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Here’s the latest action:

Google Sites now open to everyone – Now anyone can use Google Sites to create a group website. The service first launched a few months ago and let users integrate and collaborate on Google’s other offerings (written documents, spreadsheets and so on). At first, it was part of the company’s business offering, Google Apps, but it’s now available to the general public for free as a site creation tool. We’ve described Google Sites as another attempt to entice users to do their computing in Google’s “cloud” of Internet servers, and this general availability is a further step in that direction. For more details, see the video below.

Time Warner Cable leaves Time Warner – This is the latest move by new chief executive Jeff Bewkes to reinvigorate the media corporation, which will receive $9.25 billion as a result of the split. It’s not clear what, if anything, the separation means for Time Warner-owned AOL.

How to use social media to promote social change — We’ve written about Facebook applications that make money for charity, and now ReadWriteWeb looks at some other ways online services like Twitter and Digg can be used to make the world a better place, such as blogging to inspire people to donate to relief efforts in China. Hey, we can’t be greedy capitalists all the time.

Inexplicable line forms outside Apple store — Engadget was at a loss to explain why a long line formed yesterday outside Apple’s flagship store in New York City. Apparently, some people had no idea why they were waiting, while others thought they were lining up for the 3G iPhone. It was kinda like “Waiting for Godot”, with Steve Jobs in the role of Godot.

Identity theft protection entrepreneur is a victim of identity theft — Todd Davis of LifeLock has been promoting his company by posting his social security number on the web and daring criminals to steal his identity. Well, someone did it — using Davis’ social security number, they convinced an online payday loan operation to give them $500. Now, LifeLock customers are suing Davis, alleging that he knew the service was flawed.

Visage Mobile sells subscriber management business to Convergys — Financial terms were not disclosed. San Francisco-based Visage has raised $93 million in venture funding since it was founded in 2001, and it says proceeds from the sale will go towards growing other parts of its business.

More on Facebook profile changes: The feed wall — The new profile is slated for launch later this year. The latest new feature the company is previewing: A “feed” portion of the new design, where you can easily add content from within a standardized interface. The goal is to make Facebook easier to use. The company is being transparent about this latest effort — in contrast to some of its earlier product launches, like its introduction of its news feeds and its “Beacon” ad program. Now, it is giving sneak peeks of the new mock-ups of its redesigned profile pages, and getting feedback from users. Take a look for yourself, here, and see the sample screenshot, below.

Report: Jangl sold to Live Universe — Internet-based calling startup Jangl’s remnants have been sold to Live Universe, according to Techcrunch. The company’s founders and some of its employees have already left for competitor Jajah, as we’ve covered.

Analyst: Amazon’s Kindle digital book reader could be a big business — The device could contribute up to three percent of Amazon’s overall revenue by 2010, grossing $750 million for the company if one combines device sales and digital book sales, according to Citi analyst Mark Mahaney. Silicon Alley Insider takes a deeper look.

Windows XP is coming to the OLPC — One Laptop Per Child, the nonprofit organization that wants to put its inexpensive computer into the hands of every child in the world, has gained Microsoft as a partner, and its tried and true XP operating system as an option for its users.

Google CFO joins board of LifeLock — George Reyes, the long-time and now ex-chief financial officer at Google, has joined the board of Tempe, Ariz. online identity security company LifeLock. The company has issues, but it also recently raised $25 million from the likes of early Google investor Kleiner Perkins. Incidentally, former YouTube executive and current Facebook chief financial officer Gideon Yu is on the board of LifeLock rival Debix. If one more financial officer from a web company joins the board of an online identity company, we’ll have a trend on our hands.

Electric car dust-up continues — Fisker Automative and rival Tesla Motors have been locked in a legal battle about who owns what intellectual property concerning the companies’ competing electric cars. Fisker’s latest move is to file a motion to compel arbitration — it’s the one getting sued, and it is trying to end things quickly. More on the latest news here; our previous coverage here. Fisker’s sports car prototype, pictured.

Magazine article aggregator Brijit out of money, closing shop — Washington, D.C. based Brijit condenses long-form articles into 100-word summaries. It has gained more than 160 summarized stories in its database, and it is seeing strong growth, the company tells VentureWire, but that’s not enough. Although it is backed by Herbert Allen III, president of boutique bank Allen & Co., and by former Time editor-turned-banker-turned-Bloomberg executive Norman Pearlstine, it is out of money and shutting down.

