Quoted: Despite the fact that males have long accounted for the majority of online gamers, there is a surprising shortage of casual online games directed at men aged 25-45. Beyond fantasy football and online poker there is little variety, with nearly every game failing to take advantage of advanced graphics or any interactivity beyond clicking "all-in". World

Quoted: TV advertising doesn't have to be just on TV. That's the premise behind BlackArrow, a startup that caters to the cable industry by offering a way to place ads on broadband Web video, on-demand TV, and digital-video recorders (with unskippable ads). The company is announcing a new $20 million round of funding from existing investors Cisco Systems.,

Quoted: It took iTunes nearly three years to get to 1 billion song downloads. MySpace Music streamed a billion songs in just a few days after it launched on September 25. And while this isn't a fair comparison (songs on MySpace are free to stream; on iTunes users were paying $0.99 each), it's an incredible milestone. What MySpace won't say for some reason is

Quoted: Only three months after the British newspaper publisher The Guardian Group bought Rafat Ali's ContentNext Media and his collection of blogs for a reported $30 million, one of those blogs is sputtering badly. The blog in question is contentSutra, the Indian counterpart to its bigger and better known brother, paidContent (both cover the business of

Quoted: Did someone declare that startups would have a hard time raising money? Not for some of them. Paris Based Inspirational Stores will announce tomorrow a 10 million euros series B round lead by Atlas Ventures and OTC asset Management. Inspirational Stores offers famous high-end brands without online retail activity a full turn-key solution to give them

Quoted: Bitwine, a service launched in late 2006 that lets people ask questions to experts for a fee. Originally the service was tethered to Skype; more recently it began letting users connect to experts via Skype, other VoIP service, or normal phone lines. Experts can charge their clients either by the minute or a simple flat fee. Clients pay by PayPal and

Quoted: Everyone has their favorite way to predict who will win the Presidential election. Amazon likes to keep track of Halloween mask sales. Supporters of either candidate can buy rubber masks of each to wear for Halloween. So far, 57 percent of the masks Amazon has sold have been Obama masks, versus 43 percent for McCain masks. The weird thing is that

Quoted: When we commissioned the statuettes for the Crunchies Awards last year, we hoped to create something a little more memorable than the typical plastic tombstone. We opted for a plastic monkey holding a bone aloft instead. While it does have a certain menacing quality to it, we never expected anyone to turn it into weapon. But now you can find "The

Quoted: Congress is finally understanding the reality of the Yahoo-Google search deal, and what it means for the state of search competition in general. It's not about price fixing advertising rates, it's about neutering the second place market participant. As I wrote on September 27, the current deal between Yahoo and Google will inevitably lead to the decline