Google Buys Aardvark

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Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) has bought Aardvark.com for about $50 million. Aardvark is a social search engine founded by several former Google executives [TechCrunch]. Here’s how Aardvark works:
1. Send Aardvark a question.
2. Aardvark finds the perfect person to answer.
3. Get their response in a few minutes.

FundingUniverse Buys TwitJump

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FundingUniverse is an incubator firm that connects investors to entrepreneurs. Today FundingUniverse has acquired TwitJump. TwitJump has about 2,000 customers that send about 10,000 customer inquiries every month. TwitJump is offers basic services for free and premium accounts for a fee. TwitJump helps you manage the search for customers, manage analytics, and schedule tweets. [NewsWire]

Dell Buys KACE

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Dell Inc. (NASDAQ:DELL) has acquired KACE, a systems management appliance company. This will expand Dell’s systems management services. KACE sells KBOX applicances with system management capabilities to IT managers at SMBs and public organizations. [Dell PR]

Break Media Buys FileFront

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Break Media has acquired FileFront.com, a social gaming studio for “seven figures.” FileFront launched in 2001 as a video games and downloads website. They were sold to Ziff Davis in 2005 and was added to their 1UP network. 1Up was sold to Hearst, but Ziff Davis kept FileFront. Ziff was about to kill FileFront, but the management team bought it back and sold it to Break Media. FileFront receives about 9 million uniques per month. [paidContent]

SunPower Buys SunRay

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SunPower Corporation (NASDAQ: SPWRA) has agreed to acquire SunRay for $277 million. SunPower is a San Jose, California based solar cell and panel manufacturing company. SunRay Renewable Energy is a European solar plant developer company [Bloomberg].

Zynga Buys Serious Business

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Social network gaming company Zynga has acquired Serious Business. Serious Business designed a popular Facebook game called Friends for Sale. Friends For Sale is played by over 6 million people every month. Lightspeed Venture Partners is an investor in Serious Business [WSJ].

If you take the viral power of the Mac vs. PC ads and the Jersey Shore and mash it into a video together, then you have a potentially viral video. The guys at Take180.com mashed the Mac vs. PC ads and the Jersey Shore in this parody video.

My favorite part is when says Mac “I’m actually a cross between a laptop, an iPhone, and an iPod Touch” and The Situation responds with “I’m pretty much a cross between Rocky and Rambo… and Stallone.”

Music is universally one of the most powerful forms of entertainment. People that capitalize on this form of entertainment have a strong sense of what sounds pleasing to consumers. Consumers themselves have also been forming their own music communities in the form of social networks since the beginning of the digital age. Below is a list of the top 20 these music social networks:

20. May Contain Music

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May Contain Music is a small music social network that hosts music, event information, venue information, and videos.

19. Flotones

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Flotones.com is small music social network that shares revenue with indie artists. You can browse digital songs, ringtones, music blogs, albums, artists, and mobile wallpapers on the website.

18. Yibster

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Yibster.com is a smaller music social network that has albums, videos, musician profiles, games, events, etc. Profiles can be customized similarly to MySpace layouts.

17. Muso City

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Muso City is a music social network where music fans, artists, and retailers can connect to each other. Indie artists can also add MP3s to the website.

16. ShareTheMusic

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ShareTheMusic.com is a website that hosts over 60,000 songs and acts as the middleman for people that want to share music. The service works in about seven different languages.

15. Gogoyoko

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Gogoyoko is a music social network that has the ability to stream and share music. Music players can be customized. Artists can set the price of the music and they also get 100% of the profit.

Twitter Surpasses 1B Monthly Tweets

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Twitter has surpassed 1 billion tweets per month. About 1.2 billion tweets were sent out in the month of January, averaging to about 40 million per day [Pingdom]. Twitter has also hired a new CFO. Ali Rowghani will be coming to Twitter from Pixar where he served as CFO [Mashable].

ComScore Buys ARSgroup

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COMSCORE, Inc. (NASDAQ:SCOR) has acquired ARSgroup. ARSgroup is an ad research company. The financial details were undisclosed and the deal is expected to close in March. [paidContent]

GameFly IPO

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GameFly is a Los Angeles based online video game rental company that has just filed a $50 million IPO on the NASDAQ Global Market. GameFly will trade under the symbol GFLY. Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Piper Jaffray, Cowen and Company, and William Blair & Company are the companies underwriting the deal. GameFly’s investors include Sequoia Capital, Tenaya Capital, and several other investors. The company launched in 2002. [SoCalTech]

Scrapblog Raises $2.5M

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Scrapblog is a website where users can create online scrapbooks. The company has just raised $2.5 million from Steamboat Ventures, the VC firm owned by The Walt Disney Company. Scrapblog now has a total of $10 million in funding. [VentureBeat]

MySpace CEO Natta Resigns

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MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta has resigned after about 10 months on the job. “While this may be a surprising turn of events for some of you, I am absolutely confident that this change is best for all parties involved and–most importantly–the MySpace business,” stated News Corp chief digital officer in an internal memo [WSJ].

