peHUB Second Opinion 10.21

GigaOm dives into the giant Web that data mining company Rapleaf has been quietly spinning. It's worth a read. R.I.P. Chatroulette. Some of us hardly knew you, while others clearly knew you too well. Evidently, people are too cheap to pay $9.95 a month for Hulu Plus, the subscription service launched in June. They love Sesame Street online, though, and its head writer explains how it's become so buzzworthy on the Internet. Office Depot settles charges by the SEC that that it and two top executives improperly contacted analysts in 2007 to help guide them to lower earnings estimates. Blackstone Group is looking to back as many as 15 new hedge funds. Is Johns Hopkins the business school for anti-MBAs? Forbes spotlights the billionaires bankrolling Republicans.