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Mashable – John Clancy is the president and CEO at Azuki Systems, where he is leading this charge to deliver video content to the mobile devices of millions of consumers worldwide. You can catch up on Azuki news or check out the company’s blog.
Fueled by the explosive growth of smartphones and tablets, video viewing habits have forever changed. It’s no surprise that consumers, who have been quick to embrace video services like HBO GO, Netflix and Hulu, are now expecting a more personal, interactive and seamless viewing experience across their traditional TV, laptops, gaming consoles, and connected TVs, as well as on smartphones and tablets.

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Mashable – Say hello to Ness, a mobile app that can figure out which restaurants you’ll enjoy the most, based on your personal tastes.
The app, now available in the iOS App Store (U.S.-only), takes a different approach to restaurant recommendations than Yelp, UrbanSpoon and the regular tools people usually use to choose where they will dine. And Ness Computing, the company behind the app, hopes that its unique approach can also change how we shop, discover music and more.

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Reuters – The government said on Thursday it was not seeking special powers to shut down social networking sites during civil unrest after holding talks with the industry and police on how to stop people plotting violence online.

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Reuters – Internet video is getting even more crowded. Flipboard, the social media magazine whose investors include actor Ashton Kutcher, plans to add television shows and films to move it beyond the online articles that it offers now.

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Reuters – Just one minute after the 5.8 magnitude earthquake struck in the state of Virginia on Tuesday and shook much of the U.S. eastern seaboard, an online aftershock of 40,000 tweets hit the internet.

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Mashable – John Tanza Mabusu is from Maridi, a town in South Sudan. But if you ask Google Maps, Bing, Mapquest or Yahoo Maps, Maridi is in Sudan.
After decades of civil war and violence, South Sudan declared its Independence on July 9. The U.S. government and the United Nations have recognized South Sudan as an independent nation, but the overwhelming majority of Internet cartography has not.

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Mashable – The Washington Post, The New York Times and the White House have all used the social reporting tool Storify to drag and drop tweets, posts and other media culled from the social web into neat, embeddable timelines. As of Thursday, they’ll be able to post the same social media stories in a slideshow format.
Storify, which launched publicly in April, maintains the functions of each social media post included in its timelines, a function it noticed was missing from traditional online slideshows.

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Reuters – Canada’s Research In Motion Ltd will unveil a new cloud-based social music sharing service called BBM Music, as companies begin to bet on entertainment delivered over the Internet that incorporates social networking features.

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Reuters – South Korea’s top mobile carrier, SK Telecom, said on Thursday that it had no plans to bid for U.S. online video site Hulu.

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AP – Amazon.com Inc. is expanding its new local deals site to New York and other parts of the country, hoping discount-happy consumers will flock to its offerings as they have embraced market leader Groupon.

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Reuters – The deadline for initial bids in the auction for Hulu was extended from Wednesday until the end of the week to allow interested parties more time to examine the online video site’s financial information, according to people familiar with the situation.

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Mashable – Attending a Giants game? Skip printing tickets at home and use a StubHub mobile ticket for admittance instead. The new service from eBay-owned ticket marketplace StubHub will update its mobile applications for iPhone and Android with support for mobile ticketing Thursday.
Major League Baseball’s San Francisco Giants is the first organization to partner with StubHub. The Giants will begin accepting mobile tickets at its Thursday, August 25 game against the Houston Astros. Additional markets are said to follow in the months ahead.

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Mashable – The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.
Name: Buffer

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Reuters – Just one minute after the 5.8 magnitude earthquake struck in Virginia on Tuesday and shook much of the eastern seaboard, an online aftershock of 40,000 tweets hit the internet.

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AP – Google Inc. has agreed to pay $500 million to settle a U.S. government investigation into the Internet search leader’s distribution of online ads from Canadian pharmacies illegally selling prescription drugs to American consumers.

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Reuters – Google Inc has agreed to pay $500 million to settle a criminal probe into ads it accepted for online Canadian pharmacies selling drugs in the United States, the U.S. Justice Department said on Wednesday.

