VentureBeat

Here’s the latest action:

Yahoo has a bad day, but it could have been much worse — The Internet giant announced its earnings today and fell short of expectations, but only by about a penny-a-share. Net income was down 19 percent from the same quarter last year. Still, considering it no longer has a Carl Icahn-led hostile takeover to worry about, the company can — and more importantly, will live with these numbers.

Icahn’s wild weekend — While Yahoo was busy breathing a sigh of relief now that the Icahn takeover “distraction” (as Yahoo chief executive Jerry Yang called it on the earnings call today) is behind them, Icahn got back to writing about Yahoo on his blog. His new post is entitled “How I Spent My Weekend” — no, really. He’ll be here all week folks, try the veal.

Shuffle at the top of Etsy — The online marketplace for handmade things has announced that Maria Thomas, its former chief operating officer, will now be its chief executive. Founder Rob Kalin will now be the chief creative officer. It also announced Chad Dickerson as its new chief technology officer. Dickerson leaves his job as the head of the Yahoo Brickhouse special projects group. Yes, that’s another Yahoo exec who is leaving.

Sugar ends its relationship with NBC — The female-oriented blog network has decided to take charge of its own advertising. Too bad that Lauren Zalaznick, president of Women and Lifestyle Entertainment networks for NBC Universal, just played up its partnership with Sugar in announcing the BlogHer deal last week.

GigaOM scoops up a mobile blog — jkOnTheRun joins the Giga Omni Media network of blogs. Read about it from Om Malik himself.

MySpace announces support of OpenID — If you have an account with MySpace you can now use it to login to any other site supporting OpenID.

Ryan Block leaves Engadget — The editor of the popular gadget blog (left) is leaving to start an undisclosed new project with another former Engadget editor, Peter Rojas.

Google walking directions — In the spirit of summer, Google now allows you to get directions tailored for those who may not want to drive or take public transportation to a destination.

Joost goes to China — Maybe it’ll fare better there than it has in the U.S. NewTeeVee has the details.

Twitter acknowledges spam issue — The micro-messaging service is fully aware that marketers and others are signing up for accounts and mass-friending people. It does not like that, as it writes in its blog.

Here’s the latest action:

OpenID is gaining ground — OpenID is a service that lets you use your URL as your username anytime you have to login to a site that requires username and password. Until now, it has been slow to catch on — Web sites have taken their time to allow it. But an increasing number of sites are doing so, because it’s convenient for users. Here’s how it works: You use the URL as your username as you sign in, and this triggers a request by the site to obtain your identity details that you keep safely locked up another site (your so-called provider). More info here. Microsoft recently said it will support it, AOL is now supporting it, and now Digg is too, among a long list of others.

Shawn Fanning’s new company, Rupture, goes live — The site allows gamers to network and maintain profiles based on the game World of War Craft (we reported on Rupture here). Let us know what you think.

Startupping, a site for entrepreneurs — Mark Fletcher, a successful entrepreneur, has started a web site for entrepreneurs, Startupping.com — allowing them to trade tips, resources, etc. Fletcher, you’ll recall, successfully built and sold two companies: eGroups (to Yahoo) and Bloglines (to Ask).

Trulia releases housing API – Trulia, the online real estate company, has opened its API so that anyone can build their own home price forecasting tool, heat map, or application comparing home prices and other variables. We’re not sure how widely useful this is, but there are some interesting stats emerging, such as how people pay less for homes in areas where there are more women and how more foreigners mean less crime.

Odeo, podcasting service, looking for home — This the saga that won’t go away. San Francisco entrepreneur Evan Williams bought back his podcasting company, Odeo, from investors, but has now focused his energies on an SMS service spin-out, called Twitter. So now he wants to sell Odeo, which has a respectable 3 million monthly page views, and breaking even on adsense. Notably, he asks whether there’s a marketplace where he can publicize the sale. We can point him to our very own VentureBoard, launched not long ago. Recently, SupportMagic listed itself and an investor saw the listing, and bought it. (The board’s most recent listings get mentioned on our home page.)

EU commits to halt greenhouse gas emissions, while US commits to increase them — Here’s the story on progress by the European Union countries to commit to lower greenhouse gas emissions, which has yet to be ratified by the individual countries. Too bad that the U.S. is standing still. Already the biggest polluters, we’re planning another 150 coal plants over the next few years to meet our growing energy needs, and have no agreed upon way to capture the resulting carbon dioxide before it spews into the air. Meanwhile, North Pole is seeing record levels of greenhouse gas.

Confabb, the conference social network, sells? — Rumor, at Techcrunch, is that Confabb is being acquired for $5 million or so, after just three months’ work. Not bad at all for founder Salim Ismail, who’s last company PubSub didn’t do too well. Confabb’s angel investors include Dave Winer and Andrew Rasiej.