The rumor mill is always churning on San Francisco-based Bebo. Now Google may be interested in acquiring the social network for $1 billion to $1.5 billion. That's a lot of cheese for a smallish social network that has almost no presence in the U.S. Why would Google want it?

Did you know Michael Robertson personally made $115 million from the sale of MP3.com? If not, he's glad to remind you on his new site, Dealipedia. Robertson, whose main skill seems to be picking up timely domain names and concocting the appearance of a business around them, expects that a sufficient number of insiders will fill in the details of mergers and acquisitions for him, creating a database to challenge the likes of Dow Jones and Dun & Bradstreet. Right. The real service Dealipedia provides is giving people an anonymous way to let the world know just how wealthy they are. For the braggarts of the world, it offers plausible deniability. Jason Calacanis's details are already in there.

Digg and IAC's Ask.com search engine are getting close to launching an Ask-branded version of the popular headline-voting site. We'd heard in December that the two companies were working together. Indeed, the delay in the project's launch may have contributed to Ask.com CEO Jim Lanzone's ouster. Without Lanzone, the project is continuing. IAC's hiring a general manager to run an unspecified website — which could well be the Digg-like news site.

Samir Arora, the Valley's most talented flim-flam artist, has convinced investors to put in a fresh round of financing into Glam Media, his online-ad network. The deal could be announced as soon as tomorrow. The amount raised: Between $30 million and $100 million, we hear, valuing the company at as much as $400 million. A lofty figure, given Glam's scant sales — but Arora had sought a $200 million round, and a valuation in the range of $800 million to $1 billion. The premise of that valuation: The 25 million monthly visitors to sites in Glam's network, many of them female. But investors likely figured out that Glam doesn't own most of the sites those people visited.

When word leaked that John Battelle had hired San Francisco investment bank Savvian to "manage investor interest" in Federated Media, his online-ad network, the move raised a question: How interested were investors? $100 million interested, reports Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch. That's the offer Battelle got, and turned down, from one unnamed investor. Schonfeld also points out this curiosity: At Battelle's last venture, the Industry Standard, the entrepreneur was the one pushing to sell out, not wait for a better offer.

Valleywag has learned that Amazon.com has invested $4 million in sale-a-day e-commerce site Woot. The deal gives Amazon right of first refusal to buy the company should Woot hit certain unnamed sales targets, want to go public, or sell to another company. For the most part, the companies operate independently. But there's more to Woot, and its ties to Amazon, than meets the eye.

"The Wall St. buzz is that msft and yhoo are bidding for eBay. My source tells me that Yahoo! has bid 1.76 shares for eBay ($40-41) and is expected to win at that price." So writes Scot Wingo, the plugged-in CEO of ChannelAdvisor, an auctions-software maker in which eBay owns a minority stake. Let's dissect that rumor, shall we?

While Microsoft has yet to come up with a search engine that wows consumers, it has successfully wooed Wall Street with its push into online advertising. Alas for Microsoft, it's losing a key dealmaker. Bruce Jaffe, a top corporate-development executive who helped engineer Microsoft's $6 billion acquisition of aQuantive and its $240 million investment in Facebook, is leaving the company. He's been interviewing around the Valley, but last we heard, he's decided to form his own startup. Anyone have more details on what he's up to?

Silicon Alley Insider's Peter Kafka lavishes praise on Quincy Smith, CBS's hyperactive interactive dealmaker. The ostensible reason? A well-executed deal between Digg and CBSNews.com, designed to avoid offending the fragile feelings of the social news site's oversensitive communities. Forget all that. The real reason? Kafka has a massive mancrush on Smith — as does just about every other tech reporter I know. Smith is witty, adorable, and just geeky enough for us to relate. He's also got an open pocketbook to buy Web properties, which makes him a font of story-generating deal rumors. But he's mostly adorable. Oh, those eyebrows!

According to Silicon Alley Insider, Yahoo may be looking to sell its music subscription service. The move makes sense: Ian Rogers, the general manager of Yahoo Music, declared in October that he was done inconveniencing users with the digital restrictions labels required for online music subscriptions. Subscriptions simply haven't materialized as the profitable business model for artists, labels, and services alike that many had imagined. Freeing itself of the failed model will allow Yahoo to focus on free, ad-supported music. The only problem now is dumping the old service.

