Dictionary.com has launched a new application on BlackBerry App World. This application resembles the Dictionary.com application that has already been launched on the iTunes App Store. The iPhone/iPod Touch Dictionary.com application is also free and has hit about 3 million downloads.

The BlackBerry version of the app has a list of about 500,000 words, synonyms, definitions, audio pronunciations, and spelling suggestions. The Word of the Day feature in Spanish and English is built-in to the BlackBerry app too. One of the distinguishing features of the BlackBerry version is that synonyms and definitions can be accessed from the Dictionary.com app while reading or writing e-mails.

According to Dictionary.com President Doug Leeds, the company also plans to launch APIs for developers to integrate the application into their own services. The application will be integrated in several e-books too. The Dictionary.com application on BlackBerry App World is free and will be launching in the near future (if not already).

InterActiveCorp’s Ask.com bought out Dictionary.com as part of the Lexico acquisition in July 2008. Dictionary.com is the sister website of Thesaurus.com and Reference.com too.

Restaurant locator and review service Urbanspoon.com has one of the most used iPhone applications that exists in the market today.  The Urbanspoon iPhone application automatically detects where you are and is able to help you find a restaurant within a certain vicinity, priced from low to high prices, and of different ethnic tastes.

Earlier today, stastistics about the iPhone application has been revealed by The New York Times.  The statistic is that about one million people use the Shake feature on the Urbanspoon application everyday.  The Shake feature randomly selects restaurants for you based on your location or the city that you pick.  You can also “lock” one of the three columns – city, price, food type.

Urbanspoon is owned by InterActiveCorp.

IAC/InterActiveCorp (NASDAQ:IACI) has laid off about 25% of their work force at Evite.com.  Evite had about 38 employees and now they are down to about 29.  Two of the executives that were laid off includes General Manager Rosanna McCollough and VP of Marketing Lariayn Payne.  John Foley will be at the top Evite.  Hans Woolley will be reporting to John Foley.

Evite has taken a hit on revenue which was generated mainly from advertising.  Evite is also finding themselves heavily competing with social networking websites that have built in event invitations.

Evite currently has 22 million registered users and there are about 25,000 invitations sent each hour.  Evite was launched in 1998 and has headquarters in LA, CA.

[via BusinessInsider]

Charles Kushner is a wealthy real estate mogul that lives in New York. His son and boyfriend of Ivanka Trump Jared bought out The New York Observer for $10 million.  Charles was the subject of controversy when he bought a $1.8 billion office tower and routed $$18 million for himself and $5 million to the New York Observer.

Earlier this week it was announced that The New York Observer acquired Very Short List from InterActiveCorp.  Very Short List is an e-mail list of about 200,000 subscribers of wealthy people.  After the acquisition was made, Kushner wasted no time firing everybody working for Very Short List:

Timeline: We get a bunch of emails Thursday morning. At 10AM, the GM said he might have news (at 6PM, that news would finally be delivered). Someone else said that the deal had already gone through, and that it was finally over. And yet someone else said that we still had assignments for the next week, so it would stretch for another week. And then we heard that the person who was supposed to take over at the NYO had been fired the week before in their bloodbath. So nobody knew anything. Thursday night, the news came through. Our last day was Friday, after SIX WEEKS of being told we were going to be laid off. The worst part: some of us were on the phone with the NYO’s people on Friday, trying to teach them how to do our jobs.

Very Short List wanted to replicate the success that AOL executive Bob Bittman had with Daily Candy and Thrillist.  Video advertisements in Thrillist have a CPM rate as high as $275.

[via Valleywag/BusinessInsider]

Jim Safka stepped down as the CEO of Ask.com in the middle of last month and will now be moving to another online company, Chegg.com.  When Safka stepped down from InterActiveCorp’s search engine company, he said that he wanted to work on something smaller and more local-based.  Chegg is an online textbook rental service that was started in 2003.

The textbooks rent for a much cheaper price than what it costs to buy it on Chegg.  The company raised about $27 million in funding so far from Gabriel Venture Partners, Maples Investments, Kleiner Perkins, and Foundation Capital.  The first round was $2.2 million and the second round was about $25 million.

Osman Rashid, Chegg’s co-founder will step down from being CEO and will take the chairman position.

[via paidContent]

Urbanspoon is a website that recommends local restaurants based on reviews and tastes.  In a way its a competitor of Yelp.  Urbanspoon was founded by three former employees at Jobster, Patrick O’Donnell, Ethan Lowry, and Adam Doppelt.  They built the service without the need of venture capital investments, something that Jobster heavily depended on.  InterActiveCorp (IAC) bought that self-funded company.

