Amazon.com has been given a patent for a dual-screen e-reader. Given that the Barnes & Noble Nook is a dual-display e-reader, this could mean that the two companies may get into some sort of conflict. Amazon.com filed the patent in 2006 and Amazon.com agreed not to file any corresponding foreign patents during this four year patent process. This is what the patent covers:

Geolocation check in service Foursquare has partnered with IFC to send push notifications about establishments that you are near by. Foursquare users can choose to opt in for these services or have it off.  To collect data about certain establishments, the IFC polled their member base for descriptions of their favorite places in the towns that they live in or visited.  When you check in to one of the recommended places, the IFC notification is sent.

Recently Google announced that GMail will now support images as part of e-mail signatures. Here is how you set it up.

Facebook is ending their company virtual gift shop on August 1st. This business generated about $100 million in revenues for Facebook. However social gaming companies such as Zynga and Playdom make a lot of its revenues from in-game purchases, which Facebook also gets a cut from. The market for virtual goods as a whole is expanding rapidly with a projected $10 billion globally this year alone. By removing their own Gifts market, it is possible that more developers will be encouraged to join the Facebook ecosystem, thus generating additional revenue for the social network. [AllFacebook]

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) will continue their Chinese operations. Last week Google said that they would stop automatically re-routing users from the Google.cn (Google China) to the Google.hk (Google Hong Kong) link. Instead they have placed a Google.hk link on the Google.cn if Internet users in China would like to see uncensored content.

The updated Fring iPhone application [iTunes link] supports videochat over 3G. It lets you call from phone to phone or phone to computer with Skype. However you may experience a little bit of lag when doing video calls. The reason why Fring iPhone app will grow in popularity is because the FaceTime feature on the iPhone 4 is supported by WiFi only as of right now. [Gizmodo]

Facebook has bought out Nextstop, a two year old startup that lets users share travel activities. Nextstop was founded by Carl Sjogreen and Adrian Graham, both of whom worked on Google Groups, Google Calendar, and Picasa. The Nextstop team will become Facebook employees.

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAY:YHOO) has outsourced their Real Estate section to Zillow.com. Zillow will also work out an advertising deal with Yahoo! This deal is similar to the ones made when Match.com was integrated into Yahoo! Personals and Pricegrabber was integrated into Yahoo! Shopping.