Amazon UK Sees Nearly 23K% Increase in Shovel Sales as Riots Continue

As riots spread across Britain, a folding shovel has become a top-seller in Amazon UK's Sports and Leisure section.

Sales of the Gelert Folding Shovel have increased nearly 23K% over the last 24 hours to place 12th overall in the sports category but number-one in the "movers and shakers" list. Rounding out the top six in that list are various brands of baseball bats, with 24-hour sales increases ranging from 5K% to 13K%.

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Exclusive: Top-Selling Children's App Maker iStoryTime Lands $2M

Germany-based Zuuka, which publishes a library of interactive books for children called iStoryTime and creates mobile apps for kids, has secured a $2M Series A investment led by Frankfurt-based Corporate Finance Partners.

“It’s just very encouraging for where we see the market going,” says Woody Sears, co-founder of Playa del Rey, Calif.-based FrogDog Media, which created the iStoryTime business in 2009 and became a fully-owned subsidiary of zuuka GmbH earlier this year. “It really allows us to grow at the rate that we desire.”

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AOL Market Value Drops More than 25% Despite Great Product Launches

Although Aol reported advertising revenue growth in Q2 and narrowed its net losses compared to Q2 2010, its market value had dropped 26% today at press time.

Aol hasn’t had a single breakout product since Tim Armstrong took over as CEO in 2009, but the company has has had two significant product launches in AIM AV and Editions and has continued to attract talented people to its team.

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Amazon Web Services Failed Again Tonight--But Resolved Now

Amazon Web Services went down earlier this evening for nearly 30 minutes, taking Netflix, Reddit, Quora and foursquare with it.

According to the AWS Health Dashboard, the problems originated with the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and the Relational Database Service, both in northern Virginia, and were verified just before 8pm Pacific Daylight Time (PDT).

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Altucher Says LinkedIn’s Worth $3 a Share; Firm Drops 17% Today

James Altucher, contributor for The Wall Street Journal said on Friday’s "This Week in Startups" news roundtable that LinkedIn’s stock (LNKD:NYSE) was overvalued and only worth $3, following the release of its Q2 earnings report last week.

“This stock is worth probably $3 or $4,” said Altucher of LinkedIn, which closed today at $75.47, down more than 17% today in a brutal market -- but more than many other tech companies including Pandora -- as the Dow dropped 5.6%.

In Q2, revenue more than doubled to $121M and its total membership to 115.8M, yet the company’s net income reached only $4.5M.

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