Little has been heard from Slingshot Labs, the startup "incubator" News Corp. formed in February, in the months since its creation. The $15 million fund for spinoff ventures did succeed in keeping MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe in place: We hear that he made it a quid pro quo before signing a new, lucrative contract with Rupert Murdoch. He's not the only MySpace employee Slingshot played a part in keeping down in Los Angeles. We hear Nick Granado, a top engineer behind MySpace's iPhone version, first flirted with a job at Facebook, then worked briefly at Imeem, before getting lured back with a gig at Slingshot.

Buried in Dean Takahashi's seemingly endless interview with WebTV founder Steve Perlman for VentureBeat is this glistening nugget: Among the startups his Rearden incubator has launched is a website called Women of Action TV. Perlman has an elaborate explanation for why he started it:

Mercury News blog SiliconBeat found a secret dot-com incubator — secret in that coy, Googly way of promising everything and nothing. Next Internet has all the Web 2.0 trappings — pale blue color scheme, check; big sans-serif text, check; takeaway points in orange, check. And it's got big plans — maybe.