VentureBeat

Here’s the latest action:

Facebook suspends RockYou’s Super Wall – The social networking site has turned off the Facebook application’s viral aspects, like invitations and notifications, presumably as part of its efforts to crack down on spammy app activity. RockYou chief executive Lance Tokuda says he’s working with Facebook to get the suspended features restored soon. The move follows the shutdown of RockYou competitor Slide’s Top Friends application at the end of June due to a security issue. (Top Friends is back up now.)

Vinod Khosla joins Obama — The famed venture capitalist spread his bets during the primary season, giving the maximum amount to Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Barack Obama. But now he has taken sides, in a way, by joining Obama’s India Policy team. The alliance makes even more sense because Khosla has been a big booster of biofuels like ethanol, and the Obama campaign is closely linked to ethanol, at least financially.

VeriSign brings back Jim Bidzos as interim chief executive –  Bidzos, who was the company’s founder and first chief executive back in 1995, is replacing William A. Roper, who resigned early last week. VeriSign manages the .com and .net domains, and Roper had been working to pare the company back down to its core focus. As for why Roper left, Bidzos says, “I don’t think it was fair to have him around while we were looking for a replacement, so he chose to leave.”

Leapfrog launches its web-based portable gaming system — With the Didj, educational gaming company Leapfrog is targeting 6- to 10-year-olds, the demographic that has embraced the Nintendo DS game system.

Vodafone buys a controlling stake in Ghana Telecom — Vodafone is buying a 70 percent stake from the local government for $900 million. The mobile network company says Ghana is one of the most attractive markets in Africa, because of its young population and low mobile penetration.

Privacy advocates like Google’s new privacy link — Google’s privacy policy hasn’t changed, but the search giant is linking to it from its main page. A number of privacy groups praised Google’s decision, albeit rather faintly. For example, Pam Dixon of the World Privacy Forum called privacy policies an “important tool” and noted that displaying such policies is standard practice among most Web sites. In other words, everyone’s glad Google made the move, but the company probably shouldn’t spend too much time patting itself on the back.

Study shows airports are a prime hunting ground for laptop thieves — Apparently, more than 10,000 laptops are reported lost each week at the United States’ 36 largest airports, and 65 percent of those are not reclaimed. In fact, VentureBeat’s own Eric Eldon had his laptop stolen at SFO earlier this year.

Sequoia Capital makes three more hires — The additions include Warren Hogarth, who will focus on cleantech; Christopher Lyle, who will focus on public market investments; and Michael Dixon, who will focus on systems and software investments. Meanwhile, David Su, one of the founding partners of Kleiner Perkins‘ China Fund, has left the venture firm for reasons unknown.

PlyMedia raises $6 million for video layers — The company, which adds interactive layers such as speech bubbles to online video, has raised $6 million from Greylock and Elron Electronic Industries, according to TechCrunch’s sources. Other interesting companies in this space include ad company Veeple and commenting company Omnisio.

Lifestream.fm relaunches with new features and German support — The lifestreaming site was acquired by the social bookmarking company Mister Wong back in April, and now it’s relaunching in invite-only mode with new support for comments, filtering, more comprehensive searches and German.

Goojet, a company that offers a mobile “organizer,” a place to store notes and other things so that you can access them while on the go, has won the start-up competition at the conference Le Web 3 in Paris, France.

The company combines your mobile and web world, letting you access its software from both your phone and your computer. You can organize notes, votes, RSS feeds, pictures, and other documents. Yesterday, Goojet launched their beta version.

More than 30 startup companies participated in the competition. Second place went to Palo Alto, Calif.’s PLYMedia, which develops transparent media layers over web video. Third place was taken by the web based operating system G.ho.st, with headquarters in Israel and Palestine (which we’ve covered previously).

Goojet wants to make mobile services simple, and serve all java-enabled phones with internet access. You register online, and then you get an SMS sent to your phone, which lets you download the application.

The company has filed several patents.

CTO and co-founder Ludovic Le Moan (pictured below, with a modest grin) told VentureBeat his goal is to keep navigation simple, with drag and drop features. The service is free, but the company is also planning to offer some premium services. One example Le Moan mentioned is conference calls. It also wants to let people create their own services for the software, and then share any resulting revenue with them. Theses services can then be used by, and shared, with other users.

Goojet recently raised 2.3 MEUR ($3.4 MUSD), mainly from two VCs: Partech International and Elaia Partners. The company was founded one and a half years ago, and is based in southernFrance (Toulouse) and employs 15 people.

[This was written by Anders Frick, a VentureBeat contributing author]