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Here’s the latest action:

More fallout from the YouTube/Viacom lawsuit — After a judge ruled that Google wouldn’t have to reveal YouTube’s source code but would have to open its user data for all to see, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) wrote a post condemning the decision as a violation of privacy. Google lawyers are also on the case, according to The Wall Street Journal. The outcry in the blogosphere has been even bigger.

Chicken Little, the SSD-based MacBook Air prices are falling — Apple has quietly shaved $500 off the price of it’s slim MacBook Air drive with a built-in solid state drive (SSD). These are the drives that use flash memory and require no moving parts, allowing them to be more stable and in some cases much quicker. You can now get one for $2,398, according to AppleInsider.

Economic downturn hits Google? — The search giant is closing two of its offices, one in Denver and one in Dallas. Luckily, no Googlers are being laid off, they all have the option to be relocated, according to Google Blogoscoped

Activision-Vivendi Games merger likely to proceed next week — A judge has denied a request to halt the previously announced $18.9 billion deal. July 9 could be the close date, according to GameSpot.

Report: Baidu enters mobile search deal with Nokia — The largest Chinese search engine has a deal in place to pre-load its product onto Nokia phones, according to Forbes. Nokia recently bought the Symbian OS and announced it would open it in an effort to compete with the likes of Google’s upcoming Android platform. Now it has a mobile search partner besides Google as well.

Segway sales rising as gas prices do the same — Remember the Segway? Of course you do. Know anyone who owns one? Probably not. That may change soon as sales are on the rise with many people looking for alternatives to cars, according to USA Today.

Aussies living the tech lifestyle in San Francisco — The San Francisco headquarters of advertising agency Euro RSCG provides startups from Australia with office space, desks, broadband access and a telephone line on the cheap (around $600 a month), according to The Age. The idea is to help Australian companies better serve their American and Canadian customers, which often make up a large percentage of their user base.

Apple developing a whole multi-touch language — A new patent, uncovered by UnwiredView, reveals a wide range of gestures beyond the “pinch” and the “double tap.” The patent is called “gesture learning,” and interestingly it only shows left-handed gestures. A separate report says Apple has filed for 34 different multi-touch patents.

The CEO of I Can Has Cheezburger? is allergic to cats — Yep. Cats are a source of great income, but also a source of great pain, according to Valleywag.

Many people have been outraged by Google and other U.S. Internet firms’ dealings with China. There is no real freedom of speech and the country has a questionable background with human rights violations. But from a business perspective, the rationale behind partnerships has always been obvious — and now it’s official: China has passed the U.S. in terms of total Internet users.

In February of this year, China had over 220 million people on the Internet according to the Beijing-based research firm BDA China. By March this number surged to 233 million. The United States, by comparison, is still lingering around its end-of-2007 total of 216 million.

Expect this gap to widen as well. While 71 percent of the United States’ population is on the Internet, only 17 percent of China’s population has the same access, according to USA Today. China has 1.3 billion people versus the United States 304 million. If 71 percent of China had access to the Internet, that would be close to a billion people.

During its quarterly earnings call last week, Google spoke a lot about the large role of international growth in its recent success. Europe has so far been a big part of that, but the real prize that everyone is eyeing is China.

Google has been trying to outmaneuver leading Chinese search provider Baidu for access to those potential billion users. It even recently tried moving into the legally gray-area of searching for unlicensed music downloads.

Already the worldwide leader in mobile phone usage, China now has another technology bragging right as it  prepares to host this summer’s Olympic games.

[photo: flickr/fortes]

Here’s the latest action:

Mobile enthusiast gives up on “mobile web” – Russell Beattie, a Silicon Valley developer and mobile enthusiast who spent two years working at Yahoo Mobile before launching a start-up called Mowser, has given up on the mobile sector. He writes: “The general answer is that I don’t actually believe in the ‘Mobile Web’ anymore, and therefore am less inclined to spend time and effort in a market I think is limited at best, and dying at worst. I’m talking specifically about sites that are geared 100% towards mobile phones and have little to no PC web presence. Two years ago I was convinced that the mobile web would continue to evolve in the West to mimic what was happening in countries like Japan and Korea, but it hasn’t happened, and now I’m sure it isn’t going to.” Mowser focused on adapting content for mobile phones. Beattie said the expected traffic never came. His story is a cold shower for industry players hoping advances by the iPhone and the Android will inject life into the sector.

