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Here’s the latest action:

More fallout from the YouTube/Viacom lawsuit — After a judge ruled that Google wouldn’t have to reveal YouTube’s source code but would have to open its user data for all to see, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) wrote a post condemning the decision as a violation of privacy. Google lawyers are also on the case, according to The Wall Street Journal. The outcry in the blogosphere has been even bigger.

Chicken Little, the SSD-based MacBook Air prices are falling — Apple has quietly shaved $500 off the price of it’s slim MacBook Air drive with a built-in solid state drive (SSD). These are the drives that use flash memory as require no moving parts, allowing them to be more stable and in some cases much quicker. You can not get one for $2,598, according to AppleInsider.

Economic downturn hits Google? — The search giant is closing two of its offices, one in Denver and one in Dallas. Luckily, no Googlers are being laid off, they were all be relocated, according to Google Blogoscoped

Activision-Vivendi Games merger likely to proceed next week — A judge has denied a request to halt the previously announced $18.9 billion deal. July 9 could be the close date, according to GameSpot.

Report: Baidu enters mobile search deal with Nokia — The largest Chinese search engine has a deal in place to pre-load its product onto Nokia phones, according to Forbes. Nokia recently bought the Symbian OS and announced it would open it in an effort to compete with the likes of Google’s upcoming Android platform. Now it has a mobile search partner besides Google as well.

Segway sales rising as gas prices do the same — Remember the Segway? Of course you do. Know anyone who owns one? Probably not. That may change soon as sales are on the rise with many people looking for alternatives to cars, according to USA Today.

Aussies living the tech lifestyle in San Francisco — The city’s Hot House provides start-ups from Australia with office space, desks, broadband access and a telephone line on the cheap (around $600 a month), according to The Age. The idea is to help Australian companies better serve their American and Canadian customers which often make up a large percentage of their user base.

Apple developing a whole multi-touch language — A new patent, uncovered by UnwiredView, reveals a wide range of gestures beyond the “pinch” and the “double tap.” The patent is called “gesture learning,” and interestingly it only shows left-handed gestures. A separate report says Apple has filed for 34 different multi-touch patents.

The CEO of I Can Has Cheezburger? is allergic to cats — Yep. Cats are a source of great income, but also a source of great pain, according to Valleywag.

Sidewalks used to be so much nicer, before the Segway Personal Transporter started hitting the streets. Remember being able to walk peacefully along, happy on the two legs God gave us? Then Dean Kamen brought us the Segway, and suddenly you couldn’t step outside without one whizzing by. Everyone and their neighbor bought one, making Kamen and his investors rich –

Whoops, sorry, wrong future. In retrospect, it seems at least a little silly that the Segway got as much hype as it did back in late 2001 and 2002, to the point of top Kleiner Perkins VC John Doerr saying that Segway would be the fastest outfit in history to reach $1 billion in sales. Yet the firm has also survived thus far, and appears to be expanding the $10 million third round of funding we reported in January, according to a filing dug up by VentureWire.

Segway’s blessing and curse is its oddball design. It’s packed with electronics and gyroscopes that keep the vehicle balanced and make rolling around at the pace of a running human effortless. Unfortunately, aside from being ridiculous looking, Segways are also expensive, a combination that has sent most potential consumers buyers packing to alternatives like Edge scooters. Nobody except the company knows how many have been bought for recreational use, but the fan club has long since disbanded, and in most places, just spotting one makes for a red-letter day.

What has saved Segway, at least so far, is its business customers. Police departments and security love to use Segways for what were previously onerous foot patrols. Warehousing businesses and golf clubs have bought them for employee and visitor use. Google, predictably enough, offers them as a perk to employees. Other uses abound — anywhere walking, biking or driving is impractical, a Segway can likely fit in.

What’s interesting about the reported funding is that one of the new investors is the Masdar Clean Tech Fund, an arm of Abu Dhabi’s Masdar Initiative. While that could just be a venture investment, it’s possible it was more of a strategic funding — after all, Abu Dhabi will need to figure out some zero-emissions transportation options for its promised zero-emissions city.

If Segway is selling worldwide, especially to other small cities that need a local transportation option, the company could get recoup its investments, which have now reached almost $150 million of venture capital and $100 million in development costs. And though the fan club may be dead, Segway is still reaching for a consumer base, with its recently launched Segway Social network. There’s also the strong likelihood that the company will roll out other transporter designs in the future.

Backers on the round, which VentureWire says is $35 million total with a recent tranche of $9.5 million, include Kleiner Perkins, CSFB Private Equity, the Masdar fund, buyout firm Duff, Ackerman & Goodrich, and others.

