AT&T has poached a lot of customers from Verizon Wireless because of the exclusive Apple iPhone contract. The iPhone, iPhone 3G, and iPhone 3G S have been the hottest smartphones selling on the market over the last few years. Motorola has also felt the pain of losing customers to the Apple iPhone too as their sales have decreased substantially. Given that Verizon and Motorola have both been feeling the pain, they teamed up with Google to launch a new smartphone called the Droid. The Droid is expected to arrive in late October or early November.

As the three companies are preparing to launch the Droid, a video has been released in order to get the hype going. The video knocks on all the features that the iPhone lacks such as the lack of a keyboard, background application capabilities, and a high resolution flash camera. The Droid commercial points out the lack of the features starting with the expression “iDon’t.” And everything “iDon’t,” Droid does. Based on how intense the video looks, I’d say Apple should be concerned. This video has a “we’re not messing around this time” vibe towards the end.

The Droid is expected to be powered by the TI OMAP3430 core which is also used by the Palm Pre and iPhone. The Verizon Droid will be using the Android v.2.0 operating system. Google expects at least 18 devices to be powered by Android by the end of 2009.

Technorati is a blog search engine and ranking system. The company raised $30 million in the first three rounds and now they have raised an additional $2 million in Series D. The investors involved include Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Mobius Venture Capital. This investment is an extension of a previous Series D financing round of $7.5 million. The actual Series D began in June 2008.

Based on this investment, Technorati is now valuated at over $35 million. The company is rumored to be planning to raised additional funding through commercial debt. Technorati redesigned their website recently.

Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra said that this round of funding will help get them to profitability. Technorati receives about 25 million monthly unique visitors and provides advertisements to about 450 websites including social networks and blogs.

Jack Dorsey is the creator, co-founder, and chairman of Twitter. He had actually built the Twitter service in about 2 weeks. Now he is working on a new project and a source with Engadget has found out what it was. Dorsey is supposedly working on an iPhone and iPod Touch application that uses a dongle for being able to process credit cards. This allows anyone to accept credit card payments on the spot.

The venture has been given the code name “Squirrel.” In the screenshots that Engadget has about the Square system application, there is a domain name on the receipt called squareup.com. After doing a domain name WHOIS search on Squareup.com, there is a registered office in San Francisco listed. And the contact e-mail address is “billing@paybysquirrel.com.”

DanceJam is a website that focuses on videos of people dancing. DanceJam was founded by Geoffrey Arone, Anthony Young, and MC Hammer (Stanley Burrell). According to a TechCrunch source, the company will soon be acquired by Purevideo Networks. TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington is an angel investor in DanceJam. The financial details were undisclosed by the source. DanceJam launched around November 2007 and raised $4.5 million in total funding.

Xiang Dong (Mike) Yu is a Chinese employee that worked at Ford Motor Company for about 10 years (1997-2007). Before he left the company, Yu is believed to have stolen about 4,000 confidential documents. Yu has recently been indicted for the crime.

When Yu left Ford, he accepted a job with Foxconn PCE Industry Inc. and possibly passed some of the documents over. Some of the documents were related to system design specifications for Engine/Transmission Mounting Subsystems, Electric Power Supplies, Generic Body Modules, etc. Yu is also believed to have sold the documents to a Chinese automotive company. Yu was arrested at the Chicago O’Hare airport when he exited a flight from China.

Each count could be worth up to a decade in prison. He may also be fined $250,000.

Hummingbirds are perhaps the most interesting types of birds I’ve heard of. Their wings flap at about 80 times per second and they have long beaks. The man in the above video is using a hummingbird helmet to get a bird to fly up close to his face while it is feeding. For the helmet to work, you have to leave it outside for a while in order for the bird to get accustomed to it. After that you can put the helmet in your face and get the birds to feed through a tube in between your eyes on the helment. The eye2eye helmet costs $80 from HeatStick.com.

WeFollow is a directory of Twitter users that where anyone can join and associate themselves with 3 tags. WeFollow was a personal project by Digg founder Kevin Rose, but it seems that the information used by the website was useful for Digg. There apparently wasn’t any money involved in the deal. WeFollow has about 654,000 Twitter users connected to tags.

Digg plans to revamp WeFollow by ranking users based on who tags themselves properly. WeFollow will rank users based on the most followers and most influential. Below is a screenshot of the new upcoming design, as uploaded by TechCrunch.

Neuroscientists that work at Princeton University tried a new experiment that involves a mouse running through a virtual maze. In the video above, a mouse is running on a Styrofoam ball. The mouse is being held up securely by a metal helmet that has the sensors on it. The best part of the experiment is that the scientists created the virtual maze using a modified version of Quake II. I challenge the neuroscientists to get additional mice to play this one in Capture the Flag multi-player mode.