Germany-based myON-ID Media has raised an undisclosed seven-figure sum in a second round of funding from T-Online Venture Fund to expand its online reputation management platform. MyON-ID is actually more of a combination between a people search engine and an alert service for keywords mentioned across the web.

I quicky tried out searching my own name on the English version of the search application, and the results were a bit messy to say the least. From what I understand, all the engine does is perform a meta search on services like Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, LinkedIn etc. along with traditional and blog search engines like Technorati. MyON-ID aims to make money from offering a premium version.

Two years ago, when social networking was all the rage, a lot of dedicated community websites for specific (and often very small) groups of people were launched by entrepreneurs trying to cash in on the hype by carving out a certain niche. The strategy proved successful for some, but for others … not so much. And now that the economic crisis is weighing down on the entire industry, with advertisers cutting their overall budgets and the online spend decreasing rapidly, the wheat is getting separated from the chaff faster than expected.

One niche social network shutting down is Sneakerplay, an online community targeted at people who love their sneakers so much they need their own special place on the net to talk about them and share pictures of their favorite shoes with each other. That was the idea. But guess what? People don’t love their sneakers enough to bond with other people over them on an ongoing basis. At least not enough people to build an actual business around it.

As we speculated last month, Facebook is about to hand over its official classifieds listings to a partner, and that partner is Oodle, we have been able to confirm. An announcement may be made as early as tomorrow.

What is interesting about this deal is that Oodle already powers the classifieds on MySpace. Even though Facebook and MySpace are archrivals, this makes sense because in classifieds scale matters. The more listings and the more people seeing those listings, the better.

Today, Microsoft is rolling out some of the sweeping changes to Windows Live it announced two weeks ago. Windows Live seems to be gradually replacing MSN as Microsoft’s central hub for everything you do on the Web.

The new home page shows both your email and an activity stream of what your contacts are doing across the Web. It’s more FriendFeed than Facebook, with a little MyYahoo thrown in. You can also customize it to show the local weather, your calendar, and news headlines. A handful of recent your photos are displayed at the top, along with a search box and links to other Live services (Profile, People, Mail, Photos, Events, Spaces, Groups, SkyDrive, and even MSN).

Songbird, the open-source, media focused web browser, has launched its 1.0 milestone release to the public. The browser, which we’ve covered extensively since it was first announced back in 2005, offers a number of features that make it an appealing alternative to music players like iTunes, including a feature called mashTape will automatically cull the internet for relevant content for each song you play, using sources like YouTube and Flickr. The app also includes integrated support for Last.fm, concert ticket purchases, and add-ons to further enhance the browser.

In practice the browser works well (not much of the interface seems to have changed since the .7 release that I covered in August). Since .7, most of the changes have been under the hood, enhancing music playback and performance along with a few minor tweaks (for example, users can now use keyboard shortcuts).

It was only a matter of time before a location tracking app found its way into laptop security software. Laptop Cop, which lets you remotely control your computer and delete files if it is stolen, now has a geo-location feature based on WiFi-hotspot triangulation technology from Skyhook Wireless. It is the same technology that is used in the iPhone (along with GPS and cell-tower triangulation) to determine your location for geo-aware apps. Now you can tell the cops exactly what door to knock on, more or less.

Laptop Cop costs $50. It does come with those other features as well. But if you want the same Lojack service for your laptop without paying, you can download MyLoki for free.

We at TechCrunch expect a rapid expansion of the market for mobile social networks. And with the iPhone’s success as one of the main catalysts of the development, services like Facebook Mobile, MySpace Mobile, Loopt (which even offers a TechCrunch-branded version), aka-aki, and others keep cropping up.

One of the most recent social mobile networks catching our attention, MobaMingle, comes from Japan. MobaMingle is the internationalized version of Mobage-town, one of Japan’s biggest mobile social networks. The premise behind MobaMingle is to blend elements of virtual worlds, social networking, gaming and mobile blogging into one integrated concept.

I’m not a vindictive man. I believe in sweetness and light. But I would encourage anyone with a brain who travels, especially in these trying economic times, to buy an unlocked GSM phone and purchase pay as you go SIM cards or a MaxRoam SIM and a Rebel SIMCard for the iPhone 3G. I also encourage you to use Boingo for Wi-Fi roaming in airports and, increasingly, cities. Why? Because I just paid the equivalent to a flight to Paris and back just because I wanted to use Google Maps on the iPhone 3G to find my way around gay Pareee.

Note that I understood the costs involved in roaming, but I think it’s worth a post to warn business travellers of potential pitfalls and to call out a few good services I’ve used over the year (MaxRoam, Boingo) but, for various reasons, weren’t able to help me on this trip.

Apparently some sort of relatively aggressive virus is affecting certain embedded YouTube videos. Some are saying it affects IE and Firefox users, while others say it’s only going after IE. The virus is called Actns/Swif.T and seems to contain a redirect to a phishing website embedded within a SWF file.

The site apparently installs Antivirus 2009, which is malware. Be careful because this one appears to have just broken out today. If you find yourself being automatically redirected or experience other weird pop-ups, especially for something called Antivirus 2009, don’t click on anything.

[UPDATE: Spoke with Google/YouTube and apparently anti-spyware software from Computer Associates had been returning false positives, identifying certain files contained within YouTube embed codes as malware. The specific YouTube issue is apparently being corrected by Computer Associates and wasn’t actually harmful in the first place. If you’ve got CA software, you might want to check for any updates.]

YouTube is trying to clean up its act by cracking down on sexually explicit videos that are just short of porn and spam videos with misleading titles and descriptions. (Porn has always been grounds for removal). On its most visited pages, YouTube will now apply a “stricter standard for mature content” and demote sexually explicit or graphic videos from its “most viewed,” “top favorited,” and other popular pages. Also, thumbnails will now be algorithmically selected.

