Week in review: Modern Warfare 2’s new map pack, Silicon Valley’s Unvarnished truth

Here’s our summary of the week’s business and tech news. First, the most popular articles published by VentureBeat in the last seven days:
Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 map pack launches with glitch, competition from Bad Company 2 — The brawl between the blockbuster combat games restarted this week, with the release of multiplayer map packs for both Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 and Battlefield Bad Company 2.
GameCrush inundated with male gamers who want to play games with hot gamer babes — GameCrush evidently hit home with its offer to let gamers “be a player” and pay to play online games with attractive women. The site claimed that more than 10,000 people tried to sign on in the first five minutes it was open.
Self-published e-books make it to Apple’s iPad for almost no cost — Big publishers are flocking to the iPad, but smaller publishing houses are making the move, too, including self-publishing service Smashwords.
Motorola Droid finally receives Android 2.1 update with multitouch web browser — Verizon has finally began rolling out the Android 2.1 update to Motorola Droid users. The new version of the mobile operating system includes pinch-to-zoom multitouch capabilities in the web browser, maps, and gallery applications.
Google brings Quake 2 to the browser with HTML5 — Thus far, we’ve mainly seen the up and coming HTML5 web standard used for video. A bunch of Google engineers wanted to see what else HTML5 could do, and decided to try porting the classic first-person-shooter Quake 2.
And here are five more stories that we think are important, thought-provoking, or fun:
Why Silicon Valley needs the Unvarnished truth — VentureBeat’s new executive editor Owen Thomas praised a new startup called Unvarnished, calling it “not just timely, but necessary.” The site aims to gather fair and honest reviews about people who wouldn’t normally hit the limelight — mid-level product managers, senior engineers, and the like.
Squeaky-clean offer firm gWallet gets into trouble — Social gaming ran into its biggest scandal last fall, when allegations surfaced that offer companies were defrauding consumers by presenting them with less-than-savory advertising offers. Now gWallet, a new offer company with a previously solid, truthworthy reputation, has been caught running a handful of questionable offers, too. The percentage appears to be tiny, but it illustrates how hard it is to police offers.
Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr: iPad will ‘rule the world’ — Most of the focus was on the iPad at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’ event this week announcing the expansion of its the venture firm’s iFund. Kleiner partner John Doerr sounded especially excited about the device, claiming that it will “rule the world.”
Is Greenpeace overreacting about the iPad’s announcement? — In anticipation of today’s iPad launch, environmentalist juggernaut Greenpeace released a new study emphasizing the damaging impact of cloud computing — the framework that more and more of the internet, and particularly the iPad will depend on.
ChatRoulette faces a stiff challenge in becoming a legitimate business — Video chat site ChatRoulette has been mocked by everyone from Jon Stewart on the Daily Show on down for the hordes of anonymous masturbators who sometimes lurk on the site. Kim-Mai Cutler examines some of the issues facing the site if it wants to make money.
Tags: Android, droid, ipad, Modern Warfare 2, Quake 2
Companies: chatroulette, GameCrush, Google, Greenpeace, Gwallet, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, motorola, Unvarnished
People: john doerr