• Globealive Faces Court Challenge
• Ditital Music Strategies Confab Added To CMW Events
• Tunecore To Monetize Indie Music On MySpace
• Google  Search Going MultiLingual
• Mobile, The Death Knell Of Microsoft
• Univeral Motown Appointments
• Video: Behind The Scenes With Michael Buble
  

GLOBEALIVE LEGAL CHALLENGE: Canada’s largest Telecom union said on Monday it plans to take the federal government to court to force it to reverse its decision to allow foreign-backed cell phone company Globalive to operate a wireless service in this country.

The Communications Energy and Paperworkers Union said the government’s action violates Canadian-ownership rules for telecoms companies and threatens jobs. Union president Dave Coles said the union’s lawyers are working on finding a legal avenue to get Ottawa’s ruling, released last Friday, overturned.

“We are going to take them to court… We have a minority government that changes the very nature of the law that protects Canada from these global monsters because we are a small country,” Reuters

CMW has added The Digital Strategies Conference, a one-day event focused on marketing and services to its already heady schedule of events.  The sessions promise  to educate attenees on how to use the latest e-business tools andmake smart investment decisions with limited marketing dollars. Further info here

INDIE MUSICIANS now have a new way to make money online by adding their songs directly to MySpace Music in exchange for sharing in the ad revenue with the service.

The deal, announced Monday, was struck by the digital-media distribution company Tunecore, will let any artist distribute songs directly through MySpace Music starting Thursday without having to have a music label or aggregator do so on their behalf.

Artists will simply pay a small flat fee for inclusion in the on-demand MySpace Music streaming service, which is partially owned by major labels. In return, MySpace promises to pay artists a percentage of the money it makes from the ads that accompany the music. Wired

MULTILINGUAL GOOGLE: The next big breakout area for Google is going to be language, according to Marissa Mayer.

“Imagine what it would be like if there was a tool built into the search engine which translated my search query into every language and then searched the entire world’s websites,” she says. “And then invoked the translation software a second and third time – to not only then present the results in your native language, but then translated those sites in full when you clicked through.”

Right now if you type a search query into Google in English, the servers crawl only English-language sites and deliver only English-language results. But this will change and Google are working on it. Telegraph

MICROSOFT’S NAME IS MUD, according to Mark Anderson, who writes the Strategic News Service, a predictive newsletter that apparently has a wide following among technology executives and venture capitalists. “Except for gaming, it is ‘game over’ for Microsoft in the consumer market,” Anderson tells The New York Times’ Bits blog. “It’s time to declare Microsoft a loser in phones … Just get out of Dodge.” But aren’t “phones” just a piece of a far larger software and technology services market? Not for long, writes Bits.

“The smartphone is becoming the innovative hub of software development and applications, far more so than the

personal computer,” it contends. Therefore, if Microsoft loses in smartphones, “It is pretty grim,” says Anderson. Mediapost

MCMA.com is the latest creation that promises musicians a way to be discovered on the internet. The service connects artist, bands, and musicians to “hundreds of professional music industry contacts” at record companies, music publishing houses, agencies et al.

UNIVERSAL MOTOWN Records has appointed Pat Monaco to Executive Vice President & General Manager of the company. The announcement was Monday by Sylvia Rhone, President of the label. Formerly, Monaco served as Executive Vice President of Sales & Field Marketing for Universal Motown Republic Group.

Separately,  EPIC VP/Top 40 Promotion Tommy Nappi joins Universal Motown in the new year as VP/Pop Promotion.

Behind The Scenes With Michael Buble