Professional social network LinkedIn grew at a rapid pace in the United States and now they are gunning for a comparable number of users abroad. LinkedIn Managing Director Kevin Eyres announced that the company passed the 3 million user count. Eventually LinkedIn plans to have an IPO but not for some time. LinkedIn has been profitable for a couple years now.

As of right now LinkedIn has about 45 million users and the company raised about $100 million in venture capital so far. The valuation of the company is about $1 billion. The company has not yet used any of its last round of funding which was $22.7 million.

Siri is a startup that utilizes speech-to-text and searches for what you want it to through voice commands. They call it a virtual personal assistant (VPA). The company raised $15.5 million in its second round of funding from Menlo Ventures and Morgenthaler Ventures.

For example you could tell the device that you want to see a movie and it will find tickets prices and showtimes. Or you can call a cab when you are out of town. Previously Siri raised $8.5 million in funding. The company has not officially launched its product yet.

News Corporation and their subsidiaries along with the Denver Post and the Dallas Morning News might be pulling their stories from the Google search engine very soon. Microsoft is rumored to be in talks with News Corporation to partner on a deal that will add the stories into the Bing search engine and news website. The Denver Post, the Dallas Morning News, and The Wall Street Journal would charge for content and remove it from Google News.

Rupert Murdoch was interviewed recently on Sky News and he claimed Google was stealing content from his company. MediaNews Group Inc. CEO William Dean Singleton said that the Denver Post will block Google News when the Denver Post starts charging.

“There’s value in that traffic and I think publishers recognize that value,” stated Google News Head Josh Cohen. “The reason they’re not opting out is they’re getting something from that relationship.”

Roger Avary is one of the writers of the movie Pulp Fiction. He wrote the movie along with Quentin Tarantino. This past August Avary pleaded guilty to manslaughter for causing a car accident that killed a passenger and injured his wife. He has to serve one year of jail time as the punishment.

However the punishment did not hinder Avary to carry on writing. He is sending some status updates in 140 characters through his Twitter account. The Twitter account has not yet been verified but a friend of Avary’s says that it really is him tweeting from behind bars.

How Avary would have access to a computer while in prison is a mystery. The tweets are coming from the “web” so it is assumed that they are coming from a public computer. His Twitter account has over 10,000 followers.

Chegg isn’t the only online textbook rental company that raised funding this week. BookRenter.com announced that they have raised $6 million in funding as part of the company’s first round. Investors included Storm Ventures and Adams Capital Management.

BookRenter’s growth was “300 percent year-over-year,” stimulated by the the back to school season. BookRenter is led by CEO Mehdi Maghsoodnia.

Currently BookRenter has 80,000 customers across 5,000 college campuses and is predicting that they will earn $10 million in revenue this year.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin told reporters last week that “Android and Chrome will likely converge over time”. Both open source operating systems use Linux and Webkit browser code. The operating systems are very similar in user interface as well.

I was looking through some of the referral traffic from Pulse2.com and I discovered one of the hits came from Bing.com/twitter. Microsoft is being quiet about the service as of right now which is why they are calling it Twitter Beta. The URL of the service is http://www.bing.com/twitter/. The original Microsoft and Twitter deal was announced on October 21.

At the top of Bing Twitter is a list of the hottest topics on Twitter. For example a lot of people are searching for MP34FREE, New Moon, Thanksgiving, AMAs, Black Friday, and Bengals right now on Twitter. Underneath the Hottest Topics are a list of blog posts being tweeted about that are related to each of those topics.

The two most recent tweets by Twitter users are displayed beneath those blog post links and Bing gives you the option to retweet it by clicking this icon:

When you conduct a Twitter search on Bing, there are results for blog post links and the 4 latest tweets related to the keyword(s) you entered. Once again the blog post links have the two latest related tweets underneath them. The 4 latest tweets related to the keyword(s) you entered is collected in real-time from Twitter.

I did a search on the keyword “Twitter” and the 4 latest tweets were changing about every minute. There is an option to “See more Tweets about” the keyword you enter in case you missed one of the results that you liked.

What are your thoughts about Bing Twitter search? Do you foresee yourself using this service often? What is your Twitter application preference? Let us know in the comments. I personally like TweetDeck the most.

Late last week court documents revealed that Rebecca Swift will be taking Facebook and Zynga to court over scam advertisements that were embedded within applications such as Mafia Wars and YoVille. Zynga designed the Facebook applications and the social network hosted them.

Rebecca Swift claimed that the ads were “highly misleading.” But there is a federal law that gives web sites immunity for material that they did not create. The controversy started after Michael Arrington started a rant against the social network gaming companies. Arrington even posted a video of the Zynga CEO admitting that he “did every horrible thing in the book” to grow in revenues. Swift claims she lost $200 as a result of the scam advertisements.

The law that might make the case easy on Facebook and Zynga is the Communications Decency Act. Google used this law to protect themselves recently against a lawsuit that involved fraudulent ringtone advertisements appearing on their search results.