About two weeks ago, Microsoft Corporation laid off their “ambassador to startups” Don Dodge because of a broad workforce reduction. Dodge decided to come to Silicon Valley to do some interviewing shortly after.

Google extended an offer to Dodge and he accepted. Now Dodge will become the evangelist to Google Apps. He will be reporting to former Microsoft executive Vic Gundotra. Gundotra worked at Microsoft for 15 years with the most reaching position being the General Manager of Microsoft developer outreach efforts.

“Wondering what fuels him?” is a message that the Wheaties Fuel cereal Twitter account sent out to anyone that tweeted about Peyton Manning recently. On Sunday night, Indianapolis Colts quarterback Peyton Manning threw a game winning touchdown when playing against the New England Patriots. The Colts took the lead in the last 13 seconds of the fourth quarter. So far the Colts are 9-0 in the season.

The Wheaties Fuel marketing campaign includes a sponsorship of Peyton Manning (QB-Indianapolis Colts-NFL), Kevin Garnett (PF-Boston Celtics-NBA), Albert Pujols (First baseman-St. Louis Cardinals-MLB), Bryan Clay (American decathlete-Olympic champion), Hunter Kemper (professional triathlete and Olympian), and Dr. John Ivy (Expert on performance nutrition).

Above is a screenshot of the Wheaties Twitter account profile page. Do you think this is an effective form of marketing or do you think it is pure spamming? Leave a comment.

Rackspace Hosting, Inc. (NYSE:RAX) is catching up with Amazon.com when it comes to cloud computing. About a year ago Rackspace Hosting CEO Lanham Napier said that Amazon.com was far ahead of them. But now Napier admits that they are closing the gap against Amazon.com.

Rackspace cloud computing hosting grew over 100% in a year and now the business is contributing to 10% of the overall company revenue for the past third quarter. The Rackspace Cloud originally launched as Mosso LLC in March 2006.

Disclosure: Mosso/Rackspace is the hosting company of Pulse2.com.

In a lawsuit against Psystar Corporation, a judge ruled in favor of Apple Inc. However there isn’t a clear winner in this case. Psystar will have to cease designing their core products unless they appeal the case. And Apple is restricting the market share of their operating system.

Psystar installed the Mac operating system into hardware that normally is used for PCs only. After that they sell the PC with the Mac operating system which is better known as a “Hackintosh.” Perhaps Apple saw Psystar as a threat to the sales that they would otherwise make on selling the Mac directly through retail stores or Apple.com. Clearly Apple is slightly concerned about their operating system price when installing it in their own hardware because the company filed for a patent that would allow operating systems to be sold on the cheap assuming there was ads built in.

“In sum, Psystar has violated Apple’s exclusive reproduction right, distribution right, and right to create derivative works,” stated U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup.

Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, the two richest men in the United States with a combined net worth of $77 billion did a presentation at the Columbia University Business School in New York City. CNBC host Becky Quick moderated the discussion and set up the question and answer session between the students. The title of the discussion was called Keeping America Great. Above is the video. Leave your thoughts about the discussion in the comments.

The future of the Crunchpad tablet designed by Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch was uncertain for a while until news about the device was brought up during a podcast called The Gillmor Gang. During the podcast Arrington said that the price is $300-$400 and that the Crunchpad is “streamrolling around.” He also mentioned that there is opportunity for “soft revenue” and “sponsorships.” The reason why there has not been much news about the availability of the device is because Arrington is working on making sure that the tablet is “perfect.”

Ashley Towns is the first person to have created an iPhone virus, or so he claims. He does not regret writing it and he made sure to remind people that Rick Astley is here to stay. The iPhone virus is called “ikee” and it changes the wallpaper of iPhones to a picture of 80′s pop singer Rick Astley. A message on top of the wallpaper states “ikee is never going to give you up,” a pun on Astley’s popular song “Never Going To Give You Up.”

Towns, 21, said he created the virus out of boredom and curiosity. “I had just formatted my iPhone and it told me to set the password in bold, big letters and I wondered how many people have actually done that,” stated Towns in an e-mail to ComputerWorld. “So I ran a scan on my [Optus] 3G network and there was 26 phones running the service that’s vulnerable, and out of that 26, 25 hadn’t changed their passwords.”

Then he scanned the Optus 3G network and found 26 phones that were vulnerable. Of those 26 phones, 25 of them did not have changed passwords. Many jailbroken iPhones have a Unix utility running called SSH (Secure Shell). SSH runs using the iPhone default password, “alpine.”

Towns stands by his virus because it does not do anything malicious, even though it is a form of vandalism. He initially started by spreading the virus on the Optus network in Australia, but then he started targeting networks on Vodafone and Telstra. Towns even claimed he heard a report about his virus hitting a phone in China too.

David Karp did a presentation in Spain recently and reported some of the stats around the blogging service. Tumblr has over 2 million Tumblr bloggers, 40 million new posts per month, 420 million impressions, and 20 million visitors. On average Tumblr adds about 10,000 new people every day.

Tumblr has about 10 full-time employees. The company has about $5.25 million in funding. Karp said that they have about 2 years of runway left before running out of cash. Some of Tumblr’s users include John Legend, Katy Perry, etc. Tumblr has funding from Union Square Ventures, Betaworks, and Spark Capital.