In 2006, former Yahoo employee Thyagarajapuram S. Ramakrishnan was working for Facebook when he filed a patent for the news feed. Today in a sweet piece of irony, Facebook is using that same patent to sue Yahoo. Facebook claims that Yahoo’s Flickr Photostream and Activity Feeds infringe on “Generating a Feed of Stories Personalized for Members of a Social Network”.

This U.S. Patent 7,827,208 for “generating dynamic relationship-based content personalized for members of a web-based social network [with] weighting by affinity” and nine others could help Facebook escape a costly settlement over the original patent lawsuit Yahoo’s filed against it last month. See kids, trolling doesn’t always pay.

Rumblefish, a service where consumers and businesses can easily license music for their online videos, says that its catalog now has more than 1 million songs, making it the largest licensing catalog of pre-cleared music.

The idea is pretty simple: When you’re posting a video on a site like YouTube, you might want to flesh it out by adding a soundtrack. However, most people don’t have any idea how to license music legally, and even if they do, they probably don’t have the money to pay for their favorite hits. So Rumblefish makes it easy to license music at affordable rates. On its site Friendly Music (which launched last year), you can search for songs based on things like mood, see how the song looks when played with the YouTube video of your choice. When you’ve found what you’re looking for, you can instantly create a “Mash” with the synced up video, or download the song to edit into the video yourself. The licensing fees start at 99 cents.

Rumblefish, a service where consumers and businesses can easily license music for their online videos, says that its catalog now has more than 1 million songs, making it the largest licensing catalog of pre-cleared music.

The idea is pretty simple: When you’re posting a video on a site like YouTube, you might want to flesh it out by adding a soundtrack. However, most people don’t have any idea how to license music legally, and even if they do, they probably don’t have the money to pay for their favorite hits. So Rumblefish makes it easy to license music at affordable rates. On its site Friendly Music (which launched last year), you can search for songs based on things like mood, see how the song looks when played with the YouTube video of your choice. When you’ve found what you’re looking for, you can instantly create a “Mash” with the synced up video, or download the song to edit into the video yourself. The licensing fees start at 99 cents.

Rumblefish, a service where consumers and businesses can easily license music for their online videos, says that its catalog now has more than 1 million songs, making it the largest licensing catalog of pre-cleared music.

The idea is pretty simple: When you’re posting a video on a site like YouTube, you might want to flesh it out by adding a soundtrack. However, most people don’t have any idea how to license music legally, and even if they do, they probably don’t have the money to pay for their favorite hits. So Rumblefish makes it easy to license music at affordable rates. On its site Friendly Music (which launched last year), you can search for songs based on things like mood, see how the song looks when played with the YouTube video of your choice. When you’ve found what you’re looking for, you can instantly create a “Mash” with the synced up video, or download the song to edit into the video yourself. The licensing fees start at 99 cents.

If you’re familiar with Jonathan Heiliger’s work, it’s probably because you used Facebook sometime in the last five years. He was the person in charge of keeping the site online as it grew from 35 million to more than 800 million users. Or, maybe you’ve encountered his efforts over the past decade and half when you logged online — because he helped build some of the core technologies and businesses that ran sites like Yahoo, starting fresh out of high school in the 90s.

Next time you hear about him, it might also be because of the next hot company that blows up in Silicon Valley. But this time he’ll be one of its investors. He’s joining North Bridge Venture Partners today, a firm that has quietly distinguished itself by focusing on infrastructure and enterprise startups over the last two decades.

Sexism and racism in Silicon Valley. It’s a debate that doesn’t seem to want to die. On one side are those who believe that Silicon Valley is a genuine meritocracy; on the other, are those who are deeply troubled by the self-evident lack of female and/or black start-up entrepreneurs. And one of the most vocal members of the latter group is the multi-affiliated academic, Vivek Wadhwa, who isn’t shy to take on what he calls the “white boy’s club” in Silicon Valley. But Wadhwa, who spent his first career as a start-up entrepreneur, is no enemy of Silicon Valley. “It’s an amazing place,” he told me when we met last week at The Economist‘s Innovation conference in Berkeley. But what troubles Wadhwa are the smattering of sexists and racists at large venture capitalist firms who, he says, kill the deals that fund minority-led startups. These “arrogant people who think they are gods,” he told me, they are the bigots who are undermining the meritocratic foundations of Silicon Valley.

Last week, our writer Devin Coldewey wrote a 3,000-word essay on Google+. It got 114 comments. Comment numbers are a wildly inaccurate metric for popularity in general – some posts get 100 comments because they’re poorly written, sensationalistic, and/or just strike a nerve – but in this case 114 is a good number for a long piece on a relatively boring subject. On the same day we posted a video filmed inside Dropbox HQ with a 298-word post attached and a post about 99dresses that topped out at 501 words. Those got 18 and 41 comments, respectively. I could probably dig into our metrics, but you could argue that all three of those posts were interesting to our audience and that, on a comment-per-word basis, Devin had to write 26 words to get one comment while the Dropbox post needed 18 words per comment. The 99dresses post had 12 words per comment. It’s inexact science, to be sure, but bear with me.

Though the health industry has, in many respects, been slow to adopt new web and mobile technologies, it seems we may finally have reached a tipping point. This is perhaps best demonstrated by Manhattan Research’s report, which found that 72 percent of physicians owned a smartphone in 2011, with adoption potentially reaching 85 percent by the end of this year. With doctors increasingly carrying smartphones and tablets at the point of care, Borna Safabakhsh says that he is confident that the timing is right for medicine to finally take advantage of the breakthroughs in web and mobile technologies.

Safabakhsh is the co-founder and CEO of Agile Diagnosis, a Y Combinator and Rock Health-incubated startup, which is today launching a beta web and mobile platform that aims to help doctors better diagnose their patients.

Though the health industry has, in many respects, been slow to adopt new web and mobile technologies, it seems we may finally have reached a tipping point. This is perhaps best demonstrated by Manhattan Research’s report, which found that 72 percent of physicians owned a smartphone in 2011, with adoption potentially reaching 85 percent by the end of this year. With doctors increasingly carrying smartphones and tablets at the point of care, Borna Safabakhsh says that he is confident that the timing is right for medicine to finally take advantage of the breakthroughs in web and mobile technologies.

Safabakhsh is the co-founder and CEO of Agile Diagnosis, a Y Combinator and Rock Health-incubated startup, which is today launching a beta web and mobile platform that aims to help doctors better diagnose their patients.

Morning guys! It’s going to be a bright, bright, bright sunshine-y day for Android users, namely because photo-sharing darling Instagram is now available in the Android Market. If you want to hurry up and try it out without having to read the rest of this (it’s that intuitive), you can download the app here. And go ahead and skip to Paragraph 7 if you already use Instagram on iOS, and don’t want to have to sit through a n00b explainer.