Wikia was a search projected founded by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley. The company was founded in 2004 and has about 42 employees based in San Mateo, California. Since the company started, they have raised about $14 million in funding from Bessemer Venture Partners, First Round Capital, and Amazon.com.

Jimmy Wales pointed out that Wikia.com itself has seen tremendous growth. It was the fifth growing member community destination in February 2009. The top 4 were Twitter, Zimbio, Facebook, and Multiply. Wikia.com’s Wikianswers Q&A website was seeing the most growth and so the company has decided to pay more attention to that service. Basically Wikia Search wasn’t seeing the success that they were hoping for. Going forward the Wikia Search project will be shut down on March 31, 2009 and it will forward to Wikianswers.

Google has recently announced the Google Ventures, the company’s new venture capital fund. Google aims to use this division to take advantage of their own resources to support innovation and encourage other technology companies.

Google plans to invest in early stage investments across industries such as Internet, software, clean-tech, bio-tech, health care, and other industries that they haven’t thought about yet. In some circumstances, Google will depend on some of their own employees to recommend early stage companies.

Google has no problem spending tens of millions of dollars on a company depending on the stage of the company. Google Ventures is willing to co-invest with other outstanding venture capital firms. There will be a Google Ventures office based in Mountain View, California and in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

If you want your startup to be considered for funding, email is the best way to reach Google Ventures (ventures [[at]] Google.com). Bill Maris and Rich Miner are the first Managing Partners for the division.

In related news, Google recently invested in Pixazza, a service that connects advertising to images.

[via Google Blog]

This smiling teddy can power all of your USB devices and act as an alarm clock for you. This device looks like its marketed for kids, but what kind of kid needs to have a USB hub? The clock runs on a AAA battery and doesn’t have to be plugged into a computer to keep running. There are about four USB ports on the teddy hub, one in each foot and one in each arm. The teddy USB hub comes in pink, blue, and white. It can be bought from Gadget4all.com for $14.50.

[via CoolestGadgets]

Rakesh Agrawal made it a weekend project to build an application that has the ability to open his garage door. Agrawal stated by downloading the X10 Commander application on the iTunes App Store which costs about $9.99. The X10 talks to the WiFi network at his home which he always keeps running.

There is a USB dongle that is connected to his Windows XP PC which communicates with an RF to X10 interface device plugged into a nearby outlet. In the garage, Agrawal plugged in an X10 controller for low voltage devices and spliced the control wires for the garage door opener. And then the control wires were connected to the garage door opener.

Pretty ingenious, eh?

[via BoingBoing/Rake.sh]

If you own a dog, sometimes you will notice that they chase their own tails and run around in circles. Several veterinarians may have discovered the reason why. There is a link between tail-chasing dogs and high cholesterol. This is according to a study that was published in the Journal of Small Animal Practice.

Studies in humans have shown that those with high cholesterol are vulnerable to panic attacks and obsessive compulsive disorder. This is a common trait with dogs too. If a dog has too much cholesterol, they may have panic attacks and become obsessive with chasing their tail around. Sometimes dogs have a tendency to chase their tail around if they have a traumatic experience, surgery, or recent illness.

Bull terriers and German shepherds have a tendency to chase around their own tail more than other breeds of dogs. The researchers at the Turkey University of Uluda? took the blood samples of 15 tail-chasing dogs and 15 dogs that rarely chase their own tails. The dogs that chased around their tails the most had high cholesterol, both HDL and LDL than the other dogs.

[via Discovery]

About one out of thousand people in the world have an autism spectrum disorder.  Since the 1980′s, the number of children with autism has increased dramatically due to diagnostic practices.  Recently Comedy Central held a special called Night of Too Many Stars, a benefit for celebrities to raise funding for autism education and research.

Recently a fireman in Bangkok came up with a clever idea to save an autistic boy.  The boy was scared of his first day of school so he climbed on a third story ledge and refused to come in.  The mother mentioned that the boy loved superheroes and fireman Sonchai Yoosabai learned this.  Yoosabai rushed to the fire station to dress up as Spider-Man and returned back to the boy.

“I told him Spider-Man is here to rescue you, no monsters are going to attack you and I told him to walk slowly towards me as running could be dangerous,” stated Yoosabai.  The young boy allowed himself to be rescued as soon as he saw Spider-Man.  Through this quick thinking and creativity, Yoosabai proved that superheroes do exist.

Samsung is challenging Amazon.com’s e-book reading device Kindle with their new Papyrus E-book Reader product. The Samsung Papyrus has an A5 paper size screen, 512MB of memory, and comes in a variety of colors including green, white, and black. The Papyrus also has a memo pad, calendar, clock, scheduler, world clock, calculator, and contact list.

The Papyrus will be launching first in Korea. After that it will make its way to the U.K. and the U.S. Although the price has not been revealed yet, Gizmodo pegs it to be around $299.

[via Gizmodo]

Rory McInnes thought it was hilarious to draw a 60 foot schlong on the roof of his parents’ home on in England. The funniest part is that it went unnoticed for one year until a helicopter noticed the crude painting and contacted the Sun newspaper.

Rory’s dad Andy stated, “It’s an April Fool’s joke, right? There’s no way there’s a 60ft phallus on top of my house.” That must have been embarrassing for an aristocrat that lives in such a big house, right? It turns out that Andy was good humored about the whole situation. Rory’s only punishment will be to take a scrubbing brush and white spirit, climb the roof, and clean it all off.

People using Google Maps had the ability to check out the house themselves, but it has been removed since.

[via Telegraph]