[Photo credit: Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten; Flickr]

The Segway, a personal stand-up scooter with gyroscopic sensors, was once hyped as the future of transportation. However, when it launched in late 2001 it quickly became clear that it was actually the future of scooters that very few people could afford. It created a niche market. And what do niche markets do these days? Create social networks.

The Segway Social site launched this week. It aims to bring together aficionados of the device and give them a forum to share their Segway love. The site features the usual news, photos, maps and personal accounts of using a Segway. It also has a Tips and Tricks section for those new to the device.

Not surprisingly, it also tries to convince non-owners that buying a Segway is within their means. In the “Great ways to save” box, the site suggests that if you cut back on your “high -priced frappuccinos” (something near and dear to my heart), you may be able to afford a Segway in no time. Below that are some input boxes to prove it. Of course, using their set $4.75 price (which is more than an actual frappuccino, by the way) and multiplying it by a full 365 days you get $1,733.75 — still nowhere near the Segway base-model price of $5,145.

In fact, the “days” input box will only let you enter three digits. If you put in the highest number possible, 999, with again, the set price of $4.75, you still wouldn’t even have enough to buy the lowest-priced Segway!

The site attempts to play up the environmentally-friendly trend by giving users a “Green Calculator” with which you can determine how many pounds of carbon you output a day, as well as how much money you spend on gas a day given your travel habits in an automobile. Oddly, this calculator doesn’t really suggest that getting a Segway would eliminate such things.

Another niche market gets another half-baked social site. If you happen to be a Segway owner, Segway Social might be worth your time, otherwise, this site is not going to convince you to get one.

We previously covered the Segway and its funding here.

Here’s the latest action:

Veoh Networks files preemptive suit against Universal Music Group — Veoh, the San Diego video start-up we’ve written about, said it filed the suit to assert its rights as a copyright-compliant company after UMG threatened it with litigation.

Geni gets cloned by a German Verwandt, but there’s also Israeli MyHeritage — Verwandt, the German copycat of the family tree social network company Geni, told us last month it had raised financing from Neuhaus Partners, and had broken into the top 500 sites in Germany according to Alexa, with more than 200,000 profiles in three weeks (was it spamming people?). Verwandt’s only real difference from Geni, however, is that it offers comic avatars, so we didn’t bother looking too closely. However, now there’s also Israel’s MyHeritage, which has just raised funding from Accel Europe. The company reportedly has at least $3 million and maybe more (checking). These sites are coming out of the woodwork and remarkably, all getting funding.

MySpace barely making any profit — News Corp.’s Fox Interactive unit, which consists mainly of MySpace, turned a profit of $10 million on revenue of $550 million during the last fiscal year. With MySpace doing 4.3 billion page views a day, it means the company is making a mere fraction of a cent on each page view — just the latest sign that social networks are in the early days of trying to monetize with ads.

Nirvanix to launch content delivery network — The San Diego, Calif. company aims to compete with Amazon’s popular S3 storage web service. In a statement, it said it plans to offer delivery of rich media and streaming content for web developers, and is designed to be “the backbone for social networking and web 2.0 companies.” It also plans to announce in September that it has raised venture capital, though the news has already leaked (funding is reportedly $12 million).

Google showing bias for sites that use Google Checkout — Google is using its clout to boost the ranking of sites that use its Google Checkout service, penalizing those that rely on eBay’s PayPal, according to this account. [Update: Google has responded: "It's common practice to include descriptive links in blog copy, and we added the link in question for that reason," a Google spokespersons said. "This was an editorial decision, and it was made independently by Google."]

Segway Enthusiasts Club of America disbands — The hyped gyroscope-laden scooter, the Segway, apparently is losing its fan base.

Blog network GigaOm has brought on a business person and a professional managing editor — Details here.

Internet music radios — Companies like Roku, Com One, Revo, Terratec and Tivoli have all produced tabletop or bookshelf radios that are “freaky hybrids” of the old radio and the new Internet. The New York Times’ Pogue has a review. You tune into radio shows just as you have for decades, but the radios’ antennas are internal Wi-Fi receivers that connect to a wireless home networks.

Xconomy, business technology new site focused on Boston area, raises undisclosed amount of funding — Founder Bob Buderi tells us the round was led by CommonAngels. Here’s his post about it. Robert Buderi is former editor-in-chief of MIT’s Technology Review. Steve Woit, publisher, is a partner at IDG Ventures in Boston.

The Universal Music Group acquires a stake in the operator of the urban social networking Web site, Loud.com — Details here.

