A woman in Florida has sued her employers for developing carpal tunnel syndrome - also known as repetitive motion injury - in both hands. Why should this make news? It’s a common occupational hazard for data entry operators and others who spend all day typing on a keyboard. Right, except the lady in question is no data entry operator and she didn’t get her tendons in a twist from too much typing.

Find out what’s she suing her employer for.

Seeking to expand its already well-honed ability to sell targeted Internet advertisements, online search leader Google Inc. said it has agreed to pay $3.1 billion in cash to acquire ad-management technology company DoubleClick Inc.

New York-based DoubleClick helps its customers place and track online advertising, including search ads, which Google — more than its nearest search competitors Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. — has turned into an extremely lucrative business.

DoubleClick had been the target of a fierce bidding war between Microsoft and Google, and Google’s winning bid is nearly three times the amount DoubleClick fetched when it went private in 2005 for $1.1 billion.

The acquisition is the largest in Google’s history, beating out the $1.76 billion deal for online video-sharing site YouTube Inc. late last year.

USA Today

People who upload their own films to the video-sharing website YouTube will soon get a share of the advertising revenue.

YouTube founder Chad Hurley has confirmed that his team is working on a revenue-sharing mechanism that would “reward creativity”.

He said the system would be rolled out in a couple of months and use a mixture of advertisements, including short clips shown ahead of the actual film.

The offer applies only to people who own the full copyright of the videos they are uploading.

ABC News Online

To raise revenue, the feds plan to stick their noses deeper into small-business financial records.

Carson Stanwood has no problem with the Internal Revenue Service going after tax cheats. The founder of Stanwood & Partners Public Relations, based in Jackson Hole, Wyo., understands that paying their taxes in full puts small-business owners like him at a competitive disadvantage against the corner cutters.

But when contemplating some of the Treasury Department’s recent enforcement proposals - such as vastly expanding the number of Form 1099s he would have to issue and requiring him to verify his independent contractors’ taxpayer IDs with the IRS - Stanwood, 47, changes his tune.

“I applaud them going after this until I hear that it’s going to vastly increase my paperwork. I believe it would add 20 to 25 percent to what I pay my bookkeeper - another $6,000 or $7,000 a year - which would suck,” says Stanwood, whose firm took in about $1.5 million last year. “That’s two or three laptops the employees won’t get, smaller Christmas bonuses, or an epic vacation my wife and I don’t take.”

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Having made a fortune off bare-breasted women, “Girls Gone Wild” founder Joe Francis is now setting his sights on the restaurant business.

A chain under the “Girls Gone Wild” brand name is being planned by Francis, whose Mantra Films Inc. has built a $100 million business videotaping and selling the DVDs featuring young women exposing their breasts.

“This is going to be about fun, lifestyle, youth, sun. It’s about everything ‘Girls Gone Wild,’” Francis said. “It’s going to be sexy without being sexual.”

There will be no stripping, topless waitresses or filming in the restaurants, Francis said.

The first two restaurants are expected to open by mid-summer in Mexican beach towns Cabo San Lucas and Cancun. Francis sees franchises popping up mainly in college towns in the United States and around the world.

Reuters

Most manufacturers build point-and-shoot digicams with 3x zoom lenses. That’s great for shooting faraway subjects, but the zoom function narrows the camera’s field of vision, making it impossible to shoot broad landscapes or to squeeze all of your friends into one close-up frame.

Owners of pricey SLRs solve the problem by popping a wide-angle lens onto the camera body; Kodak (EK) engineers gave the EasyShare V570 pocket camera the same capability by equipping it with two independent lenses–one zoom and one wide-angle–that switch automatically. To draw attention to Kodak’s breakthrough configuration, industrial design consultant BlueMap highlighted the dual-lens system and shrouded the camera in a retro-cool design.

Read the review.

Perhaps you know that sinking feeling when a single keystroke accidentally destroys hours of work. Now imagine wiping out a disk drive containing information for an account worth $38 billion.

That’s what happened to a computer technician reformatting a disk drive at the Alaska Department of Revenue. While doing routine maintenance work, the technician accidentally deleted applicant information for an oil-funded account — one of Alaska residents’ biggest perks — and mistakenly reformatted the backup drive, as well.

There was still hope, until the department discovered its third line of defense, backup tapes, were unreadable.

More on this here.