For $6.99 you can make a speaker at a meeting feel awkward after telling a bad joke by using this cricket sound generator.  This also works well for a comedian that isn’t doing to well on stage.  Sure it is mean, but people in the audience will love it.  Its available now on CoolStuffExpress.com.

[via NA]

Last year Yahoo! paid about $79 million to outside financial advisors when they needed help with the Microsoft deal.  The advisors were also paid for “other strategic alternatives, including the Google agreement.”  As all of you know the Microsoft and Google deal both did not work in Yahoo!’s favor whatsoever.

Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers were the advisers at the time.  Lehman’s investment arm is now a part of Barclays capital Plc.  This was revealed in a report with the SEC.  About 5 separate lawsuits were made against Yahoo! last year that were related to Microsoft’s bid offer.

[via Reuters]

This video is regarding the Facebook ToS mess:

The LG Spyder 830 cell phone was recently recalled by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC).  The phone was pretty much seen as a hazard because it doesn’t hold a good connection when calling 911 emergency services.  The recall was made when a trapped motorist tried to call 911 from the phone from a disabled car.  The call was constantly being dropped, but fortunately that person was uninjured.  About 30,000 phones were removed across 9 states.

The LG 830 has a dual slider keypad and a touch screen.  The phone has GPS and EV-DO built-in.  The problem is caued by the software in the versions T83LGV03 and T83LGV04.  The recall does not pertain to the models on US Cellular and Alltel.

Several weeks ago, LG’s Canadian division recalled 250,000 LG 150 phones.

[via Om]

Earlier this week, the Amazon.com Kindle 2 started shipping.  The Kindle 2 has more space to hold more books than the original and even contains a feature called text-to-speech.   A robotic computer voice even reads the book for you if you like.

The Authors Guild, a group that represents 9,000 book authors apparently criticized Amazon for having this feature.  Amazon wrote a press release saying that the feature is legal, but decided to give the copyright owners the option to choose whether to allow the ebook to have Text-to-speech built-in.  Amazon pretty much did this as a concession, but they didn’t have to do it.

Below is the full press release:

The Union Bank of Switzerland made a pretty massive error.  The Swiss bank company made a $31 billion order ($3 trillion yen) in convertible bonds in the Japanese game company.  This deal would have been the biggest on the Tokyo stock exchange, but it turns out the order was made on accident.  The amount was wrong due to a computer error.

In actuality the investment amount was supposed to be 31 million yen ($314,000).  On the official Capcom blog, the company revealed that they were ready to do a happy dance when they first heard amount the investment.

“The official Capcom happy-dance began when we heard that financial titan UBS AG placed an order for 3 TRILLION yen (that’s 31 billion bucks!) in Capcom stock yesterday. We were unfortunately forced to reveal that there, um, isn’t ¥3 trillion worth of Capcom stock for sale, so they revised their order to a measly ¥31 million.”

Regardless of the error, at least Capcom will have a great year with the release of Street Fighter IV and it sounds like The Legend of Chun Li movie is doing okay.  Capcom is also about to launch Resident Evil 5 on March 13.  UBS apologized for their error.

[via VentureBeat]

John Battelle of Federated Media recently interviewed Jason Kilar, CEO of Hulu.  Hulu is a joint venture between NBC and FOX.  Jason Kilar is an Amazon.com veteran.  Battelle asked Jason how effective the ad on the Super Bowl advertisement for Hulu was.  It turns out that it was very much worth it.

Although Jason did not answer directly, Battelle was able to obtain a number from a different source.  It turns out that Hulu’s traffic jumped by 50%.  Considering that about 100 million people tune into the Super Bowl in the U.S., it is no surprise that Hulu’s traffic would see a sudden jump.

[via BI]