OneSeason, the stock market for sports that lets users invest real money into their favorite athletes, has closed a $3.5 million Series A funding round led by Charles River Ventures. To coincide with the funding, OneSeason has also announced that CRV’s George Zachary will join the company’s Board of Directors. Hot or Not founder James Hong and 49er superstar Ronnie Lott will also be joining the company’s Advisory Board.

The site mimics traditional stock markets, substituting famous athletes in place of large companies (they even have their own ticker symbols; KING, currently the top-trading stock, stands for LeBron James). Users can purchase ‘Synthetic Ownership Interests’ in each player, which rise in value depending on their demand. Since launching in October the site has sold over one million of these SOIs.

New York City has just launched a revamped webportal at NYCgo, which now offers an extensive database of events, restaurants, hotels, and other points of interest. All of these are tied into the Google Maps API, making it easier for visitors to quickly find things to do in their vicinity without having to hunt down their hotel’s concierge. The site will also include a listing of promotions and discounts, like the incredibly popular Restaurant Week, during which upscale restaurants offer meals at a flat (and heavily discounted) rate.

The city has also teamed with Google to create its new Information Center at 810 Seventh Avenue, which includes Surface-like map tables powered by the Google Maps API . Users will be able to browse through attractions and create travel plans which they can print on the spot, and can also apparently embed their travel itinerary into small tokens which they can use to virtually ‘fly’ through a rendered 3D version of New York City taken from Google Earth. For tech geeks this might be the first city where the visitor center is going to double as an attraction.

Yesterday was supposed to be the day that live Web video streaming took on TV broadcasting. CNN.com alone served a record 21.3 million streams, with a peak of 1.3 million simultaneous streams. And Akamai reported a peak of 5.4 million simultaneous visitors per minute to the various news sites for which it hosts video, and more than 7 million simultaneous streams.

With millions tuning in from their PCs to watch President Obama’s Inauguration speech, it was one of the biggest tests yet for live video streaming. But live streaming failed. CNN.com kept bumping viewers into virtual waiting rooms. This happened to me in the middle of Obama’s speech. I had to keep hitting refresh, but missed half the speech. The stream on Hulu was even worse, with the video frozen and the audio coming in and out. And forget about Ustream. I couldn’t even get any audio. This seemed to be the general experience out there, based on other reports.

Couldn’t make it Washington DC yesterday for the inauguration, or didn’t get hold of a front row seat? Nobody needs to know.

Just go to MyInauguralPhoto.com, powered by online photo editing software provider FotoFlexer, and pretend you were there, right behind the new president of the United States as he was sworn in.

Can you spot Mike Arrington?

Until today, we weren’t even aware of the fact that San Francisco startup Fuzz operated a social network / music discovery destination website besides its (awesome) spin-off Blip.fm, the “Twitter for music“. We only found out about that now that we’ve learned that the service, Fuzz.com, will apparently cease to exist shortly.

Here’s the notice, which can be found on their blog and was also e-mailed to its registered users:

Sadly, we are contacting you to announce that Fuzz.com is shutting down on February 13, 2009. Between now and then you may want to take the opportunity to post your forwarding information to fellow Fuzz users. It was with a heavy heart that we finally made the decision to turn off the lights, but because of increasing operating costs and flat revenues it simply no longer makes sense for us to keep Fuzz.com running. We offer our heartfelt thanks for being a part of it, and we’d like to give a special added thanks our avid, core users — true music fans who made Fuzz their home-base, and created a real sense of community.

Please note that once the site is shut down on February 13, 2009, the band and user accounts, and all other content on Fuzz.com, will no longer be accessible. For artists who have used the site to sell music, we plan to make a final payout within 60 days of the shut down.

Israeli startup Jogli, the music search engine we previously covered, is now making all of the 12M albums it streams easily embeddable, even on MySpace (example).

Beyond albums, the widget (embedded at the end of the post) also allows the embedding of playlists, artists’ best hits and radio stations. It’s color customizable (think YouTube’s player) and if you want to play with the embed parameters, its size can also be altered. Jogli makes heavy use of YouTube’s API to power its service.

I asked the for company’s perspective about all that has gone about lately with Project Playlist getting banned (here and here) and Warner pulling out of YouTube.