More YouTube metrics features — Online video needs more measurement for users, video creators and advertisers. Online video creators, for example want to see how valuable they are compared to other users; brand advertisers want to know more about which users see the ads that run in online videos. YouTube, the most popular video site in the world, already offers a basic metrics service called Insight that lets you see geographic locations where your video is popular, and how popular it is relative to other videos. Yesterday, YouTube announced addition features for Insight, including aggregate views that all of your YouTube videos have generated, and your relative popularity to other YouTube users.

1. EBay CEO Meg Whitman prepare to retire
2. Open Source revolution continues, with Intel
3. Microsoft purchases virtualization co., Calista
4. Cleverset, software recommendation co., sold
5. Yahoo has some small layoffs coming
6. Facebook-branded Nokia handsets?
7. LifeLock, anti-credit fraud co., gets $25M
8. Online ad co., Spotrunner, draws buzz
9. Jobs snubs both Amazon and Google
10. Coventi Pages gives up the ghost
11. Singapore opens search engine contest

EBay chief exec Meg Whitman is preparing to retire — Whitman, the most visible female chief executive of Silicon Valley (where there aren’t many great female role models), could step down within weeks, according to the WSJ. John Donahoe, 47, president of eBay’s auction business unit, has emerged as the leading succession candidate.

Open Source revolution continues, with Intel — In case you haven’t noted, the open source software industry is on fire. We’ve covered a series of investments into open source companies over the past few days, and last week was punctuated by the acquisition of open source MySQL by Sun for $1 billion. Now Intel is crowing about its open source investments. News today emerges that it has backed REvolution Computing, creator of an open source parallel computing software for computational statistics. The amount of the funding round, the New Haven, Connecticut company’s first, was undisclosed

Microsoft purchases Silicon Valley virtualization start-up Calista Technologies – Microsoft is trying to catch up with VMWare, which has opened up a lead in the hot virtualization industry, which lets companies reduce the number of servers they use by letting them run multiple operating systems on a single machine. So it has acquired Calista (see WSJ story for good summary). The acquisition price wasn’t disclosed, but the San Jose, Calif. Calista was backed with an undisclosed amount by Greylock Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners and others (we mentioned the secretive company more than a year ago).

Cleverset, software recommendation service, sold to ATG for $10 million — Cleverset, like many other companies we’ve covered, offers software that presents users of e-commerce sites with relevant recommendations and information. Press release here.

Yahoo has some small layoffs coming — The past few days have featured rumors that Yahoo will be laying off thousands of employees, as it tries to become a leaner, more efficient organization. The actual cuts may not be so drastic, counters reporter Kara Swisher, who has followed Yahoo closely: “[E]xpect the changes to be less bold than has been reported, much in the same way [chief executive and founder] Jerry Yang has been handling other changes at Yahoo–slow and decidedly non-dramatic,” The company will move to places where Yahoo has an advantage — “mobile, communications, like email, and its graphical ad network” — she says.

Facebook discussing Facebook-branded Nokia handsets — If Google is going to have a cellphone strategy, well, by golly, so is Facebook. PaidContent has the report about a possible partnership. The arrangement may also include Nokia buying a small stake in Facebook, according to the report.

LifeLock, the anti-credit fraud company, gets $25M more — This is the controversial Tempe, AZ company co-founded by Robert Maynard, who himself has been accused of deceptive practices, and where CEO Todd Davis publicly discloses his social security number (457-55-5462) to prove his company’s fraud protection product works. AlleyInsider first reported, and the company now confirms that the company has raised $25 million more in a round led by Goldman Sachs, and including Bessemer and Kleiner Perkins. The company previously has raised close to $13 million in round led by the latter two firms.

Spotrunner action — There’s lots of buzz around Spotrunner, the online advertising company. First, large advertising company WPP is looking at possibly acquiring SpotRunner along with another online ad company, VideoEgg, according to the NY Post. Meanwhile, Spotrunner has acquired GlobeShooter, a network of more than 1,200 independent filmmakers, videographers, producers and production companies across the U.S. Spotrunner is backed by venture firms Battery and Index (see our earlier coverage ).

Online word processor Coventi gives up the ghost — Despite actively soliciting users and press attention for much of 2007, online word processor Coventi Pages has apparently failed to gain enough users to continue competing with Google Docs, Zoho and scads of other, lesser-known rivals. The startup sent out an email to users, reported by Web Worker Daily, stating that it will close its doors on February 1st.

Singapore opens search engine contest — Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research has opened a competition, with a $100,000 prize, for a new online search engine. Rather than just fostering yet another competitor for Google, the agency is looking for an engine that can search through text, audio and video. Contestants will have eight months to build their engine following the February 29th registration deadline. [via Physorg].