These new standards are not just about YouTube trying to class itself up. The more it polices itself, the less likely that Congress or the FCC will try to police it in the future. (For the FCC, its jurisdiction would probably be limited to mobile devices that access the Web over cellular networks).

But the bigger consideration may simply be to get rid of what amount to spam videos taking over YouTube. If you are looking for puppy videos, you are probably not looking for a video with a lady in lingerie and bunny ears that is actually an ad for a porn site. (Or maybe you are, but in that case you should be searching for “lady bunny”). This is a real example, but I’m not going to link to it.

Last week, Danish Computerworld awarded IT Factory, a provider of CRM, HRM and Business Intelligence add-on solutions based on a SaaS delivery model, with the prestigious “Denmark’s Best IT-company 2008″. This week, the company has been declared bankrupt and its managing director Stein Bagger is reported missing in Dubai while under scrutiny by the police and Interpol.

The remarkable story is all over the Danish press but has remained largely unnoticed outside of the country so far.

Introducing the Nokia N97, the next generation high-end mobile phone from Nokia. Described by Nokia folks as a “handheld computer” this device is a pretty comfortable high-end phone. It has a tilting (resistive) touch-screen display, and is the first N-series phone with a QWERTY keyboard. It has 32 gigabytes of memory, expandable to 42 GB via 16 GB memory card. It has a digital compass, a 1500 milliamp battery, and DVD quality video capture. It’s extremely comfortable to hold, easy to use, and represents a solid solid evolution of the Nokia smarthphone line.

Animoto, the impressive startup that automatically generates high quality music videos from a set of photos, has unveiled a new feature for the holiday season that will allow users to append any of their videos with a holiday intro/outro movie and a snow-themed backdrop, making for a perfect holiday eGreeting. To activate the special holiday look, just click on the ‘Santa’ button beneath any video. Of course, you’ll have to come up with photos suitable for the holiday season yourself - Animoto will just make them look festive.

How-to site 5min is expanding beyond its roots as a video portal and has launched a syndication network for its videos called VideoSeed, which uses semantic matching to deliver relevant clips to participating sites. The platform matches keywords found on syndication partner pages and pairs them up with videos in the 5min database according to title and tag information (along with relevant ads to go with the video). Clips are all played in 5min’s specialized video player, which it launched earlier this year.

YouTube sure has come a long way since launching in 2005 and being acquired by Google within a year for $1.65 billion. The company has today announced a collaborative project with a bunch of classical music institutions and artists in the context of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra program, and I think it’s awesome.

Starting today until January 28, 2009, musicians are invited to submit two videos: a personal interpretation of an original Tan Dun composition, written specifically for this program, and a talent video designed to demonstrate their musical and technical abilities. The semi-finalists will be selected by an impressive panel made up of members from the London Symphony Orchestra, Berlin Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, Sydney Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic and other orchestras from around the globe.

If you thought Randall Stross’ attack on Tesla yesterday was in poor taste, wait until you read what Michael Wolff has to say about MySpace. In a dinner interview with BusinessWeek columnist Jon Fine, Wolff says:

…if you’re on MySpace now, you’re a [expletive] cretin. And you’re not only a [expletive] cretin, but you’re poor. Nobody who has beyond an 8th grade level of education is on MySpace. It is for backwards people.

That’s just part of a much longer interview in which Wolff goes into detail on exactly why he thinks MySpace will go the way of AOL. He also makes some blatantly incorrect statements, such as “All of the growth now in MySpace is international,” which is incorrect. In the last year MySpace has grown about 10% in the U.S., adding 7.5 million monthly unique users to a total of 76.4 million. Non-U.S. users have grown from 45 million to 54 million, a 17% increase. (source: Comscore)

Apparently at least some Australians aren’t happy with a PayPal advertisements that include legendary Aborigine David Unaipon with a motorcycle police helmet added on to suggest PayPal has heightened security. The ads, which are on the sides of buses in Australia, says the Sydney Morning Herald, are disrespectful and degrading according to Unaipon’s relatives.

The ads also apparently feature other bills as well. And PayPal, instead of just not commenting or removing those specific ads, makes a mess of it. “PayPal spokeswoman Kelly Stevens said the ads were “perfectly legal”" - which doesn’t really address the issue.

Best quote from the article: “It is very disrespectful because for a start no Aboriginal people have a helmet - we’re not bikies and we’re not Vikings.”

uTest, the crowdsourcing QA startup that lets companies rely on external developers to help them identify bugs, has closed a $5 million Series B funding round led by Longworth Venture Partners and Egan-Managed Capital, along with existing investors Mesco Ltd. and Massachusetts Technology Development Corp. The new round brings the startup’s total funding to around $7.8 million after a $2.3 million Series A round last year and some early seed funding.

The site offers customers a web based platform and tools for monitoring testing and QA cycles, which are available to them free of charge (they only pay for the testing completed by the crowdsourced community). Community members are paid depending on the number and type of bugs they find, and the marketprice for bug finds fluctuates depending on the number of bugs left to find, the demand for testers, and other criteria. Since launching in Febuary, the uTest community has grown to 11,000 users.

Accoona, the highly suspect New Jersey based search/electronics retailer, has suffered what might be its final disgrace - the closure of its last business, Twing.

The company, which offered a search product, has a rich history. Founder Marc Armand Rousso has a shady past involving stock fraud, and former President Bill Clinton was a spokesperson for the company.

Most of Accoona’s $137 million/year in revenue came from distributing electronics after buying a number of retailers in Brooklyn. In 2007 they canceled a planned IPO. The reason? The underwriter pulled the plug, saying “After completing our due diligence review, we have chosen to disassociate ourselves with the company.”