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A New York State court says Amazon.com and other online retailers must collect sales tax on purchases by New York residents.

Foodzie, uses the Web to connect small farmers and food makers with customers seeking fresh, artisanal foods.

Burger King shut down Whopper Sacrifice, a Facebook application that offered users a free burger if they dropped 10 Facebook friends, after Facebook raised privacy concerns.

Some of Boxee’s fans say the free software allows them to give up their costly cable or satellite TV connection.

Some lawmakers have argued that a delay would only exacerbate the confusion about the transition to digital TV.

The troubled consumer electronics chain is the latest retailer to go out of business.

Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, is said to have met in New York earlier this week with Roy Bostock, Yahoo’s chairman.

Skout, a location-based social network similar to the likes of Loopt and BrightKite, has decided to take a new approach to mobile-based networking. In conjunction with the upcoming release of its first iPhone application, the site has decided to abandon its role as a standard social network, and is instead reinventing itself as one of the iPhone’s first location-based dating services.

CEO Christian Wiklund says that location-based functionality is increasingly becoming a commodity, and that networks are going to have to do something to differentiate themselves. While some of the larger networks do offer some features that involve flirting and meeting new people, Wiklund says that because these are only secondary features people will probably use them less.

The iPhone app is planned for release next week (you can see a preview of it below), and doesn’t seem to be too different from the apps we’ve seen from Loopt and BrightKite - it seems that the biggest difference will lie in the intent of its users.

To coincide with the new iPhone application, Skout will also be revamping its homepage to reflect its new goals. Fortunately Wiklund says that 83% of Skout’s 20,000 active users were using the network for dating and flirting already, so the switch shouldn’t be too jarring. The company has also brought on a set of new advisers to help guide its new position as a dating site, including match.com founder Gary Kremen.

I think that’s there’s a definite market for dating apps on the iPhone and other smart phones, but I question if there is demand for yet another dating network - many people already belong to established sites like Match.com and eHarmony, and won’t be eager to deal with yet another one. But if Skout can form partnerships with some of these established sites, offering either white-labeled application or importing their accounts into Skout, then it could do very well for itself (the site has already been in talks with some, but won’t say who).

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

The convergence of tech giants and social networking features continue. Just as rumors are swirling that MySpace is developing its own webmail service, both Google and Yahoo have rolled out new additions to their social networks or social network-like services.

The Google news is probably more interesting. It’s now possible to add contact info to Google Profiles, and to allow your contacts or contact groups to see that information in your profile. The new feature went live with little fanfare, but Google Operating System spotted it, and CNET’s Stephen Shankland notes that this contact info could help Google figure out who are the closer connections in your “social graph”. That could be important step of Google wants to turn Profiles into a real social network, rather than just isolated web pages. It could also be integrated with Gmail, to help you focus on the emails that matter to you most.

In fact, Yahoo Mail already allows you to use social connections to prioritize certain emails, as part of its broader effort to turn Yahoo into a social network. Speaking of Yahoo, its Open Social initiative now allows you to share your activity on other sites (such as reviews on Yelp or messages on micro-blogging site Twitter) with your social network in Yahoo. This is a necessary step if Yahoo wants to have a real social network, but it’s also hard to get excited, since pretty much every social site offers something similar, most notably FriendFeed. Heck, this was even a key feature in the rather underwhelming social network-style revamp of Windows Live that Microsoft announced in November.

VentureBeat editor Eric Eldon argues that social networks like MySpace have a much better chance with their email initiatives than companies like Google have with their social network efforts. I’m not entirely convinced that’s true — the rich integration of applications of flickr and WordPress into Yahoo Mail is promising. But I doubt either of today’s announcements are amazing enough to sway the doubters.

Dell is offering one of the largest-capacity solid-state drives to date in its XPS laptop line.

Here’s the latest action:

The Steve Jobs saga continues — Talk about the Apple chief executive and his health issues remain everywhere you look. Newsweek columnist Dan Lyons says the media’s coverage of Apple “bites.” As you might expect after their heated exchange the other day, Lyons focuses on CNBC’s Jim Goldman. Meanwhile, the blog which Goldman criticized for its reporting on Jobs’ failing health initially, Gizmodo, featured a profanity-laced post from its editorial director, Brian Lam, today. He’s not angry about Goldman in so much as he’s mad about the whole situation about the media covering Jobs’ health issues.