Credit crunch hits cleantech after all — Despite some crowing from the clean-technology crowd that the credit crunch hadn’t hit it, it did eat into one a that sector clean-technology companies: private equity investment. Earth2Tech has a good wrapup of the numbers and commentary.

Silicon Valley’s giants are fine, but maybe not for long — The big tech companies of Silicon Valley, on the other hand, are humming along as if the current (probable) recession weren’t even taking place, says the San Jose Mercury News in its annual SV150 issue. The reason: Their international business divisions are going strong. However, the New York Times reports that housing markets worldwide are following the US market’s tailspin, so credit and spending abroad could suffer as well, challenging even multinational companies.

Feed your tank, starve a poor person — Biofuels have pushed back the fight against poverty by seven years and may continue to hurt poor people, according to a quote from World Bank president Robert Zoellick in the Guardian. The tapping of biofuels for alternative energy has faced a growing negative reaction, because it is sending food prices soaring around the world. Biofuels are made from food crops like corn and sugar, and so are taking away from the food stock. The effect, at least for the moment, will probably be limited to more cautious government subsidization policies.

Farecast rumored sold for over $75M — Online travel search site Farecast may have been sold for over $75 million, according to John Cook of the Seattle PI. He’s not sure who the buyer is, but speculates that Expedia would be a likely match since two major competitors, SideStep and Kayak, merged last year. Farecast has done well with its feature that lets you predict whether fares are going up or down in the near future, helping you decide when to buy.

Radio One buys Community Connect for $38M — Media giant Radio One has laid down $38 million for Community Connect, which operates niche sites based on ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation. The company had taken funding from Dominion Ventures, ConnectCapital, Comcast Interactive Capital and Jump Ventures, according to peHUB.

YouTube dominates video, while Google roars in search — YouTube boasted 73.18 percent of all U.S. visits among a group of 68 online video websites in March, according to Hitwise. MySpaceTV received the second highest percentage of visits, with 9.21 percent followed by Google Video with 4.06 percent. YouTube dominates video more than Google dominates search. But then search makes much more money. Google got 67.3 percent market share for search, and that’s a high, while Yahoo and Microsoft hit new lows.

Gawker media cuts Wonkette and others loose — Gawker owner Nick Denton tells Silicon Alley Insider that as the economy stumbles, he’s ditching three “underperforming” Gawker sites: Wonkette, Gridskipper and Idolator, which will all continue under new ownership. That leaves the company to focus on its 12 “core titles,” like Silicon Valley’s beloved gossip blog Valleywag.

Google App Engine and Amazon web services, together at last — When Google launched its Engine App a week ago, allowing developers to build and deploy web applications on Google infrastructure, the move was widely seen as a move against Amazon’s web services. But just because they’re competing products doesn’t mean they can’t work together, as Portland entrepreneur Chris Anderson has shown by creating AppDrop, which allows you to build apps with Google’s software development kit and deploy in Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud. There have been complaints that Google Engine App locks in your applications, but AppDrop shows that isn’t quite true.

LiveUniverse reportedly acquires home page service Pageflakes — LiveUniverse, the online entertainment network run by former MySpace executive Brad Greenspan, has acquired the Ajax home page service Pageflakes, according to TechCrunch’s unidentified sources. Just a few hours earlier, GigaOM reported that Pageflakes was “desperately” seeking a buyer. Last February, a number of sites said that LiveUniverse purchased video site Revver, so the network appears to be in an acquisitive mood.

Here’s the latest action:

1) Super Tuesday looks good for McCain, Obama in California
Update: But California went to Clinton / McCain
2) AOL acquires affiliate network buy.at
3) Blue Frog Media files for bankruptcy
4) Google Apps adds security from Postini
5) Solar panels that work even when the sun’s down
6) Baidu sued for linking to pirated music
7) Middle East cable break speculations
8) Flickr users still hate Microsoft

Super Tuesday looks good for McCain, Obama in California — According to the third and last Reuters / Zogby poll, Romney leads the Republicans with 40 percent support in California, while Obama leads the Democrats with 49 percent. However, a more recent WSJ article suggests that while Obama has seen a surge in popularity, Romney’s chances of winning the state have dropped to only 37 percent. Sarah Lacy comments on a poll purportedly showing Hillary in the lead in the Valley: “Based on my personal polling, that’s horsesh**.” We’d tend to agree, but any Hillary supporters out there can feel free to let us know if we’re wrong. For a quick recap of the various candidate’s stances on tech issues (because that’s all we care about here, right?), go to this CNET article and scroll down to the table. Finally, if you can’t get enough of the election happenings, check out the Google/Twitter Super Tuesday Map, mentioned in a VentureBeat article earlier today.

