The Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital D7 Conference, though on its last day, certainly didn’t fizzle on excitement, with interviews with Microsoft’s (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer and Palm’s (PALM) Executive Chairman Jon Rubinstein.

Steve Ballmer unveiled Bing, the Microsoft’s rebranded search engine, which it hopes will be able to better compete in the market with Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO).

Bing is scheduled to go live on June 3 and some of its key features, which Ballmer demoed, include a “Best Match,” which will bring up an official and authoritative site for something a user searches for, and an “Instant Answer” feature, which will provide answers to questions entered next to the search results.

Walt Mossberg of the Journal asked the CEO about competing with Google.  “Look we’re obviously where we are in search and we want to do better … we’re hoping to be one of the companies that moves the industry forward. … The PC business continues to be big, we’re going through an economic reset, but there’s still vibrance there,” he said.

Asked whether this new search engine brand has any impact on the company’s aspirations to nab Yahoo’s search, Ballmer said “I think there’s a lot that can make sense in terms of a search partnership, not an acquisition… whether such a thing will happen I don’t know.”

In a funny side note, Ballmer said Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, who at the conference yesterday said a deal would be possible under certain conditions involving “boatloads” of money, left a short note for him in the green room that read, “Steve, Forget it… Won’t help… Ha… Carol.”

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Another headliner from the event Thursday was Palm’s Executive Chairman Jon Rubinstein, who demoed the handheld-maker’s upcoming Pre device, which is set to be launched next week.

Speaking about the company’s history, Rubinstein said, “Palm is a new company today… The old Palm OS lasted 15 years but had run its course. We set out to develop a platform that will last us another 10 or 15 years.”

Mossberg asked who Rubinstein thinks Palm’s competitors are, to which he replied Apple and RIM.  However, he noted that the real competition isn’t in hardware, as many would assume, but in software.

Big names that showed up Wednesday were HDNet Chairman and owner of the Dallas Mavericks Mark Cuban, who spoke about business models and making money on the Web, as well as MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta and News Corp’s (NWS) digital head Jon Miller, who talked about the next steps for the social network.

HDNet’s Cuban had a lot to say about online video and, specifically, Google’s YouTube acquisition and its model for generating revenue.  “I think it's been a real disappointment to see in the last 10 years how far online video has come."

He said nothing’s happened with a lot of what was spoken about back then, including advertising standards and multicasting.

As for the growth of YouTube, he noted that its focus has been on ubiquity and volume without an understanding of how to make money off of it.

Asked what his business model would have been for buying the site, he said, "I wouldn't have bought YouTube because, like I wrote back then, they hid behind the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and it was a disaster waiting to happen, and that's exactly what happened.”

“There's a Viacom suit, who knows what's gonna happen there, but with the DMCA you can't just put advertising around user-created content because you're not allowed to know what content is on there; it's just user posted.  And if you don't know what's on there, how are you going to sell advertising around it?  And on top of that, this is a company that's subsidizing the bandwidth for the world.”

He also said that though he doesn’t see online video growing too much from the cable networks because “they're never going to transition those digital dollars... for the nickels that are out there online."  However, he did point out that Hulu has done a good job with online video and may very well be the site to set those advertising standards he says don’t exist yet.

MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta and News Corp digital head Jon Miller sat with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher of the Journal to talk about how the company is competing with Facebook as well as models for making more money.

Asked by Mossberg whether the site could work solely funded by advertising, Miller said MySpace is in the middle of figuring out the balance between advertising and consumer’s wanting everything to be free.

Van Natta said the site’s strength has been its music focus.  “Music's a huge advantage for us, I mean, we have a joint venture with the major record labels.”  Miller agreed and compared the site’s focus on music to Facebook’s focus on college students as sources of growth, at least in the beginning.

Miller said there are many types of revenue to be explored, including advertising, micropayments, and full-fledged subscriptions.  He said there’s a series of steps along the way that can certainly co-exist and that there’s an opportunity through MySpace to introduce a number of subscription services over time in the areas the site specializes in.

MySpace and the Wall Street Journal are owned by News Corp, which also owns FOX Business.  Hulu is a joint venture between News Corp and NBC Universal.