You know who else seems mad? Jobs himself. “Why don’t you guys leave me alone — why is this important?” Jobs told Bloomberg today. NetworkWorld lays out why Jobs health probably isn’t important from a legal perspective, while Valleywag’s Owen Thomas lays out why he thinks we all care so much about the issue.

Meanwhile, the stories continue. Various reports speculate that Jobs’ cancer may have returned, or that he could be considering a liver transplant. Beet.TV’s Andy Plesser talked with Lyons (the man formerly known as Fake Steve Jobs) about his thoughts on Apple coverage a few months ago, find that video below.

Circuit City razed — The consumer electronics chain will be liquidating all of its remaining stores. Some 30,000 employees face layoffs, reports Crave’s Erica Ogg. Remember when Blockbuster was trying to buy Circuit City last year? Yeah, that was hilarious.

Hulu apologizes — The online video site says it should have been more communicative before it took down episodes of the show It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia at the content owner’s request. Chief executive Jason Kilar wrote a message on Hulu explaining the mix up — well played.

Ballmer and Bostock meet in New York — Wonder what the chief executive of Microsoft and the chairman of Yahoo had to dicuss? Valleywag has more.

Google publishes the 100,000th Knol — The “accountable Wikipedia” has gotten hardly any buzz since it launched, but at least it’s apparently avoiding the new Google dead pool — at least for now. The Google Blog has more.

Samsung does a major reorg — The electronics maker will consolidate business operations into two divisions. Pay cuts will also be involved for execs, according to The New York Times.

Twitter now suggests users to follow — The service has launched the service under its “Find People” tab. It’s not nearly as good as Mr. Tweet’s service. Mashable has more.

iLike builds a new gadget for Friend Connect — Visitors to websites using it will not only be able to listen to songs on the site, but will be able to add their own. iLike’s blog has more.

Brightroll shares some video ad data (it’s not good) — Below find the data as sent by Brightroll:

We are seeing important trends in the following four areas:

• The Impact of the Q4 Market Downturn
• Video Ad Inventory Pricing (particularly as it compares to television rates)
• The Dominance of the Pre-Roll Ad Unit
• The Increase in Volume of Branded Content & Associated Ad Inventory

The Impact of the Q4 Market Downturn.

There have been numerous reports published about the state of online video advertising, with most focusing on the effects of the economic downturn. Although press worthy, most reports on online video advertising still project growth of 50% or more in 2009. Our internal metrics demonstrate strong Q4 growth and our pipeline suggests continued growth in Q1 across every category we track.   Perhaps these can help paint a more accurate picture of the state of the video ad industry and what 2009 will look like:

• BrightRoll Revenue Growth: Q408 vs. Q308 – up 12.1%
• BrightRoll Revenue Growth: Q408 vs. Q407 – up 171.8%
• BrightRoll Revenue Growth: 2008 vs. 2007 – up 327.2%

Video Ad Inventory Pricing (particularly as it compares to television rates).

Fundamentally, online video ad inventory has been (and continues to be) overpriced. As agencies’ video ad budgets have grown to millions of dollars, there has been significant pressure (and success) in pushing online video CPMs to converge with rates paid on television. As inventory volumes and ad budgets have increased, we saw continued CPM reduction in Q4, even for branded / broadcast quality video inventory, and expect this trend to continue throughout 2009.  We believe this is good for the category, as it will bring significantly more total dollars into the medium.

• BrightRoll Avg. Pre-roll CPM: Q408 vs. Q308 – down 12.5%
• BrightRoll Avg. Pre-roll CPM:  Q408 vs. Q407 – down 25.0%
• BrightRoll Avg. Pre-roll CPM:  2008 vs. 2007 – down 14.2%

The Growth and Overall Dominance of the Pre-Roll Ad Unit.

In Q4, we observed a continued trend of ad dollars being either initially allocated to the pre-roll ad unit or optimized to the pre-roll ad unit during the lifecycle of the campaign. The optimization to pre-roll is occurring because pre-roll tends to outperform on nearly every metric tracked by advertisers – duration viewed, click through rate, cost per view, brand lift and change in purchase intent.

