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Here’s the latest action:

Microsoft cut prices for its Xbox 360 videogame consoles in Japan by as much as 30 percent — The software giant is trying to increase momentum in its most challenging market as the holiday season approaches.

VP candidate Sarah Palin’s Wikipedia bio was cleaned up — The fact that a single user made 30 positive edits to Palin’s bio shortly before the announcement that she’s John McCain’s running mate led to a flurry of online speculation that the McCain campaign made the edits. The anonymous Wikipedia user acknowledged that they volunteer for the campaign, but denied any conflict of interest.

MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson has a rich hacker history — That history includes FBI confiscation of his computer equipment. TechCrunch revealed earlier that Anderson, who has more MySpace friends than anyone else in the world, is really 37, not 32 as his profile says.

Tesla to supply battery packs to Daimler — Tesla will provide the batteries for Daimler’s 150 electric Smart cars deployed in Berlin, according to AutoblogGreen. The site reported the rumor a few weeks ago and now says there’s confirmation in the German edition of the Financial Times.

Movie social network Flixster acquires iPhone app Movies.app — The application was purchased for an undisclosed price, then re-released last week. Movies.app is probably the first iPhone app to get acquired.

Only 25 percent of Internet traffic now routed through the United States — In the earliest days of the web, all traffic went through the U.S., and that number was still 70 percent a decade ago. The shift has implications for intelligence agencies and foreign policy.

GameStop Chief Operating Officer Daniel DeMatteo will succeed longtime CEO Richard Fontaine — Fontaine will stay on as videogame retailer’s chairman.

Linux developer Hans Reiser gets 15 years to life for killing his wife – A deal with prosecutors led to Reiser’s reduced sentence after he brought police to his wife’s body.

New software offers iPhone-like navigation on Windows Mobile devices – The application is called Kinoma Play and costs $30.

Game publisher Square Enix bids for Tecmo — If Tecmo’s board approves the deal, it would give Square Enix a stronger foothold in the United States.

Tech pioneer Judy Estrin warns of an innovation gap if the U.S. fails to invest – Estrin, formerly the chief technology officer at Cisco Systems, has written a book on “Closing the Innovation Gap.”

A few years ago, it was still a subject of regular outrage. Jobs were headed to Mexico. Factories moving to China. Everybody hated globalization, without quite understanding it. But with a flood of news coverage — the slightly nauseating peak being an all-too-popular book about the world being flat — people finally figured it out: The manufacturing jobs were gone. Get a job banking, or flipping burgers, but don’t expect to be building cars or making clothes.

The idea is that we should switch to a knowledge-based, service-oriented economy. And Silicon Valley, for one, long ago pinned its hopes on brains over brawn. Just take a look at the companies that get funding. But now that everyone’s getting used to the knowledge economy, manufacturing may make its comeback.

Here are the primary factors driving a manufacturing renaissance: The rapid growth of middle class consumers in countries like Brazil, China and India; a shrunken dollar and the loss of economic pre-eminence by the United States; less easy credit for overseas goods for consumers in the US; and, potentially, rising transportation costs that cut into cheap goods sent from overseas.

Those details are outlined by the CEO of the Manufacturers Alliance, Thomas Duesterberg, in this Industry Week article. There are a few more that could be added to the mix, though.

The first is our bid at shifting energy usage at home off foreign oil. Companies like Ausra, Nanosolar and Tesla are basing not only their research, but their plants in the United States. They have plenty of reasons to do so. States, eager to win back jobs lost long ago, are offering hefty incentives. Materials like solar mirrors and wind turbines are expensive to ship, and solar panels often break during long voyages. And for Tesla, there’s an additional prestige to having a car manufactured in the U.S., even if some parts are made overseas.

Another good example is Infinia, a solar company that is reducing its own startup costs by using existing manufacturing capacity in the country, much of which has been idle for years, to builds its solar dishes. And finally there are the many biofuel startups, many of which have no choice but to place their plants near the sources for their fuel. As the market for renewables grows, more will certainly be built here.

The need for specialized work will also become more prominent with the rise of next-generation materials, especially nanomaterials. Although fabless manufacturing in the semiconductor industry proved that high-tech work can be done overseas, the first generation of manufacturing will be at home. And with costs for overseas labor rising, the new nano industry may choose not to move elsewhere.

