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According to a number of reports Goldman Sachs is helping Demand Media to investigate the feasibility of an Initial Public Offering (IPO) – Goldman Sachs was part of a $100m fundraising effort in 2007. Currently valuated at $1.5bn, the company has been able to raise a total of $335 million over its four-year history.

Demand Media is a private company that operates a range of online brands, including eHow, essortment.com, livestrong.com and Cracked.com. It is known for creating web content from a multitude of factors, including consumer demand statistics and the predicted ROI. Demand Media also provides social media platforms to other large company websites and sells content bundled with social media tools through other outlets on the web.

Founder Richard Rosenblatt, a former MySpace chairman, told Vator.tv’s Bambi Francisco in October 2009 that they want to build a sizable standalone company and said that they believe they’re starting to attain the size to go public. In 2008 the company acquired Pluck, the social media platform company, to augment its own social media applications with Pluck’s business of creating social media applications for popular third-party websites. The company has also moved on deals to supply content to mainstream news websites including the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and USA Today.

Despite the company’s business model indicating that the content it creates is purely profit driven, the website claims that its content “solves problems, answers questions, saves money, saves time and makes people laugh”. Either way, regular web users are likely to come across more and more content published by Demand Media’s various outlets.

Trendsmap is a fun mashup that tracks trending Twitter topics by geographical location. The site combines data from the Twitter API and What The Trend which it then displays on a Google map that users can sort by city or general region, seeing the trending topics in real time. All of this is displayed over the map in a manner that looks a bit like a floating tag cloud, which sticks to the location as the user moves the map around.

One problem with Trendsmap was that it is not very good at zooming down to a decent level of detail in a particular city. The degree of detail depends on the number of geo-tagged Tweets getting posted and so far there has simply not been enough to give really high definition, but the site developers says this is changing as more and more people use mobile phones to Tweet.

Trendsmap is popular outside the U.S. and most users are currently based in Europe and South America. A welcome new feature due soon is language localisations which will simply pick up local trends based on the language in the Tweet, starting with Dutch, French, German, Portuguese and Spanish. One of the first efforts for localisation was with the Dutch national elections when Trendsmap offered results in both English and Dutch.

Of concern for the company is that Twitter’s local trends feature, which is coming soon, may offer a similar service and remains to be seen whether Trendsmap can stay ahead with new features.

Early on Tuesday, Twitter unveiled its long-expected paid advertising program, calling it “Promoted Tweets”. Messages from advertisers will be put into users’ twitter streams with initial advertisers including Bravo, Starbucks and Virgin America – all of which have already been using Twitter to promote their brands. Twitter has been edging closer to being a mainstream internet business and the obvious question has been how it plans on making money. Although Twitter’s founders have hinted at a few ideas, nothing concrete has yet been forthcoming. However it is to no one’s surprise that paid-for Tweets at the top of search results – a rather familiar idea – is picked as Twitter’s main business model.

The company claims this effort to be a new “non-traditional” approach to advertising but search ads are nothing new. According to a FAQ on the Twitter blog “We strongly believe that Promoted Tweets should be useful to you…” and “… [we will] stop showing Promoted Tweets that don’t resonate”. This reflects Facebook’s advertising platform where users can vote ads up or down on the site, an attempt to give users some sort of control over what they see, given that whichever brand appears is purely down to monetizing screen real estate.

Twitter says it will give further information on the plans for an ad service at the company’s first developer conference that opens tomorrow in San Francisco. Over $160 million in venture capital has been spent on the company and investors are no doubt eager to see profits as the user-focused website try to find a way to make money while keeping users content.

Bloomberg is reporting that Palm Inc., makers of the Pre and Pixi phones as well as the Palm and WebOS operating systems, is putting itself up for sale and possibly looking at offers this week.  Reported buyers of interest are HTC Corp and Lenovo Group Ltd.  Dell has reportedly passed on making an offer.

