Athena von Oech announced today that Ning has hit 850,000 registered social networks. Ning is a service that allows users to create social networks on-the-fly. The service is free for basic social networks, but premium social networks are charged. Ning was founded by Netscape founder Marc Andreesen and Gina Bianchini. Ning has over $104 million in funding and is valuated at about $500 million based on their investments. Legg Mason, Allen & Company, and Andreesen are the primary investors in the company.

“We just passed 850,000 social networks on Ning and we couldn’t be more excited,” stated Oech. “We love checking out the new and interesting social networks popping up – at the rate of over 3,000 each day, and about 100,000 in the past month alone. Wow!”

Ning plans on launching new features next week including improvements to chat and redesigned media players. Below is a video demo of the new features:

Find more videos like this on Ning Network Creators

SAP (NYSE:SAP), the company behind one of the most popular enterprise software is getting into the cloud computing game through the acquisition of Coghead.  Coghead will be shutting down their business and letting go of customers as a part of the acquisition.  SAP bought out Coghead’s intellectual property and hired their engineering team.  SAP doesn’t plan on reselling Coghead’s service anytime soon.

“SAP is one of the premier tech companies in the world and we’re really happy this transaction took place,” stated Paul McNamara, Coghead’s CEO. “However, the Coghead business model is not in keeping with the kinds of things that SAP wants to do.”

Coghead’s primary service was to allow customers to develop and host database applications using a simple drag & drop interface.  Coghead’s service will run through April, but after that it is safe to assume that the service will no longer be around.

Since Coghead started a few years ago, they raised about $13.7 million from El Dorado Ventures, American Capital Strategies, Western Technology Investment, and SAP Ventures.

Dr. Paul Wiseman, a professor at McGill University in Canada signed up for Facebook in 2004 when a student introduced him to it.  There are currently well over 36,000 students on the McGill network on the social network, many of who end up taking a class with Wiseman.  Wiseman teaches about 1,000 undergrad students per year and now has over 1,300 friends.  He said he accepts almost anyone that adds him assuming that they took a class with him at one point.

“What is interesting is that now almost all of my requests come from high school or university friends, which shows how ubiquitous Facebook has become, and how it has changed,” stated Wiseman.

Wiseman added that Facebook could be used for more purposes than just social.  He used it for academic purposes when a science writer from Nigeria added him as a friend.  The science writer volunteers in a malaria clinic and added him after the lab that Wiseman uses created a new way to detect malaria infection in blood cells.

It might also help that Wiseman has a good rapport with his students. “He was [my] chemistry professor in first year. Good guy, one of the best teachers I’ve had here. I’ve run into him at hockey games [both] at the Bell Centre and McGill,” stated U3 Physiology student Dan Beamer.

You may remember The Presidents of the United States of America band from the 1990′s.  They had hits such as “Lump,” “Kitty,” and “Peaches.”  I still remember in the music video for “Peaches” there was this awesome ninja scene at the end of it.  People had their songs memorized in my elementary school days.

Dave Dederer, a former singer and guitarist for The Presidents of United States of America (PUSA) is now the VP of Business Development for Melodeo, a software company that develops nuTsie.  nuTsie streams iTunes playlists from PCs, Blackberrys, and Facebook.  One of Melodeo’s latest creation is an iPhone application that distributes PUSA’s music.  Four of PUSA’s albums are available in a $3 application for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

The application contains the music and exclusive material that is updated from servers.

“IPhone apps are exploding, including for musical artists, but nobody’s done anything like this,” stated Dederer.  “The possibilities around these open app stores, with Apple being the first and foremost, and hopefully RIM, Anroid, and others to follow in terms of size and impace — they’ve radically changed the mobile application, because they’re open.”
PUSA owns the right to all of their own music which makes it easier to distribute at a price that they decide.  In order to listen to PUSA’s music through the iPhone app, a connection is required since it streams for their servers.  Melodeo plans on taking a similar approach for several other bands from another label.