In the video below, the Muppets make fun of the attitude used by the people that leave comments on Digg. We also get to see Beaker play a cover of “Dust In The Wind” by Kansas.

Fiat’s $550 Million Plant In Mexico City

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Fiat plans to invest $550 million in a Chrysler plant outside of Mexico City to assemble Fiat 500 vehicles. The $550 million investment will be financed mostly by loans from Mexican development plants. [Edmunds]

Nissan Going To Have A Booth At Chicago Auto Show

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Even though Nissan skipped having a booth at the Detroit Auto Show, they will be attending the auto show in Chicago. Nissan will have about 1,000 on-site at the Chicago Auto Show which is about 300 more than what they showcased in Detroit. [EGMCarTech]

Navigon iPhone App Going Social

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Navigon has announced that they will be updating their iPhone GPS application to support social features. There will be in-app connections to Twitter and Facebook. There will also be Panorama View 3D views that is being powered by NASA data. [CNET]

Street View Snowmobile

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Google Street View is now being used on the snowy hills of Vancouver. Google was able to take pictures using a Google Street View snowmobile vehicle. Unfortunately, they captured a picture of someone sticking up their middle finger. The photo was taken at Whistler to prepare for the Winter Olympics. [Jalopnik]

BMW Sales Up 16.6%

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BMW has announced that they have seen a 16.6% increase in sales for the month of January. They sold about 82,120 vehicles across their BMW, MINI, and Rolls-Royce brand of cars. [BMWBlog]

Honda Recalls 378K Cars Over Airbags

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Honda is recalling 378,000 additional vehicles because of air bag issues. The force in which the air bag deploys might be too forceful and affects certain Honda cars. Last year Honda had to recall 440,000 vehicles for the same reason. Cars affected include 2001-2002 Accords, Civics, Odysseys and CR-Vs. And 2002 Acura TLs may also be affected. [NYT]

Google Buzz

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Google is making GMail more interactive by integrating additional social media features into the service. Coined as Google Buzz, GMail will soon have the ability to share videos, photos, and websites with contacts within the e-mail service itself. Flickr and Twitter are both supported. [Google Blog]

Apple Aperture 3

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Apple has upgraded Aperture to the 3rd version this morning. Aperture is a high-end photo editing software. New features include Faces, Places, and Brushes. [Apple.com]

LG GD800 Mini and GT350

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LG has announced two new mobile devices: the LG GD880 Mini and the GT350. THe GD880 has a 3.2″ touchscreen, 5 megapixel cam, WiFi, AGPS, and 7.2Mbps HSDPA. The GT350 has a four line QWERTY sliding keyboard and a 3″ WQVA touchscreen. No details on pricing yet. The GD880 Mini will be available in Europe starting next month. [BGR]

Foursquare-Zagat Deal

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Foursquare has announced a deal with Zagat. Foursquare will soon offer their users a “Foodie” badge that indicates how many times the user has rated restaurants on Zagat. [NYT]

Motorola Invests In TuneWiki

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TuneWiki has raised $7 million in funding from several investors. This is TuneWiki’s second round of investment. Investors include Motorola Ventures, Benchmark Capital, Intellect Capital Ventures, HillsVen Capital LLC, and Novel TMT. [Globes Israel]

Flixster Raises $12.5 Million

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Flixster was recently acquired by Rotten Tomatoes, but that hasn’t stopped the company from raising additional funding. According to a filing with the SEC, Flixster has raised $12.5 million. The investors were undisclosed. Flixster currently receives 30 million unique visitors per month. [VentureBeat]

Yammer Raises $10 Million

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Yammer, the micro-blogging enterprise service has raised $10 million in funding as part of a Series B. Yammer has about 60,000 companies registered as their clients. “We said that we would use our Series B financing to bolster engineering, sales, and marketing,” stated Yammer founder and CEO David Sacks in a press release. [PRWeb]

Google Query Suggest is a feature integrated in Google.com where the search engine will automatically try to fill in your keyword combination for you based on your history or popular search queries. The problem with the popular search queries suggested by Google is that they can be quite off-putting. Below I have put together 130 screenshots of some of the strangest Google Suggestions I’ve ever seen. Warning: If you are easily offended by religion, politics, or racism — read a different blog post on this website.

130. Can You X-Ray Through Peanut Butter

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