Last week at a Christmas mass, Pope Benedict XVI was knocked down by Susanna Maiolo. Maiolo apparently had psychiatric problems and said that she did not intend to hurt the Pope. When someone gets knocked over on YouTube or there is some sort of fail meme involved, the video will probably get the keyboard cat treatment. That is what happened to the Pope video below:

Webvanta.com is a startup made for people that want to build a website but do not have much programming experience. The service is very similar to Joomla and Drupal. Webvanta has raised $1 million in a first round of funding.

The Series A financing was led by angel investor group North Bay Angels. The original seed financing was provided by Webvanta founders Michael Slater, Christopher Haupt, and several angel investors. Webvanta plans to hire additional staff and will add several new services. Slater and Haupt started in 2007 and they both worked at Adobe together.

Live auction website Artfact.com has raised $13 million in funding from Commonwealth Capital Ventures and Ascent Venture Partners. Artfact has also recently merged with Auctionzip.com. Artfact will use the funding to expand product development and enhance marketing/sales.

“The investment by Commonwealth and Ascent marks an important milestone for Artfact, and punctuates an exciting first year of growth in Arfact Live and Invaluable Live, our live auctions marketplaces for estate auctioneers. We are eager to have the support of two distinguished partners as we look forward to the launch of Auctionzip Live, and the SaaS version of our RFC auction management software in 2010,” stated Artfact CEO and Chairman Adam Kirsch in a press release.

isoHunt is a torrent website that is in the top 200 most visited websites in the world (Alexa.com). In September 2006 after there was a raid at The Pirate Bay, movie studios decided to go after isoHunt. Last week a federal court in California ruled against isoHunt saying that the website is guilty of inducing copyright infringement.

There wasn’t a full ruling on this case, only a summary grant seeing as how this case was similar to Napster (in their early days) and Grokster. The movie studios that filed a complaint against isoHunt include Disney, Tristar, 20th Century Fox, Columbia, Universal, and Warner Bros. Gary Fung is the man behind isoHunt.

Many Verizon customers may have noticed that they cannot change their BlackBerry or other smartphones from Bing.com to a different search engine.  Supposedly the Bing.com search default has affected BlackBerry smartphones and the Storm2 device on Verizon’s network. The Yahoo!, Google, and Wikipedia options are no longer available as default options and users are being forced to use Bing.com.

Why is this the case?  There is a rumor that Microsoft paid Verizon $500 million for a default Bing search deal.  T-Mobile has a similar deal with Yahoo!  The Microsoft and Verizon deal is to last for about 5 years. The $500 million deal was signed this past January.

“We’re a proud supporter of Microsoft’s Bing search engine,” stated a Verizon spokesman in an interview with The Register. “On a couple of select smartphones (Storm 2 the most prominent), we’ve changed the [Verizon Wireless]-supplied web menu to make Bing the default search engine.”

Othmar Muhlebach recently won second place for the Berner Design Award 2009. He designed a toaster that looks and acts just like a printer. The sliced bread is stacked and fed into the toaster which appears to be printing out. The result is breakfast being ejected onto the base of the toaster.

Eastman Kodak Company (NYSE:EK) and Samsung Electronics have settled a patent dispute and has entered a cross-license agreement as a result. Samsung will be paying Kodak undisclosed sums for payments as part of future royalty obligations too.

The agreement was made as a result of a United States International Trade Commission judge ruling that Samsung was violating two of Kodak’s camera patents. If an agreement was not reached between both companies, the Commission would have a deeper investigation.

Two rival schools in Washington have made viral videos that involves lip dubbing to see who can produce the best one. Shorecrest High students sang “Hey Ya” by Outkast and Shorewood High students sang “You Make My Dreams” by Hall & Oates.

Although both videos were good, Shorewood decided to step up their video by singing the song backwards and made the final cut of the video in reverse. Check out the videos below:

Shorecrest Lip Dub – “Hey Ya”

Shorewood Lip Dub – “You Make My Dreams Come True”