Jobs snubs both Amazon and Google — Apple’s Steve Jobs wants to own the hot mobile device market, and he takes a shot at both Google and Amazon’s latest efforts in that area. Of the Amazon Kindle reader, he says: “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he tells the NYT. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.” He’s also critical of Google’s Android project, to develop open cellphones that could compete with the iPhone: “We’ll see how good their software is and we’ll see how consumers like it and how quickly it is adopted.” In seeking not to get locked out of the mobile phone world, “I actually think Google has achieved their goal without Android, and I now think Android hurts them more than it helps them. It’s just going to divide them and people who want to be their partners.”

Here’s the latest action:

Lawyers finally sue Avvo – Earlier we reported the angry response of lawyers to the new site, Avvo, which lets users rate lawyers. Well, now lawyer John Browne has followed through on earlier threats to sue, after he decided he didn’t like the profile rating he was given. The rating noted he’d been disciplined by state authorities. The Seattle PI’s John Cook has the story. His suit is even going after Avvo backer, Benchmark Capital. Meanwhile, Avvo’s chief executive responds.

Google beats Cisco in acquisitions of start-ups — So far this year, Google has acquired five venture-backed companies, compared to Cisco’s four, according to VentureOne. (MarketWatch) Until now, Cisco has consistently been the most acquisitive company in Silicon Valley. The emergence of the Google glutton makes sense. With a high market value, Google has the currency to spend.

The bizarre story of Lifelock’s founder — Robert Maynard, founder of Lifelock, an Arizona company designed to help customers avoid identity fraud, has resigned. Turns out, a previous credit-repair company of his had been accused of false advertising and deceptive practices and shut down, that he’d been arrested because of an unpaid $16,000 debt in Vegas, and there’s talk he may have been performed ID theft on his own father — at least according to the reports. This comes shortly after a reported $6 million investment from Silicon Valley venture firm Kleiner Perkins into the company at a rumored valuation of $40 million (scroll down). Kleiner did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Frontline Wireless may or may not be making progress — Depending on what you read, start-up Frontline Wireless may have gotten a vote of support, or suffered setback in its efforts to open a portion of wireless spectrum to build out a broadband network. Some said Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, endorsed it, but his words appear relative weak, when contrasted to the rather negative remarks by Alaska’s Ted Stevens and others.

Why few blacks, Hispanics and minority women are in venture capital — The NYT’s Matt Richtel takes a look.

Apple to sell music through Bebo’s social network — Details here on Apple’s first deal with a social network.

Benchmark backs three of the top-ten massively multiplayer online worlds (MMOs) — Details here. It has invested in Gaia, Habbo Hotel and Second Life, which are only three of the top ten that are venture backed.

Mahalo now paying users to write search engine results — Jason Calacanis is offering to pay $10 to $15 per search result written at his new Web site Mahalo. This follows his efforts at his former employer, AOL’s Netscape, to pay users in an effort to compete against Digg, and which didn’t seem to go very far.

Sony talks to acquire Club Penguin are off — So says Paid Content

AT&T works with Hollywood studios and labels to keep pirated films, music and other content off its network — the first major Internet provider to do so.

Microsoft announces deal with Linspire — Microsoft continues to strike deals with companies that offer services with the competing Linux operating system. The latest deal with Lindows offers interoperability, collaboration and intellectual property assurances (that Microsoft will not sue), and comes after Microsoft feuded with the company over its previous name, Lindows. The accord follows similar Microsoft deals with Novell and Xandros.

Jingle Networks wins patent – The Menlo Park, Calif. start-up, which operates the free directory assistance service 1-800-Free-411, has won a patent for answering such 411 calls while also offering recorded advertisements based on the information requested. The company’s statement is here. It could come in useful as much bigger players start to offer similar players. We’ve used the service, and find it helpful. However, we’ve found the ads more monotonous (they are often the same ones, over and over) than we expected.

Here’s the latest tech action:

Pledging Facebook fast — Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s remarks to outside developers yesterday that they can build applications for Facebook and keep “all the revenue,” with no revenue share, drew the biggest response from the crowd, and was clearly the most significant announcement about the company’s plans for partnerships. And now, given our prodigious Facebook coverage lately, we’re declaring a Facebook fast for at least 24 hours.

Big media linking to each other — Several large newspapers have signed a deal to link to each other’s stories, to boost their collective ranking in Google’s search results.

