This week on VentureBeat: Oculus, DigitalOcean, ‘LOL,’ & more

Every week, the news team at VentureBeat brings you a blitz of news day after day, but even for our most dedicated readers it can be a challenge to catch every single story.

So, we’ve decided to pull together a handful of the best stories from VentureBeat this week, just in case you missed them, or want to read them again.

Facebook engineering VP Cory Ondrejka departs after overseeing Oculus acquisition

Facebook vice president of mobile engineering Cory Ondrejka, who has been overseeing the company’s acquisition of Oculus Rift and its integration, announced today he is leaving the company. Ondrejka, who was a cofounder and CTO of Linden Lab, which built the virtual world Second Life, joined Facebook in 2010 as director of engineering. Prior to his Oculus responsibilities, he ran Facebook’s entire mobile app transition for two years, he told VentureBeat. Read more.

Why growing cloud DigitalOcean isn’t scared of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft

NEW YORK — Fast-growing cloud provider DigitalOcean might not have hundreds of thousands of servers — the way Amazon, Google, and Microsoft do — to run its high-profile public clouds. But no matter. Ben Uretsky, the company’s chief executive, believes his startup has quite a few things going for it. Perhaps most importantly, according to Uretsky, the company refuses to deprioritize user experience — unlike the cloud giants that he sees as competitors. Read more.

OMG! Guardians of the French language warn against using ‘LOL’

The French language is under constant assault thanks to the Internet, movies, television, smartphones and all assortment of pop culture delirium. It is the job of the Académie française, which publishes thecountry’s official dictionary, to man the barricades, and to protect French from the linguistic barbarisms of the modern age. In keeping with that mission, the institution has recently identified and issued a warning about a new threat: “LOL.” Read more.

The Pirate Bay isn’t coming back anytime soon

The Pirate Bay has released a statement saying it has not yet decided whether it will come back. This is the first time the team has communicated with the public since it went down last week after police raided its data center in Sweden. “Will we reboot? We don’t know yet. But if and when we do, it’ll be with a bang,” Mr 10100100000 told TorrentFreak. “The people behind TPB are like one big collective mind. There are no leaders nor any one in charge. About 30-50 people from all over the world pitch their ideas against each other and whatever comes out of that is what will be the fate of TPB.” Read more.

Google’s Niantic Labs embarks on a giant interactive transmedia project with controversial author James Frey

Endgame is going to be a fascinating project in collective storytelling. The project started as Endgame: The Calling, a novel published in October from best-selling (and controversial) author James Frey and Nils Johnson-Shelton. It is the first of three books. Before the second novel comes out, Google’s Niantic Labs division will launch its Endgame mobile game. Much like its predecessor, the geo-location game Ingress, Endgame is an alternate-reality game, set in real-world locations as the battlegrounds that 12 factions will fight over. Fans form their own factions based on the Ancient Societies in the Endgame novel. In the book, societies compete with each other to be the one faction that survives the apocalypse. One of a cast of teen characters leads each, and that individual has received training for the moment when they will face their tests. Read more.