In This Update:

• Authorities Shut Down Spam Ring
• Evenful Raises $10 Million Series C Funding
• Motorola Introduces Touchscreen Phone
• Ross Levinsohn and Ted Meisel Put $3.5 Million Into FatTail for Ad Optimization
• Amie Street Sheds Its Barebones Look, Gets Professional with Site Redesign
• Nvidia Launches New Chip Sets in Broadside at Intel
• First New York Times API is Live
• Ad Firm Tracks Consumers Across Media
• Meet FanSnap, Search Engine for Live Event Tickets
• Content Provider Booyah Raises $4.5 Million from Kleiner Perkins

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Authorities Shut Down Spam Ring
NEW YORK TIMES
The Federal Trade Commission won a preliminary legal victory against what it called one of the largest spam gangs on the Internet, persuading a federal court in Chicago on Tuesday to freeze the group’s assets and order the spam network to shut down. The group, which used several names but was known among spam-fighting organizations as HerbalKing, sent billions of unsolicited messages to Internet users over the last 20 months, promoting replica watches and a variety of pharmaceuticals, including weight-loss drugs and herbal pills that supposedly enhanced the male anatomy, according to the commission.
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Evenful Raises $10 Million Series C Funding
CENTERNETWORKS
Local events service Eventful has announced that they have raised $10 million in a series C round of funding today. The funding came from lead investor Telefónica and existing investors, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Bay Partners. Chris Morrison at VentureBeat takes a look at Eventful and their partnership with Ticketmaster. Chris notes, “Eventful will be able to sell Ticketmaster stubs through its website. There’s no indication of what sort of cut Eventful will get, but the two companies are also agreeing to a co-advertising deal that should give them both access to a larger audience.”
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Motorola Introduces Touchscreen Phone
REUTERS
Motorola Inc, the world’s third-biggest phone maker, unveiled a touch-sensitive phone to be sold by Verizon Wireless, as both companies look to compete with Apple Inc’s iPhone. Motorola, which has been losing ground in the cell phone market as it has failed to come up with a hit phone to replace its once-lauded Razr, said the Krave ZN4 would go on sale on Tuesday for $149.99 after rebates to customers who sign a two-year contract with Verizon Wireless.
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Ross Levinsohn and Ted Meisel Put $3.5 Million Into FatTail for Ad Optimization
TECHCRUNCH
There’s always money in helping Websites make more money. FatTail tries to do that with its ad optimization software that tells Web publishers which ads and ad networks, in what combination, will give them the most ad dollars. The Southern California company, started in 2001 by math geeks who previously built a financial derivatives exchange, has bootstrapped itself until now.
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Amie Street Sheds Its Barebones Look, Gets Professional with Site Redesign
TECHRUNCH
Amie Street , the music store that sells songs on a sliding price scale based on how popular they are, has launched a totally revamped website and new features including a new music player and an enhanced recommendation system. We’ve been big fans since first hearing about them in 2006. Despite Amie Street’s growing popularity, especially in the indie music scene, the site has long had a somewhat barebones or even amateurish look that was functional but not very visually appealing. The new site is much more professional, with a rotating ‘featured’ panel prominently displaying new releases and promotions, and more intuitive overall design.
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Nvidia Launches New Chip Sets in Broadside at Intel
VENTUREBEAT
Nvidia is launching a chip set for low-end computers in a shot at Intel. In a familiar battle, Nvidia argues that low-end computers will function much better if users spend more on graphics and less on Intel processors.In low-end computers and laptops, there is no stand-alone graphics chip. Rather, graphics is integrated into the chip set, a two-chip solution that is mounted directly on a computer’s main board, or motherboard.
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First New York Times API is Live
READ WRITE WEB
The much-anticipated first Application Programming Interface (API) from the New York Times went live today, according to a post on the company’s blog Open – All the code that’s fit to printf(). First up is a campaign finance data API and next is a movie review API. Also available is a database management program initially developed for internal use at the NY Times.The Times quietly announced in May that it would soon be publishing APIs, which are means by which outside developers can access NY Times data for use in other applications, interfaces and mashups.
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Ad Firm Tracks Consumers Across Media
WALL STREET JOURNAL
A small media research company called Integrated Media Measurement is trying to bridge that research gap with a new technology that measures consumers’ exposure to the audio in ads on television, radio, computers, mobile phones, DVDs and inside a movie theatre — using a consumer’s cellphone.
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Meet FanSnap, Search Engine for Live Event Tickets
GIGAOM
FanSnap is a vertical search engine for live event tickets – everything from sports to concert tickets to theatre tickets. Just like Zillow helps consumers sift through real estate listings across the web by offering meta search results in a markedly user experience than a typical all-purpose search engine, FanSnap finds listings of tickets that are on sale.The company, which will launch its beta service tomorrow, lists chief executive officer Mike Janes as its co-founder. Janes in past life worked for FedEx and Apple and most recently was chief marketing officer at StubHub, an online ticket reseller that was acquired by eBay in January 2007 for $310 million, Mark Towfiq, former CTO of Flock, Rishi Garg (VP of Biz Dev) and Payne are other co-founders of this company.
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Content Provider Booyah Raises $4.5 Million from Kleiner Perkins
VENTUREBEAT
Mobile and web content producer Booyah announced today that it received $4.5 million from Kleiner Perkins. The two seem like a good match, considering the company’s job listings for iPhone engineers and the investor’s special iPhone developers fund. The Silicon Valley-based startup remains in stealth mode, and KP is its only named backer so far.
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