Recently marked the 8th birthday of Google’s blogger service, Google took the time to reflect on the popularity of the service and break out some baby pictures. A lot has changed since Evan Williams (He sold to Google and started Odeo,Twitter) launched the service in 1999.

Thanks to everyone who has supported us over the past four-fifths of a decade, and thanks especially to you for all the blogs.

It seems, second season of video sharing is shaping up real well. France based Dailymotion has raised $34 million in venture funding. The investment round was participated by Advent Venture Partners LLP of London and AGF Private Equity of Paris.

Dailymotion had earlier raised $9.5 million last year.

JB over at Crunchgear has the exclusive on the “upcoming” Google Phone, supposedly set to launch in Q1 2008. His source is someone inside HTC, the company that Google’s working with to pick one of 20 models to finalize their design. [read more on Gizmodo]

LG will show off its recently unveiled KS20 at IFA 2007 (Europe’s largest Consumer Electronics show), which begins this Friday, August 31st.  It’s slim at 12.8mm thick and features a 2.8″ touch screen display.  It runs on Window Mobile 6, can rock the HSDPA (3g high speed Internet) unlike the iPhone and sports a 2MP camera.  Will it be an iPhone killer?  I doubt it.  The touch screen, based on the pic and operating system, is probably more equatable to Palm’s Treo’s minus the tactile keyboard.   The LG-KS20 is set to hit the European market Q4 2007 with no word on the price tag.

My advice: Hold out for the 32GB iPhone.  Course, Apple didn’t include some slutty ‘barely legal’ chicks to show it off…

LG to Unveil its Smart Phone with All Touch Screen [Aving]

Hi-Media Group has agreed to acquire Fotolog Inc. for approximately $90 million in cash and stock. Fotolog is a New York-based social network and photo-sharing site that asks users to post a single photo every day. It claims to have more than 10 million members. Fotolog has raised about $11 million from BV Capital, 3i Group and other investors since 2004.

After a premature exposure earlier today, the all new Digg design is up and running. As promised, there’s a new “All” tab plus cleaner navigation. The images section has yet to appear; based on Rose’s recent posts, October is the latest you can expect that, and hopefully before.

[Via | Mashable]

I’m sorry.  I thought you could only get HDMI if you bought the Elite system?  According to this Amazon listing you can pick up the Xbox 360 with 20GB HD and HDMI for $350.

Anyone else thrown for a loop?

A cool $710 million later and you too can own the 3rd largest PC maker in the US. Acer is simply looking to increase it’s footprint here in the US and also prevent Lenovo from making yet another acquisition. What’s shocking is that they purchased the struggling PC maker. Gateway’s hay day has come and gone. I purchased a Gateway P60 (the Pentium 1 with 60MHz) when they were at the top of their game. It was a solid machine, but I only ran DOS, downloaded porn pics (no movies back then) over my 28.8kbps modem and played video games. I think Acer has made a mistake but then again if they can reorg things and institute some of their Korean business practices (aka fire some folks and cut costs) then they might find themselves in a position for success with the Gateway brand. Who knows if they’ll kill the ‘cow’ branding but the deal does include Gateway’s Emachine line of computers as well. Part of Acer’s move was to get right of first refusal on the Lenovo Packard Bell deal. I don’t know too much about that, but you can read more about it at Business Week.

The Acer brand is number 6 in the US. With the purchase of Gateway they now have combined machine sales of 18.6 million beating out Lenovo which boasts 16.6 million.

For those who might have missed it: Engadget has the scoop on a new software solution that unlocks Apple’s iPhone, allowing it to be used on any mobile carrier worldwide (presuming of course they run a 2G GSM network).

The second largest social network on the web has completed a ‘redesign’, adding new icons and some blue rounded corners. Comscore proves that Orkut has the second largest user base of people ‘networking’ online although they don’t seem to care. The new look is hardly a step up from the previous dull interface and no new functionality to report of.

From the official Orkut blog

When you think Google, you picture primary colors; when you think orkut, you see blue. And though we’re updating the look, we’re staying true to blue. We’ve added some rounded corners and new icons that make orkut look a little more sleek and modern. Check out a screen shot of the new homepage.