The defense of the well regarded Statsaholic (previously Alexaholic), currently on the receiving end of law suit from Amazon for the crime of daring to use Amazon’s open API’s and render Alexa data better than Amazon was, has just hit the mother of all spanners, according to TechCrunch, Statsaholic’s owner, Ron Hornbaker, is a convicted extortionist.

But wait, it gets better, because as well as serving jail time for extortion, Hornbaker wasn’t just your garden variety, every day extortionist, he was an internet extortionist as well, frequenting AOL Chat rooms trying to extort money from wayward husbands. Yep, he’s 1996’s version of Michael Crook.

Knowing this, a lot of people have got egg on their faces, including yours truly, for going in to bat for a chap who well…just doesn’t play cricket, if you know what I mean. Time to remove my name from the online petition against the legal action as well, and apologize to Amazon. Sorry Amazon, I’ll do some digging before acting against you in the future.

Originally posted on April 22, 2007 @ 11:26 pm

Techcrunch has the scoop: eBay has acquired social networking meets random surfing outfit StumbleUpon for $40-$45 million.

Valleywag does the figures and works out that whilst the deal is obviously good for the folks behind StumbleUpon.. they only ever took $1.5m in funding and never had a full venture capital round; the price means that sites like Digg may only be worth $100-$150 million, and the entire sector worth no more than $500million, which is probably significantly less than the sum total of funding that has gone into startups in Silicon Valley alone.

Originally posted on April 18, 2007 @ 7:49 pm

Mark May 15 in your diary. It’s the day Internet Radio in the United States will cease to be.

In an outrageous move, the US Copyright Royalty Board has refused to consider complaints from industry representatives against it’s earlier decision to implement the RIAA supported new royalty structure for online radio. The new fee structure, that will commence May 15, sees internet radio stations having to pay a per song, per listener rating that worse still in being implemented retrospectively back to the beginning on 2006.Currently internet radio stations pay a portion of profit for each station paid in royalties. On top of this, there will also be a minimum fee of $500 per channel per year.

The move won’t drive all internet radio stations offline, after all, not all internet radio stations are located in the United States, but it is going to see a pile of US based stations either shut up shop, or move to other countries, with a fair bit of talk about the place of a number of operators looking at moving to Canada.

Sites such as Pandora are urging users to write to their Congressman, if you’re in the US I’d encourage you to do so.

Originally posted on April 17, 2007 @ 4:05 am

Google has acquired Tonic Systems, a Silicon Valley based firm with roots in Australia as well, that has in its kit bag of goodies a java based Powerpoint clone.

The acquisition sees Google now officially announcing that the missing leg in the hat trick of Office functionality will soon be available at Google: Google Presentations, an online Powerpoint style service that makes working online all that much more appealing to the business world.

The dollar figure of the acquisition was not disclosed.

Originally posted on April 17, 2007 @ 10:33 pm