Many people have lost data as the result of a Danger Inc. server outage. Danger Inc. is the manufacturing company behind Sidekick devices and is a subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT). Two lawsuits have been filed at the federal court in Northern California this past Wednesday. The outage caused many Sidekick users to lose their address books, calendars, and contacts.

Microsoft and T-Mobile indicated last week that the data might be permanently lost. However on Monday night the companies announced that some people may be able to get their information back. One of the lawsuits claims that Microsoft and Danger did not take reasonable care of the data and indicated that the Sidekick was falsely advertised.

One of the prosecutors is Maureen Thompson. Thompson’s daughter is an aspiring model and songwriter that uses the phone to store personal and business contacts. She also used the phone for storing music lyrics that are not saved anywhere else. Thompson bought the phone because T-Mobile promised that the data would be protected no matter what.

“Further complicating the data loss is the fact that Sidekicks, unlike iPhones, BlackBerrys and other smartphones, are not designed to sync locally with a user’s personal computer without additional software and hardware,” stated the filed lawsuit. “This means that most users were not able to backup their data locally, but were encouraged and required to rely on Microsoft/Danger.”

This past Tuesday Michael Dell gave a talk about some of the products that Dell Inc. manufactures and his thoughts on Microsoft Vista. Mr. Dell said that many buyers are unhappy with netbooks because of slow performance and small screens.

“Take a user who’s used to a 15-inch notebook and then give him a 10-inch netbook,” stated Dell at the talk as pointed out by the Standard. “He’ll say ‘Oh, this is so cool, it’s so lightweight.’ Then 36 hours later he’ll say the screen’s not big enough, give me my 15-inch back.”

Dell Inc. sells several types of netbooks including the Dell Mini.

Michael Dell also took the time to point out Windows Vista flaws, but added the positive results of Windows 7. Mr. Dell blamed Microsoft for some of the PC manufacturing company’s problems with sales. He added that Windows Vista hurt the company’s image and caused a backlash. Dell restored XP as an option back in April and charges consumers $150 for operating system downgrades. But Windows 7 has been showing signs of promise. “If you get the latest processor technology and you get Windows 7 and Office 2010, you will love your PC again,” Dell added. “And we actually have not been able to say that for a long time.”

Meghan McCain, the daughter of former presidential candidate John McCain uploaded a photo on TwitPic that caused some controversy. After uploading the TwitPic, many Internet trolls left very negative comments. Many of the comments used the word “slut” in it. I reposted the picture because I believe there is nothing wrong with it. I just see a picture of a girl that likes to read.

The picture has been deleted from her account in the last few minutes. Before it was deleted, the picture was seen at least about 160,000 times.

Meghan is wearing a low cut black tank top and is holding a book about Andy Warhol by Arthur C. Danto. Below are some of the tweets that McCain sent out after reading the reactions by Twitter users:
-so I took a fun picture not thinking anything about what I was wearing but apparently anything other than a pantsuit I am a slut, this is
- why I have been considering deleting my twitter account, what once was fun now just seems like a vessel for harassment
- I am going to take some more time to think about it but seriously I was just trying to be funny with the book and that I’m a dork staying in
- when I am alone in my apartment, I wear tank tops and sweat pants, I had no idea this makes me a “slut”, I can’t even tell you how hurt I am
- ok I am getting the f**k off twitter, promise not to delete my account until I sleep on it, thank you for the nice words supporters
- I do want to apologize to anyone that was offended by my twitpic, I have clearly made a huge mistake and am sorry 2 those that are offended.

ViVu is a video conferencing company that has raised $3 million in Series A funding. Investors in ViVu include Inventus Capital Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Quest Venture Partners, and Bill Carrico. The funding will be used for sales and marketing.

ViVu considers themselves as “video as a service.” ViVu allows anyone to create live video webcasts. The webcasts can be used for presentations and training sessions. Alongside the webcasts are integrated chat and Twitter features. ViVu can host the slides and files and provide analytics on them.

Some of ViVu’s competitors include TokBox and TinyChat. ViVu is based in Sunnyvale, California and was founded by former employees at Cisco and Alcatel-Lucent. Several employees include Indian Institute of Technology graduates as well.

Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO?) issued a statement that they will be buying Starent Networks for $35 per share ($2.9 billion total). Starent Networks makes products that allow wireless telecommuncations to control large sums of data being sent to phones and computers.

The Starent deal was worth a 20% premium over the stock closing price on Monday. Starent customers include Verizon, Vodafone, China Telecom, and Sprint Nextel. “We have had a huge explosion in data traffic,” stated Cisco chief strategy officer Ned Hooper. “We expect the market for mobile data to double every year through 2013.” Cisco is also predicting that video data will be about 60% of the data traveling on mobile networks.

Cisco has been on an acquisition binge lately. Two weeks ago Cisco made an offer to buy out videoconferencing company Tandberg for $3 billion and Pure Digital Technologies (maker of Flip video cameras) for $590 million. Cisco has the most amount of cash on hand for acquisitions than any other technology company. Cisco has $35 billion.

Starent is based in Tewksbury, Massachusetts and was founded in 2000. Starent had a 74% revenue rise to about $254.1 million last year. The acquisition deal is expected to be completed by 2010 in the first half.

JVC has launched a new camcorder called the Picsio. JVC says that the camcorder has 1080p resolution but in actuality, it has 1440×1080 at 30 fps. The video is saved on an SD card as an H.264 .MOV files. The GC-FM1 is now selling for $200.

Glam Media has hired Yahoo! VP and General Manager Advertising Technology Platforms Josh Jacobs. Jacobs ran the Yahoo! display ad platform and the publisher network. At Glam, Jacobs will be working as the SVP of Brand Advertising Products & Marketing. Glam grew about 50% in display advertisement revenues over in 2009 thus far. Yahoo!’s display ad revenue actually dropped about 15%.

Glam CEO Samir Arora said that their growth is because of high engagement rates. Visitors tend to spend more time on Glam than websites such as iVillage or Conde Nast. Glam was profitable as of this past September. The company will remain profitable through the rest of the fourth quarter too.

Glam raised $125 million in funding from Information Capital LLC, Accel Partners, DFJ, DAG Ventures, Walden Venture Capital, GLG Partners, Hercules Technology, Growth Capital, Hubert Burda Media, and Mizuho Venture Capital. Glam was founded in September 2003.

Amuso is a trivia and online game company that is based in London, England. The company has recently raised £947,000 ($1.54 million). Amuso hosts trivia games on their servers and they make money by selling trivia games to MySpace, AOL, and MTV. Amuso currently has about 200,000 users.

The games are free and can be played for cash rewards. Amuso claims that their services are not gambling because the games are based on skill rather than random chances.

As part of the funding Amuso hired about 10 people. Amuso also hired Ned Walley and Rabin Yaghoubi. Ned and Rabin both worked as directors at Google. Bill Houghton, former AOL Entertainment director also joined the board of directors at Amuso.