AOL has hired Allen & Company along with Morgan Stanley to try and find a buyer for ICQ. ICQ is an instant messaging software that competed with AOL Instant Messenger before being bought out. There are supposedly two non-U.S. based firms that already have an interest in buying out ICQ from AOL. The deal will most likely take place when AOL spins off from Time Warner in December.

AOL is seeking around $300 million for ICQ according to a source with AllThingsD. AOL bought ICQ for $287 million in 1998 with about $125 million in earnouts. Tel Aviv based firm Mirabilis was the company that originally developed ICQ.

ICQ has lost quite many users in the United States since they launched originally, but their service is still strong in countries such as Germany and Russia. AOL Instant Messenger still has a strong user base in the United States.

DirecTV Group Inc. (NASDAQ:DTV) has appointed Michael White as their new CEO. White previously worked at PepsiCo (NYSE:PEP) as the Vice Chairman. Interestingly White does not have much experience in the food and beverage industry so that makes the decision quite interesting for DirecTV. There is speculation that he will act as a “baby-sitter” for DirecTV until a take-over happens. AT&T and Verizon are both potential candidates for buying out DirecTV since they both partner with the satellite TV company.

DirecTV has 18 million subscribers and the company launched in 1994. The company is currently owned by The DirecTV Group which is a division of Liberty Media.

White will be taking the CEO position on January 1 and will be replacing Chase Carey. Carey will be leaving to join News Corp. as the COO and President. Shareholders and the DirecTV management team are currently discussing whether to spin off Liberty Media’s entertainment assets into a separate company. DirecTV used to be owned by News Corporation, but Liberty Media exchanged 16.3% of their stake in News Corp. and $625 million in exchange for DirecTV and three sports networks.

AT&T has hired Luke Wilson to point out the differences between their service and Verizon. AT&T tried to file a temporary restraining order against Verizon for playing the “there’s a map for that ads.” But AT&T lost the injunction. Instead AT&T is doing an eye-for-an-eye approach by pointing out the flaws of Verizon’s network. Above is one of the many videos I’m sure we’ll see over the holiday season where AT&T rips on Verizon.

Twitter Inc. is being sued by Cooper Notification, a subsidiary of Cooper Industries Plc. Cooper Notification is based in Sarasota, Florida and the reason that they are suing Twitter is because of patent infringement.

“Cooper has suffered, and will continue to suffer, and is entitled to be compensated” stated Cooper in a complaint to the federal court in Wilmington, Delaware. Cooper Notification sends security alerts to the community and employees.

Twitter is not the only company that Cooper is going after. Cooper Notification is also suing Rave Wireless Inc. and Everbridge Inc.

Steve Case is the co-founder, former CEO, and former Chairman of AOL. AOL will be spinning out of Time Warner soon and will be going IPO. Steve Case is a shareholder in Time Warner so he will benefit from the IPO. And on top of that another startup company started by Case is being bought out by the American Express Company (NYSE: AXP) for $300 million. Revolution Money is a PayPal competitor that allows merchants to process payments at lower fees than many other traditional credit card companies.

The full press release is after the jump:
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Norwest Venture Partners is a technology venture capital firm that is based in Silicon Valley, California. Norwest has invested early in many technology companies such as Kayak, Arbortext, Rackspace, MyYearbook, Playdom, Sulekha.com, Ngmoco, and Yatra.com. The company raised a new round of funding at $1.2 billion. This is the eleventh fund raised in the history of the firm and is the largest. The new round of funding will be used for international expansion. Norwest already has offices in India and Israel. The company has invested in Chinese companies as well.

Google Image Swirl recently launched and it makes searching for images more fun. When you search for a monument or any other image and click on it, a tree form of other images show up. Google Image Swirl graduated from Google Labs. When searching for an image, twelve other thumbnails show up. You’ll see several different images at various angles. Image Swirl uses technology from Similar Images and Picasa Face Recognition to determine what other thumbnails come up. There are currently about 200,000 queries that are supported. The announcement was made by Google Product Manager Aparna Chennapragada and Google Researcher Yushi Jing.

Superfeedr is a website that can pull real-time data from Flickr and Twitter, then feed it into the standard ATOM format so that you can “parse one sort of feed no matter where it came from.” The company makes money by charging web developers for tracking over 1,000 feeds. Its a very niche service and I am not aware off-hand of anyone I know that would use this service.

Mark Cuban and Betaworks have recently invested in the company. Andrew Anker and David Recordon has joined the advisory board as well.

Facebook has been using a Java-based photo uploader for quite some time, but I have not been a fan of it since I started using a Mac. My Facebook photo uploader on my Mac Mozilla Firefox browser struggled a lot. Whenever I wanted to upload photos on Facebook, I either had to use Safari or the manual photo uploader. This is why I am feeling ecstatic that Facebook is changing their photo uploading service.

The new Facebook photo uploader can be activated [here]

The new uploader works with Mac OS, Ubuntu Linux, and Windows. The plugin installs within the browser or will need to be downloaded and installed. Below is a screenshot of how the new uploader works. Browsing folders are in a tree format. First you select the top folder, then you select the subfolder within the top folder in the next box, etc. After that thumbnails of the photos you would like to upload appear at the bottom. Select those and click upload. Voila!

