In a dramatic turnabout, the Bancroft family, which controls Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal, agreed to discuss a sale of the company to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp after initially refusing to do so. There are a number of hints that the turnabout was driven by concern over the future of Dow Jones in a digital media world:

Linking to other media companies’ content used to be unthinkable for traditional media brands, but attitudes have changed after Google made $10 billion in advertising by doing nothing but link to other media companies’ content (and run ads on other companies’ content).

New York - Internet entrepreneur Jason Calcanis, who founded the now-AOL-owned Weblogs, on Thursday debuted his latest venture, the alpha version of a new online search engine called Mahalo. The service uses a team of 40 expert guides who arrange search results based on relevance, placing the primary results in a "top 7" at the top. Users can also contribute to the search engine's effectiveness by submitting relevant links to various search terms. Mahalo currently counts about 4,000 results pages, based on the most popular search terms, and plans to reach 25,000 by the end of 2008, TechCrunch reported.

Basking Ridge, N.J. - Verizon Wireless announced on Thursday that it is offering its subscribers the exclusive opportunity to download a free copy of Prince's new single, "Guitar," to their phones weeks before his forthcoming album "Planet Earth" is available in stores. In order to download the track, subscribers will have to utilize the company's free V CAST Song ID service, by holding their phones up to a speaker playing the song, which will be available on Verizon's site as well as YouTube, Revver, Veoh and MySpace. The service will then identify the song and download it to the phone.

Los Angeles - The Bigger Picture, a unit of digital cinema firm AccessIT, said on Thursday that it will offer a preview of a new in-theater digital concert series featuring performances from the South by Southwest Music Festival on July, 14, in advance of a nationwide run in the fall. The two-hour show, which was produced by Blaze TV and DirecTV, will be projected in digital cinema with 5.1 surround sound and feature performances from artists including The Polyphonic Spree, Peter Bjorn & John and Rocco Deluca. Tickets for the series are expected to range from $8.75 to $10.25, depending on the market. Previews will be held in Boston, Nashville, Dallas and Ft. Worth.

Los Angeles - Game developer Imagination International Corp. (IIC) announced on Thursday that it has signed a three-year agreement with Disney-ABC Domestic Television for the rights to develop a DVD game based on "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire." The game, which will feature TV host Meredith Vieira, is slated to cost $19.99 as is set for release in the fall.

Carlsbad, Calif. - RealNetworks announced on Thursday that the newest version of its RealPlayer will contain a feature that allows users to download any video they find online for later viewing via the RealPlayer, and even burn them to DVD and CD.

New York - TV ratings provider Nielsen on Thursday announced results of its first ratings data that include digital video recorder viewing, which showed that ads for some TV shows received higher ratings when viewed on DVR recordings than on their original broadcasts.

Redwood City, Calif. - The Associated Press announced on Thursday that it will work with a Redwood City, Calif.-based start-up called Attributor to monitor how its stories, photos and videos are used online, and detect copyright violations.