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Back in May, we mentioned that Boulder startup Trada - a crowdsourced solution for creating keyword-based pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaigns - had introduced support for Microsoft's Bing search engine. Today, Trada is getting a huge leg-up from Bing's competition as Google Ventures has invested over $4 million, leading the company's latest round of funding. Joining Google in the Series C round is Foundry Group, whose $1.5M investment mark's the Bouler firms third investment with Trada.

According to the Yahoo help site, Yahoo Personals will close permanently on July 21. Users may either quit the pay-to-date service or transfer their profiles to Match.com.

Dating services have been online for quite a while - the debate over their efficacy beginning about eight seconds after the first personal appeared - and have grown in popularity since. But the shuttering of Yahoo Personals may owe as much to a change in revenue models as anything else.

In what can only be touted as "better late than never" news, Internet giant Yahoo! is today, at long last, launching its first ever applications designed for Android-based smartphones. There are now a trio of new apps available in the Android Market: a Yahoo! Mail app, Yahoo! Messenger app and a Yahoo! Search widget. Each of these applications have been built "from the ground up" for the Android platform, a company blog post proclaims, and they work on any Android phone running OS version 2.0 or higher.

Alongside the launch of these new Android apps, the company is also announcing the arrival of revamped Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! News mobile Web apps, designed with iPhone and iPhone Touch users in mind.

Today Yahoo will release security and workflow products for Hadoop to the open-source community.

The products to be donated have been built internally at Yahoo and are designed to provide the enterprise with more incentives to use Hadoop for distributed data storage. The products will be donated to the Apache Foundation as part of the events at the Hadoop Summit, taking place today at Yahoo corporate headquarters.

The Exceptional Performance crew at Yahoo has launched Boomerang.

"Boomerang is a piece of Javascript that you add to your web pages, where it measures the performance of your website from your end user's point of view. It has the ability to send this data back to your server for further analysis. With Boomerang, you find out exactly how fast your users think your site is."

May 2010 was a great month for YouTube. Not only did users of Google's online video service stream more videos per month in the U.S. than ever before (14.6 billion), but according to online analytics firm comScore, every single YouTube user now watches more than 100 videos per month. In total, Google's video properties now command slightly more than 43% of the online video market. No other online video service currently owns more than 3.5% of the streaming video market. In total, about 183 million Internet users in the U.S. watched online video last month.

Maybe now we can see why Yahoo wanted to buy location-based check-in service Foursquare last April - it's sinking its teeth deeper into the geolocation arena. The search engine and content aggregator announced this morning the release of Yahoo PlaceFinder, an expansion of their mapping and location capabilities that take aim in the direction of check-in services like Foursquare and Gowalla and other location features like Twitter Places.

While Yahoo may have been a little late to the social game, it seems determined to not fall behind in the next big thing - mobile social.

Social photo-sharing site Flickr has, at long last, added some much-need social networking integration to its online service. You can now simultaneously post your photos to Flickr and Facebook. Only photos you set as "public" will appear on your Facebook Wall, however, as the new sharing options respect your photos' privacy settings.

But don't be confused if you start seeing double-posts of Flickr photos once you enable this new feature: this supplements, but does not replace the native Flickr sharing you may have configured earlier via Facebook settings.

Yahoo has announced a series of changes set to roll out this week that integrate Facebook's social networking service into various Yahoo properties, including Yahoo Mail and its homepage. Also included in the announcement is news of a refresh for Yahoo Profiles. Originally launched in 2008, the new profiles will be accessible at pulse.yahoo.com (whenever Yahoo gets around to making that URL live, that is.)

With all these changes, we wonder: Did Yahoo finally pick a new direction? And is it "social network aggregation?"

Casual gaming powerhouse Zynga has bought Challenge Games. Challenge is well-known for games offering strong "virtual goods" elements.

Zynga has built up its estimated $5 billion in worth and with 200 million users, largely on games like Farmville and Mafia Wars, popular on Facebook. But it has been going to town in an effort to extend its popular franchises. Challenge may provide it with a means of turbocharging its in-game economies.