There are also opportunities for less commercial production. As the online marketplace Etsy has shown, there’s a nascent industry of crafters who are are eager to sell their goods. Ponoko, for one, wants to help those people create their goods, with online tools and a relatively inexpensive production process based on laser cutters.

And for the professionals, the small design firms and build shops of the world, cheap rapid prototyping and rapid manufacturing technology are on the rise, a subject that I wrote about a year ago.

Whether physical production can ever dominate the American landscape again is doubtful. But the conventional view into the future, which suggests that we’ll make our way as a pure knowledge economy, is likely also off the mark. The future is never quite what you expect.

Here’s the latest action:

Americans watched 12 billion online videos in May — That’s up 45 percent compared to the same period in 2007. While Google’s sites — especially YouTube — remained dominant, accounting for 34.8 percent of videos watched, Fox Interactive Media (owner of MySpace) climbed to 6.4 percent, up 1.3 percent from the month before.

Tesla breaks production “logjam” — Chief executive Ze’ev Drori acknowledges that the electric car maker has been putting the old adage that “good things are worth waiting for” to the test, but he says nine Roadsters have already arrived in California (as of Saturday), with more due soon.

Forbes: San Francisco is the number one city for yuppies – Great, now my New York friends have something else to gloat about.

EBay wins case against Tiffany — The outcome of the four-year-old suit means that jewelery maker Tiffany & Co. and other trademark holders are responsible for policing online marketplaces for violations. That takes the responsibility off eBay and similar sites.

Enterprise social networking becomes a battleground — InfoWorld looks at the competition and concludes — surprise, surprise — that consumer-focused startups like Facebook and LinkedIn may beat out established software vendors like IBM.

Veoh takes ad program out of testing mode — The video site shows ads based on a user’s past viewing patterns. The ads are targeted at nine groups, including fans of action, cars, pop culture, anime, science fiction and family fare.

Ad agency Method launches venture program with boxee – Method’s venture effort, dubbed Method Ventures, wants to team up with startups that have just raised seed funding to help them fine tune their ideas. The first partner is boxee, a startup that integrates media content with social networking.

Solar company Greenvolts plans to raise significant funding — Chief executive Bob Cart says he hopes to raise a second round of funding at the end of the year, although at “less than $100 million,” the amount would be smaller than that raised by some other solar startups recently. Greenvolts raised $10 million last year.

Google still testing Digg-style search results? — Google has been experimenting with ways to let users vote on search results, and a TechCrunch reader spotted what may be the latest version of that test.

Here’s the latest action:

The AP tries to set a new standard, doesn’t follow it — The Associated Press wants bloggers to pay it for quoting excerpts of its stories, and is threatening to sue if they don’t. Of course, that position is kind of hard to take when you yourself don’t abide by such standards, as the AP didn’t when it lifted a quote from TechCrunch on the matter for one of its stories. Arrington rightly noted how ridiculous this was and contacted his lawyers about retreiving the $12.50 the AP would owe him under its ridiculous system. The hypocrisy runs deep.

Tesla looking for another $100 million — The electric car maker’s plan is to push production up to 150 cars a month by the end of the year, according to VentureWire. To do this it needs more cash. It will likely get it. Enough said.

One former Yahoo finds a home — While his former colleagues at Yahoo continue to jump ship, Jeremy Zawodny has found a home: Craigslist. No word on his official title, but he will start in July.

An EA bigwig leaves to start his own company — Neil Young, a veteran of the gaming powerhouse Electronic Arts will leave to start an unspecified “new project,” according to Newsweek’s Level Up blog. During his 11 years at EA, Young worked on projects such as the alternate reality game Majestic, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, The Sims 2, Medal of Honor Airborne and Boom Blox (which is perhaps my new favorite game).

FCC gives Sprint more time to give up part of its airwaves — The regulators agreed to push out a deadline for Sprint to vacate a part of the wireless spectrum it controls that the government now wants to use for public safety networks. Sprint will now have until July 1, 2009.

NVIDIA chip to match AMD’s manufacturing process — The Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX+ is made on a 55-nanometer process, according to CNET. This is the same process that most of AMD’s graphic chips now use, an upgrade from the 65nm process.

