After lengthy negotiations, Electronic Arts closed it’s anticipated acquisition of social gaming startup Playfish for $275 million in cash. An additional $25 million in stock will be set aside for retaining the top talent at the startup, and another $100 million in earnouts are part of the deal as well if the business hits certain milestones. So the total value of the deal could amount to as much as $400 million when all is said and done. Although, earnouts have a tendency to come up short (see Skype).

Playfish is based in London, and has raised $21 million from Accel Partners and Index ventures. The Accel investment is from its European fund.

Last year at a presentation at the Founder’s Forum in Hampshire, England, CEO Kristian Segerstrale put up a slide with a dinosaur and expressed his desire to “kill EA.” Now he’s joining them instead. Funny how that works.

Come back with me to the turn of the century, about 1996. Your humble narrator was working for campus police at Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh, creating FileMaker databases for their police reports. It wasn’t uncommon then to see DOS machines sitting beside Windows 95 machines and the web was a primitive and strange thing. There were only two browsers of note, Netscape and Internet Explorer, and firing either up was neither comfortable or interesting. But, hidden deep behind Netscape’s bland carapace, was Mozilla. When you typed “about:mozilla” in the Netscape address bar, for example, you got:

Xignite, a San Mateo, CA-based provider of on-demand financial market data, today announced a couple of new customers that are working on interesting things, including micro-blogging information service StockTwits and iPhone app developer Turing Studios.

Customer wins are one thing, but Xignite has a pretty interesting model, has attracted millions in venture capital funding, boasts an impressive customer roster and still manages to largely fly under the radar. So this gives us a perfect excuse to take a closer look.

I’d love to have witnessed the scene at eBay’s house back in 2005 when the FedEx guy delivered their exciting new purchase…

“Hey, guys! Skype’s arrived!”

“Awesome! Quick – open it…”

“Wait, what the hell… this isn’t what we ordered. It’s just a big box full of users with the word ‘Skype’ written on the side in Sharpie – none of the core p2p technology is in here.”

“What? Didn’t you read the description before you bid on it?”

“I guess not. I just got carried away with all the excitement.”

“Shit dude. How much did we pay?”

“Uh… $2.6 billion”

“Man, we have to stop buying stuff on the Internet.”

Transactional advertising network provider Adgregate Markets, a finalist at the 2008 TechCrunch50 conference is launching ShopCloud, a platform for building portable shopping carts and other e-commerce applications.

ShopCloud’s platform lets developers build a variety of applications around e-commerce, including distributed shopping carts, lead generation forms, polls and surveys, and social media apps. The platform also promises security and the ability to build and run secure transactional applications even in non-secure content pages.

A couple of weeks ago, we put DotBlu (formerly known as BluBet) in the deadpool. The San Francisco startup, which ran an online betting play at launch which later morphed to some sort of social gaming service, discontinued its operations on October 16 despite the startup being backed by a host of star investors (Jawed Karim of YouTube fame and Kevin Hartz of Xoom / Eventbrite to name but a few).

Turns out the venture still had a considerable amount of money left in the bank, which they will now be using to run the company in its third life under the name TownHog.

As we were all painfully aware, it took AT&T forever to bring MMS to the iPhone. A new app has just been released that hopes to one-up it.

Knocking, made by Pointy Heads Software, is basically a photo-sharing app on steroids. With it, you can pretty much instantaneously share up to 100 photos at once between two iPhones. This works by establishing a connection between the two phones, during which one user selects another user with the app and “knocks” the pictures over to them. The video below shows just how simple and fast this process is.

A couple of days ago, I checked if there were any updates for the applications I have installed on my iPhone, and one that was identified as having published a more recent version in the App Store was TweetDeck, the popular Twitter client for desktop and mobile. Strangely, the update failed and I just gave up trying to install the upgraded version after a while.

Now it seems the TweetDeck iPhone app is MIA from Apple’s App Store completely, barring new users from installing the app on their phones and existing ones to upgrade to a new version.

There are many sites that show trending links across the web including TweetMeme, Topsy, and Bit.ly. Recently launched splurb is now in the mix with its site that shows the most popular links that are trending on social media sites. splurb currently indexes Digg, Reddit, Mixx, Propeller, TweetMeme, Yahoo Buzz and Fark.

