I wasn’t joking when I wrote Newsy has one of the best iPhone apps for news consumption on the go. But the startup is more than just about mobile applications: it’s on a mission to build a solid news destination site that collects and analyzes perspectives from multiple sources and wraps these views into snack-sized videos.

The company has now recruited Pam Maples as VP of Editorial to help out with ramping up the content side of the equation. Maples is the former managing editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, one of the largest newspapers in the Midwestern United States, and its website STLtoday.com.

We already knew Waveboard was bringing Google Wave to both the desktop and the iPhone with two dedicated clients, but you’ll be interested to know the iPhone app is now live on the App Store and available for less than a buck (iTunes link).

As you can tell from the short demo video below, the app does exactly what you think it does: it displays ‘waves’ and lets you search historical ones, start new ones and manage your contacts. It also opens external links in a custom browser without the need to leave the app. Waveboard also supports push notifications through a workaround (you need both the Prowl iPhone app and the Mac version of Waveboard), although they did say the next iteration will have proper push notifications.

Two years ago, a bunch of labels affiliated to music giant EMI Group sued both MP3tunes and its infamous founder Michael Robertson – former founder and CEO of MP3.com and currently running VoIP startup Gizmo5 – over alleged copyright infringement. A year ago, a judge did the sensible thing and tossed out the part of the case that could personally bankrupt the man.

Fast forward to about two weeks ago, when a new ruling gave EMI again a way to go after Robertson’s personal assets in court.

Following an investigation that lasted over a year, Turkish authorities are fining Internet giant Google a total of 71 million Turkish Lira (approx. €32 million or USD $47 million) for supposedly dodging the national tax system.

Local media reports (links in Turkish) teach us that the Turkish government claims it is entitled to additional taxes because of the fact Google operates its online advertising in the country and even boasts offices and a registered subsidiary there while bills and payments originate from Ireland. That latter part rings true, since the search juggernaut’s European headquarters are located in Ireland’s capital and most of its support and financial services are centralized there.

But Turkish authorities say Google is required to pay national taxes for revenue generated through its registered company based in Turkey, and asserts that an extensive audit shows that the American company owes the government nearly $50 million in unpaid taxes.

Israeli startup Soluto has closed a healthy $6.2 million second round of financing led by Bessemer Venture Partners and joined by Giza Venture Capital. This is on top of the $1.6 million round the company raised a year ago from Proxima, bringing the total amount of capital invested in the company close to $8 million.

The company, which is aggressively keeping its operations hidden from the public eye for now, is only willing to describe itself as being in the ‘anti-PC frustration software’ business. Our man in Israel, Roi Carthy, says the company is one of the hottest in Israel at present day, so let’s take a closer look at what they’re building over there.

The University of Southern California (USC) will be sharing some numbers about its startup funding activities at First Look L.A. tomorrow, an invitation-only event it’s organizing in partnership with UCLA and CalTech. These numbers are nothing to sneeze at: in less than two years, USC has managed to raise an impressive $115 million in funding for 15 startups.

For your background: the University of Southern California, to be more precise its Stevens Institute for Innovation, helps USC spin-offs manage intellectual property, regularly incubates and showcases new high-tech ventures and connects promising young teams to appropriate investors for follow-up financing.

It’s been about two months since Opera introduced the non-beta version of its Opera 10 desktop browser, and today the Norwegian software developer is following up on that release with that of the latest beta build of Opera Mobile, a custom browser specifically built to give Symbian and Windows Mobile equipped handset users a (much) more pleasant Web browsing experience.

The company’s latest ‘State of the Mobile Web’ report, which was based on usage data from their other mobile browser product, the popular Opera Mini, suggests that mobile web usage is still increasing at a rapid pace.

Last June, Google introduced a number of SMS-based services specifically designed to suit the mobile needs of Africans, kicking off in the Republic of Uganda. Today, the search giant is complementing one of the cellphone services it had launched in the country, an SMS-based marketplace dubbed Google Trader, with a web-based version of its own.

