Foursquare, the hip social network whose software is on the phones of many young urbanites, is branching out.

Bruce Springsteen is now attempting to erase his name from a lawsuit against a New York bar – and preserve his credibility in the process.  But a number of suits against bars and smaller establishments are starting to surface, all with Springsteen’s name attached. © 2010 digital music news (full story)

Did you know that the second Monday in February is Clean Out Your Computer Day? Just don't tell Google's Sam Schillace. The unsentimental engineer who built the precursor to Google Docs would rather throw an older computer in the trash than spend any time vacuuming crumbs out of the keyboard. "I'm not in love with my computer," Shillace said. "It's just a tool." With that Spartan attitude, Schillace has built or overseen many of Google's minimalist Web programs, including Gmail and Google Calendar. Most notably, Schillace built Writely, a Web-based word processor that was acquired by the search giant and became Google Docs.  As Google's engineering director for communications products, he now manages several teams of developers as an engineering director. He has a reputation around the Googleplex. A Google spokeswoman introduced him by saying, "He hates computers." You don't say? And he's your computer engineering director? Schillace doesn't care for his desktop the way some of his coder brethren do. "They treat it like a pet or a girlfriend," he said on the phone from Mountain View, Calif., recently. "I want it to do things for me, and when it breaks, I'll throw it out and get another one."That approach governs Schillace's aesthetic with software design too. His goal at Google is about making the computer ...

Clean-tech companies raked in just $564.5 million in the fourth quarter of 2009, a 45% plunge from the previous quarter, according to research released Monday. But the number of deals jumped 21% to 62 total, according to analysis from Ernst & Young, using data from Dow Jones VentureSource. California dominated, with 32 deals over the course of the quarter, pulling in $333.72 million. In all of 2009, investment in the clean-tech sector hit $2.6 billion with 193 deals, a 50% plunge in dollar amount and a 16% slide in the number of deals compared to 2008. The San Francisco Bay Area led the charge, with $1.2 billion in investments pouring in throughout the year; $295.6 million coming in during the fourth quarter. Southern California came in next, raising $329.5 million in 2009, with $30.5 million invested in the last quarter. New England brought in $283.7 million for the entire year, $38 million of it during the fourth quarter. Energy efficiency was the top-performing category last year, with 61 deals attracting $593.3 million, roughly a third of the total financing activity in the clean-tech sector. It also pulled in the most venture capitalist investment of the fourth quarter, with $252.8 million across 22 deals, ...

Los Angeles - MySpace Music, the joint venture between the News Corp.-owned (NYSE: NWS) social network and the major record labels, is testing 30-second audio ads that users must listen to before they can access free song streams, the Associated Press reported. The ads "are timed so that a user can listen to up to 100 songs on a playlist or to a full album with just a single interruption after the first song," AP reports. The company is working with TargetSpot to sell the audio ads. read more