VentureBeat

Here’s the latest action:

ComScore: Facebook users triple in Japan during the last year – But Mixi.jp is still number one, with 12.7 million visitors compared to Facebook’s 538,000.

MySpace and NBC select citizen journalists — They’ve chosen Matt Britten and Sara Pat Badgley to cover the Democratic and Republican Conventions, respectively, as part of the companies’ Decision08 contest. Britten and Badgley’s videos and blog posts will appear on MySpace, and possibly on the MSNBC TV channel and website.

Mobile subscribers to hit 5 billion in 2011 — That forecast comes from Infonetics Research, which also predicts that mobile broadband will grow at a compound rate of 104 percent every year until then.

Google establishes Latin American HQ in Brazil — The country is reportedly Google’s fastest growing region. That’s particularly impressive since Google only opened its Brazilian office three years ago.

Private equity firm Blackstone creates a cleantech arm — This group could help provide the late-stage investments that cleantech companies need.

Did Facebook try to acquire StudiVZ? — That’s what a former executive at the German social networking site claims. The implication is that Facebook is only suing StudiVZ because it wants more of the German market, not because (as alleged) StudiVZ copied Facebook’s look, feel and features.

Department of Energy supports green building — The federal agency will contribute to the $50,000 prize for the winning company in the California Clean Tech Open’s green building contest. That amount, of course, is only a drop in the bucket compared to the funding most green building startups actually need.

Philadelphia Inquirer: So much for that Internet news thing — The newspaper has a new policy decreeing that except for breaking news, articles won’t run on the website until after they have appeared in the Inquirer’s print edition.

Magnify.net makes video network bigger, faster — The startup, which helps customers include video channels on their websites, just added MySpace, Hulu, Vimeo, College Humor, Howcast and MTV Overdrive to its content network. That network supposedly runs twice as quickly now.

Here’s the latest action:

Amazon Web services go down over the weekend — The problems crippled messaging service Twitter and many other sites.

MySpace to join OpenID? — TechCrunch’s sources say the social networking site will join the OpenID initiative, which allows one login to work across multiple sites, later this week. If so, it would be the second-largest OpenID implementation ever, second only to Yahoo.

The New York Times and LinkedIn forge a content partnership — Users of the business-oriented social network will be shown personalized news from the New York Times about the industry they work in, according to ReadWriteWeb. These users can then share this news with colleagues.

Justin.TV reaches 1M registered users — Those users create the content for the video site, which received 5 million unique visitors last month. The big question is whether the site is making money from all those visits.

What’s behind the IPO drought? — We’ve covered the issue before, but the Wall Street Journal’s opinion piece about possible causes and effects — with an emphasis on the need for Sarbanes-Oxley reform — is worth reading.

Facebook sues German clone StudiVZ — The suit alleges that StudiVZ copied Facebook’s “look, feel, features and services,” according to The Financial Times.

Game development company Flagship Studios goes under — The company is “a startling example of what not to do when finding funding for your startup,” according to Valleywag, because it used the intellectual property of its two games (including Hellgate: London) as collateral when seeking loans. That was a big risk, and one that didn’t pay off — now the rights to those games have reverted to the lenders. (Chief executive Bill Roper is pictured to the left.)

Pressflip search engine is the new Persai – The new blog search engine is a relaunch of a site called Persai. TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington is not impressed, and says Pressflip is only worth noting because its founders previously wrote the blog Uncov, which made its name criticizing startups and entrepreneurs.

Monitor110, the startup that monitored the Internet for financial tips, closes — The company had already raised $20 million, but couldn’t find the additional financing that it needed in May.