Cisco is at it again. The company is acquiring the set-top box business of one of China’s largest cable companies, DVN, for $44.5 million. This is peanuts compared to Cisco’s latest acquisitions including the recent acquisition of ScanSafe for $183 million. A few weeks ago, Cisco announced a $2.9 billion acquisition of mobile networking infrastructure provider Starent Networks, which followed the $3 billion acquisition of video video-conferencing company Tandberg in late September.

Under the terms of the agreement, approximately $17.5 million will be paid up front, with an additional maximum amount of $27 million to be paid over four years based on sales performance. The acquisition is expected to close in the first half of 2010.

Way back in March, Apple announced that the latest and greatest build of the iPhone OS would open up a whole new world to third parties: richly featured accessories, complete with tie-in software. No longer would accessory makers be limited to headphones, cases, and FM transmitters with hardware controls – now they could make glucose meters, guitar amp controllers, and FM transmitters with onscreen controls! The possibilities were endless.

8 months later, what is there to show for it? There’s a $120 car cradle that boosts the GPS accuracy of the iPhone, some fancy running shoes, and.. er.. well, that’s about it.

With 600 million unique visits per month, Yahoo sees a large amount of traffic to its sites. In order to maintain sites in the cloud, Yahoo uses Traffic Server, a piece of software initially acquired via Inktomi, to support this massive amount of traffic. Tomorrow, Yahoo will be debuting an open source version of Traffic Server. The code is available through the Incubator project at the Apache Software Foundation.

Traffic Server enables the session management, authentication, configuration management, load balancing, and routing for an entire cloud computing stack. Yahoo says that with the open source version of Traffic Server, organizations can benefit from access to cached online content. In addition, Traffic Server enables faster responses to requests for stored Web objects, such as files, news articles or images.

By now, Tweetie 2 has probably stormed your iPhone. If not, you should check it out; in our opinion, it’s the best Twitter iPhone app out there (and yes, definitely worth the $3 [iTunes link]). But developer Loren Brichter isn’t resting on his laurels. Instead, he’s hard at work on Tweetie 2.1.

So what’s new? Well, there are a ton of small bug fixes, but also some pretty big additions. There are two that you’ll probably care the most about: New-style rewtweets and geolocation support. We got an early alpha build of 2.1 to try out, and it’s looking good.

There is a perception that Google’s Chrome is a rounding error when it comes to browsers. And maybe it still is, but Google is now fighting that perception in a very public way. Today, it announced that the Chrome Team won a Founder’s Award for their achievements so far, and for the first time revealed how many people are using the Chrome browser: 30 million active users. Update: I guess I jumped the gun here. Google has been using that 30 million active user number since July.

Now, 30 million is certainly a big number, but it is still a tiny fraction of Internet Explorer or Firefox (which has 330 million users). Nevertheless, Google is signaling with this award and this figure that it is dead serious about Chrome. Google generally doesn’t reveal user numbers for anything, so this is significant. And now it sets a precedent for Google to update the number in the future.

Will it grow, and how fast?

If you’re a Google Voice user like me, you’ll be glad to print out this quick reference card that gives you all the menu options when you call the service to listen to voicemail or change settings, or receive calls.

For example, when you receive a call with Google Voice you can hear who’s calling before you answer. Hit 1 to answer the call, or hit 2 to send them to voicemail. Easy to remember. But you can also hit 3 to send them to voicemail and listen in. Or 4 to answer the call and record it. Four is too many things for me to remember, which is why I’m printing this out and putting it in my wallet.

Thanks for CoolGeex for creating this!

Site redesigns always take longer than expected. But in the case of manufacturing marketplace MFG.com, a major overhaul of its site ended up taking three years. “The whole team has felt as though we were hand-cuffed for the past three years and couldn’t execute on all the great ideas,” MFG.com founder and CEO Mitch Free tells me.

But now those cuffs are off. Last night, MFG.com opened up its brand new site, redesigned from the ground up. MFG.com is a surprisingly successful B2B marketplace for sourcing manufactured parts, with more than $600 million in outstanding requests for quotes on the site (which is up from $50 million less than two years ago). Jeff Bezos and the German Samwer brothers are investors, as is Fidelity Ventures.

