AOL (NYSE: AOL)—which is doubling down on its own local efforts—is now setting up a $10 million venture capital fund to invest in the local space. The company cites the “increasing number of startups” in the market as driving the creation of the fund, which will operate as part of AOL Ventures. Also likely not a coincidence: AOL Ventures head Jon Brod joined the company via its acquisition last summer of hyperlocal news startup Patch.

AOL is already spending $50 million this year alone to expand Patch; specifically, the company now says it will add 15 hyperlocal sites to its current 40 over the next three months. It’s also announcing it will relaunch its City’s Best entertainment guides in 25 cities in order to add “high-quality, city-specific content” and will add geo-targeted local content to AOL.com.

AOL (NYSE: AOL) CEO Tim Armstrong went on CNBC today to discuss AOL’s local plans. Aside from announcing the company’s move into additional major metros, Armstrong said AOL would reignite investment in City’s Best, a local nightlife and dining site the company had stopped investing in about two years ago. There’s more in the video below, including how AOL is thinking about its international operations and how it plans to maintain its relevancy—if it hasn’t lost it already.

Just as Google (NSDQ: GOOG) starts being more aggressive at rolling out the Nexus One to more carriers, it was socked in the gut with this bad news: its trademark application for the phone has been denied.

Google’s application was denied because of “a likelihood of confusion” with a trademark held by Integra Telecom’s ‘Nexus’ brand, reports MarketWatch. That didn’t stop Sprint (NYSE: S) from announcing today that a version of the Nexus One will be available soon for its network. Just yesterday, Google said a compatible version was available for AT&T (NYSE: T) and Rogers in Canada.

What direction is the book industry heading? Penguin Group subsidiary Dorling Kindersley Books prepared this video on the “end of publishing” for a sales conference and it was reportedly such a hit that the company decided to share it with all. Naive? Wise? Somewhere in between? (via Mashable and the Penguin Blog).

More details on the The Sporting News switch from free to paid for its digital daily Sporting News Today, which was first announced by Publisher Jeff Price at our paidContent2010 conference last month. The Sporting News is partnering with its current digital publisher Zinio for the April 1 launch. A monthly subscription runs $2.99 and, unlike most publications, covers access on any platform or device Zinio and Sporting News offer including PC, Mac, and yes, even iPad. New features include video highlights from CineSport. The new edition kicks off with a 60-day free trial so it will take a while to see what kind of traction the pay strategy gets. You can hear Price’s rationale for the move in the video below.

Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) has hinted for several months that it would be making more acquisitions and it’s finally made one—buying up social sports startup Citizen Sports, which it says will compliment Yahoo Sports, the top sports site in the U.S.

And, indeed, the move immediately gives Yahoo clout in the social networking and mobile spaces, where it is weak. Citizen Sports owns a series of popular sports apps on the iPhone and on social networking sites, including what it says is the most popular fantasy football app on Facebook. While Yahoo has long been the top player in the online fantasy sports market, only last September did it release a fantasy football iPhone app and, as far as I can tell, it does not have any sports apps on Facebook.

Sprint (NYSE: S) Nextel may unveil the first 4G phone next week at the big CTIA wireless conference in Las Vegas.

The device, which is reportedly made by HTC and called ‘the Supersonic,’ will run on the company’s WiMax network, which is being built by Clearwire (NSDQ: CLWR), reports the Wall Street Journal, which quotes people familiar with the matter.

If the company does reveal a device, it will easily beat Verizon Wireless to the punch, which is not expected to have a 4G handset, running on its LTE network, until mid-2011.

Second Porch, which lets users find and list available vacation homes via a Facebook app, has raised $1 million in a first round of funding. The company’s pitch: Because all of its vacation home listings are on Facebook, users are able to rent or trade with people they “know and trust” (ie their friends or friends of friends). Basic listings are free, while premium listings cost $99 a year. The biggest competitor in the online vacation home market is HomeAway, which has raised more than $410 million in funding, and has been buying up a string of smaller vacation rental sites.

MocoSpace, a social network that is primarily accessed on the phone, has reached 11 million users.

While that may pale in comparison to the 100 million people using Facebook on cellphones, it easily surpasses the 560,000 using Foursquare. However, it is more in line with the 500,000 users that MocoSpace says are logging in on a daily basis to the network. MocoSpace VP of Business Development & Marketing Casey Jones said: “Scale is a critical piece to being able to deliver on the promise of our targeting capabilities. We are very fortunate to have a large, growing, and loyal audience.”

AOL (NYSE: AOL) practically added two new sites a month last year as part of its goal to reach 100 sites under its MediaGlow content group. While the content strategy has lately rested on building up its freelance content site Seed.com, AOL still plans to roll out more verticals. The latest is what amounts to an overhaul of the AOL Food channel in the form of recipes site Kitchen Daily, which was fully launched this morning. Parts of AOL Food are sticking around on Kitchen Daily, including Grilling Hub and Dinner Tonight page. But an AOL rep tells paidContent that the Slashfood blog will be kept as a separate, stand-alone site, as it continues to focus more on the food news and culture.

