Newsy just raised $2 million from some unnamed angel investor. The startup, according to Venture Beat, "is trying to do for the mobile video explosion what Ted Turner did with the cable TV explosion thirty years ago: Deliver a new kind of news enabled by the technology." Founded in 2008, Newsy is not in the business of original reporting or automated aggregation. Rather, it prepares two-to-three-minute online videos, which highlight and explain the different coverage angles on a particular news story from different media sources. "The goal isn't to look for biased reporting, but rather to provide …

Facebook has admitted that "for a limited period of time, a bug permitted some users' chat messages and pending friend requests to be made visible to their friends by manipulating the 'preview my profile' feature of Facebook privacy settings." The social network insists that its engineers have since diagnosed and resolved the issue. "You've got to hand it to Facebook," writes TechCrunch Europe, which first reported what it considered "a major security flaw." "They certainly know how to do security -- not." Added TechCrunch: "I know Facebook wants us to share more information and open up, but …

No Google acquisitions to report, today. The search giant did, however, just lead a $23 million investment in Invidi Technologies, a New York-based provider of "addressable" TV ads. Business Insider, which broke the news late Tuesday, described the deal as "fending off Microsoft," and, "part of a renewed effort to get into TV advertising." Invidi is presently developing a platform that makes it easier for advertisers to target satellite and cable audiences based on various demographics. So-called "addressable" ads are designed to target specific viewers, using data from set-top boxes, in …

Twitter is about to introduce an official "Embeddable Tweets" tool, which is designed to formalize Twitter references just like any other Web tool offered by, say, YouTube or Vimeo. "No more cutting and pasting tweets into blog posts," writes The Guardian's PDA Digital Content blog. "It's a smart move, not only because it will look strong graphically and act almost like a Twitter banner ad within editorial, but also because it preserves the integrity of the original quote," the blog adds. The tool is also expected to cut down the likelihood of messages being misquoted or taken out of …

ZDNet's Mary-Jo Foley investigates Microsoft's "Menlo" -- a "hush-hush research project which seems to be focused on replacing Windows Compact Edition (CE) with Windows NT inside of mobile devices," according to her sources. Foley is also looking into a project codenamed "Experiment 19" -- a graphics platform that Microsoft researchers are apparently building to complement Menlo. According to Foley, the lead for the Menlo project is Galen Hunt, the Microsoft researcher who spearheaded Microsoft's Singularity research project, as he acknowledges on his bio page on the Microsoft Research Web site. Singularity is a "microkernel-based" operating system developed by Microsoft Research, …

Google will reportedly begin selling digital books by late June or July of this year, a company representative tells The Wall Street Journal. In other words, life just got more complicated for Amazon, Apple and Barnes & Noble. Dubbed Google Editions, the new service will allow users to buy digital copies of books they discover through its book-search service, while it will allow book retailers -- including independent shops -- to sell Google Editions on their own sites, taking the bulk of the revenue. Chris Palma, Google's manager for strategic-partner development, just announced the timetable at a panel on Google's …

Social network platform provider Ning has signed a letter of intent with a major educational publisher to keep its service free for educators, The New York Times' Bits blog reports. Last month, the once high-flying Ning announced plans to nix its free product, and, in turn, force "existing free networks to either make the change to premium accounts or migrate their networks elsewhere." To boot, Ning CEO Jason Rosenthal -- who recently replaced the charismatic Gina Bianchini -- said the company had to cut nearly 70 employees, or more than 40% of its staff. According to Bits, the loss of …

Last month, Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser market share dipped below 60% -- a historic all-time-low -- according the new data from NetApplications. Showing a steep decline, IE had a intimidating 80% market share less than two years ago. Since then, the continued growth of alternative browsers from Mozilla's Firefox and Google's Chrome has put IE on the defensive. According to NetApplications statistics, Mozilla's Firefox browser now has nearly 25% market share, a position that is has held for the last two months. As such, Firefox still represents the largest threat to Internet Explorer's dominance. Meanwhile, Google's Chrome now commands a …

On Monday, news broke that the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission were negotiating over which of the watchdogs would pursue an antitrust inquiry into Apple, and its new policy of requiring software developers -- who make applications for devices such as the iPhone and iPad -- to use only Apple's programming tools. As Reuters points out, "The news comes amidst a high-profile dustup between Apple and Adobe Systems Inc, which makes the widely used Flash software to provide video and build games." According to The Wall Street Journal: "The growing interest in Apple's activities by …

Blake Eskin, The New Yorker's first (and present) Web editor, says Internet trends haven't affected the magazine one bit ... oh, expect for that "Critterati" contest, which encouraged readers to dress up their pets as their favorite literary character. "We're aware that people like looking at pictures of dogs and cats on the Internet," Eskin says in a Q&A with Sparksheet -- a "custom content" blog run by WPP. Still, Eskin admits, "If we threw all our energies into this stuff we obviously couldn't support the kind of journalism we do ... You can't send someone to …