Color-coding on Wikipedia edits — Wikipedia is about to test a quality-control technique: Coloring a new edit red, in order to flag potentially dubious content, especially if the editor is new or otherwise untrusted. As the editor gains a reputation, the marking color will change and become less red. There’s a test site here, and a visual example here. More details about the experiment here. It will first be tested on a related, smaller site, Wikia.

Ooma offers pre-sale orders of its Hub and Scout telecom products — Ooma says demand for its products, which allow free land-line phone calls, was sufficient to open orders for sales earlier than planned. We reviewed the home telecom product here.

Here’s the latest action:

Barack Obama gets big Silicon Valley names behind him — Obama has picked up checks from Sequoia Capital partner Michael Moritz, Google backer Ram Shriram, YouTube founder Chad Hurley and many more, making him an early valley favorite, at least among the area’s power players. Thanks to Eric Savitz, of Barrons, who has sifted through Federal Election Committee filings.

MySpace.com launches Mexico site — It is here.

TomTom, the Dutch maker of navigation devices, plans to buy Tele Atlas, its supplier of digital road maps, for $2.77 billion — WSJ has details.

Big search engines dash to ensure more data privacy — It’s no coincidence they’re all moving at the same time. Google’s privacy practices are under scrutiny by regulators assessing Google’s planned purchase of DoubleClick, so the others are scrambling to win points. At least on the surface, Google is dusted by the latest moves from Microsoft, Yahoo and Ask. Yahoo, for example, rolls out a policy to make all of a user’s search data anonymous within 13 months of receiving it, compared to Google’s 18 months. Ask, in particular, wins privacy kudos. Its Ask Eraser program lets you delete your history entirely. See Microsoft’s press release.

Google News’ strange story of the President having his “Butt”checked out — Google may want to reconsider the sources it is selecting from.

Europe’s odd search-engine technology subsidies — The European Union authorized Germany to give $165 million for research on European search-engine technology projects in an effort to challenge Google. We say odd, because subsidies to produce these sorts of technologies, already developed by private companies, is a waste of tax dollars. The French and Germans have already squabbled about the direction to take the European Theseus/Quaero search project. This latest money will go to Siemens, SAP, Deutsche Thomson and EMPOLIS, owned by Bertelsmann AG. Later, it will go to smaller businesses. (Details)

SocialText, the wiki company, looking for a new CEO — Ross Mayfield, founder of the Palo Alto, Calif. company, writes a post on his blog saying the company is looking to “take it to the next level.”

SimplyHired’s questionable relationship with WhenU — The job search engine SimplyHired is rumored to have bought “pop-under” advertisements WhenU that artificially boost its traffic, according to Techcrunch. We contacted SimplyHired chief executive Dion Lim for comment. Interestingly, he did not deny it: “Our traffic has actually been growing from a variety of sources (user experience improvements, Job-a-matic, SEO, SEM, major partners),” he responded in an email. “Also, our online marketing team is always exploring different options but can’t dive deeper into it since we don’t want to tip our hand for obvious reasons. It’s certainly in Simply Hired’s best interest, however, to preserve user experience…” The practice also raises questions about the traffic measuring technology of Compete, Alexa and other tracking services that appear to count WhenU-produced traffic. ComScore doesn’t, one more reason you’re seeing VentureBeat increasingly relying on Comscore data.

Ron Conway, Google’s angel investor, backs Event Robot — The company provides social networks for large businesses. EventRobot is a nine-person two-year-old startup that says it is profitable, and has just moved to San Francisco from Irvine, Calif. The first network is for Ozzy Osbourne’s OZFest (AlarmClock)

Bebo opening up its platform to developers? — The move would follow Facebook’s radical move to open its platform to developers to allow them to make money. Story is here. Separately, check out Dave McClure’s wild rant about Facebook being the Web equivalent of Microsoft’s Visual Basic. McClure is a valley brass-knuckled marketing type, having worked for several Silicon Valley companies to evangelize their product. This post’s emotional tone overcame annoying graphics to place it on top of Techmeme over the weekend.

Twitter is about to announce a VC round — We reported the company was raising money. Now we hear that Charles River Ventures has invested, and that the round is about done. That CRV is backing Evan Williams (owner of Obvious, which controls Twitter) shows the split between Williams and CRV over his last company, Obvious, was amicable.

The Segway film sponsored by Segway — The marketers of the movie 10 MPH sent us an email pitch about the film, calling it a story of “day to day courage” as two men, Hunter Weeks and Josh Caldwell, journey across America on their high-tech Segway scooters. They beat “incredible odds, risking everything they have, cashing in retirement and maxing out credit cards to carve out this new path in life,” the email continued. Hunter Weeks, also a director of the film, is quoted: “This film transcends the audience and its message needs to be heard.” Somehow, with Segway a sponsor, we have difficulty believing this was that selfless. More details here. [Update: The marketing firm tells us Segway became a sponsor only after the trip]

Zonbu, the energy efficient PC company — The Mercury News has the scoop on the Menlo Park, Calif. based company that is charging only $99 for a basic computer and $12.95 a month for data storage that uses 20 times less power than standard computers.