Amazon earlier this morning announced the official closing of the acquisition of Zappos, a deal which we broke the news about back in July. Turns out the valuation of the online footwear and clothing retailer went up from the reported $928 million over the past few months too – thank you, stock market – and Zappos turns out to have been deemed worth a solid $1.2 billion by Jeff Bezos & co based on Friday’s closing price of $117.4 a share.

OpenX this morning announced it has entered into a multi-year partnership with Microsoft that will allow the companies to “cross-market and promote products” to their respective publishers.

Under the agreement, Pasadena-based OpenX becomes a preferred partner to publishers for enterprise ad serving solutions and has agreed to promote Microsoft’s Content Ads monetization products and eventual future products to its own roster of web publisher customers.

People often compare market capitalization (current share price times the number of shares outstanding) for public companies as an indicator of success / failure, and one surpassing the other as a sign that one is overtaking the other, regardless of whether they’re actually full-fledged competitors or not.

Google and Apple, for example, have been making headlines when stock transactions move their respective market cap to top the other company’s (see this Bloomberg article from August 2008 or this one from GigaOM from two weeks ago).

So here’s a fun fact to start off the week with: the market cap for both Google and Apple are currently tied at about $170 billion after Friday’s market close.

We first reported on Google’s bucket testing of a new homepage that fades to nothing but its logo and the search box after receiving a tip about it at the beginning of this month. Since then, we’ve been getting more and more incoming tips from people who are starting to see this and haven’t seen our or other reports about the gimmick.

I have yet to see the experimental homepage myself, but judging from our inbox and chatter on Twitter the company does seem to be including more people in the bucket test than was the case a couple of weeks ago. Likely, they need to gain more data from actual usage to decide whether or not it can become a permanent feature or not.

It isn’t the first, and I assume it’s not going to be the last either.

Apple and AT&T are facing a new putative class action from an iPhone user who alleges that the companies misrepresented the phone’s MMS (multimedia messaging service) capabilities.

Clyde Bernard Franklin filed the complaint (case 1:2009cv00704) in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Alabama on behalf of all Alabama residents last Wednesday.

As expected, regulatory body ICANN has approved plans to let web addresses be written in non-Latin characters in a move that it calls the “biggest technical change” to how the Internet works since its invention four decades ago.

The vote was announced at the last day of the non-profit group’s Seoul conference.

The proposal would mean that domain names could be written in the languages such as Greek, Chinese, Arabic, Hindi or Cyrillic and be understood natively by the machines that connect computers together over the web.

Finnish startup Fruugo fascinates me to no end.

Founded in late 2006, the company set out to build a massive pan-European social e-commerce service, which it finally launched in closed beta at the beginning of this year. Their mission statement? To make Fruugo the equivalent of Google in search when it comes to social commerce on the Web.

The company reportedly raised dozens of millions of euros, at one point flirted with an employee headcount of 150 to 160 people (including contractors) and boasted a rock star board of directors that included people like former Nokia CEO and current Chairman of Shell Jorma Ollila as well as F-Secure Founder/Chairman Risto Siilasmaa. In 2008, they burned through about 14.5 million euros before they even put the closed beta product live and were ultimately forced to lay off almost half of its workforce as a result.

I’m currently blogging from a boat, rented by Belgian social network operator Netlog to host about a hundred of their closest business partners for a presentation about their freshly redesigned website and a roadmap of what’s in store for the future.

In their presentation, co-founders Toon Coppens and Lorenz Bogaert introduced something other than the newly revamped site. The company has also been developing a separately branded social gaming platform called Gatcha! which was talked about publicly for the first time today.

Today, Netlog – the ‘European MySpace’ as they’re often referred to – is hosting a Partner Day at and around their global headquarters in Ghent, Belgium. The most important thing the company will be sharing is a look at their redesigned website, which has been in the works for about a year and is today being rolled out to a number of key countries. I got an exclusive preview of the revamped website from co-founder Toon Coppens, so here’s an impression of what it will look like and where they’re going with the social network.