Attendio’s local events — Attendio, a San Francisco company, launched an local events service yesterday. You can search, discover, bookmark, and share events in your city. You type in a set of interests and set your location, and Attendio starts feeding you listings. If one strikes your fancy, you can bookmark it and add it to your favorites or send it to your phone, Google Calendar, Outlook, or any services that support iCal. Attendio also gives you a blog widget that lets you share the events you’ve bookmarked, add events on the fly. VentureBeat’s Dan Kaplan says he used Yelp for this sort of thing, but that Attendio has converted him. The company has raised $965,000 in bridge financing from individual angel investors, Felicis Ventures and Sunbridge Partners. Kristen Nicole at Mashable has more on the company.

Pricelock lets you lock into gas prices — Pricelock, a Dallas, Texas company, hasn’t launched yet, but it wants to let people buy gas in two months at today’s rate regardless of whether it has gone up or down. With prices rising strongly, this is a good service, because the assumption is that prices will continue to rise. However, the company hasn’t launched yet, and prices are likely (arguably) to slow down soon, raising the question of whether people are really going to want to bother about this. TheAlarmClock has more details about the service.

Intel and AMD race for technology edge — The Mercury News has a good summary of the battle between the chip titans.

MyPunchbowl’s new technology to pick a date for events — When you’re organizing an event, it can be frustrating to find a date everyone can agree on. What’s surprising is that no site has come up with a good way to facilitate the diplomacy of event date setting. Punchbowl has just done that, with an algorithm that takes into consideration preferences of your invitees, needs of the host and of “VIP” guests, the ones who are really important. It gauges momentum around specific dates, as people start responding to a host’s invite and specified choices, and then figures out what to do in tie-breaking scenarios. Here’s video about how it works (RSS readers will have to click to site):

The three-person team is still looking for $1-3 million in VC funding, but is just about to finish an angel round to tide them over. Founder Matt Douglas says he’s lasted this long on reserves from his days at Adobe.

Bebo says Yahoo rumor not true — This came in response to rumors carried by the Telegraph that the social network was in acquisition talks with Yahoo.

Technorati’s big change — The blog search engine, Technorati, has redesigned itself, to reduce its multiple features (keyword search, tag search and blog directory search) into a single search bar. Chief executive David Sifry explains, blogs are now mainstream, and tags and other features can be incorporated into a single search. However, the result of the radical change is somewhat bewildering.

Google’s “hot” search results — Google now shows you trends along city, state and country lines. Here’s the service. More details here.

The Google Way — Google vice president Marissa Mayer explains how Google’s co-founders trained new employees: “The way Larry and Sergey trained us is they just gave us way too much responsibility and yelled at us until we became the people they needed us to become. And so I’m going to try to execute that program - with less yelling.”

Google tests Adsense in video ads — Google is running is ads in videos produced by any content provider (details here). Not much is known about how well these ads take advantage of contextual clues to target the ads, something that start-ups Adap.TV and ScanScout are doing. Publishers can choose the videos they want to monetize and where the ads will appear within the video; and they can track ad performance. Ads will be no longer than 30 seconds.

Google will figure out your life for you — Eric Schmidt, Google chief executive, on Google’s efforts to get better at personalization (Financial Times):

“The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’ ”
Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said gathering more personal data was a key way for Google to expand and the company believes that is the logical extension of its stated mission to organise the world’s information.

Google translation — The search engine now instantly translates search queries and results into 12 languages, and additionally lets you translate any of the pages you land on when clicking those results.

Environment in trouble — In a story earlier this week, we buried the link to the latest worrying report about the environment, so repeating it here: The National Academy of Sciences reports says things may be much worse than we realized.

San Jose, Calif. trying to become the center of clean technology investing — WSJ has details.

Yahoo closes Webjay — Not a surprise, given that Webjay was a one-man show when it was bought by Yahoo for integration.

Here’s the latest action:

Scribd hype — Maybe because it calls itself the “YouTube for documents,” the young Scribd is getting a lot of interest from Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists. We’ve talked to some eager to invest. Rumors are leaking out, including at Gigaom and Techcrunch that the round is almost done, with GigaOm saying it is done and citing a large $10 million valuation. We talked with Scribd’s Trip Adler today, and he didn’t want to say much. He said those other reports are “inaccurate.” He hasn’t closed the round yet, he added. (Our coverage of Scribd here.)

Adobe open sources Flex platform tools — The company announced that outside developers can use its Flex platform to participate in building rich Internet applications for the Web, including Apollo applications for the desktop. This is significant because Adobe’s Flex/Flash platform — around which many cutting-edge Web sites are being built these days — has remained relatively closed. Announcement here, and more details here. Robert Scoble had an early look.

