Dmitry Shapiro is the former MySpace Music CTO. Shapiro has raised funding from investors that include Draper Fisher Jurvetson to launch an alternative to Facebook called Altly. Altly will be a social network that has strong privacy controls and data ownership.

Hedge fund manager David Einhorn is asking for Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer to step down. Einhorn believes that Ballmer is living too much in the past. Microsoft’s stock has been at a stand still for the past 10 years and they have not made a dent in their competition against mobile and Internet markets.

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) has announced the Google Wallet application that will turn your mobile device into a wallet. You will soon be able to use your Android device to tap, pay, and save using near field communication (NFC). Google is currently field testing Google Wallet and plans on releasing it ver soon.

Australian brothers Gabby and Hezi Leibovich have raised $80 million on a $200 million valuation for their companies CatchOfTheDay and Scoopon. The $80 million was provided by a consortium of investors led by Tiger Global Management. The two founders will be using the funds to grow those two daily deals websites. The companies were not initially looking for funding, but they were recently courted by American venture capital companies over the last 9 months. [WSJ]

Fring is a mobile communications startup that aims to compete against Microsoft’s Skype. Fring has raised $10 million in Series C funding from existing investors. This brings the company’s total funding to $30 million.

CrowdGather has acquired PbNation.com for $3.2 million. PbNation.com is a paintball community website that is essentially a forum. About $800,000 of the acquisition price is based on traffic requirements over a certain period of time. PbNation receives about 20 million monthly pageviews over 1.9 million unique visitors per month. The website’s traffic is primarily male. [AllThingsD]

Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE:BKS) has announced a new Nook 6-inch WiFi e-reader device. The $139 Nook has a touchscreen and a battery life of up to two months. This Nook uses e-Ink. This new Nook has only one button and sells for the same as the Amazon.com Kindle 6-inch WiFi version. The new Nook is available for pre-order, but will not be shipping until June 10th. [TechNewsWorld]

Technology blog and research company GigaOM has raised $6 million in a round led by London-based venture capital company Reed Elsevier Ventures. Reed is one of the largest publishing companies. Other investors participating in this round include Alloy Ventures and True Ventures. Kevin Brown of REV will be joining the board of directors. GigaOM is raising a new round of funding so they can grow GigaOM Pro. GigaOM Pro is a research service that has over 400 in-depth reports that covers 5 industries in real-time. [GigaOM]