Looking for the next Mark Zuckerberg -- or just some creative kids -- Google and Make Magazine are co-hosting an online "summer camp" for crafty 13- to 18-year-olds, as well as their parents and teachers, who will collaborate to celebrate "the art of making." Maker Camp participants will be expected to build 30 projects in 30 days with the help of popular makers like Mark Frauenfelder of Boing Boing, Stephen and Fritz of EepyBird -- best known as the guys behind the Coke and Mentos experiment. 

Bringing up bad memories for Microsoft, the software giant is reportedly facing a European Union antitrust probe into allegations that it is failing to offer consumers a choice of Internet browsers under terms of a previous settlement with regulators. As Bloomberg reports, EU Competition Commission Joaquin Almunia said regulators had received complaints that Microsoft may have misled the EU over the use of a browser choice screen for users of its Windows operating system. Over the past decade, the company has been fined over $2 billion in EU antitrust probes. 

Autodesk has agreed to buy mobile video startup Socialcam for about $60 million. Post acquisition, Socialcam will continue to operate its popular product “mostly independently,” AllThingsD reports -- now with the backing of Autodesk as a corporate parent. Autodesk is best known for its CAD visual effects software. Socialcam is the most popular application on Facebook, with 3.7 million daily active users and 56 million monthly active users, according to AppData. However, as AllThingsD notes, those numbers are currently trending downward. 

As is the story of Yahoo stealing Google’s Marissa Mayer weren’t remarkable enough, we now know that the new savior-in-chief is pregnant! “Of course, her pregnancy, which Mayer learned of last January, was something to think about when she got the initial call from Jim Citrin, the Spencer Stuart recruiter commissioned by the Yahoo board,” Fortune reports. Mayer’s first child is due October 7 -- and it's a boy! 

Could online tax-free commerce soon be a thing of the past? So suggests The Wall Street Journal, citing thinning state opposition (and Republican opposition, in particular) amid persistent budget strains. “Conservative governors, joining their Democratic counterparts, have been making deals with online retail giant Amazon.com to collect state sales taxes,” WSJ reports. 

Increasingly, it seems like every app aspires to serve as a storage locker for consumers’ information. No different, Evernote -- the multiplatform app that lets users capture notes, audio and images on the go -- has the Google-like ambition of organizing all consumer info. To find out why (hint: it has everything to do with essentialness, and nothing to do with ad targeting), TechCrunch sat down for a one-on-one with Evernote CEO Phil Libin. 

Fueling a million little (a few not so little) tech startups, venture capital had its single largest quarter in more than a decade. Alltold, U.S. venture capitalists put $8 billion into 812 deals in the second quarter of 2012, AllThingsD reports, citing new data from CB Insights. “Factors like the greater American economy and the bumpy tech IPO market don’t necessarily have a direct and/or timely correlation with venture capital spending,” AllThingsD notes. Quarter-over-quarter, funding was up 37%. 

With the threat of pedophilia top-of-mind for many parents, Reuters investigates efforts by Facebook, and other online meeting places, to detect and curb such activity. Facebook, if you weren’t aware, has “extensive but little-discussed technology for scanning postings and chats for criminal activity,” which can automatically flag potentially-illicit behavior, Reuters reports. Such technologies are increasingly being combined with human monitoring to thwart sex predators, and, Facebook hopes, keep its platform safe for consumers and advertisers. 

NBC Sports and Adobe Systems are working together on two apps that will stream the Olympics live via consumer mobile devices. Just launched, one is a live-streaming app for the more than 3,500 hours of content that NBC is promising, while the other is a companion app loaded with additional content. Additionally, both let fans record footage for playback, as well as share their viewing experiences via social media channels. Making the effort possible, Adobe's team has been working hard since the beginning of the year, CNet reports. 

Groupon is working on what CEO Andrew Mason calls the “operating system for local commerce," as Bloomberg Businessweek translates, a suite of software and technology services that will embed Groupon into every facet of every physical, real-world transaction. If and when the initiative takes off, it will represent a huge leap for company that has recently had trouble convincing consumers that it call deliver on the far simpler task of deal creation.