Earlier today I called a friend for his birthday. I would not have known it was his birthday unless I logged into Facebook and checked the bottom right side-bar of the homepage. Facebook does not give prime homepage real estate to birthdays and that seems pretty inconvenient to those who like using that feature often. This is why I started searching for ways to import my friends’ birthdays into my iCal.

I just started using iCal recently and now I’m hooked on it. As long as my computer is booted up, iCal has to be open for me too. Here are some ways to import Facebook birthdays into your iCal or Google Calendar. I tried finding an easy way for Outlook but did not have any luck.

iCal
1. Open up your iCal
2. Create a new calendar by selecting the + sign at the bottom left and call it Birthdays
3. Visit the Birthdays to iCalendar (.ics) Exporter application page. Click “Download your iCal file” and set the import to your “Birthdays” calendar on iCal.

Google Calendar
1. Visit the Birthdays to iCalendar (.ics) Exporter application page. Click “Download your iCal file” and save the .ics file to the desktop.
2. Visit Google Calendar at http://www.google.com/calendar/.
3. At the bottom left click where it says “Add” under “Other Calendar.”
4. Click Import Calendar
5. Select the .ics file after on the desktop after clicking browse.

India currently has a population of 1.14 billion people. One of the fast growing mobile market segments in the subcontinent are the rural areas. As a matter of fact Manoj Kohli of Bharti Airtel is predicting that there will be about a billion mobile phone users in India by 2015. His company alone plans to have about 200 million customers in the next few years.

“Achieving a billion plus (Indian mobile users) by 2015 is possible,” stated Kohli at the Mobile Asia Congress event. “The largest growth will happen in the rural market.” Currently there are about 400 million mobile phone users in India and about 600 million in China.

When Call of Duty: Modern Warfare was released, the game made $310 million in 24 hours and $600 million in 5 days. The first question that might be on a financial analyst’s minds may be, “how much of that was profit?” It turns out that the game costed roughly $40-$50 million to produce. For a video game this is a massive budget. But it took only 2 years for Activision to put together. Gran Turismo 5 took about 5 years and costed about $60 million to put together so far as a comparison.

The launch budget of the game was about $200 million which is about the same cost as a summer movie. That $200 million included producing, distributing, and marketing. “My goal was to create a launch that would compare very favorably to the biggest box offices of all time,” stated Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick in an interview with the L.A. Times. It looks like Kotick met his goal based on the sales the game made thus far.

The Verizon Droid has not been out for that long, but retailers want to capitalize on the hype around the new Google Android phone, designed by Motorola. Verizon is selling the phone for $200. Then Amazon.com decided to chop the price to $150. And now Dell.com decided to beat Amazon’s prices by offering it for $120.

Dell had a rough third quarter caused by a 54% net income drop so the company probably wants to attract more buyers to their website. Most likely Dell will be subsidizing the price drop out of their own pockets, but the commission from selling Verizon contracts might be worth the drop.

The newest Palm smartphone with 3G connection, QWERTY keyboard, social networking applications built-in, EV-DO connectivity, GPS through Sprint Navigation, Sprint TV, Amazon.com MP3 store, and 5 hours of talk time has been reduced to a mere $25 on Amazon.com with a 2 year contract of course. This is about $75 less than buying the phone from Sprint itself. This is the perfect deal for Palm fans that want to save a few bucks this holiday season.

Like.com has acquired Weardrobe.com. Weardrobe is a website that allows visitors to upload pictures of themselves and follow other users whose wardrobes they like. Like.com will be rolling their technology into Weardrobe. Weardrobe started as one of the eighteen companies from the Facebook incubator program this past summer. This is the first of those eighteen companies to have made an exit. Overall Like.com raised $54 million in funding.

Vevo is an upcoming music video website that will be similar to Hulu. Rio Caraeff is the head of Vevo and the company is rumored to have raised $300 million. The company expects to stream about 450 million videos per month. The company will be ran by about 45 people initially.

Vevo is co-owned by Universal Music Group, Sony Music, and Abu Dhabi Media. Vevo will be powered by YouTube’s technology and they will be sharing ad revenue with each other. Vevo will be launching officially on December 8.

