TechCrunch reported that a group of venture capital and private equity firms are joining forces in an effort to acquire Skype, a software application and service that enables video and voice calls, instant messaging and file sharing.

In 2005, eBay purchased Skype, but made a huge mistake in the terms of the deal by failing to acquire ownership of the software that defines Skype.  Instead, eBay licensed the software from Joltid Limited, a company owned by Skype’s founders.  This mistake continues to haunt eBay, who now finds itself in a legal battle over the software licensing, which I covered earlier this month.

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RIM’s BlackBerry continues to grow market share in spite of iPhone’s success.  While some say RIM has multiple BlackBerry models competing against a single iPhone model, the BlackBerry Curve outsold the iPhone by itself in the first quarter of 2009.

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AT&T announced today that Visual Voicemail is now available to BlackBerry Bold customers.  The new Visual Voicemail feature will allow users to selectively handle their voicemail messages in a manner similar to an e-mail inbox.

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Twitter has been one of the biggest internet crazes of the past year.  Twitter was created in 2006, but its biggest growth spurt started near the end of 2008.  Although their growth is strong, the number of new visitors that Twitter retains is fairly low.  Further, in using the CB radio analogy to describe Twitter, there is a great deal of static over the air waves.

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Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca is the first race track to be included in the Street View feature of Google Maps.  The filming for Street View took place at the American Le Mans Series (ALMS) 2008 season finale.

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Trillian Astra, the multi-protocol instant messaging client, was officially released by Cerulean Studios.  Astra is available as a free download and is also upgradable to a pro version which includes more features.  The full announcement is available at the Trillian Blog.

Astra’s release came at a perfect time.  We reported just a few weeks ago that Astra was voted “Best Instant Messenger” in a poll conducted by Lifehacker.  Also, Digsby, an Astra competitor, was slammed in the media just days ago for utilizing their users’ computer resources in distributed computing projects with this fact buried deep in their license agreement.  Digsby has taken steps to remedy this situation, but trust is sometimes hard to regain.

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Facebook announced that they have agreed to acquire FriendFeed, but the terms of the agreement were not released.  It appears the twelve member FriendFeed team will join Facebook, but Facebook’s press release indicates that their long term plan for FriendFeed product has not yet been made.

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The New York Times reported back in May that the Federal Trade Commission was investigating the violation of antitrust laws related to Apple and Google sharing two board members on their boards of directors.  Apple may have crossed another line by creating a software monopoly for the iPhone.  This issue has yet to catch the attention of the Federal Trade Commission.

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A security breach at Network Solutions has exposed credit card transactions for more than a half million cardholders.  Malicious software found on their E-Commerce servers transferred transaction and credit card information to servers outside of the company’s control.  Network Solutions resolved this breach began notifying their merchant customers on July 24, 2009.

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Mozilla has released Firefox 3.5.2.  According to the release notes, this update to the internet browser addresses approximately seventy issues including four that are security related.  The complete list of changes can be found here.

Firefox 3.5 has already been updated twice since its June 30^th release date.  It was a stable product when released and continues to pick up momentum.  The Mozilla Blog announced the one billionth download of Firefox since it was originally released in November 2004.

With efforts already underway for versions 3.7 and 4.0, it is no wonder that Firefox continues to gain popularity among internet browsers.