Free directory assistance has a price after all: $175 million. That's the price we hear Jingle Networks is trying to get for its 1-800-FREE-411 service, which gives free business listings in exchange for playing ads. Google, Microsoft, and AT&T are all preparing bids. But a source who has looked at Jingle's numbers say it will be lucky to get full price: "It's maybe worth $90 million." By late 2006, Jingle had raised $60 million; we hear it's since blown through that, and taken on debt besides.

Early in her 8-minute interview with Digg CEO Jay Adelson, BoomTown's Kara Swisher asks Adelson about the future of the company. She casually mentions acquisition rumors. "Oh that's what you want to know, I see," Adelson says. Had this been Wallstrip, we'd see an image of a turtle pulling his head into his shell flash on screen. Swisher changes the topic. But later, in the part we've excerpted above, Swisher gets Adelson to talk anyway. She asks him how he would fix a big media company. Perpetual rumors suggest his answer is to have them buy Digg. So when Adelson starts to explain his ideas, remember that everybody's selling something. This is how Adelson sells Digg.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and chairman Bill Gates have it all wrong trying to take on Google by buying Yahoo. What they really need is "an underground secret team" that works in "a new office building in Cologne" and includes " John R. Coza." Also, they need to hire "as a sort of mascot / good luck guy" bigdowro, the commenter who had this prophesy and kindly shared it with the rest of us in 443 words. It's my favorite bizzaro dreamscape since Coleridge's Kubla Khan and its pasted below.

Bernstein analyst Charles Di Bona told clients Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang's letter to Microsoft Steve Ballmer and March 18 presentation to shareholders indicate he has lost touch with reality.

According to public filings, Yahoo is planning to hold its annual shareholder meeting June 10 and file its proxy materials with the SEC by April 21. By that schedule, the Microsoft-Yahoo melodrama would necessarily come to an end on April 22. Here's the bad news: Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and the Yahoo board canceled that June 10 shareholder meeting. By law, they have until July 13 to hold it. If that date passes without a meeting, Microsoft lawyers can ask a judge to force the Yahoo board to hold one. But even then, a judge won't be able to force a meeting before another 30 days. Mark it on your calendars, people, unless Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Yang suddenly fall in love, we're in for another four months of this.

The hard sell hasn't worked, so maybe a softer appeal to the heart could woo Yahoo into Microsoft's loving embrace? Seems Steve Ballmer spent the afternoon crafting a love letter to Jerry Yang and posted it to the Missing Connections section of Craigslist.

We hear Michael Arrington is in advanced talks to acquire VentureBeat, a smaller tech blog which, like Arrington's TechCrunch, is trying to expand from the niche of covering startups. When Arrington issued a rant about the dangers of tech blogs raising venture capital, it was easy to dismiss his talk of a blog rollup as drunken fantasy. Arrington's concern: That his competitors, by raising money one by one, would make it financially impossible to assemble a "dream team" of bloggers. But why on earth would anyone accept a lower valuation just to be part of Arrington's team? Arrington, we're told, has tentatively secured venture backing from Eric Chin of Bay Partners, a longtime business associate. That would give him the capital to buy up at least some of his rivals.

Snocap, the company started by Napster creator Shawn Fanning, has been acquired by social network Imeem. What the fate of Fanning's sophomore effort proves: There may be second acts in the Valley, but they're usually not any good. Imeem had been using Snocap's digital registry to identify uploaded music for over a year. It also reunites a number of original Napster employees, like Snocap COO Ali Aydar who will be the new VP of operations at Imeem. Snocap had been rumored to be for sale for some time after slashing jobs. The 15 remaining employees will be absorbed into Imeem's growing San Francisco office — which added the staff from Anywhere.fm earlier this year.

Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang today promised the world 500 to 700 engineers will complete Yahoo's brand advertising platform by the third quarter. The announcement was Yahoo's second public response today to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer threat to lower Microsoft's bid for Yahoo over the weekend. According to the clip above, the platform — once called Project Apex, now dubbed AMP — is supposed to provide the technology for publishers to sell their own display, search, mobile and video ads through a Yahoo marketplace. Problem is Apex/AMP is not near completion, commenters on our post "Employee: Yahoo is a mess inside," tell us.