Splurb tallies the number of votes from the various sites and number of sources that list links. The more sources that cite a link, the larger the story appears on splurb. To get listed, a link must be popular on at least two social websites.

Last week Zynga CEO Mark Pincus said that they would take steps to remove scammy advertising offers from their social games. There have been a couple of missteps since then, and Facebook responded by taking Zynga’s newest game, FishVille, offline.

Zynga insists they are serious about cleaning up the industry. And today Pincus has announced that the company will remove all offer advertising from their games.

This isn’t a meaningless action. Offers account for 1/3 or so of Zynga’s rumored $250 million in revenue.

All offers will be removed by the end of today, says Pincus, “until we can control their inclusion and presentation ourselves.”

The blog post also discloses that Zynga is an investor in DoubleDing, an offer provider that competes with OfferPal and SuperRewards. DoubleDing was serving the mobile offers that popped back onto Zynga on Friday.

Pincus’ blog post:

Here are some stories from this week on CrunchGear:

Japanese company announces Dragon Ball headphones
Toyjector: Cute mini projector to be released in Japan
Choken Bako: Cute Japanese piggy bank

Zynga’s most recent Facebook game, FishVille, has temporarily been taken offline by Facebook for advertising violations.

FishVille will remain suspended, Facebook tells us, “until Facebook is satisfied that Zynga demonstrates compliance with Facebook restrictions — as well as Zynga’s own restrictions — on the ads it offers users.”

This is a relatively light slap on the wrist since the game only launched two days ago and had a couple of thousand users (Update: Zynga says FishVille had 875,000 users yesterday. wow). Zynga’s other games, including FarmVille with 63 million monthly users, remain online, despite the fact that they were showing the same ads.

But this does send a clear message to Zynga and other game developers that Facebook isn’t ignoring the problem. Whether it’s a real concern over the user experience or simply embarrassment from the press suggesting Facebook is a haven for scammers is somewhat irrelevant.

Facebook has also shut down a total of four ad networks in recent months for ad violations, including Tatto Media and Gambit. Other networks, such as SendMe Mobile, which was founded by ex-CNET executives, have largely taken their place by offering similarly questionable offers that trick users into mobile subscriptions.

This is also a bit of an arms race. Zynga may be specifically filtering Facebook employees from seeing ads that violate Facebook terms and conditions, making it difficult for Facebook to enforce the rules.

And the relationship between the two companies is complicated. Facebook battling Zynga on the advertising scams. But Zynga is also one of Facebook’s largest advertisers, probably accounting for between 10% and 20% of total Facebook revenue.

The TechCrunch Japan TokyoCamp 2009, a demo event for web startups that took place this Friday, was a total blast. No less than 350 people came to the demo pit and meetup, which were co-organized by DESIGN IT!, LLC (a Sociomedia group company that runs TechCrunch Japan) and Nikkei Digital Core (a community under the umbrella of the Nikkei, Japan’s biggest business publication).

This time, TokyoCamp gave a total of 29 startups from three Asian countries (Japan, Singapore and Korea) the chance to present their services to Japan’s leading journalists, fellow entrepreneurs, top-level VCs and TechCrunch readers. Here are thumbnail sketches (of varying depth) of all companies that were present at the event. (Here is my report on the first TokyoCamp that took place in August this year.)

Quick descriptions of all demo companies after the jump.

Executives from Tudou—one of two companies left fighting it out to be the YouTube of China—were in San Francisco earlier this week to meet with investors and do a little schmoozing.

I met up with CEO Gary Wang and COO Sam Lai, who already raised some $85 million from Granite Global Ventures and General Catalyst Partners, and they swore they weren’t here trying to raise more cash. That’s a bit of a shock. Last we wrote about Tudou and its arch-competitor YouKu, they were burning through hundreds of millions between them trying to find what YouTube still hasn’t: A way for online advertising to pay for video’s outrageous broadband costs.

I’d probably feel slightly smug, if I didn’t feel so sick.

Smug that after two weeks of me suggesting that social media might not be an unequivocally Good Thing in terms of privacy and human decency, the news has delivered the perfect example to support my view.

Unfortunately it’s hard to feel smug – hard to feel anything but sadness and nausea – when thirteen innocent people are dead.

Just five days ago Zynga CEO Mark Pincus said mobile subscriptions, among other scammy offers, would be removed from Zynga’s popular Facebook and MySpace games. “We have also removed all mobile ads until we see any that offer clear user value,” he said.

So we were surprised yesterday to see a screen shot clearly showing a mobile subscription ad in a post on InsideSocialGames about the launch of a new Zynga game, FishVille.

I went to the game to check myself, but those mobile ads weren’t there. I assumed they had quickly been taken down, or there was some other reasonable explanation.

They weren’t taken down though. Or rather, they were, but just for me. Other users were still seeing the same mobile ads. And the filtering was clearly directed at me, since I logged in on the same IP address with a friends account and saw the ads. I held a laptop showing the ads up next to my screen that didn’t show the ads and took a picture:

Yesterday I detailed my quest to find the throngs of Droid fans who had woken up at the crack of dawn to grab a place in line before Verizon unleashed the phone to the masses. Yet despite reports of lines elsewhere, I failed — the Verizon store in Palo Alto was a ghost town, as was the Best Buy down the street. Some commenters took my story and similar reports as an indication that the Droid’s launch had bombed, doomed to play out the same fate of the numerous supposed ‘iPhone killers’ before it. It looks like they may be wrong — that store sold over 70 Droids yesterday, according to one of its employees.

Today I returned to the Verizon store where yesterday’s quest began, looking to get my hands on one of the nifty docking stations that turns your Droid into a desktop clock/multimedia station. And while I expected a handful of other customers to be in the store, I was taken aback by just how crowded it was — each of the registers was busy ringing up a customer while others waited their turn, four people were standing in line just to touch the demo Droid unit, and I had to put my name on the list to talk to someone.

Last month, Apple rejected the Someecards iPhone app because it contained satirical comedy about public figures. After attempting to make their case and getting stonewalled, Someecards eventually gave into Apple and removed the offending cards which made fun of Hitler and Roman Polanski, among others. Apple swiftly approved the app and all was well.

Well, not exactly.

Apparently, Apple contacted Someecards a couple days ago because of some new content in the app — Someecards pushes new cards into the app just as it does on its site. There was one in particular that Apple did not find amusing, and wanted clarification on: A card making fun of President Obama Halloween costumes. It’s fairly easy to see why Apple wanted some clarification, the card involves race. Here’s what it says: “Just double-checking that your Obama costume will involve a mask and not shoe polish.”

Last week, Apple released its new 3.0 software for the Apple TV. Unfortunately, it looks like it came with a pretty big bug in tow: Disappearing content.

Here’s the problem in Apple’s words:

There is an issue with Apple TV software version 3.0 that can possibly cause your content to disappear after a period of time. All customers running Apple TV software version 3.0 should immediately restart their Apple TV and then upgrade to Apple TV software version 3.0.1.

Earlier this week the domain name industry was rocked by a shill bidding scandal at SnapNames. The company made the right early moves by admitting the problem and promising refunds, plus interest, to customers. Now, though, they are forcing customers to release them from liability to get the refund. We think this this is a mistake.

SnapNames acquires expiring domain names from registries and then auctions them off to interested buyers. When everything goes well people are happy. SnapNames gets a good return on investment, and the domains go to the buyer who values them the highest.

But it turns out things most certainly have not gone well. Since 2005 a substantial number of domain auctions had shill bidding by a SnapNames employee.

This isn’t run of the mill eBay shill bidding. On eBay a seller may try to participate in the auction to drive overall bidding higher. But for the most part pricing doesn’t get out of control because most stuff sold on eBay isn’t particularly unique and price boundaries are well established.

What happened at SnapNames is much worse. The company is the seller and has the most to gain by shill bidding. And the company is also in control of all auction information. Sometimes an auction may have two bidders, with one bidder putting in a maximum bid of $100,000 (yes, they go this high sometimes). Another may bid just $10,000, and so the winning buyer would just pay some small amount over $10k. From SnapNames perspective that isn’t a $10k gain. It’s a $90k loss.

So SnapNames “fixed” the problem. An executive with the company simply bid on those domains. He could bid up to, say, $90,000 with full certainty that he wouldn’t be burdened with actually winning the auction and having to pay up. SnapNames made lots of extra money. And if the top bidder backed out and the executive accidentally won, SnapNames was secretly reimbursing him on the back end. Zero risk.