East Bay Express is reporting an interesting story about Yelp.  Yelp is supposedly offering businesses a way to have negative reviews deleted from their website for a monthly price.  “Hi, this is Mike from Yelp,” stated a Yelp representative. “You’ve had three hundred visitors to your site this month. You’ve had a really good response. But you have a few bad ones at the top. I could do something about those.”

John, the owner of the restaurant that was called by Yelp said that he was not used to getting phone calls like these.  He was familiar with Yelp, but did not expect them to charge a monthly fee to have negative reviews removed. John’s restaurant has over 100 reviews and has about a 3.5 star rating on Yelp.

John had asked Mike, the Yelp rep what they could do about removing the bad reviews.  “We can move them. Well, for $299 a month.”

“When you do get a call from Yelp, and you go to the site, it looks like they have been moved,” stated John. “You don’t know if they happen to be at the top legitimately or if the rep moved them to the top. You don’t even know if this is someone who legitimately doesn’t like your restaurant. … Almost all the time when they call you, the bad ones will be at the top.”

John’s company isn’t the only one.  East Bay Express also reported that over dozens of businesses have reported the same thing is happening with them too.  Some businesses even believe that Yelp representatives themselves are writing the negative reviews.

These are extremely shady tactics and if these stories are true, Yelp is a disgrace to Web 2.0.  You figure Yelp would have a better monetization strategy given their $31 million in funding.

[via East Bay Express]

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) is really opening up their wallet to beef up the market share for Xbox 360.  The 360 exclusively gained the rights to The Lost and Damned add-on for Grand Theft Auto IV.

The Lost and Damned is only available in the Microsoft Xbox Live Internet service for $19.99.  In the Lost and Damned, players assume the role of Johnny Klebitz, VP of a New Jersey motorcycle gang called the Lost.

Take-Two Interactive revealed the Microsoft investment during an earnings call in 2007.  Was the $25 million worth it?  Check out this review done by the NYT:

“The Lost and Damned” suffers from a few curious and unfortunate design decisions — players often have less freedom than in the original — that will probably prompt most to return to the original game after completing the new episode’s main story. But there is no question that it is the most fully realized, thoroughly produced and substantial downloadable add-on yet released for a console game. Anyone who enjoys Grand Theft Auto IV should get it.”

Perhaps it was worth it because hard core gamers already knew ahead of time that Microsoft bought the rights to the extra content.  This lead to additional sales of the Xbox console.  GTAIV sold 1.8 million copies for the Xbox 360 within the first 5 days.

Baidu, Inc. (NASDAQ:BIDU), also known as the Google of China has had a slow fourth quarter because of tainted milk controversy.  The last quarter was the company’s first sales decline since they were listed on the NASDAQ in 2005.  Baidu.com was accused of managing the searhc results on behalf of milk company Sanlu.  Sanlu’s milk allegedly contained melamine thus poisoning and hospitalizing thousands of children.

Baidu denied the accusations but decided to remove the paid search advertisements of medical and pharmaceutical customers that have not filed for government licenses.  The removal of these links reduced sales by 5%.

Baidu’s fourth quarter sales were about RMB902.1 million ($132.2 million), up 58% from the previous year in the same quarter.  Baidu’s third quarter sales were RMB919.1 million.  This quarter, Baidu expects their sales to be between RMB780 million and RMB800 million.  Net profit for the fourth quarter was about RMB288.7 million, up from 31.3%.

Just as the 25 things about yourself Facebook meme is wearing down, there is a new idea developing.  This involves tagging your friends as a specific personality.  I spotted this on a friend’s profile and then I used it on my own.  After I did it, I noticed that a couple of my friends did it and now it is spreading.

The characters above are the icons to a franchise called Mr. Men and Little Miss.  The author of the series was Roger Hargreaves, but he died of a stroke.  His son Adam continued the franchise after his father passed away.  Roger Hargreaves was the third best selling author in Britain by selling over 100 million books.

If you get bored, you should give it a try too.  But don’t be surprised if your friends object to the character that you tagged them as.  My friend complained when I tagged her as “The Good Little Church Girl.”