When Free launched the site way back in 2000, he built it on ColdFusion because it was fast and cheap. It’s amazing the site lasted so long on such outmoded technology, given its growth.

Well that didn’t take long. We outlined the not-so-ethical ways that the big social gaming startups are generating revenue through lead gen scams and subscriptions through a series of posts over the last week. Starting with Social Games: How The Big Three Make Millions and Scamville: The Social Gaming Ecosystem Of Hell. We also threw in some comments by other companies and a former scammer, and a quote from Zynga that 1/3 of their revenues come from offers, much of which are scams.

We thought this would be a fight that would take months to end successfully, and we thought that only Facebook or MySpace would make the move to clean up their own platforms.

But boy am I surprised today to see Zynga, the worst of the offenders, admit publicly to the problem and take quick steps to change. CEO Mark Pincus says:

Michael Arrington posted over the weekend about CPA offers within social games and questioned why facebook, myspace, zynga and others would expose these to our users. He raises good points about ‘scammy’ advertisers and the bad user experience they create. I agree with him and others that some of these offers misrepresent and hurt our industry.

Later in the post he also says:

Site builder Webs.com (formerly known as Freewebs) is launching a new App Store today with the hopes of helping its members customize their sites with rich, dynamic web apps without having to deal with widgets. The company is adopting a model similar to Facebook Platform, inviting developers to build applications that users can install on their Webs.com pages from a central directory.

Webs CEO Haroon Mokhtarzada says that one of the biggest problems with traditional website builders is that they generate static content, and it’s up to the site owner to continuously provide new content in order to engage readers. That’s fine in some cases (like for business websites), but most people have a tough time coming up with quality content on a regular basis. But he says that rich applications, which offer users a more dynamic experience, can help.

If you’re on the hunt for a new job, check out our CrunchBoard. We’ve added nearly 50 new jobs from leading internet businesses in the last two weeks, including two jobs here at TechCrunch. Here’s a quick sample:

• Sr. Front End Developer / JavaScript Guru
  Digg – San Francisco, CA

• Health News Editor
  AOL – New York, NY

• Director, Audience Development
  TheStreet.com – New York, NY

• Senior Creative Developer (Flash)
  Modea – Blacksburg, VA

• Development Manager, Front End
  WhitePages – Seattle, WA

CubeTree, a freemium enterprise collaboration suite and social networking platform has secured $8 million in Series B financing led by InterWest Partners with existing investor Trinity Ventures also participating in the round. The company, which launched in May of 2009, has raised nearly $12 million in funding from both InterWest Partners and Trinity Ventures, as well as investors, including Mitch Kapor, to date.

CubeTree says it will will use the capital raised to continue investing in product and market development. CubeTree’s enterprise collaboration suite looks like a cross between Facebook and FriendFeed and works like a social network. There are two main components to CubeTree: The Feed and the Profile. But on CubeTree’s feed, instead of seeing updates from everyone in your social graph, you see updates from coworkers. And on your profile page, rather than highlighting pictures or videos of yourself, there is an emphasis on information and documents.

LinkedIn’s founder Reid Hoffman will be joining Greylock Partners as a partner but will continue to hold the role as executive chairman of LinkedIn. Hoffman tells us that he will be shifting his angel investing under Greylock Partners, where he will be a partner.

Greylock has also closed Greylock XIII, a $575 million fund, which will be used to invest in and support promising enterprise and consumer software, services and infrastructure ventures. Hoffman said that Greylock was the right fit because of the relationships he had with the partners, and the angel investing presence of the VC firm. Hoffman said that Greylock and his interests in funding early stage companies were aligned. He adds that he will continue to work full-time for LinkedIn.

One of the biggest sources of new searches in the coming years for Google will come from mobile devices, which is why it is attacking mobile on multiple fronts—with Android phones, mobile apps, and mobile search across multiple devices. One of its more impressive efforts lately has been around voice search. Not every phone has a touchscreen or a full keyboard, and some languages simply aren’t keyboard-friendly, and that is where voice search comes in extra handy.

