One of India’s most popular gaming platforms Indiagames is launching a nifty new Cricket iPhone app, called Cricket T20 Fever. Cricket is hugely popular in India and the new app will be a feature rich gaming app that will aim to simulate the experience of playing the sport and competing against other players.

The game will launch first on the iPhone and as a PC browser based game and within a few months be available on additional platforms like Symbian, Symbian, Maemo, PSP, Xbox Live Arcade and Nintendo DSi. And the app will feature Facebook Connect.

Over the last decade or so, the public perception of online dating has shifted from being a bit odd to something that’s pretty normal. But even as people get used to surfing the web as they look for a potential date, there’s a new trend emerging: location aware, mobile dating services. Skout, a social dating service with a strong mobile component, decided to conduct a study to see how hesitant people are to make the move from mobile messaging to in-person meetups.

The company surveyed 1000 of its users 20-30 years old, with an even gender split. While everyone surveyed was a Skout user, the questions pertained to any mobile dating service. Now, obviously these stats don’t readily apply to the general public — everyone surveyed is already a Skout user, so they’re more likely than average to be inclined to use a mobile dating site. Here are some of the conclusions Skout came up with:

Back in November, at our Realtime CrunchUp event, I sat on the geolocation panel with members of Twitter, Foursquare, SimpleGeo, GeoAPI, Hot Potato, and Google. At one point, I raised the question if location was going to be the next battleground between startups large and small, much like social identity plays (Facebook Connect vs. Google Friend Connect) and status updates (Twitter vs. Facebook). All of the panelists indicated that it wouldn’t be, because they could all get along. How sweet. Sadly, I don’t believe them. I believe they might think that right now, because it’s still very early in the game. But it’s still a game, and people are going to play to win.

I’m sure some of them would counter that because location data is fairly standard right now, and moving easily between services, all of them will win. But that’s not true either. While location, as a whole, will win, there will be individual companies that end up ahead of others in the space. More to the point, there will be one or two services that people will go to for their social location data. That’s what we’re moving towards. And the bigger companies are starting to realize it. That’s why today we saw what may be the first maneuver in an upcoming rush to secure the location landscape, with Twitter snatching up Mixer Labs, the team behind GeoAPI.

Managing a baseball team, school club, or fraternity can be a rewarding experience. It can also be a total nightmare, at least when it comes to getting everyone to cough up their dues. WePay is a very promising startup in private beta that’s looking to fix group payments for good. Earlier today news broke that the company had raised $1.65 million from August Capital and some angel investors. That’s obviously great news for WePay, but also impressive is the company’s roster of angels: as of tonight the company can count PayPal cofounder Max Levchin as an investor. Given Levchin’s experience in this industry, that’s a very strong endorsement. PayPal alum Dave McClure is also onboard, as are Paul Buchheit, Ron Conway, Mark Goines, Andrew McCollum, Joe Campanelli, and Angus Davis. WePay is also a part of the Y Combinator program.

So what exactly does WePay do that PayPal can’t? The difference stems from the way payment accounts are set up. With PayPal, your account is tied to your name, without any way to separate the payments associated with your soccer team from those of your fraternity or your own personal transactions.

Everyday I troll SEC Form D Filings to discover new startups, fundings and investments. I put everything I find into CrunchBase.

For everyone else I give you the daily digest, a quick hit of the latest and greatest SEC Form D filings in the TechCrunch sphere:

It’s not often that you hear about a startup still in deep stealth that has over 40 employees and backing from some of the biggest names in the valley. But that’s exactly the case for Santa Clara-based Kakai, which was founded in May by Chegg founder Osman Rashid. The company has recently closed a $7.5 million Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Josh Kopelman (First Round) and Ron Conway. Marc Andreessen will be joining Kakai’s board. This brings Kakai’s total funding to $9.35 million, after a $1.85 million Series A earlier this year led by Rashid himself and Mike Maples.

Very little is known about Kakai at this point. It was cofounded by Rashid and engineer Babur Habib, who has spent time working on both semiconductors and software at Intel, Philips, and Exponent. The company has been rumored to have something to do with electronic readers, but all reports are vague.

Looks like Amazon has decided to go on holiday vacation early, and invited all of its customers to go along with it. Amazon and Amazon Web Services seem to be down, and people are noticing it.

