Roundup: NY Times building API, more wireless spectrum?, Yahoo signs 4Info, and more

New York Times building API for news page mashups — Like Web 2.0 companies, the New York Times has reams of data locked away on its servers. Now the forward-thinking newspaper company is developing its own API, to allow developers to remix its stories and articles. Restaurant guides, weekend event listings and recipe books are named on Mediabistro as possible results of the project.

More wireless spectrum opening up? — FCC Chairman Kevin Martin is proposing another auction to sell off 25 MHz of spectrum and calling for a free broadband service component. The new auction will be called AWS III, and consists of 25-MHz band between 2,155 MHz and 2,180 MHz. More details coming June 12, when the FCC discusses it.

Yahoo signs on 4Info to send text message content — Content including news, sports scores and weather forecasts will now be available to Yahoo users via mobile phone text message through a new partnership with 4Info, according to the Wall Street Journal. The deal should be great for 4Info, which gets to insert an ad along with every text. We reported last year that the company was already raking it in, through a partnership with NBC Universal.

BioArts plans online auctions to clone five dogs — The bidding, scheduled for next month, will start at $100,000. One of the Mill Valley, Calif. company’s principal scientists is Hwang Woo Suk, the South Korean who led a team that said it had cloned human embryos in 2004 (the claim was found to be fraudulent). He later cloned a male Afghan hound. According to the New York Times, scientists consider dogs “among the most difficult animals to clone because they have an unusual reproductive biology, more so than humans.”

O’Reilly Media’s OATV Startup Camp for startup founders — It’s a two-day event (July 10-11) led by two startup veterans in a roundtable discussion. Founders from selected startups will also be eligible to participate in Foo Camp (July 11-13).

Facebook employees may lose perks as company buckles down — Facebook could be returning to its cash-strapped startup roots. New COO Sheryl Sandberg may get rid of the company’s $600 per month housing subsidy for employees who live near its Palo Alto, Calif. headquarters, according to Valleywag.

Khosla is right, biofuels are innocent, says analyst group — Last week, we wrote about a squabble between the Wall Street Journal and investor Vinod Khosla, in which the WSJ blamed biofuels for high food prices and Khosla denied culpability (he’s a heavy investor in biofuel companies). Analyst firm New Energy Finance reinforces Khosla’s arguments with a new study, which finds biofuels to be “far from the dominant factor” in food price increases, instead naming fuel prices and the weak dollar.

Microsoft nixes book search — Not happy with the traffic results to its book and academic publication search, Microsoft has decided to merge the specialized search into its regular search product.

Peter Thiel puts $500K into fine ocean living — When the homesteaders moved west across the United States, they stopped when they reached the ocean. Seasteaders aim to remedy that error, with floating homes set atop the waves. Lucky for them, PayPal founder Peter Thiel likes the idea, donating $500,000 to The Seasteading Institute, a libertarian group which wants to create a “permanent, quasi-sovereign nation floating in international waters,” according to Wired. Hopefully, their due diligence involved some study of the history of the Principality of Sealand.