Torrent search engine service Mininova.org has hit a major milestone. The company hit about 10 billion torrent downloads earlier this week. Mininova started in January 2005. “We never really expected anything. We don’t really tend to focus on these numbers, we are just trying to run the site the best way we can,” stated Mininova co-founder Erik Dubbelboer in an interview with TorrentFreak.

Nick Scott Studio designed an animation video of The Story of Google starting from the time that Sergey and Larry met each other to the point of the Google Chrome OS. The Studio put together the animation video using After Effects, Cinema 4d, and a little bit of film. The video was a mixture of stills photography as well. The Nick Scott Studio has done some work for Ford and MTV as well.

AOL has hired Allen & Company along with Morgan Stanley to try and find a buyer for ICQ. ICQ is an instant messaging software that competed with AOL Instant Messenger before being bought out. There are supposedly two non-U.S. based firms that already have an interest in buying out ICQ from AOL. The deal will most likely take place when AOL spins off from Time Warner in December.

AOL is seeking around $300 million for ICQ according to a source with AllThingsD. AOL bought ICQ for $287 million in 1998 with about $125 million in earnouts. Tel Aviv based firm Mirabilis was the company that originally developed ICQ.

ICQ has lost quite many users in the United States since they launched originally, but their service is still strong in countries such as Germany and Russia. AOL Instant Messenger still has a strong user base in the United States.

DirecTV Group Inc. (NASDAQ:DTV) has appointed Michael White as their new CEO. White previously worked at PepsiCo (NYSE:PEP) as the Vice Chairman. Interestingly White does not have much experience in the food and beverage industry so that makes the decision quite interesting for DirecTV. There is speculation that he will act as a “baby-sitter” for DirecTV until a take-over happens. AT&T and Verizon are both potential candidates for buying out DirecTV since they both partner with the satellite TV company.

DirecTV has 18 million subscribers and the company launched in 1994. The company is currently owned by The DirecTV Group which is a division of Liberty Media.

White will be taking the CEO position on January 1 and will be replacing Chase Carey. Carey will be leaving to join News Corp. as the COO and President. Shareholders and the DirecTV management team are currently discussing whether to spin off Liberty Media’s entertainment assets into a separate company. DirecTV used to be owned by News Corporation, but Liberty Media exchanged 16.3% of their stake in News Corp. and $625 million in exchange for DirecTV and three sports networks.

AT&T has hired Luke Wilson to point out the differences between their service and Verizon. AT&T tried to file a temporary restraining order against Verizon for playing the “there’s a map for that ads.” But AT&T lost the injunction. Instead AT&T is doing an eye-for-an-eye approach by pointing out the flaws of Verizon’s network. Above is one of the many videos I’m sure we’ll see over the holiday season where AT&T rips on Verizon.

Twitter Inc. is being sued by Cooper Notification, a subsidiary of Cooper Industries Plc. Cooper Notification is based in Sarasota, Florida and the reason that they are suing Twitter is because of patent infringement.

“Cooper has suffered, and will continue to suffer, and is entitled to be compensated” stated Cooper in a complaint to the federal court in Wilmington, Delaware. Cooper Notification sends security alerts to the community and employees.

Twitter is not the only company that Cooper is going after. Cooper Notification is also suing Rave Wireless Inc. and Everbridge Inc.

Steve Case is the co-founder, former CEO, and former Chairman of AOL. AOL will be spinning out of Time Warner soon and will be going IPO. Steve Case is a shareholder in Time Warner so he will benefit from the IPO. And on top of that another startup company started by Case is being bought out by the American Express Company (NYSE: AXP) for $300 million. Revolution Money is a PayPal competitor that allows merchants to process payments at lower fees than many other traditional credit card companies.

The full press release is after the jump:
(more…)

Norwest Venture Partners is a technology venture capital firm that is based in Silicon Valley, California. Norwest has invested early in many technology companies such as Kayak, Arbortext, Rackspace, MyYearbook, Playdom, Sulekha.com, Ngmoco, and Yatra.com. The company raised a new round of funding at $1.2 billion. This is the eleventh fund raised in the history of the firm and is the largest. The new round of funding will be used for international expansion. Norwest already has offices in India and Israel. The company has invested in Chinese companies as well.