This is bad news for any companies relying on Amazon’s cloud services. Many startups use Amazon Web Services to host files in the cloud including images and other key content. And it isn’t the first time this has happened (though its competition isn’t much better).

Regular readers will know my affinity for Apple products. In general, they’re high quality, and I’m willing to pay a bit more for that. But a lemon is a lemon, regardless of who it’s made by, and must be labeled as such. These new 27-inch iMacs? Lemons.

In case you haven’t heard yet, the screens on these massive things are failing left and right. Granted, not all of them seem to be affected, but 110 pages worth of support questions/rants on Apple’s Support page for the issue tells me the problem is pretty widespread. That’s 1,640 replies, so far. And that thread has been viewed an incredible 264,630 times. The next closest recent page with that many views has 26,852 — and guess what? It’s also about a problem with the 27-inch iMac screen.

Two days ago, Apple issued a fix for the issue. The only problem? The fix doesn’t appear to work.

Personal genomics startup 23andMe has recently raised another $14.2 million to close out its $27.8 million Series B round, according to regulatory filings with the SEC. The filing indicates that the new funding is an amendment to the company’s previously reported raise of $11 million in May, which was followed by an additional $2.6 million in June. We’ve reached out to 23andMe to confirm the funding amount, and to also determine if there are any new investors.

The last few months have been rocky for the company. In September, co-founder Linda Avey left 23andMe to start a foundation dedicated to studying Alzheimer’s disease. In late October, the company laid off a substantial chunk of its workforce, but declined to comment on how many people were affected.

Twitter CEO Evan Williams just announced on the company blog that they have acquired Mixer Labs, creators of GeoAPI. In a nutshell, GeoAPI provides developers with the ability to query the world through services which include a reverse geocoder; deep data about 16 million businesses and tens of thousands of points of interest; a writable layer for developers to annotate the world and do complex geo-queries; and location-enabled media layers (e.g., Twitter and Flickr). Just recently, they added an iPhone SDK to speed up mobile development as well.

GeoAPI will be integrated directly into the Twitter API, speeding up Twitter’s efforts in the geo-location space. In August 2009, Twitter first announced that they’re getting into the geo-location game as well. And, in September, a lot of you started seeing the Geo API in action through apps like Tweetie, Birdfeed, etc. Twitter formally turned on the functionality in November, but only through its API (not on the site itself).

Human-powered mobile answers service ChaCha has raised $7 million funding, according to an SEC filing. The company has confirmed the funding but declines to name investors. This brings ChaCha’s total funding to nearly $70 million.

ChaCha has been the subject of a little bit of ridicule at TechCrunch since its launch, thanks to its entertaining snafus and some issues with its business model. Despite its various problems over the years, the company has been able to raise a boatload of money adding $4 million to the pot earlier this year.

While ChaCha’s service currently attracts about 9 million unique users per month through mobile devices and its website, the model has had some problems ChaCha has cut guides’ payments quite a few times since its inception and was forced to lay off a significant part of its staff earlier this year. The startup recently branched out from the answers engine by launching a digital coupon service.

A lot more people have ordered the Barnes & Noble Nook, first announced on October 20, than the company expected (despite getting panned by the official reviewers). The company had Foxconn, their ODM, build far fewer of them than they should have.

The original plan was to ship pre-orders by November 30 but that date was pushed back to December 7. It took a mere month for the entire order process to break down. Now a small number of pre-orders still haven’t arrived and most brick and mortar stores are sold out and even then they were only available in “higher volume” stores on December 7.

The first batch of 150 tickets to attend the Crunchies Awards celebrating the best tech accomplishments of 2009 are on sale now, courtesy of Eventbrite.

The Crunchies Awards will be held at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco on Friday, January 8, 2010 at 7:30 pm PST. Orchestra seats are $75 and Balcony seats are $45. Along with our co-hosts, GigaOm and VentureBeat, we will announce the winners from 18 different award categories live on stage.

We welcome back the Richter Scales as part of our evening’s festivities.

It’s been a running theme for the past few years, and as more and more people get faster Internet connections, and as video compression technology continues to improve, we’re going to be hearing a lot more about it. I refer, of course (of course!), to illegal streams of live sporting events. Whether you’re firing up TVAnts on Sunday to watch Arsenal take on Aston Villa, or trolling USTREAM for a live feed of WWE’s Royal Rumble, or looking for MMA-TV to watch this month’s UFC pay-per-view, you are, in fact, breaking the law.

