VentureBeat

Hitwise: Digg has been sending more traffic to mainstream media web sites lately — Take a look at the graph below, and read what the web research company has to say, here. Allen Stern at CenterNetworks recently published his own report anecdotally noticing the changes; he speculates that Digg may be looking to sell to a mainstream news company.

Intel announces a second-quarter record of $9.5 billion in revenue — More here.

San Francisco government computer system compromised – A rogue IT employee, currently cooling his heels in jail, illegally created his own master password that gave him exclusive access to the city’s new multi-million dollar computer system. He still hasn’t turned over the password, and top administrators haven’t figured it out on their own. Files he currently has access to include city payroll files, official emails — and importantly for him, as he’s getting arraigned today — confidential law enforcement documents and jail inmate bookings (”What? Show me the documentation that I was ever in jail.”). The Chronicle has a closer look at this man-made disaster.

As real species go extinct, millions of virtual ones are springing up on Spore — First, the bad news: Researchers announced today that many more species may face extinction than previously thought, based on newly-revised calculations. Now, the good news: Spore, a forthcoming video game that recently launched a way for users to create their own virtual creatures, announced today that so far, users have made millions of new species. Spore, a game that will let you evolve a single creature into a galaxy-spanning race, is due out this fall.

Blog software Wordpress gets useful upgrade — New features include a way to track changes across blog-post revisions and a way to easily post media to Wordpress from other sites. The company has more details on these new features and others. Or watch the video. 1.

Pheedo launches additional web advertising tracking features for its RSS feed service - The press release is here.

Business networking site LinkedIn launches ads to target particular subsets of its users — The automated service lets anybody create and pay for their own text ads that run within the site. Read the company’s blog post on the ads for more detail.

When I think of addictive games, three at the top of my list have to be Scrabble, Sudoku and Tetris. I can pretty much play all three for hours on end without taking a break. This problem could get a whole lot worse when all three are in my pocket all day long — as they will be now that Electronic Arts (EA) is releasing them for the iPhone and iPod Touch via Apple’s new App Store.

EA Mobile has made these games into three of the first that are available on the App Store. Because they are native applications they will be able to utilize functionality such as the iPhone’s multi-touch screen. Though we have not played the games yet, the screen shots make it clear that the touchscreen seems like a natural fit for all three games.

The device’s other capabilities are utilized as well. For example, when you shake your iPhone in Scrabble, the tiles will shuffle. In Tetris, the shake of the iPhone will clear rows, adding a new element to the classic game.

Unfortunately, it appears that multi-player options are limited to pass-and-play, meaning you’ll have to use one device with the game on it to pass between friends. Hopefully, Apple and game makers start utilizing Wi-Fi for multiplayer matches similar to how the Nintendo DS portable system does.

Gaming is expected to be big business in the App Store, so it should be no surprise that EA, the world’s largest video game publisher, is leading the charge.

Sudoku will be available for $9.99 in the App Store, while Scrabble and Tetris will be $14.99.

Oh, and one more thing: EA is also re-confirming that its sure-to-be-a-hit Spore will be available for the iPhone and iPod Touch in September.

Here’s the latest action:

The AP tries to set a new standard, doesn’t follow it — The Associated Press wants bloggers to pay it for quoting excerpts of its stories, and is threatening to sue if they don’t. Of course, that position is kind of hard to take when you yourself don’t abide by such standards, as the AP didn’t when it lifted a quote from TechCrunch on the matter for one of its stories. Arrington rightly noted how ridiculous this was and contacted his lawyers about retreiving the $12.50 the AP would owe him under its ridiculous system. The hypocrisy runs deep.

Tesla looking for another $100 million — The electric car maker’s plan is to push production up to 150 cars a month by the end of the year, according to VentureWire. To do this it needs more cash. It will likely get it. Enough said.

One former Yahoo finds a home — While his former colleagues at Yahoo continue to jump ship, Jeremy Zawodny has found a home: Craigslist. No word on his official title, but he will start in July.

An EA bigwig leaves to start his own company — Neil Young, a veteran of the gaming powerhouse Electronic Arts will leave to start an unspecified “new project,” according to Newsweek’s Level Up blog. During his 11 years at EA, Young worked on projects such as the alternate reality game Majestic, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, The Sims 2, Medal of Honor Airborne and Boom Blox (which is perhaps my new favorite game).

FCC gives Sprint more time to give up part of its airwaves — The regulators agreed to push out a deadline for Sprint to vacate a part of the wireless spectrum it controls that the government now wants to use for public safety networks. Sprint will now have until July 1, 2009.

NVIDIA chip to match AMD’s manufacturing process — The Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX+ is made on a 55-nanometer process, according to CNET. This is the same process that most of AMD’s graphic chips now use, an upgrade from the 65nm process.

The Japanese love/hate the iPhone — A recent survey indicated that 91 percent of Japanese buyers would not purchase an iPhone. A headline like that makes it sound awful, until you consider, as Silicon Alley Insider does, that even 9 percent of Japan’s market would mean 9.3 million potential new iPhone customers, which is huge when Apple had been shooting for just 10 million worldwide by the end of 2008.

The Huffington Post goes local — The fast-growing web site, The Huffington Post, run by pundit Arianna Huffington, is planning a massive expansion across the U.S. The first of these local versions of the site will be run out of Chicago. Huffington is said to be looking for a third round of funding to support such an expansion.

Fake Beijing earthquake news spreads malware — Botnet operators in China are using fake reports of a 9.0 earthquake to spread malware, according to The Register. Classy.

Netflix shuts down profiles feature — Users will no longer be able to have seperate queues for movies as a result. The system was simply too complicated to maintain, Netflix contends.

