VentureBeat

Here’s the latest action:

Icahn haz board members? – Billionaire investor Carl Icahn is already on Yahoo’s board, but now he needs to fill the two complimentary seats given to him by Yahoo. Edward Meyer and Frank Biondi are the two front runners in AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher’s mind, but it could be her wild card, John Chapple, who gets to sit next to Biondi, according to The Wall Street Journal. They all kind of look the same anyway and all have the same basic title: “Former CEO of ______” (fill in the Fortune 500 company).

YouTube nixing live streaming service plans? — The service would add to costs, and there is still no good way to monetize any video on the Internet, let alone live streaming video. Live videos are also another potential legal headache in keeping copyrighted material off of streams, as a source tells Silicon Alley Insider.

Computer scientists come to defense of DefCon hackers — Eleven computer scientists from around the country have come out in support of the three MIT students that were banned from speaking at DefCon. They’d like the gag order imposed by a Massachusetts judge on the trio lifted, says Wired.

Silk Road adds to its first round — The stealthy medical device company is taking an additional $2.4 million, bringing its total series A round to $3.4 million, VentureWire reports. The round was led by Vertical Group.

More powerful MacBook Air soon? — It seems inevitable that Apple will update its super thin computer sometime soon. A report by PhoneNews (and republished by Engadget) says the new version is imminent, with an Intel Core 2 Duo chip of the Penryn variety. That should make the device much more powerful.

Vudu gets 99 cent movies on demand — Well, if porn can’t save Vudu, perhaps this move can, says Mashable. Meanwhile, another online movie service starting with a ‘V’, Vongo, is gone, says NewTeeVee.

Google Map Maker rolls out to 40 new island nations — And Google keeps getting the web at large to do their work for them, without that side effect of money changing hands.

U.S. Air Force halts cyber program — Maybe it realized that cyberspace wasn’t a dimension that F-16s can dominate. NextGov has more.

iTunes Movies come to Australia and New Zealand — MacRumors has more.

Online movie distribution is becoming a crowded field. So crowded that casualties are already popping up.

You’ve most likely heard of the big names with online movie offerings: Amazon, Netflix and Apple. But perhaps you hadn’t heard of Vongo, a service run by the premium movie channel Starz, which launched late last year. That was part of its problem. Vongo is now all but dead.

The service won’t be officially killed off but Starz will stop promoting it. Eventually, this will kill it. Instead, Starz is going to focus its effort on a new offering, Starz Play, which will be offered in partnership with Verizon, according to The Los Angeles Times. For $5.99-a-month, subscribers will get access to Starz content over the Internet on-demand. These films will also work with select portable devices.

Basically this amounts to Starz taking on a partner, giving a price-cut and changing the name of its online video service.

Vongo is also subscription-based, giving users unlimited streaming access to its catalog for $9.99-a-month. The problem, according to Starz spokesperson Tom Southwick, was that the selection of films wasn’t broad enough, as he told The New York Times.

It’s unclear how this new Starz Play will fair much better given that it will presumably have the same content. Still, this new service will be available now on television, provided you have Verizon’s FiOS service. Otherwise, you’ll be right back online — basically with Vongo — with a new name.

While some will argue that Vongo’s example is exactly why the Netflix/Roku set top box won’t work, remember that it is basically a $99 one-time investment for a service you’re likely already paying for (Netflix). Vongo required you pay a monthly fee without having the bonus of the largest online DVD movie rental collection to fall back on.