VentureBeat

Toyota working on Segway killer — The transportation robot is called Winglet and comes in three sizes. See screenshot, via ZDnet.

Network storage company Agami shuts down — The Sunnyvale, Calif. company raised $85 million and competed against companies that went public, including 3Par. The shut-down was sudden, catching employees by surprise — apparently, a major debt-holder wanted its money back.

Illinois mandates online cancellation for game subscriptions — An Illinois family found it difficult to cancel a recurring online game subscription fee — by phone so they talked to their politician friends…. The state just signed a law into being that mandates online game companies include an option to cancel online.

Amazon buys rare-book site AbeBooks — AbeBooks is a marketplace that offers more than 110 million used or rare titles, and it has been bought by online book giant Amazon. AbeBooks is itself a minority owner in reading list sharing site LibraryThing, a competitor to Amazon-backed Shelfari.

Security company McAfee buys Reconnex — Mountain View, Calif.-based Reconnex provides business data loss prevention software; McAfee purchased for $46 million in cash. Reconnex raised $36 million.

Third time not the charm for SpaceX’s latest launch — The privately-funded space rocket startup was attempting to launch three satellites into space, but the rocket blew up minutes into the flight. That was the third launch attempt, but a fourth is slated for later this year — the company says its determined not to give up.

AOL buys Friendfeed competitor SocialThing — When it comes to services that let you share what you’re doing on various web sites within in a single interface — “lifestreaming”, if you will — I prefer Friendfeed and Facebook. AOL, meanwhile, has bought smaller Friendfeed rival Socialthing.

Flickr cofounder Caterina Fake joins stealthy startup Hunch — Fake talks about her move here, you can sign up for Hunch here.

Obama takes flack for telecom reversal — Barack Obama is about as smart as politicians get when it comes to technology, and even plans to name a chief technologist for the country if elected. But he has finally managed to offend the devoted, by changing his opinion on telecom immunity for Bush-era wiretapping and endorsing a bill that would expand the government’s power for domestic spying and protect telecommunication companies that assisted the Bush Administration. Some 7,000 of Obama’s followers have converged on his website to protest, according to the NYT.

AOL possibly up for sale — Sources within AOL say that Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes is giving off the impression AOL is on the auction block, according to Silicon Alley Insider. Other sources disagree. Our take: Bewkes was elected CEO this year to clean house at Time Warner, and AOL has historically been a huge mess. If a good offer comes up, look for AOL to switch owners.

Thin-film solar to surge ahead by 2012 — The various forms of thin-film solar cells will take 28 percent of the market and reach $19.7 billion in sales by 2012, up from less than 10 percent of the market now, according to a report from Lux Research. Solar concentrator systems, by contrasted, are expected to “disappoint” for the immediate future, and organic and Grätzel photovoltaics will take longer than five years to mature at all.

Monster.com founder won’t even let newspapers have death — Before Craigslist, the first thing we all thought of for jobs was Monster.com. And before Monster, it was newspapers. In fact, Monster is often blamed for starting the landslide of listings away from newspapers, hastening their demise. Not content to let his old foes rest, Monster founder Jeff Taylor has started Tributes.com to add obituaries, one of the last revenue monopolies for newspapers, to the world of Web 2.0.

Publishers and analytics on the mobile web – That’s the subject for a free evening event, Mobile Monday, held at the San Francisco Microsoft campus next week, with companies in attendance including Admob and Opera, and a panel moderated by our own Matt Marshall. Keep in mind that our own MobileBeat2008 conference is coming up on July 24th.

McAfee returns results of S.P.A.M experiment — Ever wonder what would happen if you answered all your spam emails? Just to find out (and get some press), anti-virus software maker McAfee launched the Spammed Persistently All Month, or S.P.A.M., project with 50 volunteers. In a single month, the five US participants got 23,333 messages, not including junk mail arriving at their homes, leaving one, a realtor and housewife, “horrified”.

EBay fines $63.2M by French courts — In a decision only a capitalist-unfriendly European could come to, a French court has ordered eBay to pay several luxury brands $63.2 million for sales of fake goods by some users. But perhaps they were right to — any fool could tell from the stitching on that Louis Vuitton bag that it’s a fake.

Tesla supplying Mercedes-Benz with batteries — The electric car manufacturer will have an extra revenue stream from battery sales to Mercedes-Benz, according to Leftlane (via TechCrunch).