From The Wall Street Journal: "Microsoft said that NBC Universal Inc., Walt Disney Co., Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. and Showtime Networks Inc. have agreed to contribute entertainment content to the software maker's Xbox Live and MSN online services. The deals were slated to be announced during a speech by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates on the opening night of the Consumer Electronics Show."

Warner Music has struck a deal to bring its entire back catalog, free of copying restrictions, to the Amazon MP3 store. (New releases from artists like Josh Groban are not included.) This brings the total number of songs available on Amazon to 2.9 million, and strikes another blow at Steve Jobs's quest to remove digital rights management code, or DRM, from iTunes music. So far, only EMI and a number of independent labels allow Apple to sell music in the DRM-free MP3 format. The theory is that the other music labels are willing to allow Amazon.com to sell DRM-free music in an attempt to break Apple's stranglehold on the digital distribution of music. Of course, they're hardly hurting Jobs, since Apple's iPods can play Amazon-sold MP3 files. Did we mention that the music industry is run by self-defeating idiots?

Also in Apple's movie rental deal yesterday with Fox: Apple will license its FairPlay copy-protection technology to the studio for DVD movie releases. This will allow DVD purchasers to easily — and legally — copy movies to their computers for playback on iPods and iPhones.

Japan's dominant wireless carrier, NTT DoCoMo, will use Google's Internet search and email on the carrier's handsets. [WSJ]

The main thing anyone ever knew about Edgeio, an online classifieds startup, is that it launched Michael Arrington's career at TechCrunch. Desperate to find out more information about this "Web 2.0" thing he kept hearing about, Arrington started blogging, and eventually left Edgeio, swapping a 10 percent stake in TechCrunch for a 10 percent stake in Edgeio. Arrington's stake is now worthless — which I think would actually make Teare the savvier businessman here — and Edgeio's assets have been sold at auction.

Microsoft will pay Viacom $500 million over five years to serve ads and distribute content for the media conglomerate, according to reports. What does that mean? Besides Microsoft-sold ads on MTV.com, expect to see Nickelodeon clips on MSN, Laguna Hills downloads on your Xbox 360 console, and so on. Viacom's old advertising service was DoubleClick. We're guessing that relationship turned sour when Google — which faces a $1 billion copyright infringement suit from Viacom — announced its intent to purchase DoubleClick for $3.1 billion. (Photo by AP/Mark Lennihan)

IAC's Ticketmaster division is trying to close a multiyear deal to be the official ticket scalper of the National Football League. TicketMaster competitor and eBay subsidiary StubHub is the other potential bidder for resale rights. Earlier this year, Stubhub made a deal to resell Major League Baseball tickets, a significant blow to Ticketmaster. Unfortunately for Ticketmaster, while the MLB deal gave StubHub resale rights for all 30 teams at once, because of the way the NFL is structured, the league has negotiating rights for only about half the league.

GPS device maker TomTom has partnered with Google so TomTom owners can send business name and address information directly from Google Maps to their sat-nav systems wirelessly. This is similar to the Send To Car feature that Google and BMW rolled out earlier this year. [Bloomberg]

Users of LiveJournal call it "defriending." As terrible as it sounds, defriending's not really that bad; it just means you're bored with someone and don't want to hear about their issues anymore. Or share yours with them. That, in essence, is what Six Apart, the San Francisco-based blog-software company, has decided to do with LiveJournal, the online community it acquired from Brad Fitzpatrick in 2005. Andrew Anker, Six Apart's vice president of chopping the company into little bits for convenient and lucrative disposition corporate development, orchestrated the sale of LiveJournal to Sup, a Russian media company which already runs a localized version of the site. With the sale, Anker and the rest of Six Apart's team are letting LiveJournal know, as gently as they can, that they're just not interested in its problems.

The merger between Vivendi's games division and Activision is a big deal in the videogame business. The industry's Davids now have not one but two Goliaths to sling stones at. More importantly, console makers have two equal-sized publishers to play against each other. But it wasn't Activision CEO Robert Kotick's dream of forming a company to rival Electronic Arts that convinced him to form Activision Blizzard with Vivendi — it was World of Warcraft. According to accounts in both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, Kotick was "eager" to get into online games — multiplayer online worlds are all the rage right now.