AOL has filed a lawsuit against Advertise.com.  Advertise.com used to be known as ABCsearch.com.  ABCsearch bought Advertise.com for an undisclosed price earlier this past year.

The lawsuit states the following:

“…Advertise.com recently commenced use of the virtually identical and confusingly similar designation Advertise.com and design in connection with the same and complimentary services as those offered by Plaintiffs under their federally-registered Advertising.com name and marks and their Ad.com name and marks.”

AOL believes that Advertise.com would cause consumer confusion for those that are interesting in Ad.com or Advertising.com.  AOL does not own the domain name Ad.com but had previously referred to Advertising.com as Ad.com.

Jambool is a virtual currency startup company that has a platform called “Social Gold” that works with social networking applications.  Jambool has raised $5 million in funding, led by Madrona Venture Group with participation from Bay Partners.

Vikas Gupta, co-founder of Jambool said that the funding will be used to accelerate the growth of the company.
“The last ten months have been a whirlwind for us,” stated Jambool CEO and co-founder Vikas Gupta. “Since we launched Social Gold, we’ve seen virtual goods become the de facto monetization engine for social applications. It has been very exciting to build the platform and tools that power large online, virtual economies and enable a great in-app purchase experience for millions of users on social networks. We are thrilled to partner with Madrona and Bay as we accelerate our product development and distribution.”

CrimeReports.com is a website that uses a Google Maps API. CrimeReports works with 500 agencies across the U.S.  CrimeReports offers software for law enforcement agencies to help understand crime trends.

The website has just raised $7.2 million in Series B, led by Austin Ventures and vSpring Capital.  “We are pleased to announce this investment led by Austin Ventures,” stated CrimeReports founder and CEO Greg Whisenant. “This will allow us to expand our products and services in the coming months, offering law enforcement agencies of all sizes and budgets the additional tools they need to effectively engage citizens and reduce crime using social media and web 2.0 technology.”

Polyvore is a fashion website that has a drag and drop interface for mixing and matching clothes from different stores.  Polyvore recently raised $5.6 million in capital from Matrix Partners.  Dana Stalder of Matrix will be joining as a Board member of Polyvore.

The previous round of funding that Polyvore had was $2.5 million from Benchmark Capital and other angel investors.  Stadler joined Matrix last year after previously working at PayPal.

“I think e-commerce as it has been done for the last 10 to 15 years on the Internet doesn’t work particularly well for soft goods — people are buying books the same way they’re buying skirts online,” stated Stadler. “This site has the ability to revolutionize e-commerce and the apparel category.”

Around April 2008 Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) passed Wal-Mart as the #1 music retailer in the U.S.  Now Apple controls 25% of all music sales through iTunes.  Compact discs have 65% of all music sales.  The remain 10% is other digital music sources.

In the first half of 2009, Apple had a 69% share of all digital music sales and Amazon.com had about 8%.  ”The growth of legal digital music downloads, and Apple’s success in holding that market, has increased iTunes’s overall strength in the retail music category,” stated NPD Group entertainment industry analyst Russ Crupnick.

In terms of the CD market share, Wal-Mart has about 20% of the total market while Amazon.com and Target has about 10% each.  Best Buy has 16% of the CD market share.

“Many people are surprised that the CD is still the dominant music delivery format, given the attention to digital music and the shrinking retail footprint for physical products,” added Crupnick. “But with digital music sales growing at 15 to 20 percent, and CDs falling by an equal proportion, digital music sales will nearly equal CD sales by the end of 2010.”

The Southeastern Conference  college athletic conference headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama is not a fan of social media.  As a matter of fact, the SEC is looking to have all of their athletes banned from using social media such as Twitter, Facebook, TwitPic, etc.

One of the reasons why the SEC possibly wants to have social media banned is because of a contract they have in place with CBS.  The problem is that it is hard to make a conference-wide ban on social media because it is a part of our everyday lives.

The Big 10 Conference on the other hand is fully embracing social media.  On The Big 10 website there are links to the Big Ten Conference’s Twitter account along with the personal Twitter accounts of their executives.  The Big 10 website also has a gallery of TwitPics that were taken in relation to the Big 10.

On top of the Twitter links, the Big 10 encourages users to join their Facebook groups and watch some of the best Big 10 games on Hulu.

I agree with Bret Feddern of BleacherReport when he writes “The SEC should follow the lead of the Big Ten rather than basing its decision making on the fear of what it doesn’t understand.”

Back in January Liskula Cohen decided to sue Google because of content that is published on blogspot.com, the domain name that 10 year old blog service Blogger.com uses for their users.

Today a judge ruled in favor of Cohen that she has the right to know who the anonymous blogger was for a website called “Skanks in NYC.”

Cohen’s argument was that she was defamed on the Skanks in NYC blog and that she had the right to know who called her an “old hag.”  Judge Joan Madden wrote that “the thrust of the blog is that [Cohen] is a sexually promiscuous woman.”  Google will now be forced to reveal the identity unless an appeal is made.

Sony Corporation has released a new version of the PlayStation 3.  The new version is much slimmer than the old which caused the price of the older PS3 to become slimmer.

The buttons on the front of the slim version are physical buttons and have a “click” in to function the device. The hard drive is swappable too.  To swap the hard drive, there is a screw at the bottom of the slim console.  The Slim PS3 weighs about 4 lbs. less than the “fat” versions and consumes 30W less electricty.

One of the cons of the Sony PS3 Slim version is that there isn’t any backward compatibility with PS2 games.

The 120GB Slim PS3 and the fat 80GB PS3 now both cost $299.99.  But now the 160GB PS3 costs $399.99.  Not bad compared to their Wii and Xbox competitors.

[via Engadget]