The Japanese love/hate the iPhone — A recent survey indicated that 91 percent of Japanese buyers would not purchase an iPhone. A headline like that makes it sound awful, until you consider, as Silicon Alley Insider does, that even 9 percent of Japan’s market would mean 9.3 million potential new iPhone customers, which is huge when Apple had been shooting for just 10 million worldwide by the end of 2008.

The Huffington Post goes local — The fast-growing web site, The Huffington Post, run by pundit Arianna Huffington, is planning a massive expansion across the U.S. The first of these local versions of the site will be run out of Chicago. Huffington is said to be looking for a third round of funding to support such an expansion.

Fake Beijing earthquake news spreads malware — Botnet operators in China are using fake reports of a 9.0 earthquake to spread malware, according to The Register. Classy.

Netflix shuts down profiles feature — Users will no longer be able to have seperate queues for movies as a result. The system was simply too complicated to maintain, Netflix contends.

Here’s the latest action:

Icahn considers his own proxy war for Yahoo — Billionaire investor Carl Icahn began buying massive amounts of Yahoo stock last week — up to 50 million shares — and now is thinking about using that influence. He is considering replacing some of Yahoo’s board members (not quite the full replacement Microsoft was considering) with those of his own choosing, according to CNBC. Such a move could potentially force Yahoo to sell to Microsoft. The problem? The Microsoft offer is no longer on the table, and there is still no indication that it would come back even if Icahn is successful — though something tells me it would.

Craigslist countersues eBay – Just two weeks ago, online auction site eBay filed a lawsuit against online listing site Craigslist for taking unspecific actions to lessen eBay’s economic interest in the company (eBay owns a minority interest of Craigslist). Now Craigslist is returning the favor, charging eBay with unlawful and unfair competition, misappropriation of proprietary information, deceptive passing-off, business interference, false advertising, phishing attacks, free-riding, trademark infringement, trademark dilution, and breaches of fiduciary duty, according to its blog. With minority partners like these, who need enemies?

Google Search to be bigger than Windows next year — Some people still look at Google and wonder what exactly it does to make so much money? Next year, those people will be even more confused as Google’s search business is on track to surpass the size and profitability of Microsoft’s Windows business, according to Silicon Alley Insider. As SAI notes, this is just Google’s search business, this doesn’t even include its advertising wing, AdSense. Now perhaps you see why Microsoft so badly wants to becomes a legitimate online player.

Fisker Auto seeking a large round of funding — Fisker Automotive is seeking more funding to produce a $40K sedan in a few years, according to CNET. It is currently working on an $80K sports car. The back story here is that Fisker is competing with Tesla, which has the $100K Roadster (which was at the VentureBeat SF Green event) and is planning a $60K sedan. Tesla has sued Fisker, which Ray Lane (who was at SF Green) has called “ridiculous”. The Fisker founder helped design the Tesla. Fisker plans a counter-suit, according to Earth2Tech.

Electronic Arts continues to lose money — The world’s largest video game company, also know as EA, lost $94 million in the fourth quarter of last year as it spent a lot of money developing new titles. The loss was worse than Wall Street had been expecting, and significantly worse than the same time period last year, according to Bloomberg. EA is trying to take over game developer Take Two, and it could sure use the $500 million Take Two’s Grand Theft Auto IV made in its first week of sales.

Mayor wants electric cars for San Francisco — San Francisco’s mayor, Gavin Newsom, may want to help Project Better Place move to his city, according to Earth2Tech. Better Place is an electric car startup that wants to build recharging stations all over Israel and Denmark, and has $200 million towards that plan. We’ve covered the startup extensively (see the links), and would love to see it in SF. However, considering Newsom’s failure to even get extra solar subsidies passed — we’ve heard further rumors today that the measure will die — it seems highly unlikely that electric car charging stations will fly, unless the money is all private.

It’s not TV, it’s iTunes — and HBO is on it — Following up on yesterday’s rumors of HBO coming to Apple’s iTunes store, several shows were in fact launched today. These include The Sopranos, The Wire, Sex in the City and others.

