Roundup: Feed reader showdown, Insiderpages & more

Here’s the latest action:

Newsgator looking for cash — Dan Primack points to a list of 23 companies looking for cash, and one of them is Newsgator. The companies presented at the VC in the Rockies conference in Colorado. We point out Newsgator because it is a so-called RSS feed reader, which allows people to collect and organize the blog/news/other feeds they subscribe to, and it is facing lots of competition. The latest evidence suggests Yahoo, and especially Google are growing dominant in this area, along with Bloglines, now owned by Ask. Techcrunch has an informative piece on the latest feature at Feedburner, a company that manages many feeds for publishers, and which has gathered information about the feeds and how they’re being read. Its “user engagement report” shows how often the various feed readers are being used by their subscribers. Of note: Newsgator appears to be losing market share. And then there’s the question, how do you make money?

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Insiderpages, a site for local businesses, is rumored to have been acquired by a public company — More details to come.

Fox Interactive buys ad company, Strategic Data Corporation — The company is supposed to help Fox Interactive, the division of News Corp. that operates MySpace, to boost advertising. Already, Fox Interactive is bringing in $500 million, and this company should help increase. (See NYT)

Microsoft to pay $1.52 billion for MP3 patent infringement — A federal jury awards Alcatel-Lucent the damages, after finding that Microsoft paid a German consortium for use of the format years ago, but that Alcatel-Lucent had patents on the format beforehand.

Stem-cell royalty struggle continues — The California stem-cell institute has been beset by political problems that just won’t go away. A bill expected to be introduced as early as today would require companies doing business with California’s $3 billion stem-cell institute to give the state a larger portion — up to five percent — of their revenue than the one percent he institute had proposed. Story here.