Not only are you breaking the law, but you may even be taking money away from the companies/teams/sports you purport to support. But is that all there is to it?

Yesterday, Blippy opened its doors beyond a private group of users it had been testing with. Their invites went quickly (we have more below), and despite the obviously controversial idea of opening your credit card purchasing data to your social graph, a lot of users jumped in and started sharing data. So many, in fact, that Blippy is already tracking well over $1 million in sales, we’re told.

Obviously, that’s a big difference from Blippy actually making $1 million, but eventually, that’s the idea. Still, the fact that users are willing to show off about 25,000 different purchases on the service shows that not everyone is so opposed to the idea.

Aol is telling a good story, but Citi analyst Mark Mahaney isn’t buying it. AOL is probably the toughest Internet turnaround story, he says in a report today, citing “28% Y/Y decline in its Subscriber base and 38% Y/Y decline in its EBITDA.” He recommends people buy Yahoo, which “will almost surely revert to growth before AOL.”

Mahaney also notes that Aol was the only top 5 web property in the U.S. to have year over year declines in visitors.

On the upside, Aol’s management team is prohibited from large cash acquisitions: “Per the terms of an existing credit facility, AOL can use no more than $100MM a year in cash for the purpose of an acquisition. Given the relatively unsuccessful large acquisitions of AOL in recent years (e.g., Bebo for approximately $700MM), we interpret this M&A cash constraint as something of a good thing near-term for AOL.”

Barclays analyst Douglas Anmuth was similarly bearish on AOL a couple of weeks ago.

The reports from a few days ago that the Jajah deal with O2 closed at $200 million were correct. Telefónica Europe (aka O2) just announced that it bought Jajah for 145 million Euros ($207 million) in an all-cash deal.

Jajah, which provides Internet calling services and thus competes with Skype, was on the block since at least November (which TechCrunch was first to report on), following Google’s purchase of much-smaller Gizmo5.

Well, Rupert Murdoch is going to love this. More people around the world get their news online from Google News than from CNN or the news properties of the New York Times. In November, 2009, according to comScore, Google News attracted 100 million unique visitors worldwide, making it a larger news site than CNN (66 million) or the combined properties of the New York Times (92 million). But do you know who is even larger? Yahoo News, with 138 million unique visitors worldwide. Funny how you never hear Murdoch complaining about Yahoo News.

Still, the top two sources of news online are Yahoo News and Google News, followed by the New York Times sites and CNN (China’s QQ.com News would come in fifth with 53 million visitors a month, followed by the BBC and MSN News with about 48 million each—the Wall Street Journal Online is way down the list with only 6.8 million).  Google News is the orange line in the chart.

The live video streaming application Qik has just been approved in the App Store and should be available shortly, we’ve learned. The company submitted the app a couple weeks ago following the approval of Ustream’s live streaming application, and as expected, Apple also had no problem with it now. This marks a change from Apple, which previously was blocking all apps that did live video (recording) streaming.

Apparently, the way these streaming apps work is using a restricted API (a screen capture API) to get around the fact that Apple doesn’t grant them access to the video APIs for live capture and streaming. But Apple has suggested that it will no longer enforce protecting this API and in the future should open more that allow for live video streaming.

Six months ago I wrote about a startup called Shopkick (it was then called MOBshop). The company won’t disclose much of what their eventual product will be, but they’ve attracted some of the most high profile investors in Silicon Valley: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Reid Hoffman.

Here’s what CEO Cyriac Roeding will say about Shopkick which is scheduled to launch in 2010: they aim to bridge the gap between the mobile phone and the physical shopping worlds.

In the meantime they are launching CauseWorld, “the first mobile application that let’s you do good deeds simply for walking into a store.” The application should be available on the iPhone appstore later today. Android is coming soon, along with more mobile platforms.

CauseWorld app users earn “karma points” when they walk into stores and check in with their cell phone. No purchase is required at any store, and karma points can be redeemed nine predefined good causes. Big brands like Kraft Foods and Citi (both are on board) then turn the karmas into real dollar donations to those causes. Food for poor families, water in Sudan, trees in the Amazon, etc. are examples of the causes.