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Consumerinfo.com pays $300,000 to settle charges following $950,000 fine a year ago.

As the economy struggles, the ability to receive funding for an idea and turn it into a successful startup company will become increasingly difficult. But at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco today, nine companies explained how they got their companies off the ground with initial funds of $50,000 or less.

Last week, Microsoft announced its cloud-computing effort, called Azure. Fitting between Google's and Amazon.com's current offerings, it represents a very big step toward moving applications off the desktop and out of a corporation's own datacenters. Whether or not it will have any traction with corporate IT developers remains to be seen.

But does the media giant really understand what viewers want?

Microsoft is seeking to squeeze every bit of juice from the momentum from its Vista and Office 2007 introductions.

But lawyers say they will appeal.