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Way back in October 2007, Microsoft invested $240 million in Facebook at a $15 billion valuation. The company’s actual valuation was never really that high, and with the recession, it’s currently somewhere south of $4 billion.

So the deal didn’t happen.

In his interview with BusinessWeek, Thiel, one of the founders of PayPal, didn’t discount the possibility that Facebook could make other acquisitions in the future. But as the interview also points out, that could be diffic

Five years after a Netroots candidacy didn’t quite get him into the White House, online support for Howard Dean is back.

Fans of the former Vermont governor and 2004 Democratic presidential candidate are turning to Facebook and online liberal mainstays like FireDogLake to make the case for why President Obama should nominate Dean to run the Health and Human Services Department.

(Credit: DeanForHHS.com)

It’s not just Dean’s Facebook friends asking

As part of the deal, BlackBerry users will have the option to use Microsoft Live Search as their search engine of choice within the device’s browser. Also, Microsoft’s Live Search will be an option from within RIM’s mobile portal.

Microsoft announced a deal with RIM back in May to get its Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Hotmail onto the BlackBerry.

Although Microsoft competes with RIM for business phone customers, it has also worked to get some of its prod

Open source is about choice, including the choice to run open source with closed complements. Yes, sometimes the lack of proprietary complement support is a matter of resources, not intention. But to the extent that we build projects that run only with other open-source projects, and intend them to only work with open-source components, we’re acting like the proprietary ecosystems that we’ve been trying to overcome. We shouldn’t pull a Microsoft. Or, given its seemingly new directio

The companies, however, have pushed back the special shareholder meeting to November 7, in order to allow time to finalize the agreement’s documentation. The shareholder meeting is now scheduled to reconvene at 4 p.m. PDT.

Foundry shares rose as high as 17.8 percent, to $15.32 a share, in premarket trading, giving its stock a much needed lift after it suffered a blow last week, when the company adjourned its special shareholders meeting to vote on the initial deal.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Sticking with Earth for a moment, Google Earth 5 also introduces historical maps. Accessible from the clock icon on the toolbar, they’re neat to peruse but aren’t useful for in-depth data mining. The time-lapse imagery of recent decades in specific urban areas, like documenting the growth of Las Vegas, is fun but somewhat counter-intuitive to the real-world relationship that Google Earth attempts to perpetuate.

Compiling all this information into

The issue, of course, is that most music videos are already available on YouTube, and it’s not clear yet whether people will change their browsing habits and actually go over to MTV Music for videos now.

Viacom-owned MTV Networks has built in community features through its Flux technology, so that members can comment on videos, rate them (not surprisingly, Rick Astley’s 1988 song “Never Gonna Give You Up,” which has experienced a wild surge of Internet-meme popularity in

The story explains China’s new Web vigilantism this way: “An information expert thinks large-scale human flesh search engines are unique to China, a claim that appears to be true. This is understandable as a consequence of China’s ubiquitous manpower and ingrained tradition of ‘people’s war’ tracing back to Mao. On the other hand, because China’s laws are imperfect, the Internet is seen as a way to seek justice.”

No trial, no jury.

“Within days, photographs of Wang ap

The new version of the service, which does not allow users to upload music from their hard drives, instead relies on bands to submit their own tracks for listeners to play on Muxtape–and Muxtape only.

Until the official relaunch, users who were previously registered with the service will find that their log-in credentials no longer work. Likewise, you’re unable to assemble any of the tracks into a custom playlist–one of the highlights of using the service.

Muxtape

Earlier this month, Skype announced at the GSMA Mobile World Congress 2009 in Barcelona that it had struck a deal to embed its software onto Nokia devices, starting with the N97, which goes on sale on June. The Skype feature is expected to start shipping on the device in the third quarter of 2009.

The carriers may refuse to carry phones with the Skype feature embedded. Instead, they may insist on selling only Nokia phones without the Skype feature, the Web site said.