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Reuters – The Writers Guild of America, West, has signed its first-ever deal for web newswriting.

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Reuters – A U.S. judge said parts of a false advertising lawsuit can proceed against online coupon distributor Groupon, according to one attorney who attended a court hearing on Wednesday.

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Reuters – Google Inc has agreed to pay $500 million to settle a probe into ads it accepted for online Canadian pharmacies selling drugs in the United States, the U.S. Justice Department said on Wednesday.

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Mashable – AmazonLocal, the online retailer’s daily deals service, is heading to New York City.
Amazon will start offering daily deals in coming weeks to customers in four regions — downtown, midtown and uptown Manhattan, as well as Brooklyn. Early deals include 50% off tickets to Cirque du Soleil’s newest show, Zarkana, in Midtown, $13 for $27 worth of cupcakes at Brooklyn Cupcake and $15 for $30 worth of groceries at any Upper East Side Gristede’s supermarket. (The Upper East and Upper West Sides are considered “Uptown.”)

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Mashable – Former House Speaker and GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich was correct in his explanation for why he has relatively few active accounts among his 1.3 million Twitter followers, an analysis requested by Mashable has revealed.
Earlier this month, Gawker published allegations from an anonymous former Gingrich staffer, who said the candidate had bought most of his Twitter followers. (Thousands of dummy Twitter accounts are available for sale on eBay for anyone who wants to boost his or her follower count.) One analysis of Gingrich’s account suggested that a mere 8% of his followers were real.

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Mashable – The story of Napster, the peer-to-peer file-sharing service that disrupted the music industry, will soon be told in documentary form.
The documentary will track the rise and fall of the music network launched by college student Shawn Fanning in 1999. Alex Winter, Bill from the Bill and Ted films, will direct it.

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Mashable – Funny Or Die fans with social influence will get first access to web shorts and events courtesy of the site’s partnership with Klout, the startup that measures web users’ influence across a variety of social sites.
As part of the deal, Funny Or Die will be the exclusive comedy publisher providing Klout Perks. The companies will combine talents — web video production, brand relationships and online reach — to produce branded campaigns targeted at the most influential audiences on the web.

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AP – A Communist Party leader has told China’s Internet companies to tighten control over material online as Beijing cracks down on dissent and tries to block the rise of Middle East-style protests.

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Reuters – Online data tracking service comScore Inc siphons confidential information including passwords, credit card numbers and Social Security numbers from unsuspecting users, according to a lawsuit filed on Tuesday.

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Reuters – Fifteen years ago, a growing sense of isolation due to old age prompted Kayoko Okawa, then 66, to knock on the door of a local volunteer center and timidly ask if it was possible for someone her age to start an online community for seniors.

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AP – A woman who sued Match.com after being sexually assaulted by a man she met on the dating website settled her lawsuit on Tuesday when she saw proof that the site was screening its members for sexual predators.

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AP – MediaNews Group is combining most of its daily newspapers in the San Francisco Bay area to save money on their print editions so that the company can invest in ways to bring in more revenue from the Internet and mobile devices.

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NewsFactor – A full Android port of the WebKit browser-layout engine for rendering web pages has been promised by Google’s development team, meaning the mobile market can look forward to an authentic Chrome browser experience.

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Reuters – Chinese Internet video games maker Shanda Games posted a jump in quarterly sales helped by strong demand for its massively multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPGs).

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AP – A year after Tommy Stinson’s online auction raised nearly $50,000 for children ravaged by last year’s earthquake in Haiti, the Replacements bassist is getting ready to help out again.

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AP – Satellite TV broadcaster Dish Network Corp. wants to build a wireless broadband network as a way to help it compete more effectively with cable TV and phone companies that offer video services.

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Appolicious – If you pay attention to the Android Market, you’ve probably heard a few things about the troubles developers have with the store as compared to Apple’s iTunes App Store. The Android Market, by its very nature, is a tougher place to break into than Apple’s store, and other issues like device compatibility can make it tough for developers to get users to notice their apps.