In a letter addressed to "Dear Steve," Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and chairman Roy Bostock responded this morning to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's weekend letter. The pair write that Yahoo is not opposed to a Microsoft "transaction," but that at $42.25 billion, Microsoft's merger bid remains too low. Bostock and Yang also reject Ballmer's clam that Yahoo management refuses to negotiate. They admonish: "Steve, you personally attended two of these meetings and could have advanced discussions in any way you saw fit." Sounds like a call for the monkey dance to us. Yang and Bostock's whole letter is embedded below.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is tired of waiting on Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and the Yahoo board to realize it's time to negotiate. He's sent an angry letter to the board. "We've seen no indication that you have authorized Yahoo! management to negotiate with Microsoft," he writes.

Microsoft is looking at its $42 billion bid for Yahoo in light of "worsening market conditions" according to Reuters.

At 10 a.m., Jeff Bonforte, the ex-Yahoo who's now CEO of Xobni, described his status on LinkedIn as "legal documents up to my ears." What could have him so submerged? Microsoft has long been rumored to be interested in Xobni, which makes a plugin for its Outlook software. Not long ago, Microsoft startup scout Don Dodge took the startup's small team to dinner, but Xobni's said to have balked at a sub-$20 million offer they viewed as lowball. If Bonforte has actually persuaded Microsoft to raise it, he'll have earned his pay. The irony, if a deal happens: Bonforte will likely end up working for Microsoft long before his former colleagues. Update: Xobni cofounder Matt Brezina tells me the legal documents are for intellectual-property licenses, not a sale. Sounds dreadfully boring — and good training for a career at Microsoft if the widely expected purchase goes through.

Microsoft and Yahoo execs met this week in Sunnyvale, but the talks didn't go anywhere. The sticking point: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's troops refused to consider raising their cash-and-stock bid and so Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang's representatives likewise refused to initiate "formal negotiations," the WSJ reports. Meanwhile, commenters confirm that while its new brand advertising platform flounders, Yahoo "is indeed a mess inside. Yahoo is full of pissing matches at the VP level." Please, tell us more.

Google plans to sell DoubleClick's search engine marketing division. "Maintaining objectivity in both search and advertising is paramount to our mission and core to the trust we ask from our users," Google's DoubleClick integration boss Tom Phillips wrote on the company's blog. In the '80s, Phillips ran a magazine called Spy which would have skewered him for such carefully groomed language. [WSJ]

Institutional investors aren't the only ones growing increasingly impatient with Yahoo management. One Yahoo tipster tells us that "from the view of an employee, Yahoo is a mess inside." The employee tells us that Apex, the brand advertising system that's supposed to help increase Yahoo's revenue 72 percent by 2010 "is being made by the same fools that did Panama" — Yahoo's long-delayed search marketing platform:

Yahoo's board and top executives continue to hope Microsoft will raise its per share bid to $40, or at least the mid-$30 range. Not going to happen, a source close to Microsoft told the WSJ. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and company consider Yahoo's talks between Time Warner and News Corp dead, and "there's no reason to bid against ourselves," this person told the paper. Meanwhile, frustrated Yahoo institutional investors told BoomTown they plan to support Microsoft in a proxy fight.

Ever since Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang put out a shareholder presentation promising a 72 percent revenue increase by 2010, hostilities have quieted between the Microsoft and Yahoo. That's because merger negotiations are heating up. BoomTown's Kara Swisher reports that Microsoft might raise its offer to somewhere between $34 and $36 per share to seal the deal. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is also said to be considering offering more cash and less stock in a new bid, fattening Yahoo retention packages, and giving Yang and Yahoo president Sue Decker independence to run the company after it's owned by Microsoft. A display of such gratitude from Ballmer may seem uncharacteristic — until you remember that Yang and Decker's management is what landed Yahoo in this spot.

We've been hearing that impending layoffs have DoubleClick employees fearing for their jobs after Google finishes its takeover. Why? Working there sucks. Ask any Googler. Below, four reasons why DoubleClickers should welcome their liberation from the Googleplex:

The EU will review Nokia's $8.1 billion buyout of digital mapmaker Navteq. The Commission believes the deal could hurt competition. Navteq only has one large rival, Tele Atlas, which is being acquired by GPS maker TomTom. The EU is already examining that transaction. [FT]