Microsoft may be ready to pay eight hundred million, or possibly more, to acquire TellMe Networks. TellMe is a voice applications company that enables speech recognition, and could be very important to Microsoft’s mobile Internet plans. Last year, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told the Wall Street Journal that “The leading edge battleground between us and Google in local search really will come on the phone.” The two parties may announce the purchase later this week.

Rumors about a possible Google Phone received another boost as photos of the new gadget began to circulate on a mobile phone forum. Garett Rogers speculated that the pictures of the Samsung built mobile have probably been manipulated even if they are of a real prototype. Google reportedly has about a hundred people working on software for the device.

Microsoft has opened a social networking site for the finance industry. The Dynamics Live Community beta site recently opened during a San Diego conference, where Microsoft staffers have been calling it a ‘MySpace for financial pros.’ The new site offers articles and expert columns as content, and blogs and forums for its users. Networking features are listed as ‘coming soon.’

News aggregator Topix.net paid one million dollars to purchase the Topix.com domain January. Topix CEO Rich Skrenta told the Wall Street Journal the two domains have been running side by side since then, and plans to switch to the dot com address. But Topix could face a loss of search engine traffic during the changeover, and Skrenta’s plea for help from Google received a canned response to post his request on a support message board.

“This can’t be the process,” Mr. Skrenta says. “You’re cast into this amusing, Kafkaesque world to run your business.”

Defense contractors have been big players in crawling audio tracks for online video. Beet TV said Podzinger, a subsidiary of BBN, has crawled one point five million YouTube clips since December. Podzinger’s Alex Laats said they crawl thousands more each day. Beet TV also claimed that the same technology has been used by government agencies for a variety of other tasks since 2001.