• % of Campaign as Pre-roll:  Q408 – 83%
• % of Campaign as Pre-roll:  Q407 – 63%

The Increase in Volume of Broadcast Content & Associated Ad Inventory.

In contrast to industry lore, there is a plethora of unsold broadcast quality inventory in online video and the influx of additional content is occurring at an ever increasing rate. Since broadcast quality video inventory is most sought after inventory by media buyers today, and that broadcast inventory is over 50% unsold, we just announced a new product called BrightRoll Broadcast to allows brand-sensitive advertisers to capitalize on BrightRoll’s unparalleled network of branded content providers.

• Number of Broadcast Publishers in BrightRoll Network:  27
• Number of New Broadcast Publishers in Q4:  7

BrightRoll Broadcast Announcement - http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Brightroll-937109.html

Casual games are multiplying like weeds. But Heyzap can bring them to your web site via a widget that can be embedded on any web site.

With a few clicks, you can embed the code in a web site and thereby “gameify” it. Games are sticky. They’re engaging and are often a lot more fun than most business-oriented web sites. Heyzap’s notion is to embed a game on a site to keep visitors there for a longer time. It’s fairly democratic. Big brands could use it, but so could music fans who want a favorite flash game embedded on a MySpace page.

It’s a good deal for the game publishers and developer because it’s a way to distribute games to a far wider audience than they otherwise might reach. Heyzap takes a cut, the game developers or publishers get a cut, and so does Mochi Media, which embeds advertisements in the games.

So far, Heyzap has collected more than 4,000 games into a database and customers can embed any of those games into their site via an automated widget, or light web application. It can sort the games into sports or puzzle categories. By organizing the games, Heyzap says it is something like a YouTube of flash games. (Of course, Kongregate, which aggregates user-created games, already has that nickname).

Immad Akhund and Jude Gomila founded the San Francisco company. It has funding from Y Combinator. The company expects to look for money later. Developers can upload their games directly into the site. It will face some serious competition on the web from the likes of Wild Tangent, Oberon Media, Addicting Games, Games2Win, GameCurry, and the aforementioned Kongregate. NeoEdge does something similar with widgets, but NeoEdge focuses mainly on downloadable games.

Akhund previous founded Clickpass and sold that a couple of months ago to Synthasite. Here’s a sample widget below.

@import ‘http://www.heyzap.com/elightbox/lightbox.external.css’; heyzap.com - embed games

Another sizable jump in digital sales failed to make up for a deepening decline in the compact disc market.

Last week, Microsoft released the public beta of Windows 7, the successor to the much-maligned Vista operating system. After spending the past three days testing the system, I’m impressed. Windows 7 proves that the company from Redmond is in no mood to cede control over the desktop OS market. According to Net Applications, Microsoft’s OS market share dropped to a 15-year low of 89.62 percent last year, with the most gains coming from Apple’s OS X. Some believe that webtops (think Google) will soon kill stand-alone desktop operating systems, but I disagree. Microsoft’s overall OS user reach is so huge through hardware sales (a majority of the approximately 300 million Vista deployments are said to be from embedded systems) that an improved version that better integrates with the web will likely stem the desktop market slide. Google understands the advantage Microsoft has, which is why it’s trying to develop the same system for mobiles (as well as for portable cloud client computers) by developing Android.

Microsoft shouldn’t worry too much — at least for now. Windows 7 has UI features that are logical and is better optimized for lower-powered computers, like netbooks.

No, it’s not the full desktop-Internet hybrid that one would have expected, but it is made to take advantage of the Internet. Windows 7 improves web browsing by offering a better desktop experience. For example, your favorite sites (on IE8) can now be launched straight from the taskbar. It also removes bloatware like Windows Mail and Movie Maker in favor of web app versions hosted by Windows Live. This is a double bonus: It frees up a fast system to be used in the cheap netbooks bound to dominate hardware trends in the near future and gives users flexibility over their web choices. Kevin Tofel over at jkOnTheRun has already installed Windows 7 on his netbook.

Windows 7 vs. Windows Vista

Where Windows 7 focuses on improved everyday desktop navigation, Vista focused on the demands of powerful media-centered PCs with a system that eschewed ease of use in favor of powerful but hard-to-use features. And there were the annoying security pop-ups that required excessive proactive engagement on part of the computer users.