The Walky Robot is a project designed by students at the Keio University in Japan. The students were able to make a toy robot acknowledge finger gestures on an iPhone. The robot also acknowledges the movements in accelerometer. Finger gestures can control the movement of the robot walking. Above is a video demo.

Looks like the Danny Ocean of Belgium and his friends decided to hit CEVA Logistics where it counts: their iPhone vault. An unknown number of burglars cut a hole in the roof of one of CEVA’s warehouses and ran away with $3 million worth of iPhones (2 million Euros worth). The burglars got to the roof by climbing up a fire ladder. However telecommunciation company Mobsistar could track down the serial numbers for those iPhones and make sure to deactivate them. This way the customers that buy iPhones from the black market will not benefit from the lower than retail prices.

100. Chris Rauschnot
http://themacwizard.com/
Las Vegas, Nevada USA
Chris Rauschnot is a web 2.0 and social media expert. He also has been an Internet Entrepreneur for over 10 years and is a certified apple tech. He has over 24,000 followers and sent out over 10,800 tweets.

99. Ruth Zoarets
http://twitteranalyzer.com/
Tel Aviv, Israel
Ruth Zoarets is a co-founder and the VP of marketing at TwitterAnalyzer.com. She engages very often with her followers and is a frequent retweeter. She has over 22,000 followers and sent out over 24,800 tweets.

98. John Battelle
http://battellemedia.com/
San Francisco, California USA
John Battelle is the Chairman, Founder, and CEO of Federated Media Publishing. He is also the executive producer of the Web 2.0 conference and is a “band manager” with BoingBoing.net. Before that he was a co-founding editor at Wired Magazine. He has over 24,000 followers and sent out over 3,400 tweets.

97. Jason Fried
http://www.37signals.com/
Chicago, Illinois USA
Jason Fried is the co-founder of 37signals. Fried often speaks at conferences about start-ups and motivation. He has over 21,000 followers and sent out over 2,000 tweets.

96. Chris Sacca
http://www.whatisleft.org/
San Francisco, California USA
Chris Sacca is a Twitter investor and advisor. He is the former head of special initiatives at Google Inc. and is an associate fellow of the Said Business School at Oxford University. He has over 1.1 million followers and has sent out over 6,200 tweets.

95. Steve Rubel
http://www.steverubel.com/
New York City, New York
Steve Rubel is the SVP/Director of Insights for Edelman Digital. He also is a columnist for Adage and is a lifestreamer. He has over 34,000 followers and sent over 8,800 tweets.

94. Paul Force
http://forces2.blogspot.com/
Horseheads, New York USA
Paul Force is a PC technician and consultant. He is also a “Security Dude” and likes to brighten your day with recycled jokes. He has over 25,500 followers and sent out over 14,700 tweets.

93. Molly Wood
http://cnet.com/buzzreport
Mollyy Wood is a host at CNET TV. She is a self-proclaimed “minor Internet celebrity and part-time bouncer.” She has over 25,000 followers and sent out over 4,700 tweets.

92. Walt Mossberg
http://walt.allthingsd.com/
Washington D.C. USA
Walt Mossberg is a tech columnist at AllThingsD. He is also a principal technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal. Mossberg worked at The WSJ since 1970. He has over 28,000 followers and sent out a little over 500 tweets.

91. Ryan Block
http://ryanblock.com/
San Francisco, California USA
Ryan Block is a co-founder of Gdgt.com and is an editor. He is also a former editor and editor emeritus of Engadget. Block has over 27,000 followers and sent out over 2,800 tweets.

90. Wayne Sutton
http://socialwayne.com/
Raleigh, North Carolina USA
Wayne Sutton is a social media evangelist, technology evangelist, podcaster, video blogger, and entrepreneur. He is very responsive to his followers. He has over 27,000 followers and sent out about 26,000 tweets.

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The Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band edition has made its way to the Sony PlayStation 3 (starting later today), Microsoft Xbox 360, and Nintendo Wii. The game was developed by Harmonix Music Systems and published by MTV and EA.

Amazon.com is launching the Kindle in Canada soon. The Kindle was rolled out internationally last month but Canada was not on the list at the time. In Canada the Kindle will have access to over 300,000 books and several Canadian newspapers. Some of the Canadian newspapers that can be downloaded on the Kindle include the Globe & Mail and The National Post. The Kindle will be able to store about 1,500 books and is available online for $259. The reason for the delay is believed to be negotiations with telecommunication companies and Amazon.com.

AdMob is becoming a property of Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG), but the company has not been slowing down since the acquisition announcement. The company announced earlier this week that they will support video advertisements for the iPhone and iPod Touch. iPhone and iPod Touch users will still be able to surf the web or watch other videos while the video ad is playing. Videos are saved as different file sizes and will play different qualities based on the user’s connection. For example, higher quality videos will play when a user is on a WiFi or 3G connection.

“AdMob’s new Interactive Video Ad Unit brings together consumers’ love of watching videos on their mobile device with advertisers’ goal of providing an interactive, social experience for consumers,” stated AdMob Founder and CEO Omar Hamoui. “We are excited to create new ways for advertisers to engage with consumers on their mobile devices and for the developers behind the most popular and engaging iPhone applications to effectively monetize.”