Netlog currently sees about 250 million visits from 56 million unique visitors on a monthly basis and is handling half a million new sign-ups every week. Its main target has historically been young people (65% of its user base is between 14 and 24 years old) and with the redesign the company is clearly catering to that particular demographic, making the homepage much more visual and far less cluttered. You can see some screenshots of the impending new version below, along with a screen capture of the ‘old’ homepage.

Launching in beta today is MyCE, a community-driven network that aims to cross swords with the CNETs and GDGTs of this world when it comes to building places on the Web people gather to share news, reviews and knowledge about consumer electronics and gadgets. The site is a new venture from Amsterdam, The Netherlands-based RankOne Media.

Actually, it’s not entirely new. MyCE is in fact the rebranded version of CDFreaks.com, an online community founded in 2007 focused solely on optical storage devices. The existing community, which the company claims currently amounts to about 3.5 million unique monthly visitors, will be integrated and rolled over to the new platform it is debuting today.

Frontier Communications shareholders have voted to approve the company’s acquisition of Verizon’s local exchange businesses in 14 states, as well as certain related customer relationships.

Shareholders also voted to increase the number of authorized shares of Frontier common stock. Various state regulators still need to ok the deal, but Frontier is confident the deal will be closed during the second quarter of 2010.

Red Bend, a VC-backed mobile phone software developer, is taking Google to court over alleged infringement of a patent it holds.

In its legal complaint filed earlier this week in Boston’s district court, Red Bend claims the Internet giant is using a patented algorithm that allows it to issue smaller-sized updates for its Chrome Web browser.

Jon Steinberg, now former Strategic Partner Development Manager on Google’s SMB (Small Medium Business) Partnerships team, has accepted a position as Executive in Residence at Polaris Venture Partners. Steinberg will be working from the VC firm’s New York offices, where he’ll help identify new investment opportunities as well as working with existing portfolio companies.

The investor’s portfolio is of course listed on CrunchBase in its entirety, but the most familiar to our readers will be JibJab, Sprout, Quantcast, LogMeIn, Thing Labs (of Brizzly fame) and Automattic (parent company to WordPress).

Reality Digital, a provider of white-label social media platforms for brands, is introducing a new spin-off service today called Spotlight. With the new offering, the company makes its entry into the market of online video management and distribution platforms.

This is growing into quite a saturated field with players like Ooyala, Brightcove, MIG69 and Swarmcast fighting hard for pieces of the pie.

Tomorrow at the eComm Europe 2009 event, Brussels-based provider of international VoIP origination services and telephone numbers Voxbone will be officially announcing that its global phone number service iNum now supports high-definition voice calling between Skype (which now boasts over 521 million users worldwide) and dozens of VoIP networks.

Voxbone will be transcoding between Skype’s wideband SILK codec and the HD codec G.722, with support for additional codes planned for the future.

Browser maker Opera has released its latest ‘State of the Mobile Web’ report this morning, claiming that there was a huge surge in mobile web usage past September.

Last month, more than 35.6 million people used Opera Mini (which is now serving over 500 million pageviews per day on average on a wide range of mobile devices), up 11.5% compared to August 2009 and more than 150% compared to September 2008. The Norway software developer also claims more than 2 petabytes of data is now processed by its servers on a monthly basis. That’d be 2,000 terabytes.

I’ve always considered the Grooveshark web app’s UI to be quite amazing, so I was wary when I was granted preview access to the service’s new look, which the startup is presenting publicly for the first time today (at 12 AM EST). Fortunately, they somehow managed to make it even more awesome than it already was, and the makeover was more than a new lick of paint as it also included a number of performance tweaks to make it run smoother.

In case you’re not familiar with Grooveshark: it’s a great web-based music search, play and management tool that’s been around since April last year. You can use the app to instantly look for and listen to music, and there’s the quintessential social component that allows you to interact with people from its community and discover new music from others’ choices.