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A consortium of investors led by The Walt Disney Company is currently engaged in advanced talks to invest in Bus Online, China’s leading in-bus digital media and advertising company, sources tell Reuters . The deal, which would provide Disney with a new platform to promote Mickey Mouse in China, is oddly said to involve Google, which is a minority investor in the consortium according to the news agency’s sources. The consortium reportedly planned to acquire a stake of between 30 and 40 percent in Bus Online for more than $100 million via a purchase of old and new shares to be issued by the company in private placements. Bus Online has raised approximately $80 million from VC firms and banks since 2004. Google was expected to take only a small stake in the Bus Online deal compared to Disney, but Reuters’ sources stressed that no agreement had been signed yet and senior Disney execs are planning a trip to Beijing to meet Chinese media regulators about its China plans first. Nevertheless, Google’s involvement in the negotiations is rather odd. The search and digital advertising giant recently took a stand against censorship in China, after having been hit with ‘highly sophisticated and targeted attack’ on its corporate infrastructure from the country. Google threatened to shut down its business operations in China if the government did not agree to…

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It looks like some major consolidation is about to go down in the Central European Internet market, and in particular Poland. According to local newspaper reports, the largest Internet group in the region, Naspers /MIH Group, is conducting due diligence of assets belonging to DST (Digital Sky Technology)-owned holding Forticom, including the “Facebook-of-Poland” Nasza-Klasa.pl which has 23 million users. Naspers/MIH Group and DST already together own the largest Russian online portal Mail.ru .

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Loopt continues to ramp up its focus on location-based deals. The pioneer of the mobile social network is launching a new app called LooptCard, which lets mobile consumers tap into offers, coupons and discounts by checking-in to spots. Today, Loopt is partnering with deals site Mobile Spinach to offer users deals and coupons for local merchants via the Loopt App. The deals are part advertising part coupon and will only be featured in San Francisco for now. Coupon site Mobile Spinach will offer dozens of deals exclusively to Loopt users and through their own site per week. For example, Blowfish Sushi, a Sushi restaurant in San Francisco, offers any signature roll for free which typically costs $10-$15 per roll. Loopt users show their phone message at the restaurant to receive these discounts. Loopt says it will be rolling out the offers in LA and New York in the coming months. The deals feature will be integrated into Loopt’s app in the same way that local content and reviews about restaurants, bars and events from Zagat, Citysearch and the Loopt community are featured in the app. Loopt’s COO Brian Knapp tells me that location-based …

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Vitamin D Video has officially gone out of beta and is now available in 1.0. The basic, single camera version of the software is available now for free while a two camera version costs $49 and unlimited cameras costs $199. The software watches a web-based camera - including many popular models from Linksys and D-Link - and records motion as it it happens, even alerting you when humans step into the frame. I’ve been using the beta for months now with a Linksys WVC54GCA and I consider the software an early warning system for the home. Since I work up in the attic I can’t always tell if I’m facing a friend or a foe at the front door so I rely on Vitamin D to ping whenever someone comes into the frame. Special motion sensing systems also pick up lights and other activity outside while the system can also email clips to a mailbox whenever an event occurs

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Social music player TuneWiki has raised an undisclosed amount of additional funding in a Series B round led by Motorola Ventures and joined by Intellect Capital Ventures, HillsVen Capital, Novel TMT and prior investor Benchmark Israel. Update: The Marker (in Hebrew) says the investment totals $7 million . TuneWiki says it will use the investment to expand its product offerings for mobile platforms and the Web. The company will continue to focus on the use of song lyrics in new ways that connect music fans with new products, including an upcoming mobile game. TuneWiki boasts apps for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and Nokia handsets. This is the second funding announcement for Motorola’s venture arm in a week – on Feb 2 the investor announced that it had injected extra capital into mobile barcode company Scanbuy . CrunchBase Information TuneWiki Motorola Ventures Information provided by CrunchBase