TheStreet.com buys Stockpickr.com — This is another success for Web 2.0. Stockpickr offers place for people to compare and exchange investment tips. (Story here).

Grand Central offers its one-telephone number feature via mobile devices — You’ll recall (VentureBeat’s coverage) that Grand Central is the company that lets you create one telephone number for all your needs. Through a Web dashboard, you can direct calls to whatever phone you want to use, and centralize voicemail. Now, you can control all this from your cell-phone too. (Grand Central Mobile)

Oak Pacific Incorporated falling apart? — The Chinese Web company that some have called the Chinese Myspace, backed by U.S. venture capitalists, has laid off serious numbers of employees. From recent blog posts (here and here, you’d think the company is disintegrating, and chief executive Joe Chen out of control. However, we talked with David Chao, partner at DCM and an investor in OPI, and he said bloggers have focused on the visible lay offs from units that have struggled, in part because of new regulations imposed by China Mobile. Those regulations increase the revenue share on wireless services such as SMS, MMS and voicemail management, and also restrict their use in some ways — so the revenues of all wireless companies got hit, not just OPI. That said, OPI is sort of like IAC — a holding company with lots of properties. Some units are going to do poorly, and they’ll be cut. Others are growing quickly, including Mop.com and Xiaonei, which Chao likens to the Facebook of China, and is on fire — one of the fastest growing companies in China, in terms of page views and visits. We covered Xiaonei here. All told, Chao says the business is a “net positive.” And chief executive Joe Chen is talented at making multiple bets, he said.

Red Herring not as dire it seems — While we had Chao on the phone, we asked him about the struggling business magazine Red Herring, where Chao is a board member. ValleyWag says the mag is in default, and that it has the proof to show it — in the form of lawsuit papers filed by Comerica. Sighing at the question, he said he didn’t want to get in a pissing match with another publishing company (i.e., Valleywag’s parent, Gawker) but that the financials aren’t as bad as they appear.

Tim Draper in Vietnam — Tim Draper, who has been expanding his Silicon Valley venture firm, Draper Fisher Jurvetson more aggressively internationally than just about any other firm, announced a $50 million Vietnam fund last year (see our coverage). He was in Ho Chi Min City a few days ago to celebrate its launch, and looks quite at home.

Razz, the voice-mix service, raises another round — The San Francisco company, earlier known as Phonebites, lets you insert noises while you are talking on the phone. As Thealarmclock puts it, “farts” for example. Mayfield Fund, one of the alleged new investors, did not respond to our request for confirmation of the investment, reported by PE Wire. Besides Mayfield, Cardinal Venture Capital, Garage Technology Ventures and Greenpark Capital also reportedly invested. (Our past coverage)

Cozmo.TV, latest personalized TV site — The San Francisco start-up joins a crowded space of players wanting to let you personalize and share the TV programming you watch. With Cozmo, you select shows from places like YouTube, Google, MySpace and combine them into channels that you then roll into an embeddable widget, which you share. Problem is, there are other sites that do something similar. There’s Blinkx, Channels.com, Joost and MeeVee. (See Techcrunch)

Speaking of Blinkx, it is being taken public — The video search company will go public on the London AIM exchange, which has somewhat of a flimsy reputation. Om says Blinkx has been adrift, and suggests public investors may be duped.

Speaking of Joost, it is signing up lots of advertisers — This is advantage you get if you have the name recognition Skype co-founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. The duo haven’t even formally launched their company Joost, yet have lined up several major advertisers. The company wants to send free videos and other programming to your TV. The NYT says United Airlines, Microsoft, Sony Electronics and Unilever are among 30 on board as “launch partners.” The launch is planned for Tuesday, the Times says.

In other news:
– Metamatrix, a company backed by venture firm Kleiner Perkins, has been bought by Redhat, and some suggest it was at a loss. Kleiner did not respond to a request for comment.
– MySQL, the open source database company that lots of Web sites run on, got $50M in revenue last year and plans to go public, its chief executive says.
–ChinaCache raises $32 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Ignition Partners, IntelVC, Internet Investor Growth, JAFCO ASIA, SIG, Starr International, and Susquehanna International Group. It is a ten-year old company, and helps speed up content delivery over the Web.
–Lifelock, an online identity management and identity theft prevention company based in Phoenix has raised $6 million in Series B funding from Kleiner Perkins, according to Gigaom. Word is, it’s valued at more than $40 million. Kleiner declined comment.
–Here’s a beginner’s guide for Twitter. It has everything (via Nolan).