Good news American Nintendo fans. The DSi XL will be headed your way at the beginning of 2010. The DSi XL device has a 4.2″ screen, stylus, large touch pen, and large battery (4-5 hour life on brightest setting, 13-17 hours on the low). No word on price yet.

Recently without notice Sprint decided to block tethering for smartphones on their network out of the blue. And Sprint customers are furious about the changes. I read comments that some people may quit the service just because of the change. It doesn’t matter if you are on the “Everything” plan or not, tethering will no longer work for you starting in 2010.

The changes were confirmed by Sprint executive David Owens. During a virtual chat on the Sprint website, Owens also revealed that Google Android OS updates will be added to the HTC Hero and the Samsung Moment. The price of Android phones will decrease “as we see volume across the industry” according to Owens.

The N-Gage is a mobile phone that was designed to be more user friendly for gaming. The mobile phone was based on the Series 60 line of Nokia products and was officially launched in October 2003. The device was intended to challenge the Game Boy Advance.

Around 2005 Nokia said that they are planning to add the same capabilities as the N-Gage to smartphones. The N-Gage did not actualy get an app store until February 2008. Now Nokia has announced that they are ending the N-Gage by the end of 2010. The launch price of the device when it launched was about $299. One of the reasons why the gaming/mobile device did not take off as much as Nokia anticipated was because the lack of a good number of games.

In total the company estimated to have shipped slightly over 2 million units. When the Sony PSP and Nintendo DS handheld consoles were released, it was even more bad news for the N-Gage. If you own an N-Gage what do you think of Nokia ceasing the development of the device?

Greylock Partners is tapping the business skills that Reid Hoffman has by making him an investing partner at the VC firm. Hoffman will work as the Chairman of LinkedIn at the same time. As part of the announcement that Greylock made, the company announced a $575 million round of funding. Currently Jeff Weiner is the CEO of LinkedIn.

In the past 6 six years, Hoffman has invested in Facebook, Digg, Flickr, Zynga and several other companies. “I definitely wear too many hats,” stated Hoffman as quoted by VentureBeat. “[Greylock and I] both wanted to make sure we had good, aligned interests. My interest was that I would continue to be massively focused on LinkedIn, and their interest was that I would help provide intelligence on the consumer Internet.”

Greylock is also an investor in LinkedIn. LinkedIn has over a $1 billion valuation based on their last rounds of funding. LinkedIn raised about $103 million in funding from Sequoia, Bain Capital, SAP Ventures, Goldman Sachs, McGraw Hill, Bessemer, Greylock, and the European Founders Fund. Hoffman worked at PayPal shortly before the acquisition and is considered one of the PayPal Mafia members.

Google’s web browser is growing by leaps and bounds. According to TechCrunch, the browser is now being used by over roughly 30 million people. In October, the browser grew at a faster pace than Firefox did. Granted Firefox has a lot more overall users but Chrome is still a new player in the web browser market. Google even has TV advertisement spots for the browser that is sometimes played on Hulu too.

The Chrome team also won a Founder’s Award for their efforts over at Google. This means that the team may get some additional stock options with Google. Overall Firefox has 330 million users and Google Chrome has about 3.58% market share. This means that Google Chrome is close to passing the market share of Apple Safari. If Google Chrome continues to grow at its current rate of 0.4% every month, it will pass Safari in February 2010.

In the third quarter of 2009, the smartphone mobile market soared like an eagle. About 290.5 million smartphones were sold in the quarter which is an increase of 5.6% from the year before. Between the five major telecommunications companies, all of them sold more phones in this quarter than the previous quarter. However Motorola slipped into 5th place behind Sony Ericsson this quarter. Samsung and LG broke new sales records this quarter too.

Samsung shipped over 60 million phones this quarter which is the highest they have ever done. Below is the break-down of the numbers provided by our friends over at UnwiredView:
* Nokia – 108.5 million units, 37.3% market share
* Samsung – 60.2 million units, 20.7% market share
* LG – 31.6 million units, 10.9% market share
* Sony Ericsson – 14.1 million units, 4.9% market share
* Motorola – 13.6 million units, 4.7% market share
* Others – 60.1 million units, 21.5% market share

100. Tamagotchi – link

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Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) decided to take Jonathan Mann’s Bing jingle and teach it to a bunch of middle school students in Pennsylvania. Mann won a $500 content that Microsoft held for creating a song about Bing. TechCrunch’s MG Siegler criticized the song so Mann retaliated by making a song about the editor.

Mann sent the below video to TechCrunch with the e-mail message:

I literally cried a little bit when I saw this video. On the one hand I’m happy I was able to provide some kids with an excuse not to do school work for a few hours. On the other hand, not sure how I feel about these kids being indoctrinated into the cult of, well, whatever. It’s kinda creepy. But on the other-other hand, the kids do look damn happy. So…oh well?

Hopefully the students at Keith Valley Middle School get some sort of compensation for synchronized singing and dancing Microsoft services. Especially because the school cheerleading instructor spent about 12 days teaching 6th graders the dance.