Windows 7 reduces those irritations. By only assigning memory tasks to windows you’re using, it hogs less power and memory. This makes it quick on systems with only 1GB of RAM — I booted the OS in less than a minute on two laptops and they had plenty of RAM left over to play multiple applications. This should allow Microsoft to ship it in netbooks without XP-downgrading embarrassments.

The fact that the UI has been remodeled for simple web apps also makes it versatile. A new wireless connections manager now displays all available networks with a single click on the taskbar. Before, it took three navigation screens to find them. The new taskbar does something similar. Traditionally, the bar was used to only keep track of open documents and apps, with text labels. Now, large icons are used to switch between docs and to launch apps, a version of the old alt-tab. This is a controversial change because multifunction apps can be confusing. But navigating through the icons is logical for the web — simply click on the IE8 icon, and each of your open tabs will hover above the bar for your choosing.

It’s also more efficient. To end the annoying pop-ups, there’s a User Account Control window that lets you choose their regularity. Finally, recently visited pages are constantly recommended for quick navigation, like when you right-click on Explorer.

But let’s not kid ourselves. Windows 7 is built on top of the same platform as Vista, it has much of the pointless visual Vista hallmarks (transparencies anyone?), and it’s not quite Linux-thin. But the changes are positive and should fend off the vultures circling in the cloud for a few more years.

As long as the price is competitive for businesses (a valid concern), many will finally see a reason to leave XP and move up in class, especially if their workers use a netbook.

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Ustream is anticipating Apple’s approval of the first non-jailbroken iPhone application that will let users record and broadcast live video from the device. Last month MobileCrunch obtained a picture of the application running on a test phone. Yesterday, co-founder John Ham demo’d the product for me here at TechCrunch - see the video below.

The application lets users broadcast live video from the phone, as well as read and participate in user comments.

Competitor Qik has had a similar application running on hacked phones since August 2008 (also here). Flixwagon has a similar application for jailbroken iPhones. But no one has gotten one through Apple’s approval process.

Here’s the video:

Note that this is a different application than we wrote about yesterday. Yesterday’s application allows people to watch Ustream videos on their iPhone (which is also really cool). This app lets people broadcast live video from their iPhone to the Internet.

The application is currently pending approval from Apple, and Ustream isn’t saying much about when that might be. But stay tuned, hopefully this is coming very soon.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

The successful crash-landing of crippled U.S. Airways flight 1549 yesterday by Captain C.B. “Sully” Sullenberger is one of the most uplifting stories of the new year — and social media sites have been part of the story. A Twitter user may have gotten the best picture immediately following the incident, and Twitter users haven’t stopped talking about it since. But more than a dozen Facebook groups and fan pages have also sprung up to adulate Sullenberger.

Facebook said there were 75,000 fans so far spread across the site, not counting the many other conversations that Facebook users are having about the incident within their profile pages and news feeds. This fan page, for example, has added around 7,000 fans in the last hour I’ve been watching it. Although that Sullenberger page is surely getting a boost because it’s the favorite page of Facebook’s own fan page (see above).

That’s not meta, that’s social media cross-promotion in action. Seriously, who’s not inspired by the story — after a flock of birds destroyed the plane’s engines, Sullenberger successfully navigated it to a crash-landing on the Hudson River, saving everyone on board. Cable television shows are talking about the story non-stop but users can’t do more than watch the anchors talk. Sites like Twitter and Facebook let them share their own feelings. In an era of corrupt politicians and small-minded business leaders, this display of heroism — and the conversations around it — helps bring everyone closer together. As Twitter user jimformation puts it: “If we all did our jobs as competently & professionally as Chesley B. Sullenberger III did, the economy wouldn’t been in the mess it is now.”

The pilot who successfully landed US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River earlier this week is garnering a cult-like following on the social network.

Why bother with the press release when you have Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr at hand and your target market is tech-savvy?

A second iPhone developer this week complains about app getting pirated, but this one is considering criminal charges.

The New York Times confirms a Valleywag report that the Microsoft CEO and Yahoo chairman met earlier this week in New York+.