Palm’s stocks have been on a very bumpy ride for months, shooting upwards upon release of the latest gadgets last year and then plummeting when sales figures were in a continued slump.  Palm’s market value is guessed at $870.8 million, but a final price may be higher if it includes patent rights and other holdings.

The sale is being said to be run by Goldman Sachs Group and Qatalyst Partners.  The majority owner of Palm is Elevation Partners, which holds about 30% of the company.  Palm is currently headed by CEO Jon Rubinstein, formerly of Apple (think iPod).

Palm devices are sold on the Sprint and Verizon networks and hold less than 10% of the total handheld market.  The company has posted losses for 11 straight quarters.

Gizmodo comments that if HTC acquires Palm, it would save Google’s butt in the current lawsuits over patent infringements with Apple regarding the Google phone.  As Diaz says, “Palm owns patents that may become very effective weapons in the war against Apple’s omnipotent JesusPhone.”

Since the current rumor for this pending sale is entirely on Bloomberg, though, the question of how authentic this whole scenario is looms.  Even Mashable barely gives it a mention, so it may be just more “private sources” rumor mill fodder.  Who knows?

Apple unveiled the plans for this summer’s latest iPhone operating system: OS4.  With a ton of new features, probably the biggest and most-wanted by users is the ability to multi-task.  Developers will also be happy to hear that the software development kit (SDK) will offer over 1,500 new APIs for app creation.  The iPad, which will finally be able to compete with Netbooks and small computers at its price point, will get the upgrade this fall.

Some of the more robust features, like multitasking and video focus, won’t be available on older devices.  Most of the features will appear across the board and some are previewed on the iPad with its release last weekend.

Some of the more noteworthy features, besides multitasking, are:

• Spell check
• Bluetooth keyboard support
• User-defined wallpapers
• Tap-to-focus when recording video (like with photos)
• Nested playlists
• App folders for sorting, just like a desktop
• Multi-inboxes for merged mailing so all your email can be in one spot
• iBooks
• Game Center for iPhone live gaming

Developers get a stack of new tools in the SDK that was released today as well.

As CNet News points out, another big bonus will be VoIP support for Skype-style apps on the phone.  This lets VoIP users use their calling system the same way they can with standard phone calls on the iPhone, so you can multitask while talking.

Here’s Steve Jobs giving the keynote and making the OS4 announcement.  He also talks a little about the new iAd plan.

Twitter’s top investor, venture capitalist Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, blogged about what he thinks Twitter will be doing over the next little while to improve itself.  He likened it to the early days of the Macintosh when a company he was part of supplied hard drives for the original Macs that came only with a floppy.  That business eventually went kaput when Apple started putting hard drives in at the factory.

Most startups are like that, he says, with bare offerings that many others jump on in order to fill in the missing extras that users begin to expect.  Macintosh had its external hard drive makers and desktop publishing software, the PC had its Windows and Lotus Suites.  Twitter is no different.

Current third-party add-ons to Twitter like photo sharing and mobile applications are, he says, filling holes that Twitter itself will eventually fill itself.  In other words: Seesmic, Tweetdeck, TwitPic and others.. your days are numbered.

Of course, many bloggers like Nicholas Carlson at Business Insider took a serious affront from this.  How dare he say that 3rd party Twitter developers are doomed!

But Wilson has a point.  Facebook went through the same sort of thing (and continues to do so), as did the PC, the Mac, Windows, and hundreds of others before.  Twitter will, eventually, add on or buy a proprietary photo sharing app, build or acquire a proprietary mobile app, and so forth.  Those who provided those services up to now will continue to enjoy residual users for a while, but will eventually die off.

This is how these kinds of services work.  They continually evolve and change.  It’s what makes technology interesting and what makes it so continually adaptable.  If the developers who make these third party apps aren’t prepared to eventually be outmoded or replaced, they are disillusioned about what they’re doing.

Eric Schonfeld at TechCrunch understands that.  Only the truly killer apps will survive.  All others are subject to Darwin.