VentureBeat

Here’s the latest action:

ComScore: Facebook users triple in Japan during the last year – But Mixi.jp is still number one, with 12.7 million visitors compared to Facebook’s 538,000.

MySpace and NBC select citizen journalists — They’ve chosen Matt Britten and Sara Pat Badgley to cover the Democratic and Republican Conventions, respectively, as part of the companies’ Decision08 contest. Britten and Badgley’s videos and blog posts will appear on MySpace, and possibly on the MSNBC TV channel and website.

Mobile subscribers to hit 5 billion in 2011 — That forecast comes from Infonetics Research, which also predicts that mobile broadband will grow at a compound rate of 104 percent every year until then.

Google establishes Latin American HQ in Brazil — The country is reportedly Google’s fastest growing region. That’s particularly impressive since Google only opened its Brazilian office three years ago.

Private equity firm Blackstone creates a cleantech arm — This group could help provide the late-stage investments that cleantech companies need.

Did Facebook try to acquire StudiVZ? — That’s what a former executive at the German social networking site claims. The implication is that Facebook is only suing StudiVZ because it wants more of the German market, not because (as alleged) StudiVZ copied Facebook’s look, feel and features.

Department of Energy supports green building — The federal agency will contribute to the $50,000 prize for the winning company in the California Clean Tech Open’s green building contest. That amount, of course, is only a drop in the bucket compared to the funding most green building startups actually need.

Philadelphia Inquirer: So much for that Internet news thing — The newspaper has a new policy decreeing that except for breaking news, articles won’t run on the website until after they have appeared in the Inquirer’s print edition.

Magnify.net makes video network bigger, faster — The startup, which helps customers include video channels on their websites, just added MySpace, Hulu, Vimeo, College Humor, Howcast and MTV Overdrive to its content network. That network supposedly runs twice as quickly now.