Tweepler is a brand new application for Twitter users who are finding it difficult to sort through new followers and decide if they should follow back or not. The application offers an interface that divides your followers into ‘unprocessed followers’ and two sidebars that give you an overview of people you are following back and users you are ignoring.

When you first sign up, you register for an account using your Twitter credentials and Tweepler will automatically import users you are following and who are following you (this part is a little buggy). Once the import is finished, the latter group is thrown into the bucket of unprocessed followers along with bits of information which make it easier for you to decide if you should follow them back or not.

Back in 2006 when we first introduced SlideShare, we called it a mix between PowerPoint and YouTube. Today, that statement gets even more accurate.

SlideShare will now allow users to embed YouTube videos into their Flash-based presentations - an oft-requested feature that has countless potential uses. Users will now be able to include personal introductions to their slideshows, offer video that supports the contents of the rest of the presentation, or (in the case of startup pitches) include demonstrations of a website’s features. In the past users wishing to include video in their presentations have been forced to include links to separate video files, which sort of defeated the point of having a dead-simple way to share PowerPoint presentations.

It may be Obama Day today, but it was definitely also Facebook Day - the company had its Facebook Connect service integrated nicely into the live CNN.com coverage of the inauguration. Facebook users could log into Facebook while watching the event, read comments from friends (or anyone) and leave their own.

We updated our post at 10:15 PST with some of the user stats sent over by Facebook - over 600,000 status updates had been posted from the live stream by then.

We requested updated stats this evening, and got them. Things sure didn’t let up. Since this morning more than 1.5 million status updates have been posted through the feed (there were 200,000 b 8:30 am PST). During the broadcast an average of 4,000 status updates were written every minute, and 8,500 were written every minute during Obama’s speech.

We wrote about the Shorty Awards, a competition to note the best Twitter users in various categories, last December. The competition is now drawing to a close, the winners will be announced in New York in February.

Twitter users were asked to nominate others and then vote on the finalists in each category. And apparently the competition for the award, absurdly, has driven some people to buy votes on Amazon Mechanical Turk. The going rate? $0.48 per Tweet.

Dan Zarrella noticed and posted the details on his blog. He claims another finalist in the Social Media category, Dan Hollings, was paying Mechanical Turk users $0.48 to create a Twitter account and vote for him. “DO NOT post publically that you are being paid for your work,” he warned.

There’s a lengthy article over here written by a well-meaning but perhaps slightly self-deluding Sony apologist, detailing nine reasons why Blu-ray will succeed. It’s worth looking at, but it’s pretty clearly the view from one side. So check it out and then come back and see if you agree with the following tempering of that laudable but unwarranted optimism.

No, those aren’t giant ants swarming around the Washington Monument all the way up to the U.S. Capitol Building. This is the first satellite image of the inauguration taken at 11:19 AM EST today by the GeoEye-1 satellite. This is the same satellite that supplies Google with images for Google Maps and Google Earth, so we may see this image show up there one day as well.

All those clumps of people in between the Washington Monument and teh Capitol are clustered around Jumbotron screens. The image was taken from 423 miles in space and shows objects as small as a half-meter.

Yahoo Live was a short lived project that let users broadcast live video on Yahoo. It was very similar to other live streaming services like Stickam, Justin.tv and Ustream and Blogtv, and it deadpooled less than a year after launching. Today the site has a message saying “kthxbai.”

Now someone is trying to bring back Yahoo Live as an independent service at Y!Undead. There is little information on the site, other than a sentence on the about page saying “From the ashes of Y!Live… [Insert cliché about Phoenix rising etc etc].”

We’ve heard speculation that former Yahoo employees who worked on Live are behind the new service. We’re looking into that, and trying to get into the service itself, which is in private beta, to have a look. If you have an account, please let us know.

Pandora Radio, the cool personalized radio station that recommends songs based on its Music Genome Project, has started serving audio ads. The high royalty costs associated with streaming licensed songs seem to have finally caught up to the service, which until now has primarily used image-based advertising. The ads seems to be fairly sparse, but have received enough attention that the company’s official Twitter feed just annouced “So you know, we did not take on audio ads lightly. We try to be extremely respectful of your listening experience, & promise to be prudent.”