Here’s the latest action:

Icahn considers his own proxy war for Yahoo — Billionaire investor Carl Icahn began buying massive amounts of Yahoo stock last week — up to 50 million shares — and now is thinking about using that influence. He is considering replacing some of Yahoo’s board members (not quite the full replacement Microsoft was considering) with those of his own choosing, according to CNBC. Such a move could potentially force Yahoo to sell to Microsoft. The problem? The Microsoft offer is no longer on the table, and there is still no indication that it would come back even if Icahn is successful — though something tells me it would.

Craigslist countersues eBay – Just two weeks ago, online auction site eBay filed a lawsuit against online listing site Craigslist for taking unspecific actions to lessen eBay’s economic interest in the company (eBay owns a minority interest of Craigslist). Now Craigslist is returning the favor, charging eBay with unlawful and unfair competition, misappropriation of proprietary information, deceptive passing-off, business interference, false advertising, phishing attacks, free-riding, trademark infringement, trademark dilution, and breaches of fiduciary duty, according to its blog. With minority partners like these, who need enemies?

Google Search to be bigger than Windows next year — Some people still look at Google and wonder what exactly it does to make so much money? Next year, those people will be even more confused as Google’s search business is on track to surpass the size and profitability of Microsoft’s Windows business, according to Silicon Alley Insider. As SAI notes, this is just Google’s search business, this doesn’t even include its advertising wing, AdSense. Now perhaps you see why Microsoft so badly wants to becomes a legitimate online player.

Fisker Auto seeking a large round of funding — Fisker Automotive is seeking more funding to produce a $40K sedan in a few years, according to CNET. It is currently working on an $80K sports car. The back story here is that Fisker is competing with Tesla, which has the $100K Roadster (which was at the VentureBeat SF Green event) and is planning a $60K sedan. Tesla has sued Fisker, which Ray Lane (who was at SF Green) has called “ridiculous”. The Fisker founder helped design the Tesla. Fisker plans a counter-suit, according to Earth2Tech.

Electronic Arts continues to lose money — The world’s largest video game company, also know as EA, lost $94 million in the fourth quarter of last year as it spent a lot of money developing new titles. The loss was worse than Wall Street had been expecting, and significantly worse than the same time period last year, according to Bloomberg. EA is trying to take over game developer Take Two, and it could sure use the $500 million Take Two’s Grand Theft Auto IV made in its first week of sales.

Mayor wants electric cars for San Francisco — San Francisco’s mayor, Gavin Newsom, may want to help Project Better Place move to his city, according to Earth2Tech. Better Place is an electric car startup that wants to build recharging stations all over Israel and Denmark, and has $200 million towards that plan. We’ve covered the startup extensively (see the links), and would love to see it in SF. However, considering Newsom’s failure to even get extra solar subsidies passed — we’ve heard further rumors today that the measure will die — it seems highly unlikely that electric car charging stations will fly, unless the money is all private.

It’s not TV, it’s iTunes — and HBO is on it — Following up on yesterday’s rumors of HBO coming to Apple’s iTunes store, several shows were in fact launched today. These include The Sopranos, The Wire, Sex in the City and others.

Here’s the latest action:

Another Google exec heads to Facebook – Elliot Schrage, Google’s vice president of global communications and public affairs will become the vice president of communications and public policy at Facebook, BoomTown’s Kara Swisher has learned. “This is a really important role for us and one that we’ve been trying to find the right person for a while. Elliot’s role will be critical to helping us scale based on our culture that values transparency, openness, and honest internal communications,” Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a memo to employees.

Schrage becomes the latest in a string of Googlers who have left for Facebook. As one commenter joked on FriendFeed earlier: “Facebook now imports Google execs…” Valleywag caught wind of Schrage’s interview at Facebook first.

Mosso to add more storage to the cloud — The cloud computing division of hosting provider RackSpace will be launching a new online storage service called CloudFS later this year, according to CNET. Developers will have access to almost limitless amounts of storage at the cost of 15 cents per gigabyte. This will compete against similar services from Amazon and eventually Google.

AP launches news site geared towards iPhone — The Associated Press and the 100+ newspapers it services will allow owners of the device to type in their zip code and get personalized news. Apple gave the service pointers about how to best build such a site. So you know the integration is good.

Sun gives developers OpenSolaris, wants apps in return — Sun Microsystems gave away OpenSolaris, the open source version of its operating system, at the CommunityOne developers conference on Monday. Sun hopes open source will help it regain relevance in the within the community, according to CNET. The main rival here it thought to be Linux.

Nine Inch Nails keep the free music coming — The rock band has a new album, The Slip, which is it giving away entirely for free on its website. There is no catch, it’s simply a gift for the fans, frontman Trent Reznor explains. Users can choose between a variety of formats and quality. This follows the band giving away the first part of its Ghosts I-IV album and other bands such as Radiohead and Coldplay giving their music away for free over the Internet. The album can also be streamed right from the social music site iLike.

LiveProcess Corp. takes a $3.62 million series A — The Verona, N.J.-based company is a provider of an online application to manage a hospital’s disaster preparedness plans and response. No institutional investors were disclosed, according to PEHub. The company says it’s the only disaster preparedness software endorsed by the American Hospital Association.

EA fires back at Activision — The world’s two leading video game publishers continue to go at it. Activision’s chief executive said that EA “did a very good job of taking the soul out of a lot of the studios it acquired.” EA’s response in an interview with Newsweek’s LevelUp blog: “The truth is, everyone laughed.”

TomCruise.com launches — And thank God. The actor is celebrating the 25th anniversary of his first starring role in Risky Business. Luckily the site has nothing to do with Scientology and everything to do with movies (though there is an interview with Oprah where he discusses the controversial religion). This site can be my wingman anytime.