Google already has impressive voice search capabilities on the iPhone, Android, and other phones in English. But today, it is extending voice search to Mandarin Chinese and to Nokia S60 series phones. There are so many different accents and nuances to spoken Chinese, which is the most popular language in the world, that getting the speech-to-text good enough to return relevant searches is a huge challenge.

Happy post-Halloween! Thanks for sending in your costumes and thanks, most of you, for following the rules. That said, I’m proud to show you the 11 best costumes in this line-up, as judged by all of us at CG. I added one extra because we just couldn’t bear to choose between the various Iron Men we saw.

Here’s how to vote:

Last June, Google introduced a number of SMS-based services specifically designed to suit the mobile needs of Africans, kicking off in the Republic of Uganda. Today, the search giant is complementing one of the cellphone services it had launched in the country, an SMS-based marketplace dubbed Google Trader, with a web-based version of its own.

Now that Twitter has officially unveiled its Lists feature to all users, the frenzy has started. But while Lists are available via Twitter’s site, the feature has been slower to come to Twitter clients. Today, Seesmic is announcing the availability of Lists on its desktop client, Seesmic Desktop.

The new, downloadable version of Seesmic Desktop will display your Twitter lists in the left sidebar from any Twitter account you have (Seesmic lets you use one client for multiple accounts). The new feature also lets you add any Twitter user to any user list from any of your account. Right now, list functionality is limited. You cannot see lists that list you, only lists that you follow. And you cannot create lists from the client; this must be done within Twitter’s site. But, Seesmic’s founder and CEO Loic Le Meur told me that both the ability to create lists and see lists that follow you will soon come to Seesmic Desktop in the next few weeks.

Forgive us for not noticing sooner, but last week Google’s social network Orkut announced that it is rolling out a complete redesign. The new site is faster and, like every other social network these days, puts the activity stream front and center. Orkut has actually reduced the number of pages so that the most popular actions can all be done from the home stream. For instance, there is now in-line commenting for status updates, photos, and videos. And the various notifications (”friend requests, testimonials, community requests or birthday announcements”) have all been consolidated onto the homepage as well.

Orkut also now has video chat, in addition to regular text IM. Access to other Google properties such as Gmail, maps, and search are now integrated at the top of the homepage. Profile pages are more customizable, and photo uploads are faster.

Frankly, since I started writing my weekly column for TechCrunch a few months back, I’ve been growing increasingly worried about the sanity of our readers. And not just for the reasons you might think.

Under a growing list of bylines, more than 200 posts are published on TechCrunch.com each week – with countless more on the various spin-off Crunch sites. Even allowing for MG Siegler’s eight personalities, and the fact he hasn’t slept since the day Twitter launched, that’s still an enormous amount of content for one blog to produce.

Consuming every single word that appears on TechCrunch is a fool’s errand, and yet we know some of you try to do exactly that. We know this because, even when you find a post that doesn’t interest you, you still take the time to let us know rather than simply moving on to something else. “Too long; didn’t read” you say, helpfully.

Knowing how keen you are not to miss anything good, but worried that our ever-increasing output is going to turn you crazy, I took Arrington aside after our weekly game of beer pong to suggest a solution. Why don’t I compile a weekly ‘Best Of TechCrunch’, rounding up the most important, informative and entertaining content from the preceding seven days?

Amazon earlier this morning announced the official closing of the acquisition of Zappos, a deal which we broke the news about back in July. Turns out the valuation of the online footwear and clothing retailer went up from the reported $928 million over the past few months too – thank you, stock market – and Zappos turns out to have been deemed worth a solid $1.2 billion by Jeff Bezos & co based on Friday’s closing price of $117.4 a share.

User generated content has been the rage for quite some time now, but there have been few sites that nail the process of getting users to create quality content on the web. Launching today is TechnoBuffalo, a new site that is aiming to bring user generated content to a new level of sophistication. TechnoBuffalo features original tech content, a social network, and tools to build and monetize your own tech blog.

TechnoBuffalo is built on a customized version of WordPress Multi-User. TechnoBuffalo gives users the option to create their own blog with a custom URL (TechnoBuffalo.com/username) complete with full WordPress content management. Users can add writers, and customize the layout of their tech blogs. Users then have the option to manage their own advertising, or have TechnoBuffalo supply advertising on the site.