Last year YouTube launched a service called Partner Program.  This allowed YouTube content owners and highly prolific users to make money from their videos.  Aside from all the publicity that they receive on YouTube, the content owners would receive a cut from revenue earned from ads on their videos.

This program was only available for select publishers, but now the program is starting to open for individual viral videos.  Some of YouTube’s most visited viral videos will receive the benefits of the program such as the people behind Battle at Kruger, David after dentist, and Otters holding hands.

YouTube determines whether a video is eligible for the partner program by looking at the number of views and the video’s compliance with YouTube’s Terms of Service.  If a video is eligible, YouTube will send an e-mail to the account holder with a subject that says “Enable Revenue Sharing.”  Revenue from the video will be added to the account holder’s Google AdSense account.

Nintendo is seeing tremendous success with the sales of Wii Sports Resort.  The game has sold about 1 million copies in the first month of release.  Wii Sports Resort is the sequel to the game that comes with the Nintendo Wii.  The game started selling on July 26th.

The game comes with a Wii MotionPlus controller and has games such as Frisbee, kayaking, ping-pong, waverunning, sword-fighting, etc.  Nintendo has also sold about 2 million Wii MotionPlus controllers which comes bundled with EA’s Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf game.

Considering that the game is selling for about $46 in retail stores and on Amazon.com, that gives Nintendo close to about $46 million in revenue just for one game in a month minus all of the overhead costs.

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) has launched a new service called OneApp.  OneApp makes it possible for phones that have very little processing power to be able to use Facebook, Twitter, Windows Live Messenger, and other services.  The OneApp software itself is only 140 KB in size.

“Microsoft OneApp will be able to help people do things they could not do before with their feature mobile phone — anything from paying their bills to helping diagnose their health issues or just staying connected with friends and family,” stated Microsoft Corporate VP Amit Mital.

Developers can build apps for OneApp using Javascript and XML.  There is also expected to be a OneApp software developer kit available for download by the end of 2009.  The OneApp software is already available for download in South Africa through Blue Label Telecom and the application will roll out into other countries within the next year.

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) has made an agreement to acquire Maktoob.com.  Maktoob is based in the country of Jordan and is one of the biggest Arab portals on the Internet today.  The fee was undisclosed, but the acquisition is pegged to be about $75-$80 million.

The acquisition should be completed by the fourth quarter.  Maktoob.com itself will become a Yahoo! property but assets under the Maktoob Group will be rolled into a new name called Jabbar Internet Group.  Jabbar will continue to own properties such as cashU.com and Araby.com.

“With the acquisition of Maktoob.com and our investment commitment to the region, the Arab world will soon get the entire Yahoo! experience in Arabic with relevant local language content, programming and services,” stated Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz in a press release.

Maktoob started in 2000 and is in the top 10 for most Arabic-speaking countries according to Alexa.com.  Maktoob holds the number one spot in many countries too.  This will help boost Yahoo!’s market share in an area that is heavily untapped by Google and Microsoft.

Facebook has hired David Recordon.  Recordon was the Director of Corporate Development at Six Apart.  He spent two total years at Six Apart.  Recordon made the announcement about joining Facebook on his blog.

“So yeah, it’s true. Next week I’m excited to join Facebook’s engineering team as the Senior Open Programs Manager and will continue focusing on open source and open standards,” wrote Recordon.  “I haven’t started yet, so I’ll keep it light on the details until I’ve really started to dig in.”

Recordon was essential for the development of OpenID, the login system used by a plethora of web services and social networks.  This announcement is consistent with the announcement that Zuckerberg plans to aggressively hire 50% more employees this year.

For those of you out there that have seen an episode or two of Family Guy, you may recognize the voice of “top of the line PC” in the video below. If you don’t recognize the voice, think Joe Swanson, the testosterone-filled neighbor of Peter Griffin that was permanently handicapped because of a fight he got into with The Grinch. The new celebrity to be featured in this Get A Mac ad is none other than Patrick Warburton. Warburton has an interesting IMDB resume which also includes Seinfeld, Men In Black II, and The Tick. It’s uncertain how much more we’ll see of Warburton but he does play a good “top of the line PC.”

For those of you that enjoy sitting in the front row of the movie theater, now there is a way to get your eyes even closer to the screen.  The i-3D video glasses can be worn on your face and can display images 920,000 pixels per LCD with an aspect ratio of 4:3.  The glasses weigh 2.4 oz. and costs $399.  Brightness and contrast can be adjusted.  The device is powered by a lithium ion battery with 3.5 hours on a single charge.

Twitter has hired Leland Rechis, a user interface designer from Google.  The announcement was made by Kevin Thau, Director of Business Development at Twitter through a tweet (naturally).  “Very excited to have @leland join the Twitter Mobile team today,” stated Thau.

Biz Stone and Ev Williams both worked at Google through the acquisition of Blogger before starting up Twitter.  Another Google exec Doug Bowman left the search engine company to join the micro-blogging startup.

Why switch from Google to Twitter?  Google has roughly 20,000 employees.  Employees are probably starting to feel that their contributions aren’t as groundbreaking as they used to be.  And Twitter is one of the hottest and most talked about start-ups in the Valley right now.