Although there isn’t an official figure, TechCrunch believes it is “something in the millions of dollars range” since the company is already fairly profitable.  Urbanspoon used IAC’s CitySearch reviews for customers looking for restaurants.  The acquisition talks have been taking place since the second half of last year.

Urbanspoon’s popularity had especially grown from their free iPhone application which finds out where you are located and recommends a random restaurant using a slot machine style.  Urbanspoon will remain based in Seattle and will update their iPhone application soon.  Now that Urbanspoon has access to IAC’s various other Internet properties, you never know what they will come up with next.

Yelp is currently one of the leaders on listing reviews for restaurants and bars. However MySpace and IAC/InterActiveCorp are partnering to challenge Yelp directly using the millions of users already signed up with MySpace.

Soon MySpace users will be able to look up the addresses and phone numbers of local restaurants and post comments about what they think about those places. The directory of the businesses will be provided by Citysearch.com, a company owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp.

In terms of the user interface, the MySpace/Citysearch combo looks very similar to Yelp’s. There is basic information of the business and it is followed by the comments from MySpace users. MySpace and Citysearch will sell ads to local businesses placed along the reviews. So far Coors and Outback Steakhouse have signed up as the pilot advertisers.

[via Forbes]

InterActiveCorp subsidiary CollegeHumor.com was started in 1999 by Jakob Lodwick, Josh Abramson, and Rick Van Veen.  The parent company of CollegeHumor is called Connected Ventures and they also operate BustedTees, Defunker, and Vimeo.

Now they have another company to add to their portfolio: SportsPickle.com.  The design of SportsPickle looks like it was made in the 1990’s and I’m assuming the company wasn’t making much money, thus giving CH a chance to buy it on the cheap.

However SportsPickle has been around for a while (November 2001) and had a book released based on their columns a couple of years ago.  Some of their articles were syndicated on ESPN also.  CollegeHumor will be revamping the whole brand eventually.

[via paidContent]

IAC/InterActiveCorp announced a deal to sell ReserveAmerica, an online camping reservationwebsite to another sports website called The Active Network for a stock deal.  Active Network Inc. raised $80 million in funding this past August.  In exchange for the site, InterActiveCorp received 3.5 million convertible preferred shares in The Active Network.  InterActiveCorp now owns about 9% in the company.  The deal will be wrapped up by the end of the month.

The $80 million in funding that The Active Network raised this past August was led by ESPN.  The funding will be used to make strategic acquisitions.

ReserveAmerica was part of IAC’s “emerging-business” division.  This division also includes sites like CollegeHumor, Busted Tees, RushmoreDrive, and TheDailyBeast.  “We don’t think emerging businesses are the tomorrow of our business,” stated Barry Diller in a Q3 earnings call this past November.  IAC will start selling more of their emerging businesses this December.

ReserveAmerica was founded in 1984.  Seth Rosenberg is the President of the company and he will remain in his current position.  ReserveAmerica has over 300,000 campsites in their database.

Moshe Koyfman has left IAC/InterActiveCorp (NASDAQ:IACI) to join Boston, Mass.-based Spark Capital. Koyfman will stay back in New York after transferring to Spark.

Koyfman was formerly on the Board for Connected Ventures, subsidiary of IAC. Connected Ventures, LLC is the parent company of CollegeHumor, Busted Tees, Big Shocker, Defunker, Vimeo, and TodaysBigThing. Koyfman was the COO of Connected Ventures.

Spark Capital is also an investor in 5min, 8D World, Buzzwire, Covestor, EQAL, KickApps, Me.dium, Veoh, and Twitter.

Related Link:
1. AlleyInsider

Photo Credit:
1. VentureBeat

Steve Berkowitz announced in Feb. 2008 that he plans to leave Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT).  Berkowitz was the SVP of Microsoft’s Online Services Group, responsible for marketing & sales for MSN.com and Windows Live.  Before Berkowitz worked at Microsoft, he was the former CEO of Ask.com.

According to CNET, Berkowitz has joined TheLadders.com, a job search engine with a focus on $100K salaries.

“Steve is an experienced and visionary leader whose proven record of success leading online services makes him an ideal person to join our board,” stated TheLadders.com CEO Marc Cenedella.