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On the heels of the EU’s approval of Oracle’s $7.4 billion deal to acquire Sun Microsystems, the tech giant has opened up the purse strings to acquire application management software provider AmberPoint. Terms of the deal were not disclosed and the acquisition is expected to close in the first half of this year. AmberPoint’s software helps organizations diagnose and resolve issues in application performance and business transactions, such as insurance claims processing or account provisioning where multiple applications need to work together. AmberPoint’s software will be folded into Oracle’s Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) offerings. Oracle says that the addition of AmberPoint’s software will help diagnose and manage the performance of business applications, provide monitoring for application performance and will enrich SOA design time with run-time metrics for SOA governance. CrunchBase Information Oracle Corporation Information provided by CrunchBase

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Trackle, the personalized web and realtime feed tracker, is going pro with the launch of premium tracking services aimed at marketing and PR professionals looking to track mentions of clients across the web. Trackle.com’s web service lets users create personalized RSS feeds for data such as the latest crime in a user’s neighborhood, fluctuating airline ticket prices, updated job listings, sports scores and more. On Trackle, marketing, PR and sales professionals can set up realtime tracking alerts for key words to track press coverage and mentions across Tweets, blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn and the web. The initial service will allow users to enable “Trackles” for a select number of keyword categories, including company, person, brand, SEC filings; website changes and LinkedIn updates. Trackle will email and SMS alerts for mentions and even provide users with graphs and charts detailing results. The service is available for $9.99 per month. Trackle, which launched a year ago, recently became more social by allowing you search and follow other users’ Trackles by keyword. The search platform also lets users filter the sources by credibility, social network…

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AMEE , the US/UK-based startup that aims to build the largest engine for computing greenhouse gas emissions, has secured a $5.5m series B financing lead by Amadeus Capital Partners alongside existing investors, including O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Union Square Ventures. AMEE will use the funding to expand its geographic reach and platform. The prize AMEE is aiming for, known in the sector as “enterprise carbon management”, is expected to reach $4 billion by 2017 because of government and consumer pressure to address climate change. AMEE’s engine is now being used by companies offering carbon accounting or business intelligence software, as well as governments, multi-nationals and SMEs.

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A decade ago most of us were using AltaVista or something similar for search. No one was really complaining very much about the huge amount of spam and other noise that cluttered the results because we didn’t know there was a better way. Then Google came along with Page Rank, and had a profound effect on the quality of Internet search. Suddenly (and it really was that sudden), we couldn’t imagine going back to AltaVista and searching pages of results for the thing that Google gave us immediately. For a good history of search, get John Battelle’s book The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture. The online social landscape today sort of feels to me like search did in 1999. It’s a mess, but we don’t complain much about it because we don’t know there’s a better way. Everything is decentralized, and no one is working to centralize stuff. I’ve got photos on Flickr, Posterous and Facebook (and even a few on MySpace), reviews on Yelp (but movie reviews on Flixster), location on Foursquare, Loopt …

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Wikia , a for-profit group of user generated wiki sites that was founded by Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales in 2004, is now a profitable company. CEO Gil Penchina says the company’s revenues grew 4x in 2009 while they kept costs in check. Late last year the company reported strong financial results, but hadn’t yet reached true profitability. He won’t disclose what revenues are, but the company currently has 40 employees and has open spots for a dozen more, he says (although I only count eight positions on their jobs page ). Wikia sites attracted about 21 million unique worldwide visitors in December (Comscore), and those visitors racked up over 2.7 billion page views. The company attracts around 8 million U.S. visitors monthly, they say. The site makes money on ads surrounding content. They have a direct sales team and also pull ads from networks and Google. Their largest site is lyrics.wikia.com , with over a million lyrics pages. answers.wikia.com , which launched a year ago, has 600,000 user generated questions and a million monthly visitors. A couple of months later the company ended its attempt to build a search engine that could challenge Google. The company has raised $14 million over two venture rounds. CrunchBase Information Wikia Information provided by CrunchBase

