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Valley-based PR company Edelmann and The Electric Sheep Company are teaming up to sponsor what is most probably the first business plan competition for entrepreneurs in the virtual world of Second Life. according to the official announcement, applications are expected to be focused on improving the SL community, including business ideas like development of products, services or machinima-movies. requirements for filings include:

• Clear, detailed description of the product or service you plan on offering
• Description of how you intend to make money, and the cost structure that would be needed to support operations
• Description of your target market and any research you have done proving out demand for your product or service
• Description of how you intend to bring the product/service to the market, i.e. sales and marketing strategies
• Analysis of direct or indirect competition
• Background of your team (i.e. show why you are the people to get it done)

the winner is entitled to use a private island for 6 months and, more importantly, the amount of L$350.000 - equal to approx. USD 1.280,-. while this might not sound a lot, it could at least free an aspiring web-developer or gfx-designer from everyday-work for a few weeks, to get things started.

while O’Reilly’s web 2.0 summit is almost over, PodTech’s John Furrier published a bootlegged video of Eric Schmidt’s keynote given on tuesday:

An overflow crowd waits for the Eric Schmidt Web 2.0 keynote. At $3,500 per conference attendee, and a full plate of sponsors, it looks like they made some serious bank. Speaking of bank, the Google CEO denies rumors of $500 million legal reserve for YouTube, and states that Google will never trap user data.

Michael Arrington gave a comprehensive summary of Launch Pad, the kick-off event giving 13 startups the chance to demo their products to an high-profile audience. contestants included companies like sphere, omnidrive and oDesk.

despite not participating in the summit itself, Riya (formerly known for their face-recognizing image-search engine) managed to do the most-covered product-launch this week: like.com utilizes their technology to find products (currently limited to jewelry, shoes, handbags and watches) based on visual similarity. coverage all over the place.

and finally there’s an interesting sum-up of a talk between John Batelle and Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie on Read/Write Web.

update: Redeye VC links to Mary Meeker’s presentation on the “state of the internet” - 41 slides incredibly stuffed with numbers & stats on business-development on the net.

a very honorable mention goes to Lou Reed, who has been performing on yesterdays post-dinner party, sponsored by AOL (via Webware). bubbly, anyone? …update: here’s the video!

earlier today, Google’s press-center confirmed what probably will be this years hottest and most controversial aquistion in IT-land: YouTube, 65 employees strong and searching for a business-model in business for less than 2 years, was sold to Google in an $1.65 billion all stock transaction (TechCruch has more details). besides the self-evident decision to continue the YouTube-brand (raising the question about the future of Google’s very own Video-service), details on the deal haven’t been disclosed. however, Google not only bought the worlds fastest growing website, but a plethora of possible IP-lawsuits against YouTube (read Mark Cuban’s post) as well. now that YouTube is owned by someone actually worth suing, it’s probably only a matter of time until the media-companies go to court. anyway, congratulations to Chad Hurley and Steven Chen, founders of YouTube!

now that’s what I’ld call ‘news’ - of course if it turns out to be true… Michael Arrington reports on rumors whispering that Google might be about to close aquisition of YouTube for $1.6 billion. Arrington ponders that these rumours are “40% likely to be at least partially true”…;)

update: the rumor is still around, backed by articles in the NY Times and the Wallstreet Journal.

Competitious is a collaborative tool, helping project-teams to track competing websites in their market. just enter URL and name of a site and watch Competitious automatically collect traffic-data and related blog-posts both from the companies’ blog and from all over the web. users can create feature-lists to compare several services in a feature matrix. comparative traffic-data is graphed using Alexaholic (therefor limited to max. 5 sites per graph). users can track several independet projects and may share data with team-members. a bookmarklet is used to collect data from other sources - those so-called “clippings” are distributed among the team via RSS. keeping things simple & lean, Competitious might be a great timesaver for everybody in need to staying up-2-date in web(2.0)-space.

while Apple is almost certainly quite likely going to announce feature-movie downloads for the iTunes Music Store on next tuesdays special event, Amazon is first off the mark by having launched their movie download-service Unbox.com tonight. Unbox offers TV-episodes for $2 USD and movies in the range from $8 to 20$ for download, movies are also rented for $2 - $3 (that is for one playback!). according to TechCrunch, video is delivered in both a DVD-quality hi-res-file and a low-res version suitable for portable devices (both using DRM’ed Windows Media). Unbox.com is currently available to US-customers only.

SpiralFrog is in the news again. after last weeks major announcement on their deal with Universal Music (entitling SpiralFrog to start distribution of free music-downloads from Universal’s catalog by the end of 2006), a yesterday announced partnership unveils a similar venture between SpiralFrog and EMI Music Publishing. with two major labels on board and Universal about to buy one half of Sony-BMG, SpiralFrog’s business-model is strongly gaining momentum among the music industry.

while it’s clear that the free distribution-model will be ad-supported, there is still no statement on the exact form of advertising being used. according to rumours on a recent episode of TWIT, advertising could even go as far as requiring the user to listen to ad-spots each time they access a song. while this would definitely overshoot the mark and lead to poor acceptance of the service, I think modestly inserted ads would be tolerated by many users.

in what could turn out to be the beginning-of-the-end for current digital-music business-models, newcomer SpiralFrog yesterday announced a major deal with the Universal Music Group, authorizing SpiralFrog to distribute UMG’s extensive catalog as free - though DRM’ed - and legal downloads within the United States & Canada. the free music-service is an attempt to offer “young consumers an easy-to-use alternative to pirated music”. SpiralFrog will monetize on advertisment by - according to TechCrunch - requiring users to log into their website at least once a month to keep downloaded files valid (probably by a technique similar to Napster on-the-go). TC further reports that SpiralFrog will be based on the Windows-Media-format, therefor locking out millions of iPod users (though it’s not even sure if mobile playback will be supported at all). SpiralFrog’s service will be launched in late 2006.

according to this Yahoo! Finance-article, Google CEO Eric Schmidt was elected to Apple’s board of directors earlier today. after announcing Google Apps, this looks like Google’s second slap in Microsoft’s face within a few days. Steve Jobs on Apple’s latest reinforcement:

“Like Apple, Google is very focused on innovation and we think Eric’s insights and experience will be very valuable in helping to guide Apple in the years ahead.”

Richard White, member of the team that created Kiko, wrote an honest post on the lessons he learned from Kiko’s failure. Kiko is an early - if not the first - AJAX-calendar (way before Google Calendar and 30boxes). yesterday, TechCrunch among others broke the news that Kiko Software decided to discontinue the service and put the domain and software for sale on eBay (if you ever felt an urge to compete with Google in a market where it’s hard to charge users, now is the time! the bid is currently at USD 50.000,-). Richard points out that Kiko wasn’t doomed by the mere appearance of Google Calendar or other competitors. according to him, the reason for the team calling it a quit was the perceived impossibility of getting a grip in the small business-market. the importance of breaking out of the blog- & web2.0-audience is probably the most significant lesson learnt from Kiko…