Update note on the above: At midnight, it looks almost certain that Hillary Clinton has won California, along with three other big states. Perhaps it was those quiet Silicon Valley supporters chipping in. McCain performed as expected here, taking the state. The overall race for both parties is still an open field, with McCain front-running for the Republicans and Clinton looking just slightly ahead for the Democratic nomination.

AOL acquires affiliate network buy.at — AOL has picked up an affiliate marketing network called buy.at for an undisclosed price (although TechCrunch UK reports that it was probably around $150 million). Buy.at offers pay-per-action advertising, rather than paying based on other standard measurements like page impressions or click-throughs. The company was founded in 2002 and funded by DFJ Esprit. See the press release for more.

Blue Frog Media files for bankruptcy — Blue Frog Media, an “interactive TV music channel” funded to the tune of $16 million by Canaan Partners and MK Capital, has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, according to John Cook at the Seattle PI. The company has a slew of creditors and liabilities up to a million dollars, but the back story is even more complicated, with investors fighting for control and some uncertainty over whether the bankruptcy filing is official. None of that is likely to change the end scenario for Blue Frog, though, with one of the company’s creditor’s telling Cook “We have pretty much written it off.”

Google Apps adds security products from Postini – For $3, $12 and $25 respectively, Google has begun offering message filtering, security and discovery powered by a company it acquired, Postini, to its Apps package (Gmail, Google Talk, Calendar and Docs). The additions show that Google is serious about trying to make its online products more palatable for enterprise use.

Solar panels that generate electricity even when the sun’s down — Researchers at the Idaho National Laboratory have developed a prototype solar panel that could absorb infrared radiation, which is present even at night. Their innovation is using highly efficient “nanoantennaes” embedded in an inexpensive material. More at the INL website.

Baidu sued for linking to pirated music — Baidu may have captured the majority share of the Chinese search market, but part of its appeal may be a certain lax attention to copyrights, according to a lawsuit filed by the International Federation for the Phonographic Industry. The suit points to Baidu’s practice of linking directly to pirated material, a practice the IFPI already won a judgement against Yahoo China for. More at Ars Technica.

Middle East cable breaks a frightening possibility for the future? — The four undersea fiber-optic cables cut near the Middle East have presented a mysterious case: Most serious media outlets have declined to speculate on the how or why of the breaks, but it seems unlikely that four breaks in as many days could be accidental. Thus, we’re forced to turn to Global Guerillas for some nuggets of Ludlum-esque theorizing. Our two favorites: “Disconnection from the global communications grid is very likely to become a form of economic/social coercion in the future,” and, from the comments, “Somebody wanted to (gently) make sure the Iranian oil bourse didn’t open for business until after Super Tuesday.”

Flickr users still hate Microsoft — Appalled at the idea of Microsoft inheriting their precious service from Yahoo, some 1,855 members (at last count) have joined an anti-Microsoft group on Flickr. If unending election coverage isn’t wasting enough of your time today, the resulting Flickr gallery should help. Via TechCrunch.

Chinese search engine Baidu is apparently having more problems with click-fraud that Google is — and it has hurt Baidu’s stock.

Click-fraud is a major problem, and it is rampant in China. Click-fraud is when people click on an online ad and have no intention of buying anything, thus driving up the cost for the advertiser, who pays on a per-click basis. The fraudsters can be any number of people, including competitors who want to drive up the advertiser’s costs.

The study, conducted by Peter Lu, of the China IntelliConsulting Corp (copy of pdf here), found that advertisers believe 34 percent of all clicks on Baidu ads are fraudulent, compared to 24 percent on Google. The report has other warning signs for Baidu, including suggestions that more advertisers plan to cancel campaigns with Baidu, compared with Google, and that more advertisers plan to begin campaigns with Google.

Also, note the graphics below, which also show Baidu is inserting ad keywords in its generic search results, a blurring of ads and results that would cause a furor here if Google tried that.

