In the last quarter, EA lost about $371 million and the company announced that they are planning to lay off about 17% of the total company. The first major lay off since they made the announcement will be taking place at Pandemic Studios. Pandemic Studios is a company that EA bought in 2007 and about 200 lay offs will be taking place at that subsidiary.

Only the “core IP team” will be kept at EA and relocated to the Los Angeles office. The former CEO of Pandemic Josh Resnick and the former President Greg Borrud were among those that were laid off. Games will still be made under the Pandemic brand name.

Pandemic started in 1998 and launched several popular titles since they started such as Full Spectrum Warrior and Star Wars: Battlefront. The lay offs at EA will also affect those who work at Maxis, Rupture Studios, The Saboteur, Tiburon, and Mythic Entertainment.

Kevin Rose was at the Web 2.0 Expo and admitted that he was interested in making the Digg homepage location based. That means that those who are in Chicago will see a different Digg homepage than those in London. But Rose said that the technology isn’t there to offer that option yet. “The noise out there is extreme” said Rose during an interview.

Rose had invested in FourSquare earlier this year which is a location-based mobile application company. That investment indicated his interest in making services more location-based. Rose also recently invested in DailyBooth which is a company that competes against TwitPic.

Qunar is a Chinese travel search engine company that has raised $15 million from GGV Capital, Mayfield Fund, GSR Ventures, and Tenaya Capital. This round of funding occurred shortly after TripAdvisor acquired Kuxun.cn for $12 million. Qunar will be using the funding for marketing, branding, and other developments.

At the 1:50 minute mark in the video above, Robert Pattinson is handed a gift bag with Bing written on it. Pattinson had no idea what the Microsoft search engine was. The event took place at the Westwood red carpet film premiere which was being sponsored by Microsoft. At the time of the question Pattinson was being interviewed by Ryan Seacrest.

Paul Nicklen is a photographer at National Geographic that went to Antarctica to film some leopard seals. When Nicklen slipped into the water with his camera, he was worried about what the seals would try to do to him. One large leopard seal approached his camera and gaped its mouth open. But then it backed off.

The same leopard seal came back with a penguin in its mouth and tried to shove it into Nicklen’s camera thinking it is its mouth. The penguin escaped and the leopard seal gave a look of disgust to Nicklen. Nicklen said the leopard seal kept bringing back penguins to him over and over. The leopard seal eventually realized that Nicklen was a “useless predator in her ocean, probably going to starve to death.”

Then Nicklen said that the leopard seal started looking a bit concerned. So it brought back weak penguins and some dead penguins. Then it brought partially consumed penguins in an effort to teach Nicklen how to eat them. This happened for over 4 days straight.

FreeCreditReport.com has won an arbitration case that entitles them the ownership of 1,017 domain names. The complaint was filed by ConsumerInfo.com, the owner of FreeCreditReport.com. This is thought to be the largest case in the past ten years involving the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (UDRP). The domain names that were being disputed involved misspellings of FreeCreditReport.com such as ereecreditreport.com.

Jason Calacanis is starting a new company called the Open Angel Forum. The reason he is starting this company is because he is sick of angel groups such as the Keiretsu Forum, Maverick Angels, and AlwaysOn charging start-ups for presenting. The investment company that Calacanis is starting will be a for-profit and will have chapters across 20 cities.

In the first quarter, a chapter will be opened in Los Angeles. This is where Calacanis lives and plays poker with over two dozen angel investors. Currently there are logos being voted up and Calacanis said he will discuss more about the business on his webcast.

RockYou is a company that designs widgets and applications for social networks such as MySpace and Facebook. It is considered one of the most successful companies based on installations. The company has raised $50 million in Series D from Softbank recently.

The company launched in November 2005 and raised $119 million in total capital. The company has revenues of about $30 to $40 million per year. RockYou has about 10 million registered users and 150 million widget views per day. The company was founded by Lance Tokuda and Jia Shen.

Previous investors in the company include First Round Capital, Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Partech International, SK Telecom Ventures, and Doll Capital Management. RockYou makes revenues from virtual goods and advertising along with in-game offers.