eBay Inc. founder Pierre Omidyar is starting up a new venture in Honolulu, Hawaii. The venture will focus on issues taking place in Hawaii. Omidyar is partnering with eBay VP Randy Ching on the new project.

“We’re starting something up in our own backyard,” stated Omidyar on his blog. “We are creating a Honolulu-based local news service that will produce original, in-depth reporting and analysis of local issues in Hawaii… We have a lot of work to do before our public launch in early 2010.”

Omidyar is also close to finishing up his Ginx project with Ching. Ginx is expected to be a recommendation website that utilizes Twitter.

Through eBay and other ventures, Omidyar’s net worth is at $5.5 billion.

Above is a picture of Quebec resident Natalie Blanchard. She lost her insurance benefits because of the above photo and several other photos that were on Facebook. Blanchard was on a long-term disability for 18 months because of a depression diagnosis. Her insurance company ruled that she was no longer depressed because she did not appear to be that way on her Facebook status messages and photos.

One of her Facebook status messages said that she had climbed a mountain recently. She was collecting the benefits because a psychologist said that she should take time off from her job at IBM.

Some of the other pictures showed Blanchard at bars, beaches, and male strip shows. But Blanchard said that she was at those events after her insurance company stopped paying her. Manulife disagreed about that. Blanchard and her lawyer will be suing Manulife in the near future as the result of what she believes to be a violation of privacy.

Chegg is the biggest online textbook rental company and they are aggressively funding themselves in order to expand their business. The company raised $57 million in Series D equity funding led by Insight Venture Partners. Insight Venture Partners also provided Chegg with $25 million in credit facility. Before that Pinnacle Ventures and TriplePoint Capital provided Chegg with $30 million in debt facility. This gives Chegg a total of $112 million to work with.

Insight Venture Partners Managing Director Deven Parekh will be joining the Chegg Board of Directors as part of the funding round. By providing textbook rentals, Chegg has helped students across 6,400 colleges save about $65 million.

“We are thrilled with the continued excitement from leading investors who understand the tremendous value we provide to students around the country,” stated Chegg.com CEO and Co-Founder Osma in a press release. “This new funding is a significant step up from Series C and a testament to the growing market opportunity for Chegg.com’s textbook rental offering. With college tuitions continuing to climb and higher unemployment rates, parents and students are looking for any and all ways to cut costs.”

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) has acquired Teracent. Teracent is a service that allows advertisers to build smarter display ads by capturing the images, colors, and text themes. Teracent can also capture the geographic location, language, and content of the website and customize banners.

Before the acquisition announcement, Teracent raised a total of $5.8 million in funding. Teracent’s technology will be rolled into a service offered by Google’s Content Network and DoubleClick. Yahoo! previously had a partnership with Teracent, but after the acquisition takes place it is assumed that the deal will be removed. Teracent is based in San Mateo, California.

“This technology can help advertisers get better results from their display ad campaigns. In turn, this enables publishers to make more money from their ad space and delivers web users better ads and more ad-funded web content,” Google VP of Product Management Neal Mohan and Google Engineering Director Joerg Heilig on the Google Blog.

AT&T is getting aggressive when it comes to marketing. AT&T’s temporary restraining order against Verizon for the “there’s a map for that” advertisements fell through so they had to respond. First AT&T hired Luke Wilson to be a spokesperson and now they have launched two new commercials that points out that their network can manage voice and data simultaneously. After the jump is the two videos.

BNO News (also known as @BreakingNews on Twitter) has over 1.4 million followers. The company also has a very popular iPhone application and has decided to start syndicating content from sources for their Twitter followers. One of their first partners is MSNBC.com. While MSNBC.com manages and syndicates content to the Twitter account, BNO News founder Michael van Poppel will focus on building a subscription based news wire service.

The news wire service will begin in January. While MSNBC.com will have access to the Twitter account, it will not have access to the iPhone app data of BNO News. MSNBC’s own breaking news account has only 40,000 followers. MSNBC.com will probably link to news articles on their own website through the BNO Twitter feed and gain additional traffic that way.

Last night at the American Music Awards, Jennifer Lopez was doing a live performance. In one of the dance steps, she climbed on top of a guy’s back and then had to jump off. It turns out that she took a nasty spill as soon as she jumped off and this cropped video is circulating around the Internet like wildfire with some commentary.

ESPN has disallowed editor Bill Simmons from writing for two weeks because he criticized sports radio station WEEI on a tweet. In a blog post, ESPN editor-in-chief Rob King wrote “we’ve taken appropriate measures.”

ESPN and WEEI have a radio partnership that began on October 7. Simmons has criticized the radio station at least twice since the partnership has been announced. About a month ago Simmons tweeted “WEEI’s ‘The Big Show’ was apparently ripping me today. Good to get feedback from 2 washed-up athletes and a 60 yr-old fat guy with no neck.” And then on November 10 Simmons sent out another tweet that said “Hey WEEI: You were wrong, I did a Boston interview today. With your competition. Rather give them ratings over deceitful scumbags like you.”

The blog post written by Rob King did not specify the punishment terms, but supposedly Simmons told a fan that he was suspended for two weeks.