Segway, the maker of the high-tech scooter-like self-balancing vehicles, has raised $10.12 million of a planned $20 million third round of capital, according to a regulatory filing cited by PEhub.

When it launched, the Segway was hyped as the next new thing. But it failed to meet expectations. The company has had a topsy-turvy ride — getting banned in various public places, and recalled for technical problems. On the other hand, just enough people are buying the Segway (more than 23,000, as of Sept.) to keep the interest of investors.

It has already swallowed $126 million. Backers in the latest round apparently include Kleiner Perkins, CSFB Private Equity and buyout firm Duff, Ackerman & Goodrich, however we’ve reported on enough of these vague regulatory filings to know they are often misleading (we’ll update, if necessary).

The Bedford, N.H.-based company founded by inventor Dean Kamen has sophisticated gyroscopic technology, and slick design. Hopes are that its future models, including the four-wheel centaur (pictured here), will do better.

Roundup of the latest Silicon Valley action:

Browster, dies — The web 2.0 carnage is beginning to pile up. This week’s casualty is San Francisco’s Browster, the company that wanted to save you time by popping up a little image of a page when you scrolled over a link — letting you avoid clicking. It focused on search results at Google, but never found a way to make money. It munched through $5.8 million in funding from Advanced Technology Ventures, Vanguard Ventures, First Round Capital, and individual investors. (Via GigaOm.)

Amazon.com invests $10 million into Wikia — We reported last month that Amazon.com had invested in Wikia, the for-profit wiki company that is about to launch a user-directed search engine on the same principles as Wikipedia. At the time, the amount was confidential, but the deal has been been filed with the SEC, and reported by PE Week. This brings Wikia’s total investment to $14 million.

Dash, why not give us a choice? — Lot’s of publicity about the move by Dash, the car navigation system that hooks you up to the Internet, to sign a deal with Yahoo. Using Yahoo’s local search, users can find restaurants and other places easier. The idea isn’t new, because Dash told us in August it planned to go with either Yahoo or Google. (Here’s our first mention of Dash). But if your strategy is to give people an Internet connection — and thus be more open than the closed incumbent navigator players — why not give people a choice? We realize that it helps to configure search especially for the driver, and this may be a way to make money, but some of us have gotten used to Google and Ask City, both of which offer competitive, and in some ways arguably better (scroll to bottom), services.

Techdirt has raised funding — Techdirt, one of our favorite blogs, has launched an analyst business, and has raised $600,000 in new funding from six investors and from its own five-person founding team, reports PEHub, citing SEC documents. We wrote about the ten-year-old company here, when it launched its latest analyst offering — which lets its corporate clients pay for expert advice from analyst bloggers in Techdirt’s network.

India’s private equity boom — Private equity firms invested a record $7.5 billion in about 300 in India during 2006, according to a study by Venture Intelligence. That’s more than three times more than 2005, which itself was a record. (See info here.) Venture capitalists poured $1.7 billion into 125 Indian companies during 2006, up from $1.1 billion invested into 70 companies during 2005, according to Thomson Financial. More here on trends, though we differ with Haislip’s analysis, which suggests the jump is due to regulations. Regulations or not, India’s growing middle class makes it a very attractive place to invest.

Marty, the repo man, not doing so well — You may recall Marty Pichinson, the fast-talking clean up man who moved from Los Angeles to Silicon Valley to shutter dot-bombs and negotiate away their assets with impressive rapid-fire skill. We followed him around in 2001, and so know him more than most. We almost got in an accident while driving in a passenger seat with Marty — he veered into a neighboring lane on Hwy 101, while talking on two phones and tapping on his PDA — all in the name of selling more of said assets. Our story about him even won an award from the Peninsula Press Club, and was picked up nationwide by other media. Marty has since become famous, but sadly for him, that bites him when the economy is relatively rosy.

Europe, forever divided — The Europeans will always find something to quibble about. When it comes to the world’s sexiest business — search — French are going to back their Quaero, while Germans prefer their Theseus. Good summary of the differences here.

Foreign jurisdiction perplexes U.S. companies — Brazilian judge orders YouTube to shut down for showing a local model having sex with her boyfriend on beach (YouTube is apparently removing it, but people keep putting it back up), while Netherlands bans the high-tech scooter, the Segway, simply for making riders lean back to brake.