Week in review: Police investigate lost iPhone, Blippy overshares credit card numbers

Here’s our roundup of the week’s tech business news. First, the most popular stories VentureBeat published in the last seven days:

Police get involved in the lost iPhone case — Police are investigating the case of the lost iPhone prototype, which was left by an Apple engineer at a bar and subsequently sold to the blog Gizmodo for $5,000.

Blippy users’ credit card numbers found on Google — VentureBeat broke the news that some members of Blippy, a social-sharing site for shoppers, had their credit card numbers published to Google by Blippy’s servers. Blippy cofounder Philip Kaplan soon responded, stating, “While it looks super-scary and certainly sucks for those few people who were affected, and is embarrassing to us, it’s a lot less bad than it looks.”

Will FaceCash, the mobile payment application, kill the credit card? — A Silicon Valley company with a noteworthy founder has created a mobile payment system called FaceCash that it hopes will one day displace credit cards. You might be tempted to write this off as too audacious. But consider this: The founder is Aaron Greenspan, the Harvard graduate who claimed in 2007 that his former schoolmate, Mark Zuckerberg, ripped off his work when Zuckerberg created Facebook.

Lost next-generation iPhone puts a scorching spotlight on luckless Apple employee — Speaking of the lost iPhone, it reportedly belonged to Gray Powell, a 27-year-old Apple software engineer. The story is pretty comic, unless you’re the hapless Powell or a member of the Apple legal team.

What’s wrong with an LLC? — Attorney Scott Edward Walker looks at the pluses and minuses of running your startup as a limited liability company (LLC) or a corporation.

And here are five more stories we think are important, thought-provoking, or fun:

What you missed at Facebook’s f8 conference — Facebook made some huge announcements its f8 developer conference on Wednesday. This post highlights the biggest news and also points to the rest of VentureBeat’s coverage.

Facebook steps up lobbying, deepens ties with intelligence agencies, FTC — Facebook has also been gradually boosting its profile in Washington D.C. over the past year. Disclosures released recently show that, on top of lobbying the usual suspects Internet companies reach out to, the fast-growing social network has also been busy deepening ties to government intelligence and homeland security agencies.

Fabulis vs. GayCities: A social-networking battle that’s totally gay — Jason Goldberg is moving in on Scott Gatz’s turf. And Gatz is not taking it lying down. The two openly gay entrepreneurs are both trying to create the hot place for their brethren to check in with each other online.

YouTube’s video rental store is open for business — After dabbling with film rentals by offering five Sundance Film Festival titles in January, and expanding its beta testing effort with more content in February, YouTube finally launched its rental store this week.

How Facebook plans to fuel the app economy with Facebook Credits — One of the less-hyped elements of Facebook’s event was the release of more details about Facebook Credits, a long-awaited virtual currency on the social network that will likely have a lot of impact on how much money is made by Facebook’s partners.

[top image via Gizmodo]