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Americans watched 12 billion online videos in May — That’s up 45 percent compared to the same period in 2007. While Google’s sites — especially YouTube — remained dominant, accounting for 34.8 percent of videos watched, Fox Interactive Media (owner of MySpace) climbed to 6.4 percent, up 1.3 percent from the month before.

Tesla breaks production “logjam” — Chief executive Ze’ev Drori acknowledges that the electric car maker has been putting the old adage that “good things are worth waiting for” to the test, but he says nine Roadsters have already arrived in California (as of Saturday), with more due soon.

Forbes: San Francisco is the number one city for yuppies – Great, now my New York friends have something else to gloat about.

EBay wins case against Tiffany — The outcome of the four-year-old suit means that jewelery maker Tiffany & Co. and other trademark holders are responsible for policing online marketplaces for violations. That takes the responsibility off eBay and similar sites.

Enterprise social networking becomes a battleground — InfoWorld looks at the competition and concludes — surprise, surprise — that consumer-focused startups like Facebook and LinkedIn may beat out established software vendors like IBM.

Veoh takes ad program out of testing mode — The video site shows ads based on a user’s past viewing patterns. The ads are targeted at nine groups, including fans of action, cars, pop culture, anime, science fiction and family fare.

Ad agency Method launches venture program with boxee – Method’s venture effort, dubbed Method Ventures, wants to team up with startups that have just raised seed funding to help them fine tune their ideas. The first partner is boxee, a startup that integrates media content with social networking.

Solar company Greenvolts plans to raise significant funding — Chief executive Bob Cart says he hopes to raise a second round of funding at the end of the year, although at “less than $100 million,” the amount would be smaller than that raised by some other solar startups recently. Greenvolts raised $10 million last year.

Google still testing Digg-style search results? — Google has been experimenting with ways to let users vote on search results, and a TechCrunch reader spotted what may be the latest version of that test.

comScore has just released its April analysis of online video consumption in the United States and once again, the market is expanding and Google’s dominance continues to grow right along with it.

The numbers below make this clear:

In March, Americans watched 9.8 billion videos, down from a high of 10.1 billion in December of 2007. (coverage)  Google’s properties, YouTube and Google Video (almost entirely YouTube), accounted for approximately 3.63 billion, or 34.3%, of those views, with Fox Interactive Media (led by MySpace) far behind in second place, with around 584 million, or 6%.

In April, video intake regained its momentum. Americans watched 11 billion online videos and Google had 37.9% of them. Fox dropped to 557 million, or 5.1%. Yahoo! and Microsoft were next on the list, with around 352 million (3.2%) and 268 million (2.4%) respectively.

Overall, almost 3/4ths of Americans with Internet access are now consuming online video, spending an average of 228 minutes doing so per month. One small but fascinating statistic is that the average duration of an individual online video was 2.8 minutes, suggesting that attention span shrinkage is not at all limited to the written word.

Fox Interactive Media, the parent company of MySpace, Fox.com, AskMen, IGN and a host of other websites, has hired a firm called Operative to help it streamline its ad operations.

MySpace ad only turned a profit of $10 million in a year, we reported in August, despite receiving 4.3 billion page views per day. More recently, Silicon Alley Insider speculates FIM may have missed its $1 billion revenue target, putting it under pressure to increase ad sales.

Bringing on Operative may help FIM grapple with the problem of monetizing its stable of properties.

Operative will assist FIM with building a business system that can sell ads across all its brands at once, rather than selling through dozens of fragmented networks. It will also build a centralized interface that pulls together the various software used by its ad salespeople.

When we asked Michael Leo, the CEO of Operative, whether the aim was to pare down FIM’s advertising workforce, he told us: “Cost savings is probably not on the top of anyone’s mind right now.”

The idea is not to lay salespeople off after becoming more efficient, rather to let those salespeople spend more time doing sales. Right now, many publishers and their sales team are overwhelmed with the technical challenges of advertising, managing things like behavioral targeting — and need to get back to selling, Leo said.

Operative has several irons in the fire, often serving competitors at the same time. It works for big companies, but it also provides consulting services to start-ups with advertising as their business model. It has served older companies, such as the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, WPP, MediaCom, Omnicom and MSN.