Magento has raised $22.5 million according to a regulatory filing.  Magento is an open source e-commerce software platform.  Magento has about 60,000 merchants using their software.  Magento was downloaded about 1.5 million times.  The company said that they have registered over $15 billion in transactions thus far too. [TechCrunch]

Tarpon Towers is a wireless communications tower company that received $15 million in equity commitment from Spire Capital Partners.  Spire Capital is a private investment fund company that focuses on communications, information services, and business services.  Andrew J. Armstrong Jr. of Spire Capital will join Tarpon’s Board of Directors.

Tarpon owns about 85 towers across 14 states.  “Significant wireless infrastructure investment will be made by the wireless carriers over the foreseeable future to address increased wireless subscriber usage, specifically as a result from continued wireless substitution as well as the explosion of wireless data usage and the proliferation of bandwidth intensive wireless applications,” stated Armstrong. [PRNewsWire]

Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei asked Twitter creator Jack Dorsey “Is it possible to provide a Chinese access on Twitter?” He followed that up by saying “I need a clear answer, yes or no.” Dorsey said “I would say yes. It’s just a matter of time” at a panel discussion on social media. Dorsey participated over teleconference.

Ai is frustrated with Internet limitations in China. “In China, we cannot see YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter, and very soon, maybe not see Google,” stated Ai. “Basically it is society that forbids any flow of information and freedom of speech.”

Dorsey said that Twitter is working on language translation but getting the service to work through China’s firewall will be tough. Ai’s art work has been seen around the world. He also was a design consultant for the “Bird’s Nest” National Stadium during the 2008 Beijing Olympics. [PCWorld]

Classmates.com is paying $9.5 million to settle a lawsuit that alleges that the social network is duping people to buy paid memberships. Each of the 3.16 million users with “gold” premium accounts are expected to receive $3 for receiving messages that appear to be from old classmates.  But they are fake.

Classmates is also facing a potential class-action lawsuit that alleges privacy violations.  The social network changed the default settings to make information more public.  Classmates is owned by United Online. [MediaPost]

AT&T has these in-store promotional flyer that shows a man that is proud to be a “she-mail (schedule and email.)”  I wonder if this she-mail has a Hotmail account. [The Daily What]

On the day that Apple started selling pre-orders for the iPad, they were selling at about 25,000 per hour. However sales have slowed down to about 1,000 per hour.

Daniel Tello is a blogger and analyst that has been tracking the numbers of the iPad pre-orders at the AAPL Sanity board on Investor Village. The weekend number was about 152,000 pre-orders as of Sunday at midnight. These numbers do not include reservations for pick-up.

Regardless of the drop of about 25,000 to 1,000, these are some solid numbers considering the device is still weeks away from being available to the public. I’m also anxious to see how these devices affect iPhone app developers.
[Fortune]

Symbolics.com was the first domain name ever to be registered. The registration took place on this day about 25 years ago (March 15, 1985). Symbolics was a computer manufacturing company and now the domain name is being used as the personal blog of Aron Meystedt. About 668,000 domain names are currently being registered every month, but back then the rate was about 6 registered in all of 1985. [Mashable]

KIT Digital is a Prague, Czech Republic based video tool player company that has acquired a rival called Multicast. The deal is rumored to be worth about $18 million. This is about one week after KIT Digital announced a $15 million equity offering in order to buy back 4 million outstanding warrants. Multicast will receive about $4.9 million in cash and the rest is 1.3 million shares of KIT digital common stock. Multicast is based in Atlanta and they have over 90 employees. [paidContent]