Last week, former eBay (EBAY) CEO Meg Whitman officially launched her campaign for governor of California, hoping to clinch the Republican nomination.

Also last week: News broke, thanks to proceedings in a London court, of a worldwide scam involving potentially millions of dollars and thousands of customers duped into buying counterfeit golf clubs, of all things, as well as clothing, airline-lounge passes and other luxury goods sold on eBay.

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Medical marijuana, meet location-based mobile marketing.

Seeing an untapped opportunity in the growing number of legal California dispensaries and limited advertising outlets, app developer NexStudios launched iPot, an application for Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone that lists nearby stores.

“This industry is the wild, wild West of establishments,” said Chris Seta, a NexStudios co-founder and one of iPot’s lead developers. “Dispensaries are opening daily, and there’s very little way to find them.”

The free version of the app provides basic location information for nearby stores, while the $2 upgrade adds reviews and ratings and does away with advertising. The two apps have been downloaded nearly 100,000 times since their July launch, with about 80 percent opting for the free one.

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Apple (AAPL) has been up in the Sierras, shooting a new ad for, well, something new.

The Sierra Sun reports that Apple employees have been spotted in Truckee, California, shooting an advertisement at a diner called Jax on the Tracks. The newspaper writes that “because the product they were advertising hadn’t been released, members of the group didn’t release any information, or allow any photographs.

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Metacafe, seeking to reach more “media-snacking” consumers, is launching a section of its video site devoted to short clips from “Nurse Jackie,” “Weeds,” “Big Brother” and other television shows.

The Palo Alto, Calif., company, which is funded by Highland Capital Partners and DAG Ventures, focuses on what it sees as a middle ground between YouTube and Hulu–short-form videos that are professionally produced or poised to go viral–said its chief executive, Erick Hachenburg, a former Electronics Arts (ERTS) executive.

YouTube has a high percentage of personal or response videos, he said, while Hulu is where consumers go to watch an entire TV episode. Metacafe.com, in contrast, is pared down to channels for movie trailers, sports clips and music videos. It had about 7.3 million unique video viewers in April, according to comScore (SCOR), compared with Hulu’s 40.1 million uniques.

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There are computer hacks, and then there are REAL hacks, like of the saw variety. Silicon Valley got a wake-up call in the latter variety Thursday, when vandals hacked into fiber-optic cables beneath the ground, knocking parts of three California counties offline.

Some 52,000 households in Santa Clara County were expected to be without phone and Internet until at least late Thursday night, according to a county spokesman. Other counties experienced outages as well. Cellphones were also impacted since the cables that were cut handled all voice and data traffic in and out of the area.

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Videogame creator Will Wright’s employment at Electronic Arts (ERTS) is toast–the very breakfast food that’s helped to inspire the next stage of his career.

On Wednesday, the man behind games such as Spore and Sim City resigned from the Redwood City, Calif.-based company to concentrate on his eight-year-old think tank, Stupid Fun Club, which aims to bring games to a host of new platforms.

Potentially among them: Toasters.

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Are iPods changing our perception of music? Are the sounds of MP3s the music we like to hear most?

Jonathan Berger, professor of music at Stanford, was on a panel with me at a meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Mountain View, Calif., on Saturday. Berger’s presentation had a slide titled: “Live, Memorex or MP3.” He mentioned that Thomas Edison promoted his phonograph by demonstrating that a person could not tell whether behind a curtain was an opera singer or one of Edison’s cylinders playing a recording of the singer. More recently, the famous Memorex ad challenged us to determine whether it was a live performance of Ella Fitzgerald or a recorded one.

Berger then said that he tests his incoming students each year in a similar way. He has them listen to a variety of recordings which use different formats from MP3 to ones of much higher quality. He described the results with some disappointment and frustration, as a music lover might, that each year the preference for music in MP3 format rises. In other words, students prefer the quality of that kind of sound over the sound of music of much higher quality. He said that they seemed to prefer “sizzle sounds” that MP3s bring to music. It is a sound they are familiar with.

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The footage is shaky and low quality, with chaotic shouts and protests from onlookers at a subway station in San Francisco’s East Bay. But it clearly shows three policeman roughly handling a group of young men–including one who is pinned to the ground by two officers and shot in the back.

This shooting of 22-year-old Oscar Grant–who died later in hospital–has outraged many in California and triggered riots in Oakland in a case that many feel echoes the brutal beating of Rodney King by LA police in 1991.

Transport police were called to the Fruitvale train station in the early hours of New Year’s Day after reports of a fight. Grant was one of a small group of men taken off the train and restrained, at which point several passengers began to film, using mobile phones and cameras.

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Former eBay (EBAY) CEO Meg Whitman has resigned her seats on the boards of Procter & Gamble (PG), eBay and Dreamworks Animation (DWA), The Wall Street Journal reports, increasing speculation that she may be planning a run for governor of California. The WSJ reports that sources say Whitman will announce her plans in the next four to six weeks.

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ICO Global Communications (ICOG) late yesterday announced that the jury hearing its breach of contract and fraud case against Boeing (BA) awarded the company $371 million in damages. That includes $279 million for breach of contract and fraud with regard to satellite pricing by Boeing Satellite Systems International and another $91.6 million for fraud related to satellite launches.

The company noted that the jury awarded ICO another $91.6 million from Boeing Satellite’s parent company for “tortious interference.” ICO said whether it can collect $91.6 million from Boeing in addition to the $371 million from BSSI will be the subject of further proceedings.

The award does not include any prejudgment interest to be applied by the judge in the case under California law. The jury also has yet to decide whether to award any punitive damages; a hearing on that question will begin Oct. 28.

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In a windowless underground computer lab in California, young men are busy cooking up viruses, spam and other plagues of the computer age. Grant Joy runs a program that surreptitiously records every keystroke on his machine, including user names, passwords, and credit-card numbers. And Thomas Fynan floods a bulletin board with huge messages from fake users. Yet Joy and Fynan aren’t hackers—they’re students in a computer-security class at Sonoma State University. And their professor, George Ledin, has showed them how to penetrate even the best antivirus software.

The companies that make their living fighting viruses aren’t happy about what’s going on in Ledin’s classroom. He has been likened to A.Q. Khan, the Pakistani scientist who sold nuclear technology to North Korea.

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Plantronics (PLT) this afternoon reported better-than-expected results for its fiscal first quarter ended June, thanks in large part to strong demand for Bluetooth headsets. The demand surge, the company noted, reflected the July 1 adoption of “hands-free” driving laws in California and Washington.

Revenue in the quarter was $219.2 million, above the Street consensus of $209.1 million, and ahead of the company’s guidance of $205 million to $210 million. Non-GAAP profits of 45 cents a share were well ahead of guidance of 33 to 36 cents and the Street at 34 cents.

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