Before Berkowitz was the CEO of Ask.com, he was COO and President of IDG Books.  Berkowitz oversaw the expansion of the “Dummies” series books and IDG’s acquisition of CliffNotes, Frommer’s, Betty Crocker Cookbooks, and Lasser’s Tax Guides.  Berkowitz attended State University of New York in Albany.

Related Links:
1. Microsoft PressPass
2. CNET via Yahoo!

IAC/InterActiveCorp (NASDAQ:IACI) has five units that make the company what it is today.  IAC CEO Barry Diller is now planning on taking these 5 separate units public, thus giving them independence from working as one entity.  The five units are IAC’s internet businesses, Ticketmaster, HSN.com, Tree.com, and Interval Leisure Group.

Starting tomorrow, these five units will start trading on a “when-issued” basis according to RedHerring.com.  The temporary symbols for the properties are IACIV, TKTMV, HSNIV, TREEV, IILGV.  The properties is expected to be fully public by August 21.  The V’s will be then dropped off from the stock ticker symbols.  For about 20 days after the spin-offs enter the market, IAC will trade as IACID.

The list of all 5 business units and their subsidiaries are available at: http://www.iac.com/businesses.html.

IAC/InterActiveCorp  (NASDAQ:IACI) has launched a How-To site that competes directly with Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) Knol, Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) Answers, and About.com.  The new site is called Life123.  The original name of the company was Life333.com.  Primary categories on Life123 include Beauty & Style, Celebrations, Food & Drink, Health & Wellness, Money, Home & Garden, Parenting & Family, Relationships, Technology, Travel & Leisure, and Work.

I can already tell you that the market for How-To sites is extremely saturated.  What makes Life123 distinguishable?  It’s just another alternative to other sites.  A lot of the content is provided by third party information providers, including other IAC subsidiaries.  IAC properties: Match.com, Shoebuy.com, LendingTree.com, RealEstate.com, ServiceMagic, Ask, Pronto and Reserve America are all providing content on Life 123 [paidContent].  5min.com is providing Life123 with How-TO videos. 

Life123 is launching today with 10,000 articles across 1,000 topics.  Life123 is currently looking for good writers.  The site is currently in Alpha mode.

High quality video streaming service and IAC/InterActiveCorp (NASDAQ:IACI) subsidiary, Vimeo will no longer allow the uploading of video game samples.  Users will no longer will be able to do walk-throughs, game strategies, player vs. player battles, raids, fraps, etc.  Videos that already have this type of content on them will start being deleted on September 1st and new videos with this type of content will be removed immediately.

Why is Vimeo doing this?  First, It’s not creative expression.  And second, video game demos have a tendency to be longer in length, thus being the single biggest reason for transcode wait times.  If this is the case, then we should see an increase in speed for playing and uploading videos on Vimeo.

Will other video upload sites block this from happening?  I doubt it.  Learning how to beat certain parts of a video game is a huge market.  There are video game magazines published that solely teach gamers how to beat certain levels.  Vimeo is just having a hard time learning how to scale.  They need to take some lessons from YouTube.

Related Links:
Vimeo.com
Vimeo Blog

Ask.com, the search engine company that is owned by InterActiveCorp (NASDAQ:IACI) has picked up a dictionary, literally. Ask.com bought the properties of Lexico Publishing Group. Lexico owns Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, and Reference.com. With these, Ask.com’s traffic will now be 145 million unique visitors per month.

Answers.com attempted to buy Lexico properties last year, but the deal did not work out. The deal between Lexico/Answers.com was roughly worth $100 million, but Ask.com left the price of this deal undisclosed. The second most search term on Ask.com was dictionary.

Ask will use their technology to advance functionality on Lexico’s sites. Ask.com will be powering the search on these sites as well. Dictionary is a top key search on Google, Yahoo!, and Live too.

In related news, Barry Diller, CEO at InterActiveCorp has resolved his differences with Liberty Media Corporation. Liberty Media owns 30% of IAC and they wanted to spin off some of IAC’s businesses as single-tier businesses.

IAC/InterActiveCorp owns excite, MyWay, iWon, excite, Evite, Bloglines, Zwinky, insiderpages, CollegeHumor, GarageGames, Vimeo, Busted Tees, gifts.com, Entertainment.com, BagsBuy.com, Shoebuy.com, LendingTree, Match.com, Admission.com, and Ticketmaster.

Information Source:
[1] Associated Press:  Ask.com acquires Dictionary.com, other references by Michael Liedtke