In contrast to recent Nielsen figures that showed flat spending for display last year, Kantar Media—fka “TNS Media” before being acquired by WPP Group and folded into its KMR Group—says that the segment actually gained a healthy 7.3 percent versus 2008. Kantar says that increased activity by the telecom, factory auto and travel categories helped provide a boost to display. Nielsen and Kantar also diverge on cable TV, which the former has figures that show a gain of nearly 15 percent in ad spending last year, while the latter says the segment declined 1.4 percent.

The days of web sales nearly doubling each year are long gone. UK Association of Online Publishers (AOP) members - who forecast 31 percent higher online income in 2008 and 16 percent in 2009 - now expect 2010 growth of just 10 percent.

And that forecast is only being made by half of AOP annual census respondents. The association will only detail a membership-wide forecast of merely “positive revenue growth”, suggesting the average growth forecast is small.

In other words, online publishers - who have always had reason to be bullish because their medium offers advertisers more bang-for-buck - have lost their confidence as the ad downturn has flattened their perpetual up-curve.

Several cable operators and movie studios are teaming together to launch a $30 million marketing and promotion campaign touting the virtues of movies on demand.

The three month, multi-media campaign titled “The Video Store Just Moved In” will shine a spotlight on the burgeoning movie on demand category, according to operator and studio executives. The campaign, which began last night (Tuesday) with a spot on Fox’s American Idol, will focus on the fun and ease of ordering and watching top theatrical movies at home as compared to trudging out to rent movies from the local home video store, according to campaign officials.

The campaign launches as more studios are debuting top box office titles via on demand at the same time they hit video store shelves. Over the last two years there has been more than a seven-fold increase in the number of day-and-date titles offered to digital cable customers nationally, according to VOD content aggregator In Demand. More on Multichannel.

Popular online golf game World Golf Tour has raised $10 million in a third round of funding, which the company says demonstrates that “investors believe online sports to be a big growth area.” Have to say, however, that it’s been rare lately to see stand-alone game sites like World Golf Tour raise rounds; most of the cash being invested in the gaming space right now is going into startups that have built their games on top of social networks.

Here’s another chart with hockey stick-like projections for the global mobile applications space: The market is set to grow to $17.5 billion by 2012, which will be greater than the value of all CDs estimated to be sold that year. The report was commissioned by GetJar, which distributes free applications on the behalf of developers worldwide, and was conducted by Consultant Chetan Sharma.

Other findings:

—Mobile app downloads across all types of handsets are expected to increase from more than 7 billion downloads in 2009 to almost 50 billion in 2010 – an annual growth rate of 92 percent.
—The sale of apps will shift from carriers to off-deck sources over the next two years. In 2009, mobile operators accounted for more than 60 percent of all apps revenue, but in 2010, this will fall to under 23 percent.
—In 2009, the number of app stores grew from eight to 38 – an increase of 375 percent.

The end could be near for bankrupt satellite radio firm WorldSpace. The company put out a terse statement this afternoon saying that its “strategic transaction negotiations” with creditor Liberty Media (NSDQ: LINTA) had been terminated by that company.

Ominously, WorldSpace—which had raised $150 million in an IPO in July 2005 but filed for bankruptcy protection a year ago, warns that while it awaits word from Liberty about “the handling of Liberty’s collateral” it is planning not only to review its strategic alternatives but also to potentially decommission its satellites.

Social gaming startup Playdom is putting this past fall’s $43 million funding round to quick work lately. The San Francisco company is investing $5 million in Argentina-based social gamer MetroGames as part of the South American company’s first round. The investment comes a barely two weeks after Playdom acquired Offbeat Creations, the developer of several Facebook-based titles, including dice game Super Farkle.

I gave serendipity a chance today at SXSWi, opting to attend a session solely because the title caught my eye—Making Sure The World Doesn’t Suck: How Independent Content Can Save The Media. The payoff: a lively session, although the topic often felt like an umbrella that anything could fit under, and the brief video chat with Sean Lennon embedded below.

Lennon was the outlier on the panel moderated by IFC’s Evan Shapiro, rankling some of the others when he said “you don’t have to be dedicated to be a blogger.” He quickly added that he wasn’t trying to impugn the character of bloggers, just to highlight the low barriers of entry for blogging and many other areas. Yes, agreed game designer Harvey Smith, but “a low barrier to entry doesn’t mean a low barrier to make great content.”

Universal Music Group was early to tap into the whole music gaming phenomenon by partnering with Tapulous to make iPhone apps for artists such as Lady Gaga and Souja Boy Tell ‘Em.

Now it’s branching off and working with others to create even more gaming applications. The record label’s latest app is called Six-String and is now available for $4.99 from the App Store for the iPhone or iPod touch. The game was developed by Frontier, which makes popular guitar simulators for the iPhone. The app will be used to highlight new releases, such as The Scorpions’ “Raised on Rock,” which can already be played on the phone, even though the album isn’t due out until March 23.

News Corp.-owned IGN Entertainment, which includes both the video game network of the same name, as well as sites like AskMen, is reportedly going through a major round of layoffs. In an all-staff memo, posted by Joystiq, IGN president Roy Bahat says that while the company has been “doing well—we’re profitable and our audience continues to grow,” IGN is “still feeling the effects of the economy, and we need to make sure we can invest where there is opportunity.” He says jobs are being cut “in every part of the company.”