Google acquired BumpTop, an application that changes the way to use the desktop by transforming it into a 3D interface. (Via Mashable)

Google invests $38.8 million into wind farms in the North Dakota to promote renewable energy. (Via Official Google Blog)

Personalized start page Netvibes is partnering with Orange to deliver widgets to 130 million mobile users. (Via VentureBeat)

Gowalla got a new and nice redesign by Belgian designer Tim Van Damme. (Via Jeffrey Zeldman)

Google introduced Gesture Search for Android 2.0 or above to search on the phone by drawing alphabet gestures on the touch screen. (Via Google Mobile Blog)

John Gruber wrote an interesting post on the Apple – HTC patent dispute and software patents in general.

Jason Santa Maria announced the launch of Typedia, a shared encyclopedia of typefaces. Typedia makes it easy to classify, categorise, and connect typefaces. (Via Jason Santa Maria)

The new edition of Jeffrey Zeldman’s book Designing with Web Standards can be preordered. The author wrote a blog post about what is new in the third edition of DWWS.

Nokia announced a netbook today. The Nokia Booklet 3G will be Windows based. A first video can be found on YouTube. (Via Fee Beyer on Twitter)

Apple released Mac OS X 10.5.8. Seems this is the last update before the release of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard in September. (Via Macworld)

German based identity hub YIID has added a new, more comprehensive address book containing people you follow on YIID and imported contacts. (Via YIID on Twitter)

MySpace plans to incorporate open semantic microformats code. (Via Marshall Kirkpatrick, Technology Journalist)

Dr. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, is resigning from Apple’s Board of Directors. As the two companies become rivals in several businesses there are more potential conflicts of interest. (Via Apple Press Release and Macworld)

Design Observer, a weblog focusing on writings about design and visual culture, announced its makeover. The new Design Observer Group serves four channels: Observatory (design essays), Change Observer (design for social innovation), Places (essays from the Places magazine) and Observer Media (audio and video). (Via Observatory: Design Observer)

TheTWiT Netcast Network started a new show called This Week in Google. Leo Laporte, Lifehacker founder Gina Trapani, journalist Jeff Jarvis and guests talk about latest Google-related news and cloud computing.

Twitter starts blocking bad URLs. Unfortunately shortened malicious links are not identified. (Via ReadWriteWeb)

NewsGator announced Google Reader syncing for the new version of NetNewsWire. Moreover a send to Instapaper feature was added. NewsGator will stop NewsGator Online and some other services. The company recomends migrating to Google Reader before the end of August. (Via NewsGator Daily Blog)

YIID, the service that helps you build a social identity, released some new features including activity streams for yourself and for your friends and one click registration in Communipedia.

Finally Apple started selling and renting movies in the German iTunes Store.

Taking Your Talent to the Web by Jeffrey Zeldman is now a free downloadable book. (Via Jeffrey Zeldman (zeldman) on Twitter)

Apple has approved third party web browsers for the iPhone. (Via Mac Rumors)

Apple CEO Steve Jobs takes leave of absence until June, because health-related issues are more complex than he thought. Meanwhile Tim Cook will be responsible for Apple’s day to day operation. The company’s shares had dropped 7.8 percent after the announcement. (Via NYTimes.com)

Web design company Blueflavor launched 97bottles. It is a community site that lets you add, review and get to know different types of beer. It is for the ones who drink beer what is Corkd for wine lovers. 97bottles is very nice designed and supports OpenID. Would be nice if microformats would be supported too.

YouTube disables audio tracks that have not been authorized. It seems there will be a lot of silent movies like this one. (Via Twitter / Christian Heilmann)

Flickr launched the nearby-feature. For photos with geotags it is possible to see other photos that have been taken nearby this location. Just click on map link in the Additional Information section of a photograph, then click on the “See nearby photos and videos”-link on the bottom of the pop-up layer to see something like this. You can filter by whom and when the photos were taken. (Via Twitter / Dunstan Orchard)

Google is not only cutting stuff, but Google Catalog Search will be discontinued, Jaiku will be release as open source, dodgeball.com will be discontinued, developement on Google Notebook will stop and uploads to Google Video will no longe be allowed. (Via Search Engine Land, Inside Google Book Search, Jaikido Blog, Google Code Blog, Google Notebook Blog)

Google Reader added statistics for each subscribed feed. You can see them when showing the feed’s details. (Via Steve Rubel)

Apple launched Apple Developer Forums for everyone taking part in the iPhone Developer Program. (Via TidBITS)

MTV Music is a new nice and clean designed site features a large library of music videos. It’s possible to rate and comment videos and they can also be linked to and embedded. (Via Daring Fireball)

The Belgium design studio Duoh! has a new site. Duoh! is the brain child of Veerle Pieters and Geert Leyseele. More on the new design in a blog post by Veerle.

Huffduffer is a web site that lets you create your own podcast by linking them, adding them to your profile and tagging them. You can explore audio files by tags or by user and you can subscribe to podcasts by others. Huffduffer was built by Jeremy Keith.

Britney Spears has a new website with a blog and there are Britney profiles on YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and even on Twitter. Does that mean Twitter goes mainstream? (Via TechCrunch)

There will be a Brigthkite iPhone App soon. (Via Brightkite Blog)

Ma.gnolia, the social bookmarking site, introduces paid accounts that turn off ads on the site. (Via Ma.gnolia Blog)

A report of the FAS includes a chapter on potential for terrorist use of Twitter and other mobile technologies. (Via Wired)

YouTube is testing a new and improved video uploader and everybody can try it out. It’s possible to upload multiple files at once, edit the video’s metadata while the upload happens and videos can have a size up to 1 GB. (Via YouTube Blog)

There have been made some more improvements to Webkit’s Web Inspector like a redesigned interface, changes to the Elements Panel, JavaScript Profiler in the Profiles Panel, Database Panel and lots of changes under the hood. (Via Surfin’ Safari – Weblog)

In honour of it’s 10^th birthday Google gives you the chance to search like it is January 1991. (Via Webmonkey)

Adobe is still working on a Flash player for the iPhone and hopes that Apple will approve it. (Via Daring Fireball)

Apple has decided to drop the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) for released iPhone software. (Via Twitter / Cameron Moll)

Flickr quietly launched an iPhone friendly mobile version of their site.