Viacom, the parent company of brands such as MTV, VH1, Comedy Central, Spike TV, etc. filed a lawsuit against Google shortly after they acquired YouTube. Within the last 24 hours, legal documents in the copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube by Viacom were made public. Below is a statement that Viacom released [Viacom.com]: (more…)
Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) has acquired sports startup company Citizen Sports. Citizen Sports will complement Yahoo! Sports especially during March Madness. Citizen Sports owns several iPhone applications and Facebook applications. The deal is rumored to be about $40-$50 million according to [AllThingsD]
Its a very sad day in the tech and auto community. Apple Board member and Chrysler CFO Jerry York has passed away according to a brief statement by Apple. He was hospitalized after suffering from a burst brain aneurysm yesterday morning. He died shortly after.
York was the chairman, President, and CEO of Harwinton Capital. He was also the former CFO of IBM and Chrysler. And he joined the Apple Board of Directors in 1997.
York was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1938 and graduated from the U.S. Military Academy. He also received an M.S. from MIT and an MBA from the University of Michigan. “It’s been a privilege to know and work with Jerry, and I’m going to miss him a lot,” stated Apple CEO Steve Jobs. [PRNewsWire]
Zillow, the digital real estate service, has launched on Google Android. This is about the same time that their iPhone application hit about 1 million downloads.
Zillow provides house pricing data for any U.S. address that you enter. You can also find house pricing data using geolocation. Zillow has about 88 million houses in the database. There is also information about floorplans in the database.
Backed with $87 million in funding, Zillow is based in Seattle. The company has investment from Benchmark Capital, PAR Capital Management, and Technology Crossover Ventures. [VentureBeat]
Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) user experience manager Paul Ray said that the blue color of the Bing logo “was worth at least $80 million” at the MIX10 conference in Las Vegas. The hexadecimal color of the logo is #0044CC.
It appears that people that see this bluish color, people tend to click on more links and ads. “We wanted to try red links or brown links and no color,” stated Ray. “It was really hard to argue with the success of this color.” [The Seattle Times]
Steve Riggio is no longer the CEO of bookseller company Barnes & Noble. He is being replaced by William Lynch, the President of BN.com. Riggio will be the Vice Chairman of Barnes & Noble going forward. [TechCrunch]
Mafia leader Pasqual Manfredi was Facebook chatting when his secret hideout apartment was raided by police officers. Police officers were able to track him through Facebook. Manfredi’s nickname is Scarface. He is being charged with multiple counts of murder and drug violations. In one of the murders, there was a portable rocket launcher involved. Police are also investigating Manfredi’s 200 Facebook friends to see if they can find other leads to Mafia members.
Yelp and Epipheo Studios worked together on a video that explains how the filtering process works. Yelp has a reputation to protect as they are facing lawsuits that involve extortion. Below is a video of how it works:
