Will this be smooth sailing for wi-fi? Boingo Wireless has acquired the wi-fi networks for 11 Washington State Ferries terminals and 15  boats, with plans to charge $7.95 per day or $21.95 per month. Most of the crossings of Puget Sound are less than 90 minutes, so this service is certainly targeted at the Internet addicts among us.

Trilogy Equity Partners and Ignition Partners have invested $7.5 million in FireApps, according to a filing picked up by PeHub.com.  The Scottsdale, Ariz.-based company helps financial executives manage issues tied to foreign currency exchanges. The two Seattle area venture firms also have co-invested in Xeround, InstallFree and TTM.

National Venture Capital Association president Mark Heesen says that President-elect Barack Obama will be good for the venture capital industry, noting in remarks in Cambridge, Mass. that the clean tech and life sciences industries could benefit. More from Mass High Tech.

Following news that Sun Microsystems plans to chop as many as 6,000 employees, The New York Times reports that the technology industry's immunity to the financial meltdown is now over.

Derek Johnson, the 22-year-old founder of Bellingham startup Tatango, is featured in the style section of The Wall Street Journal as an example of a young worker who prefers tennis shoes and T-shirts over more formal business attire. Johnson tells the Journal that he wore a $900 suit to a meeting with a venture capitalist once, but it didn't go so well: "I think I wasn't really myself." Gawker casts a critical eye on the story, calling Johnson "young and dumb."

The Denver Post has more details on the bison hunt that Attachmate CEO Jeff Hawn sanctioned on ranch land in Colorado, a hunt that last week led to the executive's guilty plea on criminal mischief and animal cruelty charges. He could face 10 days in jail.

Wetpaint Chief Executive Ben Elowitz appears in a King 5 report about the protests being organized in Seattle and other cities Saturday in support of gay marriage, following the passage of Proposition 8 in California which banned gay marriage. Elowitz said Wetpaint's wiki sites are being used to organize protests in more than 300 cities, with the site, Join the Impact, attracting more than one million visits since it was set up a few days ago.

“When Web 2.0 started, people started talking about giving ordinary people a voice online. This is the pinnacle of giving people a voice online," Elowitz tells The New York Times.

The San Jose Mercury News has details of a sad story in Silicon Valley about a laid off technology worker who killed three people --including the CEO and vice president of SiPort -- at the offices of the company after losing his job.

Bellevue's Talisma has a new owner, at least for a portion of the assets. The maker of customer relationship management software, which was gobbled up by nGenera just six months ago, has a new owner for its CRM software business, its higher education business and its Bangalore, India unit. Campus Management Corp. bought the assets in a deal of undisclosed size. nGenera will continue to operate Talisma's customer interaction management software business. [Correction: The post has been updated to reflect nGenera's ownership of a portion of Talisma's business]