Variety is reporting that Fox’s long running MadTV will be canceled after this season and possibly looking for a new home.

Valleywag is reporting that they are unable to sell ads so they will be folded into the gawker.com page as an editorial. The inability to sell ads seems like a common problem amongst most of the companies that have gone under this year or about to go under.

Goodbye Valleywag, I hardly knew ye.

Valleywag has joined the Unfortune club. They say that their inability to sell ads has been the culprit. Valeywag will continue to live on as an editorial on Gawker.com.

Research Triangle Park, N.C-based Digitalsmiths has closed a $12 million Series B round of funding to extend its video indexing and ad targeting technology platform. The money comes from existing investors The Aurora Funds and Chrysalis Ventures; .406 Ventures also participated.

Digitalsmiths has been indexing digital content in videos (both visual and audio) for Hollywood studios for the past three years and recently started providing its technology for web-based video platforms. The idea behind it is that content owners and publishers can monetize their digital video content more efficiently, while advertisers could potentially target ads to thematically relevant video content automatically.

The company first appeared on our radar when Warner Bros. announced it was using Digitalsmiths’ technology for enabling visitors of TheWB.com to search through their video clip archive by what the characters in scenes are saying (you can see our introduction to the new features here). A similar solution has been made available to another Time Warner property, TMZ, which notably pushed out competing video platform Brightcove in favor of Digitalsmiths.

Auditude (see previous coverage) and Viewdle are also players in this space, offering intelligent audio/video content detection.

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The U.S. dollar was mixed against major currencies Thursday as the German economy tumbled into recession and the Reserve Bank of Australia confirmed its intervention in the currency market.

The head of the Senate Banking Committee Thursday said banks receiving money as part of the $700 billion federal bailout must step up their lending to consumers and businesses.

The head of the Senate Banking Committee Thursday said banks receiving money as part of the $700 billion federal bailout must step up their lending to consumers and businesses.

Talk about being where the action is: Ground zero for today’s financial crisis is the business of home mortgages, and Bank of America’s Barbara Desoer oversees the biggest collection held by any financial institution in the U.S.

Talk about being where the action is: Ground zero for today’s financial crisis is the business of home mortgages, and Bank of America’s Barbara Desoer oversees the biggest collection held by any financial institution in the U.S.

The blogosphere quickly showed interest for ScreenToaster, a new simple solution that creates screencasts from your browser, although it was not really launched. The service is still in private beta but is releasing today a new version with a new set of features. After recording (by just pressing Alt+S), you can add a voice over, change the thumbnail preview and include subtitles in the video. The user experience is quite simple and makes creating screencast a very easy task. It works also for creating screencast outside your browser (as long as Screentoaster site is open). The only disturbing aspect in the experience is that you need to have Screentoaster site open in a tab and launch the recording from there. I have no doubt they will come up with a browser applet or plugin for compulsive screencasters.

Below a screencast with the new features

Their websites includes also a few changes: screenscasts can be indexed and searchable or just published in private mode. Screentoaster will have most popular navigation features you can find in typical online video services: most popular ranking, most viewed, ratings, comments, tags, categories and of course embed modes.

I have tried ScreenToaster and was nearly happy with it. There are endless free/non free, browser based possibilities out there for creating screencasts but this one is quite simple and efficient. I must warn you that the version is still buggy with Mac and i would like to see a few more editing options (like add in video URLs, or cutting and mixing). A one click upload to YouTube would also be welcome.

ScreenToaster has been created by Iteria a new French Startup, based in Paris.

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