not going to sell, say multiple sources.

So what made the deal go sideways? We?re working on that. From the information we?ve gathered, there is currently no other suitor seriously looking at the company. For now Yelp intends to stay independent. We?re betting that someone ? Apple, Microsoft, etc. ? came to Yelp with an offer for a strategic deal that gave Stoppleman the confidence to say no to Google. But who that partner is and what they offered isn?t something we?ve been able to track down.

But this isn?t just another Android phone. Very trustworthy sources who have seen the phone say that it is the Google Phone we first wrote about last month (despite the uninformed saying we were dreaming). It will be branded Google and sold by Google as an unlocked phone, which could change everything. As we wrote in our original post:

Google is building their own branded phone that they?ll sell directly and through retailers. They were long planning to have the phone be available by the holidays, but it has now slipped to early 2010. The phone will be produced by a major phone manufacturer but will only have Google branding (Microsoft did the same thing with their first Zunes, which were built by Toshiba).

There won?t be any negotiation or compromise over the phone?s design of features ? Google is dictating every last piece of it. No splintering of the Android OS that makes some applications unusable. Like the iPhone for Apple, this phone will be Google?s pure vision of what a phone should be.

The phone itself is being built by HTC, with a lot of input from Google. It seems to be a tailored version of the HTC Passion or the related HD2 (Unlocker scored some leaked picturesback in October which are of the same phone). Update: Here is a more recent picture.

Here are the details we know so far about the phone: It will be called the Google Phone (update the official name is ?Nexus One?) and will launch in early January, 2010. It won?t be sold by any one carrier, but instead will be an unlocked GSM phone. In the U.S., that means T-Mobile and possibly AT&T, whose exclusivity deal with the iPhone is about to run out. It will be running Android 2.1

The phone is ?really, really fast,? says someone who has seen one in action. It runs on a Snapdragon chip, has a super high-resolution OLED touchscreen, is thinner than the iPhone, has no keyboard, and two mics. The mic on the back of the phone helps eliminate background noise, and it also has a ?weirdly? large camera for a phone. And if you don?t like the touchscreen keyboard, a voice-to-text feature is supposed to let you dictate emails and notes by speaking directly into the phone.

Yelp was founded in 2004 as a way to let users leave reviews on local businesses. Comscore puts worldwide traffic at nearly 9 million monthly unique visitors, and it has been growing fast ? the company says it?s real numbers are more like 25 million monthly uniques.

Yelp has whispered that 2009 revenues will be around $30 million and are expecting $50 million or so in 2010.

Yelp last raised venture capital in early 2008 from DAG at a $200 million pre-money valuation, we?ve heard. They?ve raised a total of $31 million over four venture rounds.

On the odds of the deal happening ? one source says its 80% likely. Not signed, sealed and delivered, but past the term sheet stage.

Google is building out their own directory of local businesses with its Place Pages, which can be accessed via Google Maps and local search. They are encouraging local businesses to put Google-branded stickers in store windows and recently added their own ratings summaries to business profiles. Yelp, of course, already has all of this data, along with a growing and active audience of consumers who are used to finding (and rating) businesses on Yelp.

For their part, Google is clearly on a shopping spree. They recently acquired AdMob for $750 million, and were in the running on the LaLa acquisition. Expect lots of deals to be announced by them over the next three months.

What can we expect? Driver support will likely be a weak point. We?ve heard at various times that Google has a legion of engineers working on the not so glamorous task of building hardware drivers. And we?ve also heard conflicting rumors that Google is mostly relying on hardware manufacturers to create those drivers. Whatever the truth, and it?s likely in between, having a robust set of functioning drivers is extremely important to Chrome OS?s success. People will want to download this to whatever computer they use and have it just work.

We expect Google will be careful with messaging around the launch, and endorse a small set of devices for installation. EEE PC netbooks, for example, may be one set of devices that Google will say are ready to use Chrome OS. There will likely be others as well, but don?t expect to be able to install it on whatever laptop or desktop machine you have from day one. Google has previously said they are working with Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba on the project.

We?ve seen convincing and not so convincing screenshots of Chrome OS over the last several months. The good news is the speculation is about to end, and you can try it out yourself. If you have one of the supported devices, that is.

Tonight, Google has unveiled their Google Apps Marketplace. This is an app store for enterprise apps in the cloud. Using a set of APIs, these third-party apps can deeply integrate their products within Google Apps, which already some 25 million people are using. And that also includes over 2 million businesses ranging from startups, to small businesses, to Fortune 500 companies.

For customers, this means a one-stop shop for a variety of applications that their business or organization can use. And it?s extremely simple to get started with apps in the marketplace ? it just takes 4 clicks, Google says (though that initial click will have to come from your domain admin to approve the use of the app). For developers, particularly small startup developers, it means instant access to more users than they can likely imagine. It also potentially means something more important: money.

Like the popular mobile app stores (Apple?s App Store and Google?s own Android Market), Google is allowing developers to sell their apps through this Marketplace. And they?re actually offering a better deal: Google will keep just 20% of the revenue, while the developers keep the other 80% (compared to a 30/70 split with the Android Market). The reason for this better split is that Google believes the B2B market is a bit different, and they want to entice developers to join on board. And instead of Apple?s App Store, which charges a $100 yearly fee to developers, Google is charging a one-time fee of $100 to enroll in the program and that?s for as many apps as you want to create.

Some quick math (with Google?s help) tells us that 1,765,472 seconds equals a little over 20 days. What happens in 20 days? It could be the end of the world, when Google becomes self-aware, or 2010. You decide.

To make sure, we went ahead and switched our system clocks to trick it into thinking it was December 31, and sure enough, the countdown ends at January 1 at midnight. Unfortunately, there doesn?t appear to be a payoff when the timer hits zero. Maybe Google will add that later. That is, if they got it done before the code freeze.