VentureBeat is proud to announce a gathering for clean technology entrepreneurs next Monday, May 12. We’ve joined forces with SF Green, a San Francisco gathering founded by Steve Newcomb that aims to help shape the region’s cleantech and environmental future.

The aim is to bring together some of the brightest local entrepreneurs and investors, as well as other interested parties — environmentalists, government representatives and regular citizens — in one place, helping to forge connections and spark new ideas, just as we did last week with our Digital Media launch party.

Keynoting the next SF Green are Ray Lane, the managing partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers who invested in Fisker Automotive, the new Think America partnership and the solar thermal startup Ausra; plus Tesla Motors’ VP of marketing Darryl Siry, and a Roadster or two. Both will join us for Q&A sessions at different times during the evening, with the chance for the crowd to ask a few questions of their own.

SF Green was started this March by Newcomb, a founder of Powerset who left to pursue legislative issues and an as-yet-unannounced startup. The first event was a hit, drawing together several hundred people from various backgrounds in the sustainability movement.

By holding an open event, we hope to continue attracting members of all those groups to come together and discuss their ideas. Along with Newcomb, we hope that we can help influence the Green Economy by sparking new discourse. Newcomb has more thoughts on why he founded the event at his blog.

If you’ve noticed a transportation theme for this particular event, you’re dead on: We’ll also have one of the new Smart cars to exhibit inside the venue. Naturally, much of the talk will revolve around the subject we’ve chosen, but if it’s anything like the first event, there will be conversations about every sector of cleantech. And to help round out the night, we’ll have other cleantech companies demoing amidst the crowd.

We’ll also have our generous sponsors on hand: Ernst & Young, Sun Microsystems, Dig Communications, Network Verde, California Cleantech Open, and the SF Chamber of Commerce. Our organizer is Room Full of People, who also plan the popular SF Beta event.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, 111 Minna is a gallery and bar south of Market Street in the Financial District. The place only holds about 400 people, and tickets are going to go fast. If you’ve got $15 and an open night on Monday, swing on by. You can get your tickets right here.

World’s biggest chip maker qualms tech market fears: Intel reported solid first-quarter results in the face of a weak U.S. economy. The company reported revenue was up 9 percent to $9.7 billion in the quarter ended March 31 while net income was $1.4 billion, down 12 percent due to a write-down but in line with expectations. Some growth is coming from strong server-chip sales as Google and others build massive data centers for cloud computing, said Paul Otellini, Intel’s CEO. Second-quarter guidance exceeded analysts’ expectations. About 80 percent of the chip company’s sales are overseas, which explains the strong growth despite a U.S. recession. Intel is pounding its rival Advanced Micro Devices, which is laying off 10 percent of its work force. AMD reports earnings on Thursday. Flash memory prices were down again, hurting Intel’s margins. The chip giant is selling its NOR flash memory business to a joint venture, dubbed Numonyx, with ST Microelectronics. Intel’s stock rose 8 percent in after-hours trading.

Codexis files for IPO: Biotech company Codexis hopes to raise $100 million in an IPO. The Redwood City, Calif., company sells catalysts used in chemical manufacturing and other processes. It also makes biofuels. Contractors use the Codexis catalysts to make ingredients for drug companiesl. In 2007, Codexis lost $39 million on sales of $25.3 million. The company has raised $72 million from investors including Shell Oil, Bio-One Capital, CMEA Ventures, Pequot Ventures, Chevron Technology Ventures and Maxygen. Credit Suisse Group, Goldman Sachs & Co., Piper Jaffray Co., RBC Capital Markets and Thomas Weisel Partners LLC are the underwriters for the offering.

Cell phone companies support LTE: Big wireless equipment makers threw their support behind a high-speed wireless Internet and cell phone technology known as LTE, or long-term evolution. Nokia, Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, and NEC agreed to limit royalty fees charged for patents related to LTE. The wireless network is one of the primary competitors to the WiMax wireless Internet technology supported by Intel and others. The LTE networks will be built by carriers such as Vodaphone Group, AT&T and Verizon in the coming years as they promise to deliver fast web-browsing over mobile gadgets.

