This article has been re-posted courtesy of Ex Post Facto.
Internet
Skype announced an enterprise grade video conferencing product with document sharing to be release in late Q3 2011.
Kayak will provide travel search results for Bing in a new partnership between the two companies. The DealMap will provide aggregated daily deals for Bing.
Sony announced 70M PSN users, 70% of whom connect to the service weekly. This is more than twice the size of paid service XBox Live, at 30M users.
33% of U.S. consumers, 75% of Brazilians, 65% of Chinese and 52% of Indian polled say they are likely or very likely to purchase a vehicle online, according to a survey by Capgemini.
Groupon launched GaoPeng.com, a Chinese joint venture with Tencent.
33% of QVC sales are now ecommerce.
MeFeedia released data indicating 63% of the 30 million videos in its index are now HTML5-compatible, up from 10% a year ago, 26% last May, and 54% in October.
Mobile
Android has now reached 29% US installed based market share, compared with RIM’s 27% and Apple’s 27% according to Nielsen. Android has disproportionate share of 18-24 year olds, likely due to the lower cost of devices.
Apple released the iPad2, a minor update that adds a front and rear, low resolution camera. The new iPad case may be the biggest innovation. In addition the company reported 200M Apple IDs (reportedly the largest collection in the world of credit cards), 100 million iPhones sold, 100 million ebooks downloaded on iBooks, and $2B in developer royalties. Apple launched the iPad2.
Random House, the world’s largest publishing house acceded to Apple’s eBook revenue share and began distributing eBooks on the iTunes store last week. Random House is the last of the top 5 houses to distribute books on iOS.
Angry Birds reaches 30M downloads on Android.
Google is going to initiate a “remote kill” function that lets it zap applications on any infected phones from afar. Google also released new SDKs for combating platform fragmemtation. Today, 57.6% of devices run Android 2.2 and 31.4% run 2.1.
The wireless data market grew to $55B in 2010(+23% Y/Y) representing 40% of carrier revenue up from 5% in 2004, according to Chetan Sharma Consulting. US mobile penetration reached 100%. Connected devices comprise 7% of the installed base, up 55%.
Jambool, acquired by Google, announced the team is building the in app payments functionality for Android, slated for May release.
Square processes $1M in GMV daily. The company is adding 100,000 SMBs each month.
China Unicom, the second largest Chinese carrier with 15.5M 3G subs, revealed a new mobile phone OS based on Linux. ZTE, Huawei, Motorola and HTC have committed to producing handsets running the OS.
Unity Technologies released the first 3D graphics engine for Android devices. The company also announced 400,000 developers are using the toolkit.
40% of Angry Birds gamers buy assistance in the game through in app purchases.
Financings
MyLikes, an advertising platform based on spreading personal product endorsements through social networks, announced today that it raised a $5.55 million in Series A led by Khosla Ventures.
Egnyte, a white label cloud storage provider, raised $10 million from KPCB.
WeatherBill Inc. raised $42 million in Series B funding from Google Ventures and Khosla Ventures.
Boxee raises $16.5M from Pitango and Softbank
CrowdGather, a roll up of forums, raised $7.85M in Series A.
ContextLogic, maker of NLP analysis technology, raises $1.7M from SVAngel and a large group of angels.
CBS acquires Clicker, a TV guide on the web, for an undislosed amount.
Facebook acquires Beluga a group messaging company founded by a team of NYC Xooglers.
AOL acquires Outside.in, a local news aggregator, for an undisclosed amount.
Google acquires Zynamics which builds reverse engineering tools to prevent security vulnerabilities.
MyBuys, a provider of product recommendations technology, raises $20M from Rho, Lightspeed and Palomar.
Andreessen Horowitz has named former IronPort Systems Inc. co-founder and chief executive Scott Weiss as its fourth general partner–a move that is in keeping with the firm’s entrepreneur-friendly philosophy.
Greylock Partners raised its newest fund, $1 billion up from $575 million with $200M allocated to growth investments. In the last fund, growth stage companies represented 40% of invested capital .
