ReadWriteWeb

The words "fat cats in Washington" have been uttered in every corner of the nation from Texas to the Bay, yet DC's tech scene is anything but sluggish. Companies like AOL, Nextel, MCI and Uunet found early success in the region and since then, a slew of young entrepreneurs have emerged to follow suit. Some of the companies include LivingSocial, Clearspring, CareerBuilder, OPower and iPhone app development service PointAbout.

AOL is continuing with its push to create content on a massive local scale, according to a story by the Silicon Valley Insider. The story says that AOL is looking to "expand Patch, its network of local news blogs, from 30 sites to 'hundreds', by the end of 2010."

AOL recently announced a similar 0-to-60 sort of initiative with its attempt to cover every single band at this year's South By Southwest festival with its content distribution project Seed.

Known by many as The Big Apple, and by some in the tech scene as Silicon Alley, New York City has been an international hub for media, art and business for decades. More recently New York has ebbed and flowed with the success and failures of the Internet startup culture, and is now well on its way to cementing its reputation alongside Silicon Valley as a driving global force in the industry.

Facebook and AOL announced last night a partnership that will integrate a user's Facebook friends into their AOL Instant Messenger. The announcement came on a day when Google announced its new attempt at capturing your social attention with Google Buzz and Yahoo! reminded us from the outskirts that they've been at this game for a year now.

Israel isn't just an emerging tech hub, it's a hotbed of activity and has been for many years. Per capita, Israel has the most startup companies and spends more on research and development than any other nation in the world. Israelis lay claim to the invention of Intel's Pentium 4 microprocessor, CheckPoint's firewall, Comverse's voicemail, Amdoc's telephone billing system and a ton of VoIP technology through companies like Audiocodes and Vocaltec. Between a value for innovation and a great funding scene, Tel Aviv and Herzliya are ripe with startup entrepreneurs. ReadWriteWeb caught up with some influencers to hear their thoughts about the country's tech scene.

In its heyday, ICQ was one of the most popular instant messaging networks. Today, you will probably have a hard time finding your friends on ICQ. Nevertheless, almost two year after the release of ICQ 6, ICQ just released a new version of its IM client. ICQ 7 now integrates updates from Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Delicious, Flickr and YouTube. ICQ plans to add support for more social networks in the near future.

ICQ 7 is only available for Windows. Mac users can rest assured that they are not missing out on much.

In an ironic twist of fate for 2009, Fox's IGN Entertainment, a company known for its game reviews of products like Zombie Apocalypse acquired What They Play. The newest member of Fox Interactive is touted as the "family guide to video games" and offers reviews, warnings and suggested products. Under the umbrella company of What They Like, What They Play uses the "Entertainment Software Rating Board" (ESRB) to warn parents of games containing explicit lyrics, cartoon violence and drug references.

As part of the European Union's antitrust agreement with Microsoft, the company will be required next year to show a list of alternatives to Internet Explorer to any Windows user with IE installed as their default browser.

Love or hate the government intervention, it's notable to see which browsers are about to get a big boost in user numbers. The EU says increased viability in the browser market will lead to more competition and more innovation. Here are the companies that will get a first crack at new levels of market viability in Europe.

Late last night, AOL revealed a sneak peek at their new branding campaign for their soon-to-be standalone content-focused business. The rebranding effort will officially launch on December 10th when AOL begins trading on the New York Stock Exchange as a separate company from Time Warner, its current owner. The new logos - yes, there are more than one - feature a lowercase "aol" on top of various colorful images that range from an orange goldfish to a green scribble. The odd designs are definitely different than AOL's "running man" or "triangle with swoosh" logos of years past - logos that became synonymous with the service that a large part of America once used to go online. But are the new logos any good? Or do they look more like the joke that AOL hopes it's not becoming?

The social media data company Rapleaf has just released the final parts of their 3-part study involving the demographics and online behavior of webmail users. In the first part of the study, gender and age data was examined and revealed some interesting findings...like the fact that Gmail has more female users than male, for example. In the final sections of the study, the company has turned its attention to social networking data to discover more details about webmail users' social media profiles, memberships and network preferences.