This news got buried in the whirl of News Corp’s talks with Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) on a stake sale deal: News Corp has formed a separate incubator company called Slingshot Labs (we reported on it before here), and seeding it with a $15 million investment, according to this BW story. The new company is based in Santa Monica, CA, and former MySpace executives Josh Berman and Colin Digiaro will be serving as co-presidents (Berman served as COO and Colin Digiaro served as the SVP of International Corporate Development at MySpace).

The company will spawn startups to work with all of News Corp’s digital properties including MySpace, IGN and even WSJ.com. It will hire about 40 employees, mostly software developers, and will develop four to five ventures per year. SlingShot employees will receive equity in the startups. Apparently this has been a pet project of Chris DeWolfe, the CEO and co-founder of MySpace.

Facebook’s similar attempt with its $10 million FB Fund has been a non-starter till now.