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Today, the blog Chromium Notes , which is written by a developer who works on the open source project (that Google Chrome is built on top of), posted a very interesting graph: one that shows the number of code commits to WebKit . Notably, it appears that Google has overtaken Apple as the organization that contributes the most commits to the open source project. Now, the author is quick to point out the caveats of the graph (and does so for four paragraphs), and notes that he was hesitant to even publish it because of how easy it is to misinterpret. The graph, while it shows commits, doesn’t weigh more important ones versus less important ones. Nor does it in any way measure the ways in which companies or individuals contribute to WebKit in other meaningful ways. That said, it does clearly show that in late 2009, Google surpassed Apple as the company that now contributes the most (again, in terms of commits) to the project. WebKit is the open source web browser engine that both Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome browsers (among others) are built on top of. As such, it should be obvious why both are so heavily involved in the project (others on the graph include Nokia and BlackBerry maker RIM). The graph ranges from 2007 to the present. According to it, on November 15, 2009 Google surpassed Apple in number …

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Linus Torvalds , the inventor of the Linux kernel, has an absolute disdain for mobile phones. All of the ones he has purchased in the past, the man writes on his personal blog, ended up being “mostly used for playing Galaga and Solitaire on long flights” even though they were naturally all phones run on open source operating systems. Things have changed now, he adds, now that he has caved and bought Google’s Nexus One a couple of days ago. Torvalds has owned a number of phones before, including Google’s G1 device and ‘one of the early China-only Motorola Linux phones’, but it took for Google to add multi-touch capabilities to the Nexus One before he finally broke down and bought one from the company’s web store. And he’s loving it: But I have to admit, the Nexus One is a winner. I wasn’t enthusiastic about buying a phone on the internet sight unseen, but the day it was reported that it finally had the pinch-to-zoom thing enabled, I decided to take the plunge. I’ve wanted …

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This time last week I rattled off the world’s laziest column . I was struggling against my book deadline which expired 24 hours later and I simply didn’t have time to write anything else. This week should have been different; I should have finished the book days ago and now be sitting on a beach in the Caribbean, sipping a Diet Coke martini and lazily writing a long, well-thought-out column about some vital issue of the day. Why it’s inadvisable to write a mea culpa in the passive voice (otherwise it’s just a ‘culpa’). Something like that. And yet, and yet – the fact that, seven days later, I’m still sitting at my desk and I still haven’t delivered the manuscript to my publisher, should give a hint to how perilous things are right now. I’m Wile E. Coyote about five seconds after he looks down and realises he’s overshot the cliff. And yet despite my urge to sack off this week’s column and focus on lessening the size of crater I’m …

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“People in technology businesses are drawn to places known for diversity of thought and open-mindedness”, is what Professor Richard Florida concluded after studying the growth and success of 50 metropolitan areas in the U.S. The most successful regions were those with the most gays, bohemians, and immigrants. These groups flourish in Silicon Valley, and its diversity has undoubtedly provided it with great advantage. But after attending the recent Crunchies Awards , I realized that something important is still missing — women entrepreneurs.  I was shocked that the only woman CEO on stage during the entire event was TechCrunch’s own Heather Harde. Nearly all the companies that competed in the event (other than the PR firms) had males at the helm. This dearth may be one of the reasons for which the Venture Capital community is in such sharp decline, and why the Valley isn’t achieving even more success. An analysis of Dunn and Bradstreet data shows that of the 237,843 firms founded in 2004, only 19% had women as primary owners. And only 3% of tech firms and 1% of high-tech firms (as in Silicon Valley) were founded by women. Look at the executive teams of any of the Valley’s tech firms – minus a couple of exceptions like Padmasree Warrior of Cisco, you won’t find any…

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There’s a certain irony that TechCrunch’s in-house satirist Paul Carr is currently slaving over the sequel to his book about his failure to launch a startup. Fridaycities was to be a site which allowed anyone to swap information in real time about London, and eventually other cities. The site failed, Paul wrote his book (and a few other things, let’s admit) and the rest is history, including our little run in , thankfully. If only he’d done it in the era of Facebook rise into the mainstream. Because today, two weeks after launching, the Secret London Facebook group has 182,010 members and counting and is poised to propel it’s 21 year old creator into her first startup. Bristol university graduate Tiffany Philippou originally set up the group in response to a competition from ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi to win a mere summer internship. However, it seems unlikely that Tiffany will be too bothered. There’s now a holding page and Twitter account ( @secret_london ) as Secret London morphs into a full-blown startup.

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