Related but seperate: We’ve learned more about the investors in the new anti click-fraud company, Fraudwall. It is an impressive group that Google is likely to be partial to, but only if it can execute. Aside from early Google backers Ram Shriram and Ron Conway (as reported here and here), investors include Paul Buchheit, the former Google engineer who wrote GMail; Steve Anderson and Frank Caufield, both formerly at venture firm Kleiner Perkins; Michael Parekh, of Goldman Sachs, Rajeev Motwani, a Stanford professor and former Google advisor, Peggy Taylor, a board member at Fair Isaac, which does credit and fraud scoring for the financial industry, and others. Among its board of advisors are Chuck Geiger, chief technology officer at Ask.com; and two executives at IAB, which is a trade association that has played a significant role in creating standards between advertisers and ad networks: Rich LeFurgy, founder, and Greg Stuart, chief executive.

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SpotDJ, an angel-backed start-up in San Francisco, yesterday launched a service that lets people insert “spots” within iTunes music, which can be listened to by other SpotDJ users. The short spots can be descriptions of the song’s artist, a back-story to the song, or a recommendation about a different version.

Here’s how it works: Once you’ve downloaded SpotDJ, you can listen to a song on iTunes, and then hit the “spot this song” button. That lets you record a spot, and then other SpotDJ users can listen to it. If you don’t want to get bugged by random spots, you can set preferences to select only your favorite DJs. You can rate spots between 1 and 5, so that the community benefits places only the highest rated spots for a given song.

Strip out the junk from your Google search results — Oliver Humpage found that searching for products on Google can be annoying: Nothing but spam from Kelkoo, Pricerunner and other places clogged up his search results. So he wrote GiveMeBackMyGoogle.

Baidu starts (censored) Chinese version of Wikipedia — Chinese search engine Baidu has proven that it works well with Chinese authorities on censorship issues. Some of Wikipedia’s entries are blocked in China. We’ll see if Baidu can do any better.

Turns out, the plush looking MeeVee sign was for free — We mentioned new lavish looking sign of MeeVee, the personal TV and entertainment guide start-up, because some suggested it was a sign of a bubble era. We heard back from the MeeVee folks, who told us it was part of their lease extension negotiation. Also, the sign is visible from the 101, particularly at night, so it was a no-brainer, they said. No bubble perhaps, but it is true that the Silicon Valley corporate real estate market has tightened considerably lately (registration required).

The PayPal mafia and diagram, yet again — You may have seen the PayPal “Diaspora” stories before, about how the former employers of that online payment company have moved on to form other companies. The New York Times jumps in with another story about where all the PayPal folks ended up. It has a helpful diagram (if you’re registered with the Times, click on image here to go to the original version, which you can enlarge), and more background about where they came from, and how they still help each other out:

Mr. Thiel tapped his network of friends from Stanford, many of whom had worked at the Stanford Review, a libertarian magazine that Mr. Thiel co-founded in 1987. They populated PayPal’s business ranks. Mr. Levchin, for his part, hired engineers in large part from his alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign…

Reuters reporter lives in Second Life — The news service has assigned a reporter to live within Linden Labs’ virtual world game, Second Life, and report what is going on there.

MySpace spruces up its site to highlight its own video — Now that YouTube is more of a threat, MySpace has made a few minor changes to highlight its own video offerings. MySpace now features videos on its homepage (see top left hand corner). User profile pages now include a section called Video Space, which displays videos the user has uploaded.

A much better way to connect: two feet of cable — Apple chief executive Steve Jobs has a good line, saying Microsoft’s Zune music player is unlikely a threat to Apple’s iPod. He tells Newsweek:

I’ve seen the demonstrations on the Internet about how you can find another person using a Zune and give them a song they can play three times. It takes forever. By the time you’ve gone through all that, the girl’s got up and left! You’re much better off to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear. Then you’re connected with about two feet of headphone cable.

Starting an Internet business — I’ll moderating a panel about “Monetizing your Site” at the From Garage to IPO conference tomorrow at TiE in Santa Clara. Event details here.

Here’s a notable NYT story about Robin Li, who grew up in an impoverished city during China’s cultural revolution, but who worked hard to get to the U.S., became a frustrated engineer at Infoseek, and then left to China to found his own search company, Baidu, in 1999.

Now, seven years later, he’s running a $3 billion market value company. And after a few years when the jury was still out on the competitive race with Google, Baidu is emerging as a clear leader in China.