Nokia is determined to compete with Apple at every level – even in sending the authorities to strong-arm journalists . In a slightly creepy post titled “one of our children is missing,” the cell phone giant has accused Russian blogger, Eldar Murtazin of stealing a prototype of its newest handset. The company also claims that Murtazin is refusing to respond to their letters and calls and so has had no alternative but to report him to the Russian authorities.

The Onion has done it again. The satirical news outlet is generally great at parodying a wide range of topics — but they always seem to be especially good at parodying Apple topics. The latest victim?

Last year, Y Combinator held a special event called AngelConf , where it invited dozens of prospective angel investors to get advice from some of Silicon Valley’s most seasoned veterans.

Yahoo just added another former Microsoft executive to its ranks. Bill Shaughnessy , who left Microsoft in during a shakeup in 2008, will join as a senior vice president of product management, reporting to chief product officer Blake Irving , another former Microsoftie who joined last spring . Shaughnessy was a global VP of sales at Microsoft

Foursquare is growing quickly , gaining momentum from mainstream deals , and now they have the money in the bank to keep it up. But the big question remains: can they keep it up in the face of major competition? Twitter already has location features, Yelp recently added check-ins, and soon Facebook will as well

Listen, I hate forking over $100 a month for my TV, too. I also wholeheartedly agree with The Consumerist picking Comcast as the worst company in America . But they still get my money every month and just like the vast majority of people who pay for their TV, that’s not going to change anytime soon

It can be argued that this has been the Decade of Piracy. Whereas media piracy existed as a scourge for millennia (Bach was totally pissed when PrisM posted the pre-release sheet music to the ‘Das Wohltemperirte Clavier’) the rise of the MP3 and other media compression formats – not to mention the release of the iPod in 2001 – brought piracy into the mainstream

[Editor's Note: The data cited in this article is excerpted from Inside Facebook Gold , our membership service tracking Facebook's business and growth around the world. Visit Inside Facebook Gold to learn more about our complete data and analysis offering.] Asia is an exploding presence on Facebook. In this month’s Global Monitor report, in which we track Facebook’s growth around the world, five of the top six countries gaining the most new monthly active users were Asian.

If you’re looking to build a website or webapp for your business, there are plenty of options to get started. First, there’s a variety of fully hosted solutions like WordPress.com, which take away the headaches of managing software and server configurations at the cost of reduced flexibility. Another popular option is to get a hosted server from the likes of Rackspace or Dreamhost, which can give you much more flexibility, but also come with more things to worry about

Social gaming company Playdom is definitely on an acquisition spree. Last month it bought Hive 7 , this month it is Metaplace , a startup that l aunched at TechCrunch 40 in 2007. Metaplace has developed an in-browser virtual-world engine which can be applied to social games