KODA.us is an an online community intended for hiring young professionals. KODA has raised $1.5 million in angel funding. KODA.us allows users to create profiles, photos, and upload photos. The website also provides guidance for job seekers. [alarm:clock]

It wasn’t too long ago that Yelp was mulling an offer from Google, but opted to raise additional funding instead. About a year ago, a business owner claimed that he was being blackmailed by Yelp too. Now Yelp is facing a class action lawsuit addressing an extortion complaint. The complaint was filed in Los Angeles by Miami-based law firm Beck & Lee and San Diego-based law firm The Weston Firm. The plaintiff is a Long Beach, California based veterinary hospital. The hospital claims that Yelp only offered to remove the negative review for $300. [PEHub]

General Motors will be shutting down their Hummer line of automobiles after a deal with a Chinese company fell through. The Chinese company Sichuan Tengzhong stalled because of environmental concerns by the government. This is GM’s fourth major brand to be shut down after Pontiac, Oldsmobile, and Saturn. [Jalopnik]

Six book publishers have asked RapidShare to proactively filter out certain e-books from being uploaded. If they fail to do so, RapidShare would face $339,000 in fines or jail time. The six book publishers involved include Bedford, Freeman & Worth and Macmillan, Cengage Learning, Elsevier, The McGraw-Hill Companies, and Pearson. About 148 titles were provided to RapidShare to prevent from being uploaded. The District Court in Hamburg handed down a ruling to RapidShare that ordered them to remove all of the book titles named in the lawsuit by February 17th. [TorrentFreak]

Rick Astley’s music video “Never Gonna Give You Up” was temporarily removed YouTube.  Removing the video was a mistake as confirmed by YouTube by Neowin.net.  “We review all flagged content quickly, and if we find that a video does violate the guidelines, we remove it, on average in under an hour. We also have a team that is dedicated to identifying and removing spam from YouTube.  Occasionally, an account flagged by users or identified by our spam team is mistakenly taken down,” stated YouTube in a message. The music video had about 30 million views on YouTube when it was temporarily removed. [Neowin]

ZillionTV has received $10 million in investment from Qwest Communications.  ZillionTV will be providing Qwest exclusive rights to offer video-on-demand service as part of the deal.  ZillionTV plans to launch commercial services in the second half of this year.  With 15,000 TV shows, movies, and other videos on the web, ZillionTV has distribution agreements with Disney, NBC, 20th Century, FOX, Sony, and Warner Brothers.  ZillionTV is based in Sunnyvale, California and started in 2007. [paidContent]

In Turin, Italy a video was uploaded where a bunch of bullies picked on an austic child.  The video was uploaded to Google Video.  Once Google found out about the video, the company removed it and worked with local authorities to track down the bullies.  A Milan based public prosecutor indicted four Google employees because of the video.  The four Google employees had nothing to do with the video. David Drummond, Arvind Desikan, Peter Fleischer, and George Reyes were charged with criminal defamation and failure to comply with the Italian privacy code.

Three out of the four employees were charged with failure to comply with Italian privacy code, but were found not guilty of criminal defamation.  Google plans to appeal the case, but the actual verdict seems astonishing. Does this mean that user generated content is not welcome in Italy? If someone is breaking the law in a photo and it gets uploaded to Facebook, then Mark Zuckerberg should be responsible for it? What is the logic here? [Google Blog]

Like.com has some of the most interesting photo recognition technology embedded within their portfolio of websites.  One of Like.com’s most recent creations is Couturious.com.  Couturious allows you to pick a model from a variety of races and body types.  After that you can decorate the model with boots, lingerie, dresses, shirts, etc.  This way consumers can learn how an outfit would look on them without having to physically change.  Like.com launched in 2006 and raised $32 million in funding.  The company is currently valuated at about $100 million and is run by Like.com CEO and founder Munjal Shah. [TechCrunch]