Elisha Cuthbert has been cast the female lead in ABC’s comedy pilot Happy Endings – fueling reports that executives at FOX have decided to end their long-running hit 24 after the current series. Cuthbert is best known for playing Jack Bauer’s daughter on the series.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the project revolves around a bride [...]

Casey James and Crystal Bowersox who?!?

With a performance of Kate Bush’s “This Woman’s Work,” Michael Lynche established himself as the new American Idol favorite last night.

Showing incredible range, from an amazing falsetto to an impressive baritone, the man known as Big Mike brought Kara DioGuardi to tears. A lot of tears. She could barely get her words of praise out as she choked up. It was actually a very sweet moment.

Below, we’ve ranked the eight performances from last night. Lynche aside, who was your favorite?

1. Michael Lynche: So this is what happens when your wife is in the audience, huh?
2. Casey James: Not his best performance, and we agree the Keith Urban song was a safe choice… but who else deserves this spot?
3. Alex Lambert: You can stop with the banana references now, Ellen. Solid rendition of a Ray LaMontagne classic proves Lambert is simply a great singer.
4. Andrew Garcia: The judges have forced him to get as creative as possible each week, taking his focus off actual singing, it seems. Can we all just forget about his “Straight Up” arrangement at this point?
5. Todrick Hall: Points of taking a risk. But “Somebody to Love” almost belongs to the Glee cast at this point. We just think of them when we hear it.
6. Aaron Kelly: Solid version of “I’m Already There.” We’re glad Simon shut Kara up about taking the song so literally and making it seem like a young crooner couldn’t take it on.
7. Lee DeWyze: He’ll likely stick around, but our least favorite performance from this rocker.
8. Tim Urban: Were we listening to a different version of “Hallelujah?” We didn’t buy him at all singing this classic.

(ChattahBox)—The outspoken Democratic Freshman Congressman from Florida, Alan Grayson, is a strong proponent of a public option, as a vital part of any meaningful healthcare reform. And on Wednesday he did something about it, instead of whining like Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), by introducing the four-page Public Option Act, which permits Americans to buy-in to [...]

Opera Software, creators of one of the most popular desktop and mobile browsers has today released it’s newest beta of it’s mobile browsing software; Opera Mini 5 on the Android operating system. The company already boasts more than 50 million browser users worldwide on the Blackberry, Windows Mobile and most Java-enabled phones. Opera Mini  enables a faster [...]

(ChattahBox) – The producer who blackmailed David Letterman into admitting to sexual conduct with show staff has plead guilty to a count of second grand larceny.

Robert “Joe” Halderman, a former producer for CBS’s ‘48 Hours’, admitted in a statement that he attempted to extort $2 million from David Letterman in exchange for keeping quiet about [...]

I’m feeling pretty good today so I thought I’d get things started with a little taste of some Victoria’s Secret model’s cleavage, here’s Selita Ebanks giving us a good look at why she got the job as a lingerie model. This to me is the perfect amount of cleavage, big enough to [...]

Think the semantic web is all hype with no bite? Paul Allen backed semantic startup Evri will announce tomorrow that it has been acquired, we’ve learned from a reliable source. The service specializes in extracting the names of people, places and things from raw streams of text in order to facilitate smart user navigation and related content recommendation. The company launched a striking new version of its website earlier today.

Evri launched just short of two years ago and raised $8 million from Vulcan, the fund of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. More interesting than the business side of this story, though, is the technology. Evri brings the semantic and the real-time web together in some very interesting ways.

Sponsor

We profiled Evri as one of 10 intriguing companies in the real-time web space in our recent research report The Real-Time Web and Its Future. Also included was the now Google-acquired Aardvark. (See our coverage: How I Loved and Lost an Aardvark)

Here’s how we described the real time part of what Evri does in that report:

Evri is a semantic Web recommendation service for online publishers. The company tracks the real-time Web to know when it needs to create or update a topic page for one of its emerging news topics.

Evri watches news sources to see when a news topic is trending, including articles on Wikipedia that publicly available data shows have leaped in page views. Then it visits structured databases like Wikipedia and FreeBase to check for updates to entries about related entities. It then creates or updates a topic page with news links, photos and Twitter search results. The language used in those Twitter posts is analyzed and the names of news entities in the posts are linked to other Evri topic pages, like pivots.

Evri has done lots of other things as well, including a blog widget, an iPhone app, automated content portals for publishers and a sentiment analysis product. The company didn’t see a particularly large amount of hype but was closely watched. Robert Scoble, for example, named Evri one of his top startups to watch for 2010, even a year and a half after it launched.

We haven’t been able to identify the company that has acquired Evri yet but the most obvious candidate would be its neighbor and kin Microsoft, where the service would compliment the Powerset team nicely and change the Bing user experience in news search dramatically. Now that we know that Google is working on building a real-time index of the web (our coverage) the prospect of a competitor upping the ante with near real-time semantic parsing, riding on top of real-time indexing, sounds like a hot move.

A number of people have raised the possibility of an Amazon acquisition as well. Evri was also tested out by Yahoo! starting last Fall as a way to facilitate navigation throughout its Sports content pages.

Take that, semantic web doubters.

We’ll update this post when the acquiring party is identified. Geeky types interested in an in-depth explanation of Evri’s work would be well served by checking out a 6 part video series on YouTube wherein Deep Dhillon, CTO of Evri, discusses the company’s technology with students at the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering.

Discuss

If you’ve seen G-Tec’s thought control cap being used to control a Second Life avatar, play a game of Pong, or make music in an orchestral setting, you probably wondered when the thing would become available for less frivolous pursuits (to help the disabled communicate, for starters). Well, it looks [...]

Pitching his healthcare reform legislation in suburban Missouri, the president announces a broadened initiative to block fraud in government health programs.

Promoting a new initiative to reduce waste in Medicare, Medicaid and other government programs, President Obama traveled to suburban St. Louis on Wednesday to keep up momentum behind his push to complete work on a health overhaul this month.

Luke Harangody had 20 points and 10 rebounds in a healthy performance off the bench, and Notre Dame shut down Seton Hall’s high-octane offense for a 68-56 victory in the second round of the Big East tournament Wednesday night.