VentureBeat

AOL has proved it’s still alive and kicking with the acquisition of Goowy Media, a widget developer based in San Diego.

Goowy was far from the only option on the table for AOL, with widget companies crawling out of the woodwork — Gydget, Kadoink and Widgetbox, to name just a few. However, Goowy had an advantage over its peers, having worked hand-in-hand with AOL since shortly after launching in late 2006.

The company provided widgets for the myAOL portal, although it also allowed other publishers and independent developers to make widgets on its Yourminis platform. It didn’t say whether it would work exclusively with AOL in the future.

The two companies didn’t disclose the acquisition price. Goowy had only taken seed funding to date, from entrepreneur Mark Cuban. Goowy also posted a blog entry on the acquisition, found here.

Here’s the latest action:

Google Korea has cluttered page — This is a striking departure from the spartan interface Google is known for. Details here. We checked with Google, and a spokeswoman confirmed the Korean site was developed in response to market research and feedback from Korean users. She called it a “new intuitive and easy-to-use design” that helps discover Google products and services.

AOL serving ads in IM and chat — AOL subsidiary Userplane lets Website publishers install IM, chat and other widgets and serve advertising within them, sharing revenue with Userplane. It is called Userplane Money.

Volpi joins Joost? — Mike Volpi, who gave up his CEO-in-waiting job at Cisco in February, is reportedly joining Internet TV company Joost as CEO (source: PaidContent). Volpi served on the board of Skype, the previous company of Joost’s co-founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, so this isn’t out of the blue.

RealNetworks releases new player that lets you capture Flash video — With one click on a video you see online, you can save the file — whether Flash, QuickTime or Windows Media — to your desktop, and burn it to a CD or DVD. The player will be out next month. This capability has been offered by other companies, but not by a major player like Real. Video with DRM, however, won’t work. If you’re interested in this, Scoble has details in the video below:

Google Street View continued — They should have called Google’s latest map service, Street View the Google Living Room View instead. Turns out Google has been driving its own cars around the Bay Area and collecting street level views, including of tabby cats in people’s homes. Bizarre. Google also partnered with Immersive Media for the street service.

Panoramio, bought by Google — For every company squashed out of existence by Google for doing mashups that Google can easily replicate, there’s one that ends up getting snapped up with welcome Google dollars. Panoramio, which lets users upload their photos to share them on Google Earth, is the latest.

Senator Hillary Clinton’s clean-tech agenda — Passing through Silicon Valley today, she lobbies for the establishment of a Strategic Energy Fund to coordinate research on energy and global-warming solutions, provide tax incentives for home and businesses to become more energy efficient, and help install E85 pumps for ethanol-enhanced gasoline and more. See the WSJ, which reports she’d even support the creation of bacteria to remove radioactive materials from the atmosphere.

Despite past failures, another effort to take on the NFL — Bill Hambrecht, the well-known San Francisco banker who tried to take on the IPO establishment with his “Open IPO,” is doing it again. He’s starting a professional football league called the United Football League. So far, he and his partner, Tim Armstrong, a senior executive at Google, have pledged $2 million each. Mark Cuban, the billionaire who owns the N.B.A.’s Dallas Mavericks, will be a team owner. Hambrecht, you may forget, has a history. He was part owner of a team of the earlier failure, the United States Football League. (See NYT)

Facebook’s Platform slammed this afternoon — After seeing Facebook’s Platform site down periodically over the course of this afternoon, we checked with Facebook to ask what was up. Spokeswoman Brandee Barker: “We’re experiencing an unexpected surge in the number of applications being built on Facebook Platform – more than 300 as of this morning.”

Is EMI’s music really DRM-free? — Well, that’s the announcement we covered earlier, but what we didn’t know at the time is that the EMI songs sold via iTunes without DRM still have a user’s full name and account e-mail embedded in them, which means that dropping that new DRM-free song on your favorite P2P network could come back to bite you (Arstechnica).

News corp confirms Flektor and Photobucket purchases — See statement here. Photobucket deal rumored to be $250 million.

Attributor to track copyright material for AP — Attributor, a company in Redwood City, Calif., said its filtering technology will be used to fingerprint AP copy and to identify and document its display wherever it appears across the Internet. Attributor is just one of many digital fingerprinting technologies that have popped up over the past year.

Yahoo’s technology chief resigns from Yahoo — Farzad Nazem leaves just six months after Yahoo named him head of the company’s newly created technology group, saying he simply wants to retire.

Want to try Spock? — Here are a few invitations for Spock’s people search engine, still in closed testing.

Google Mapplets — Just when you thought you’d seen enough Google Maps, there’s another barrage coming: Google has introduced Mapplets, giving developers a way to perform specialized searches directly within Google Maps. The example below is of movie search. You type in a zip code and a movie, and voila.

(Updated: Corrected PBWiki seed amount and added reference to Seraph investor)

Here’s the latest news on the Google bull in the Silicon Valley china shop:

Google unveils a Gmail application via your mobile phone — Phone must be Java enabled. It lets you get Gmail directly, bypassing browser.

Socialtext launches second round of Wiki Wars — After Google buys the wiki company Jot, competitors in the wiki industry scrambled to respond. Chief among them is Socialtext, which took issue with our earlier statement that it is struggling. Socialtext’s chief executive Ross Mayfield has since offered users of JotSpot’s wiki sever product, the JotBox, free migration over to Socialtext for a year. Jot, for some reason, had discontinued the JotBox, which serves large companies. Mayfield wouldn’t comment on his revenue traction. He did say, though, that this is “round two of the Wiki Wars.” (For background, we wrote an article two years ago about the Wiki Wars, featuring heavily backed Jot against the more frugal Socialtext — that original story is now long gone behind Merc’s archive wall). Mayfield has launched a number of products and redesigns recently. He says there’s plenty of room for multiple players, citing Gartner prediction that 50 percent of large companies will be using wikis by 2008. He’s aggressively hiring in engineering and sales, he adds.

PBWiki is here too! — We also heard from the guys at PBWiki is in San Bruno. They’re just three guys in a single office and host 130,000 wikis, which they claim is the biggest wiki hosting service. David Weekly, Ramit Sethi and Nathan Schmidt are all Staford guys in their 20s. They’ve taken $350,000 from Seraph (an
angel group), Chris Yeh (Symphoniq) and Ron Conway (prolific angel investor).

The Google binge machine timeline — Here’s an Ajax chart of Google’s acquisitions through time. You’ll have to scroll down to the blue table, and then start dragging the map.

Google Base 2? — Google Blogoscoped has the scoop on the latest Google classifieds project.

Google co-founder buys a place in New York — Don’t know who, or why.

UTube sues Youtube — This news has been widely covered, but as usual, Techdirt has good perspective.

Speculative stuff about bribery on YouTube deal –Lots of people pointing entrepreneur Mark Cuban’s blog on dubious stuff that went down between Google, YouTube and the music labels right before the GooTube acquisition, and some are calling it bribery. We didn’t point to it initially, because even the original anonymous source says some of it was based on speculation (if that’s not a warning signal, don’t know what is). But it has appeared everywhere, so we point to it too.

Google launches sponsored videos — You produce a video, Google gives you a cut of the revenue from ads appearing beside the video. Google kicks it off with the latest Diet Coke and Mentos video.

Google flexes political muscle, funds Republicans & everyone else — Details here.