Tesla drives into litigation: Electric sports car maker has filed a lawsuit against rival electric-car maker Fisker Automotive. Tesla alleged that the designers at Fisker misappropriated trade secrets after they designed the body and interior of Tesla’s car and then announced they planned to create their own vehicle. On top of that, Tesla is also being sued for failing to pay a transmission supplier. Magna Powertrain sued Tesla for failing to pay Magna for its work to design a two-speed transmission for the Tesla Roadster. Magna is seeking $5.6 million.

Peter Gabriel backs new music discovery site: TechCrunch reports the rock star is backing a digital music company dubbed The Filter. The site is a meta-recommendation engine for movies, music, and web video. Recommendations on the site’s home page change daily and there are RSS feeds to music and movies. The site is in a closed beta at the moment.

Porn action: AdultVest Inc., the Beverly Hills, Calif.-based investment bank that focuses on the adult industry, said in a statement that it has acquired iPorn.com. The company said it has very big plans for iPorn and the acquisition is a “natural fit.” AdultVest said it has other expansion plans on the way. We’ll leave that one alone.

MySpace shoots for global expansion: News Corp.’s MySpace plans a big expansion overseas to help boost revenue and profits in coming years. Travis Katz, senior vice president of MySpace’s international business, said the company plans expansions overseas. The company launched its Korean-language site on Tuesday.

Hearst Magazines teams up with Spleak network: The publisher, whose magazines including CosmoGirl, Seventeen and Teen, will now distribute its content to sites like Facebook and AIM through Spleak’s platform, which combines traditional media with user generated content. Mashable has more details.

1. Tesla to begin production of the Roadster on March 17
2. Blog ad network FM turns down $100M offer?
3. CDN Akamai sees record traffic from social networks
4. Newspaper traffic up; old media on the rise?
5. Creating popular social networks, apps
6. Gazprom-Media reportedly acquiring RuTube
7. WSJ will stay subscription based, says Murdoch
8. Recording industry to start going after ISPs
9. World Wide Packets sells for $280 million

Tesla to begin production of the Roadster on March 17 — All safety and emissions testing has been completed by Tesla Motors, and it’s on schedule to start shipping its first cars. Comforting news, after a recent round of layoffs at the company, as well as some production problems centering around the transmission. Michael Powell, the company’s VP of Vehicle Integration, blogs about the nitty-gritty details of crash-testing a new vehicle here. The company took home a Crunchie last Friday, for top cleantech startup.

Blog ad network Federated Media turns down $100M offer? — John Battelle, who runs blog ad network Federated Media (it places ads on sites like VentureBeat), said he has retained an investment bank, Savvian, to manage investor interest in the company. Rumors are that he has received a $100 million offer. He sent a note to his authors trying to head off the rumors, saying FM had received lots of interest from investors, but adding no details: “I don’t know if anything will come of this process, but I do know that as a fast growing business, it’s always smart to assess investor interest, and to be ready to quickly arm the company with additional capital to do new things and continue to accelerate our growth, should that option prove attractive.” After what happened at Battelle’s former company, Industry Standard, where there was a bit of a kerfuffle among insiders about when it was the right time to sell — and the indecision gave way to outright implosion — Battelle will be taking this very seriously indeed.

Content delivery network Akamai Technologies sees record traffic from social networks, widget companies — Mashable has an interesting post looking at the huge growth the CDN is seeing from these sites.

Newspaper traffic up; old media on the rise? — A new study by the Newspaper Association of America shows that traffic to the newspaper websites rose seven percent in 2007 to 2.87 billion pageviews. Either there are just more readers coming online, or “old” media is beginning to figure out how to reinvent itself for a wired audience. That’s mostly good news for startups — more intelligent, web-oriented content from traditional media sources both benefits and takes advantage of Web 2.0 darlings like crowd-sourcing and aggregation, and plays into the business plans of all sorts of companies, from Digg to ShareThis.

How to create a popular social network platform, how to create a viral social network application — Widget-maker Slide chief executive blogs about the former, RSS service Newsgator looks at the latter. How to create a popular social network platform, how to create a viral social network application — Widget-maker Slide chief executive blogs about the former, RSS service Newsgator looks at the latter.