Zazzle is an online retail company where users can customize apparel, mugs, postage, cards, etc. Zazzle is now being sued by Summit Entertainment, the company behind the licensing rights for the Twilight series. A lot of tweens have used Zazzle to make Twilight gear and this clearly did not make Summit happy whatsoever. This is why Summit is suing Zazzle.

While Zazzle themselves aren’t the ones that decide the design, they still are the ones that customize the goods. Summit claimed trademark violation and defamation.

In November 2008 Zazzle was sent a cease-and-desist letter, but the company continued to sell the items. Summit said that this is considered “willful” infringement. Summit is seeking punitive damages, injunction, and accounting damages.

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) has been having some success with Google Voice. The service has about 1.42 million users and 570,000 of them use it every single day. The numbers were revealed in an FCC document filed by Google and discovered by BusinessWeek.

The same document revealed Google’s plans to expand the Voice service abroad. Google Voice allows users to have a universal number that forwards to a person’s mobile phone, work phone, or home phone. Google Voice was developed through the acquisition of GrandCentral. Google supposedly payed close to $50 million for GrandCentral in July 2007.

OneRecovery is an addiction recovery social network that has raised $1.49 million in funding. The funding round was discovered in an SEC filing by SoCalTech. The $1.49 million round of funding was part of a $2.5 million fund-raising round. OneRecovery is led by David Metzler. Metzler is a former VC with Mission Ventures and also previously worked as an investment banker at CIBC World Markets. Metzler himself almost died from drugs and alcohol which is the reason why he started OneRecovery.

“We congratulate Enjoyor on its IPO and support the launch of the Growth Enterprise Market,” stated Intel Capital President and EVP Arvind Sodhani. “We see the emergence of a liquid and thriving domestic Chinese equity market such as GEM as critical and essential for growth and emergence of successful innovative technology companies in our portfolio like Enjoyor.”

Yesterday Enjoyor Technology Group went public on the China Growth Enterprise Market. Intel Capital’s investment was made about 8 months ago. Intel signed a 3 year business collaboration deal as part of the investment. Enjoyor is helping Intel push their Atom processors in the areas of digital health-care in China too.

Intel Capital put in about $7.5 billion in companies since 1991. The $7.5 billion were spread across about 1,000 companies in about 45 countries. Of those 1,000 companies, 168 have gone public and 212 have been acquired or merged.

Tesla Motors seems to be getting their way lately. A lawsuit has been dropped. The company made a profit this past July. The U.S. Department of Energy and Daimler both invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the company. On top of all this luck, the state of California decided to give Tesla a $28.8 million tax break.

The tax break was made by the California Alternative Energy and Advanced Transportation Financing Authority. The break will save Tesla taxes on $320 million worth of equipment according to VentureBeat.

Ford Motor Company (NYSE:F) and The University of Michigan are now working together on a project that involves bringing cloud systems to cars. The service would be an add-on to Microsoft and Ford’s partnership on the Sync system. Sync is an in-car communications and entertainment system. Sync allows you to command your car to perform certain tasks using your voice.

The project between The U of M and Ford has the code-name American Journey 2.0. This will give U of M students the opportunity to work with a development operating system that could possibly benefit future Ford customers. “Already with Sync we have proven that we can access information in the cloud,” stated Ford head of infotronics Venkatesh Prasad. The infotronics division at Ford is part of the Research & Advanced Engineering department. “This research gives us the opportunity to harness the power of student innovation to explore beyond those capabilities and develop what’s next. We want the students to get creative and develop ways to responsibly connect the car to communicate and share with the outside world.”

“What excites me about this project is that it gives our students the opportunity to unleash their creativity using cutting-edge technologies that connect the vehicle and the cloud,” added U of M associate professor Dr. Jason Flinn.

American Journey 2.0 will be divided into two phases. The first phase involves testing and attempting to break the system by running several applications. During the second phase, an in-vehicle connectivity platform will be built.

After the platform is done, a competition will be held. The judges of the competition include representatives from Microsoft, Ford, the U of M, Maker Faire, and several others. The winning application developers will install their software in a Ford Fiesta at the Maker Faire DIY convention.

The Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPhone is now available in China through the China Unicom telecommunications company. The problem with the iPhone in China is that there isn’t any built in WiFi. Apple did this in order to comply with a government regulation. In China the iPhone costs between 4,999 yuan ($730) to 6,999 yuan ($1,025).

Given the high price in China, it seems unlikely that the phone will be as big of a hit there as it was in America. That seems unfortunate considering that the iPhone is manufactured in Shenzhen. WiFi was banned by the Chinese government in order to replace it with WAPI technology. WAPI stands for WLAN Authentication and Privacy Infrastructure. WAPI was rejected by the ISO and was one of the reasons for a U.S. and China Trade dispute.

“We are talking with Apple and expect the problem to be solved by the end of this year,” stated Unicom spokesman Yi Difei. Do you think that this will hinder people in China from buying the device?