It'sall over the news in Russia this morning: Mail.ru, the leading Internet portal in the country, will reportedly be replacing Russian search king Yandex as its default search provider and hand over the keys to Google again.While nothing has been official confirmed by either party yet, the information comes from solid sources, according to multiple publications.

  Rumor has it that actress Salma Hayek never smoked before filming the movie Frida. But she had to learn how to play artist Frida Kahlo, and after the movie she had trouble quitting.I know exactly how she feels. Because part of the fallout of all the Scamville posts I wrote last month is a lingering addiction to one of Zynga's games, Fishville (yes, the game that Facebook shut down for three days for violations of their advertising rules).

  US retailing giant Amazon is in deep and secret negotiations with Vente-Privee, the French private sales club which has taken the ecommerce and fashion industries by storm, our sources say.We asked Xavier Court, marketing director at Vente-Privee, on the record if Amazon had acquired Vente-Privee. His response was "Very flattering but not true at all."However, our sources say that although the two companies have not yet agreed anything, they are in fact negotiating a price close to 2 billion Euros, or $3.01 billion. In October we learned that Vente-Privee was looking for a sale of between $2 billion and $4 billion.

  In a brief interview with FOX Business Network, Google CEO Eric Schmidt talked about his views on the talking points of Obama's Jobs Summit at The White House, which he attended.The full clip is embedded below, but here are some of the highlights of what Schmidt said:- small and medium sized businesses do much of the hiring in the U.S., so they should be running into less problems getting loans- banks should be forced by the government to provide SMBs with more loans, by means of regulatory changesMore after the jump

  We recently previewed the upcoming put.io cloud storage service which fetches media files and lets you stream them immediately. The service has created a lot of buzz, because it's able to keep redundant copies of your files which you can access from anywhere with a browser, including files for the iPhone and PS3. These can be fetched automatically from bittorrent networks, FTPs, direct download links, Rapidshare links or basic http authenticated links. And you can stream your downloaded files instantly with an appropriate player. For example, Divx Web Player for DivX files. Cleary it has the potential to create something of a media storm.

  Google has quietly rolled out its own online dictionary, complete with multilingual support and accompanying photos. The new site was first discovered by the LA Times Tech Blog, and you can access it at Google.com/Dictionary.It works exactly as you'd expect: type in a word, and Google will give you the definition, part of speech, and maybe a similar phrase or two. If you're logged in, you can star a word for future reference.The new dictionary obviously isn't good news to the many other web dictionaries. Answers.com, in particular, stands to lose out, as it is currently Google's default whenever a user clicks the "define" link on a Google results page. The Times article says that Google now uses its own dictionary as the default, but I'm still seeing Answers.com as the source, so apparently the switch isn't live for everyone.

  Google has begun its big push to bring extension support to its Chrome web browser. Currently, it's accepting extensions from developers that it will be placing in some sort of gallery to launch at a later date. Last week, we showed the nice, new Aviary extension for Chrome. Today, we get very popular Firefox extension that is now Chrome-ready, Shareaholic.As we noted in September when Shareaholic closed its seed funding, the extension has surpassed over 1 million downloads for Firefox. And for good reason: It makes sharing on just about every service on the web as simple as two-clicks. The new Chrome version works pretty much exactly the same as the Firefox version; you click the button and you are presented with a drop down list of social options for sharing. A shortened URL is automatically made for the webpage you are sending.

  Wow. Bing is completely and utterly down right now and has been for several minutes. The tweets about it are flying in at a massive pace — as are the tips to us. [Update below, it's back after about 30 mins of downtime.]It's one thing when startups, like Twitter, go down, which happens all the time. It's another when a major search portal does it. If this is part of the new strategy to beat Google, Microsoft didn't mention it in the Fall Release event the other day.

  If you use Twitter frequently on your smartphone, there's a good chance you use a native Twitter client. Between apps like Tweetie on the iPhone, Twidroid on Android, and Seesmic on Blackberry, there's no shortage of quality apps that put advanced features at your fingertips. But, according to a post that just went live on the Twitter blog, there are still plenty of people who navigate to m.twitter.com, the Twitter mobile site that's about as spartan as they come. Tonight, Twitter is showing off a preview of the new mobile site it's working on, housed at mobile.twitter.com. And it's a big improvement.There are quite a few obvious changes in the new version. First and foremost, you'll notice that it looks quite a bit nicer than the old version. And everything much more closely mirrors the desktop version of the Twitter.com homepage. As with the desktop version, you'll be shown Twitter's real-time search engine when you first visit the site.More importantly, the new client includes all of the basic features that every Twitter client has had for years, but the old mobile client lacks.

  It seems that every day there's a new travel site looking to streamline the process of planning out your itinerary. And for good reason: trips, even the fun ones, are usually a total pain to plan. Those problems are only magnified when you're trying to plan a trip with more than one person. Duffel is a startup that launched from TechCrunch50's demo pit that's looking to help. It's giving users a straightforward, visual way to plan out their trips using a tool that's long since proved its utility: a bulletin board.Of course, as an online service Duffel's bulletin board is virtual, but many of the concepts stay the same. To get started, first you tell Duffel what city you're going to be traveling to. The site presents you with a virtual bulletin board populated with a handful of suggested activities and places to stay, each represented by a small note card. From there, you can add your own ideas manually (you enter a title, notes, and URL) or you can use the site's bookmarklet to quickly save things from across the web to your Duffel.

  Next Big Sound, a TechStars 2009 company that tracks the growth and popularity of music groups across major web properties like MySpace, Twitter, Last.fm, and others, has raised a seed round in the $1 million range. The company would not reveal the exact amount, but did confirm that they had recently raised the funding.As Robin described it in August, Next Big Sound is a statistics and comparison engine à la Alexa or Compete, but for music artists and industry professionals. Next Big Sound measures number of fans, number of plays, and comments for bands.According to an SEC filing, Next Big Sound filed a Form D for their seed round that stated they had raised ~$100k, though they have in fact raised significantly more. Foundry Group led the round, with Jason Mendelson taking a board spot. Also participating were SoftTech VC, Alsop Louie Partners, Professor Troy Henikoff from Northwestern University and TechStars Executive Director David Cohen.

  Who says Twitter isn't mainstream? Vogue Italia has just dedicated an issue to the microblogging network. The magazine's December cover features a montage of TwitPics of some of the world's most famous models, including Gisele Bundchen, Christy Turlington, and Natalia Vodianova. In the collage, models are taking pictures of themselves via popular Twitter photo sharing app TwitPic. And the layout of the editorial feature is also an ode to Twitter.

  Does anybody go to Second Life anymore? It seems like a ghost town these days, although every now and then you hear rumblings of a quiet comeback for the proto-virtual world. Well, at the very least Second Life will be getting a second life at the movies. A documentary called Life 2.0 will be screened at the Sundance Film Festival.Life 2.0 was produced by PalmStar Entertainment (which is theglobe.com co-founder Stephan Paternot's indie movie company) and Andrew Lauren Productions (The Squid And The Whale).

  Robert Scoble allows 1,768 people to know where he is at all times. Let me repeat that: 1,768 people know his location at all times. How do I know that? A new list from Osnapz told me.Osnapz' Top Foursquare Users list takes advantage of Foursquare's new API to create a list that sorts the "top" users of the service. I put "top" in quotations because the way they determine this by default isn't a very good metric: It's the number of people you allow to follow you.