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NewsFactor – If you thought a lot of people were scooping up tablet computers now, the market will be through the roof in the next six years. That’s the prediction of In-Stat, a Surrey, U.K.-based market research firm that specializes in mobile Internet and digital entertainment.

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AP – iTunes’ top 10 selling singles and albums of the week ending Aug. 22, 2011:

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Appolicious – It’s always been curious that Google’s Chrome browser wasn’t a standard offering on Android mobile devices. Being from the same parent company, many expected that Android and Chrome would somehow work together one day. It looks like that time has finally come, as Google software engineer Andrei Popescu revealed that the Android team will be working more closely with the WebKit developer community. It’s full of potential for Chrome’s impending presence on Android devices, granting even more points of integration around Google products.

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Mashable – Small businesses will now get American Express points for buying online advertising, thanks to a new offer from the company’s small business arm.
American Express OPEN announced Monday a new Business Gold Rewards Card, which gives double points for all spending on marketing — online and off. The points are good for a range of products and services, including retail purchases, access to dining and entertainment events, travel and gift cards. A program introduced in June also lets users cash in those points for Facebook ads.

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AP – A major Chinese online commerce site has banned sales of software used to bypass Internet censorship amid Beijing’s efforts to block the development of a Middle East-style protest movement.

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Mashable – An online newspaper billing itself as “the hometown newspaper of the World Wide Web” made its debut Tuesday in a daring bid to prove that there’s still more of the social web to cover.
Under the direction of former Valleywag editor Owen Thomas, The Daily Dot pledges to cover the biggest online communities — think Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, Reddit and Etsy — in the style of a hometown newspaper.

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AP – The first Facebook employees are just getting settled at the company’s new Menlo Park, Calif. headquarters, but the online social network is already talking about expanding.

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Reuters – Two of eHarmony Inc’s main backers stand to gain extra leverage over the online-dating company in early November when redemption rights from its last financing round kick in — an unusual development in the venture capital business.

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AP – Google Inc.’s online mapping service has changed the name of a Libyan location to what it was called before Moammar Gadhafi rose to power four decades ago.

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Mashable – Microsoft has revealed that Windows 8 will boast “robust” support for USB 3.0 devices, though it will continue to support old USB specifications.
Microsoft’s Dennis Flanagan, the director of program management for its Devices and Networking group, explained the engineering work Microsoft is undertaking to support USB 3.0 on the company’s blog. The USB standard is more than 10 times as fast as its predecessor, USB 2.0. Its competitor, Apple, has opted for the faster Thunderbolt standard.

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Reuters – Recommendations to unload Google Inc stock are extremely rare on Wall Street. But the latest “sell” rating for the Internet company was so fleeting it existed for just three trading days.

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Mashable – Students in a two-year ethnographic study referred to Google more than any other database when discussing their research habits. But ironically, say the study’s authors, they weren’t very good at using it.
The series of studies, known as the “Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries Project (ERIAL)” is a collaborative effort by five Illinois universities that aims to better understand students’ research habits. Its findings are set to be published by the American Library Association this fall.

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AP – Israel has given Google a green light to photograph its streets after a deal with the Internet giant meant to ensure its panoramic Street View service would not aide terrorists planning attacks on sensitive sites.

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AP – Online auction house eBay says it will expand in Utah again by building a new facility in Draper that will add 2,200 jobs over 20 years.

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Reuters – Amy Winehouse’s father Mitch said his plans to set up a charity in his late daughter’s name had been frustrated by a cyber squatter who had stolen the organization’s intended address on the internet.

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AP – Lil Wayne is hoping his performance on the MTV Video Music Awards will be so good, fans will rush out and get his new album: The rapper is making it digitally available at midnight after Sunday’s show.

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Mashable – Miramax joined fellow studios Warner Bros., Paramount and Universal Monday by launching its own video rental service on Facebook, making many titles available for online viewing for the first time.
The Miramax eXperience offers 20 rentable titles to U.S. consumers, and 10 to both the UK and Turkey (full lists below) in what PaidContent notes is the largest Facebook streaming movie venture to date. Rentals are to be made available to France and Germany in the near future.

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