When firing employees sometimes rivalry is created.  Seattle P-I is facing this circumstance since they have gone web only and had to fire many employees.  More than a dozen of their former employees have joined together to create a website called SeattlePostGlobe.org.  This is a Seattle-focused site that will report politics and sports scores.  They also have several media partners.

The Seattle Weekly is helping find advertising for the Post-Globe and the local TV station is providing them with office space and cash.  As of right now, the Post-Globe writers are working for free.

China has launched a satellite that is intended to mark a new development in global positioning.  The satellite is called the Beidou II and is the first “network deployment” satellite placed in a positioning system by the name of Compass.  The satellite was launched from the Sichuan province.

The purpose of the satellite is to provide speed measurement, positioning, and time services to China.  This is similar to GPS services available in the U.S. Beidou II will enable China to compete for commercial contracts and for military purposes.  China will depend less on foreign communication by using Beidou II.

The original Beidou-1 system, launched in 2000,  is made of 4 satellites and has limited coverage.  Beidou-2 will consist of 35 satellites. Over the next several years, China will invest $296 million in the Galileo positioning system project.

“Beidou” is named after the Big Dipper constellation.  The constellation is known as “Beidou” in Chinese.

I haven’t been giving Kosmix the greatest reviews in the past because I did not see them as being very innovative when it came to search.  Clearly I may be alone in my opinion because Kosmix’s traffic is surging.  As a matter of fact, in the month of March Kosmix’s traffic surged 419%.  The website received 3.2 million unique visitors in March.  TechCrunch compares Kosmix to Mahalo.

Kosmix basically aggregates news items, popular videos, and breaking news from external sources.  This is all put together by various algorithms rather than using human editors like Mahalo.  Around December 2008, Kosmix raised $20 million.  Thus far the company has about $55 million in funding.  The $20 million round was led by Time Warner.

In 1988 when Bill O’Reilly was about 39 years old, Inside Edition did a special on the Super Mario Brothers for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Enjoy the video, you’ll get a kick out of the hair styles and the call center where they give level tips. Bill O’Reilly still looks like the same disgruntled guy he looks like today. WE’LL DO IT LIVE!

The video also features Howard Phillips who was “Fun Club President” at the time. I wrote about Phillips last month when he joined Chair Entertainment. Phillips is wearing his signature bow tie in the video which was the inspiration behind the Howard & Nester comic.

[via Mental Floss]

“I would rather burn that money than give it to them.”

This Friday a court in Stockholm will make a ruling on whether the four men involved in the creation and maintenance of The Pirate Bay will be charged for copyright violation.  The Pirate Bay is used to download torrents, a cluster of files that are downloaded by groups of people using the BitTorrent platform.  The RIAA and MPAA basically are the enemies of The Pirate Bay and pushed for the lawsuit against the service.  The Pirate Bay does not actually host any copyright files on their own servers.

Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, and Carl Lundstrom are the guys behind The Pirate Bay.  The Pirate Bay has about 22 million people using their service.  Prosecutors want the four people involved in THe Pirate Bay to do one year of time and they also want $14.3 million in compensation.  The compensation would be paid to MGM, Colombia PIctures, 20th Century Fox Films, Universal, EMI, and Sony BMG.

“I would rather burn that money than give it to them,” stated Sunde.

If the four are charged, it would also put Google in the hot seat as well.  YouTube hosts many copyrighted videos but are willing to comply with removal.  The main difference between Google and The Pirate Bay is the attitude of the people behind the websites according to Andre Rickardsson, a former investigator of the Swedish security police.  When companies ask to have music or videos removed from The Pirate Bay, the e-mails are posted with an explicit response from The Pirate Bay.

On the second day of the trial, 50% of the charges were dropped against The Pirate Bay team due to weak evidence.

I suppose the moral of the story here is a little niceness can go a long way.  If you’re going to distribute copyright material, at least be Mr. Nice Guy about it when you are given a DMCA notice.

[via SacBee]

The Wall Street Journal has jumped on the iPhone bandwagon.  Interestingly, the iPhone application is free despite the fact that they charge for their publication on the web and on the Kindle.  Last year The Wall Street Journal created a free BlackBerry application so it was expected that they made one for the iPhone too.  Even though the application is free, users will be glaring at massive advertisements at the bottom of the screen.  Notice the Oracle logo that is prominently placed at the bottom of the screen?

Other major publications that have built an application for the mobile device includes Bloomberg, CNN, and The New York Times.  None of these charge to use the application so The Wall Street Journal had to remain competitive too.

The videos and streaming radio that is available through The Wall Street Journal application connects to the built-in YouTube application on the iPhone.

[via Wired]

This is the first time I’ve heard that a Twitter account has been acquired where the buyer was actually believed to be the product owner to begin with.  The product is an account called CNNbrk on Twitter.   CNNbrk reports breaking news that occurs on CNN and it has been managed by James Cox over the last two years.  Today the account has almost 1 million followers and it is racing with Britney and Ashton to hit 1 million followers.  CNN was personally working with Cox on the account for over two years.

CNN.com probably received additional pageviews by the hundreds of thousands through the CNNbrk account so it is likely that CNN paid a healthy amount to take control of it.  The financial details were undisclosed.  If you’re interested in following Cox on Twitter, visit him at: http://twitter.com/imajes.

[via BusinessInsider]

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently had a board meeting about accepting additional funding that would give the company a $4 billion valuation.  The company decided against the funding because they don’t need it.  Several reporters have been accusing Facebook of having a “high burn rate” so they need the funding, but all of these sources are “totally wrong” according to a source with VentureBeat.

The social network now has about 200-250 million monthly users that are uploading 2,000 photos per second.  Facebook has over $200 million in the bank as of right now which they can run off of for the next two years.  TechCrunch wrote that Facebook received several funding offers from private equity firms that were pegging the social network’s valuation at $2 billion.

Last year Facebook made $300 million in revenue and reported that this year they are beating their projections by 70% which would put revenue at almost $500 million.  This would make Facebook profitable.  The company also has a focus on cutting costs by having engineers publish reports on how infrastructure is managed.  Impressive.