Gazprom-Media reportedly acquiring RuTube, Russia’s Answer to YouTube – Russian newspaper Vedomosti reports a deal has been reached by Gazprom to acquire RuTube, citing an investing banker and source close to Gazprom-Media. Both companies confirmed they are negotiating a deal. Reports emerged of such a deal as early as July. More from Yakov here.

WSJ will stay subscription based, said its new owner Rupert Murdoch — “The really special things will still be a subscription service, and, sorry to tell you, probably more expensive,” he said. But then again, he also said the WSJ would expand and improve the free content, and that ultimately could mean the majority of the articles, which will be short-form in nature.

Recording industry to start going after internet service providers — A French policy of forcing ISPs to monitor customers for illegal file sharing, and disconnecting those customers after three infringements is paving the way for the recording industry to try to introduce similar policies around the world, including in the US. PaidContent has more.

YouTube offers mobile version, so you can watch its videos on your phone — More here.

World Wide Packets, Ethernet access switch company, sells for $280 million — Ciena has picked up the eight-year-old World Wide Packets, after that company raised $147M from a group of investors including Argo Global Capital, Azure Capital Partners, Eagle River Investments, Entrepia Ventures, Madrona Venture Group, Northwest Venture Associates and Rally Capital. In addition to $280 in cash and stock, the purchase includes $15 million in assumed debt. The Spokane Valley, Wash. company has $30M in revenue.

Tesla Motors, the high-profile Silicon Valley electric car company, announced it has appointed Ze’ev Drori, an experienced entrepreneur and car enthusiast, as its new chief executive officer.

This completes an arduous search process that spanned several months.

Drori (pictured left) replaces interim CEO Michael Marks, who took the helm in August. The shuffle comes after the company announced a couple of delays to its first car’s release.

Tesla is first building an ambitious sports car that will go zero to 60 mph in 4 seconds. It has received $105 million in investment from a variety investors including Jeff Skoll, eBay’s original president, Elon Musk, a PayPal co-founder and Google’s co-founders.

Drori has joined the company at a critical stage: The company plans to release its first vehicles in the first quarter of 2008. The company is working on transmission durability with a new supplier, which could affect the speed with which subsequent cars will hit the market.

In an interview with VentureBeat, Drori said Tesla can be a leader in efficient electric vehicles, and that help with the important goal of transitioning the industry away from dependence on foreign oil.Drori has more than 30 years of experience running companies. The first company Drori founded was Monolithic Memories, a Silicon Valley semiconductor firm that pioneered fundamental advances in memory and logic technology, before being acquired by AMD in 1987. After the sale of Monolithic Memories, Drori purchased a controlling interest in Clifford Electronics, then a small start-up in auto security systems, and joined as its chairman and CEO. In 1999, Drori sold Clifford Electronics to Allstate Insurance.

The two-seat roadster will be released at a base price of $98,000. Tesla says it then plans to expand its vehicle fleet to include affordable electric compact and family cars, which may do more to reduce carbon emissions. Tesla says the price for its vehicles will drop in the near future.

Some critics, including well-known technology investor Vinod Khosla say electric cars will have little to no effect on slowing rising carbon emissions.

Tesla Motors, the Silicon Valley maker of the all-electric roadster due out this year, said the vehicle won’t be able to travel as far as previously thought without a recharge.

The Tesla will now have a range “greater than 200 miles,” less than the 250 originally promised — because of design changes made to fulfill safety regulations and for other reasons. From a new transmission to new stereo subwoofer, the alterations have added “several hundred pounds” to the car’s weight, the company said in a letter to people who had put down a deposit for the car. Instead of a curb weight of 2,500 pounds, it is now over 2,600 pounds.

No change, yet, on the promise it will go 0 to 60 mph in less than 4 seconds. No one has yet asked for their deposit back, the company tells the Mercury News’s Matt Nauman (see full story).

The Tesla is backed by a number of high-profile investors, including Google co-founders and PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, and has been touted by folks like Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has been pushing an eco-friendly agenda more aggressively lately. It is part of a wave of investments in new clean technology companies. Investments in such clean-tech North American and European companies totaled $903 million during the first quarter, a strong 16.5 percent increase over the $775 million invested in the previous quarter, and a 42 percent increase over the same quarter a year ago, according to the Cleantech Venture Network yesterday.