Social network Friendster has over 30 million monthly visitors worldwide, says Comscore. The problem (or perhaps the opportunity) is that just 1.7 million of those visitors are in the U.S. The vast majority, nearly 28 million, are in the Asia/Pacific region.

The company’s new CEO, Richard Kimber, is based in Sydney Australia. Friendster’s old San Francisco headquarters have been relocated as well, and the company now has a small Mountain View office for U.S. employees. Today the company announced that they’ve opened new offices in Singapore and Sydney. They have existing offices in the Philippines. A majority of the company’s employees are now in the Asia Pacific region, and at least 85% of new hires going forward will be based there.

There is a terrific monetization opportunity in the region over the long haul, but the company must be hurting for revenue today. Ad rates aren’t anywhere near comparable to the U.S. and Europe. Luckily the company has a fresh $20 million venture round to see it through.

According to Hitwise, last week visits to Twitter surpassed visits to Digg for the first time. Hitwise measures visits in terms of “market share,” which isn’t a very helpful metric (both have 0.021 percent market share, but Twitter is ranked No. 84 and Digg is No. 85). This data is of last week, when visits to Twitter surged following the much-Tweeted emergency landing of a plane on the Hudson. (Note that these numbers do not include usage on mobile devices, desktop apps, or through other Websites via Twitter’s API).

Today, traffic to Twitter was even higher with everybody feeling compelled to let everyone else know that, yes, in fact, the U.S. has a new president and that they saw his inauguration speech. (You too?) Twitter co-founder Biz Stone blogs that Twitter saw five times as many Tweets per second today compared to last week. (See chart below). So maybe those two lines between Digg and Twitter will keep diverging.

One of the best things about Facebook is that you know who you’re dealing with. You’ve verified every friend connection and nearly everyone has a collection of personal photos proving they’re who they say they are. Now it looks like some scammers are using this trust to their advantage, hacking accounts and exploiting the wealth of personal information available to trick your friends into giving them cash. In the past Facebook has had its fair share of spam and phishers, but now it looks like these scammers are getting smarter by engaging in a form of identify theft.

Today we received a transcript from Rakesh Agrawal, President/CEO of SnapStream, that shows how the scammer dug through his friend Matt’s profile to learn about his wife and children. Fortunately, he didn’t do quite enough digging.

Google’s dreams of world domination may be dwindling (at least its dreams of ruling the advertising world). Today, it announced that it will no longer be selling print ads in newspapers. (Yes, Google sold contextual ads that appeared in 800 papers. It also sells radio and TV ads). In a blog post, Spencer Spinnell, Director of Google Print Ads, writes:

Actor Ashton Kutcher and Internet celebrity and Digg founder Kevin Rose held a 24 hour event last weekend at the Sundance Film Festival called 24HoursAtSundance.

Some observers are saying the event, which was sponsored by Qik, HP, Nokia and Nikon, was full of cheating, conflicts of interest and tasks that put participants in undue danger. Which frankly makes the event sound like a whole lot of fun. Except that very little of the video was ever uploaded to the Internet because of connectivity issues with the Nokia/Qik phones participants were given to record their exploits.

Four teams were invited to participate in an “online game show” where they would complete a series of tasks, some of which were humiliating, for points in the competition. The LA Times, CNET, AFP and other media picked up the story when it was heavily pushed by Ashton’s company, Katalyst Media.

Tasks included getting celebrities to say ridiculous things like “how many other celebrities have you slept with?” or “what is the worst thing you’ve asked your assistant to do.” Another task was to find a bar and get the bouncer to show his ID, or taking a Lat/Long point, traveling to it and writing something in chalk.

Whether you realize it or not, you’ve probably come across the handiwork of Worth1000, a site that invites readers to use their image-editing skills to do everything from crafting new logos, to creating vintage ads for modern products or adding monsters to otherwise tame photos. The site has run over 200,000 contests since its inception in 2002, and now has galleries teeming with hundreds of thousands of user-created images.

Now Aviary, the company behind Worth1000, is looking to give site owners a chance to run their own image-design competitions. The company has built a powerful suite of browser-based imaged editing tools, and is now launching a new site called w1k.com that helps users easily create their own online photo-editing contests. These contests can consist of anything from crowdsourced logo-design competitions to humorous celebrity-morphs (and everything in between), and could appeal to a broad range of publishers.