A curated selection of the day’s most newsworthy tech stories from all over the Web. Sign up to get the newsletter delivered to you everyday.
- Daily deals site LivingSocial, which has made a splash over the last few months with half-off deals from Amazon and Fandango, just clinched $400 million in funding from existing investors like Lightspeed Venture Partners and Amazon, at a valuation of $3 billion. (Wall Street Journal)
- Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of DreamWorks Animation SKG, joined casual game-maker Zynga’s board, which already includes Owen Van Natta, Reid Hoffman, Bing Gordon, Brad Feld, and Zynga founder Mark Pincus. (Zynga)
- Texas Instruments plans to buy its rival National Semiconductor for $6.5 billion, a deal that would give TI a larger variety of products to sell in the medical device, telecomm, and industrial equipment markets. (Wall Street Journal)
- Google bid $900 million for Nortel Networks’ patent portfolio, making it the company’s third-largest purchase to date, beat only by the acquisitions of YouTube and DoubleClick. (New York Times)
- Senior VP of Product Management Jonathan Rosenberg resigned from Google the same day founder Larry Page began as CEO. He will stay with Google throughout the summer and continue to consult for Google afterwards. (Fortune)
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Digg co-founder Kevin Rose's next project is Milk... Digg co-founder Kevin Rose, who quit the ailing service a few weeks ago, has moved onto Milk, a startup of six which TechCrunch reports is geared towards solving industry problems using the mobile Internet. (TechCrunch)
- A federal judge overruled a verdict that claimed Apple infringed upon a patent owned by Mirror Worlds having to do with the way documents are displayed on a computer screen. “Mirror Worlds may have painted an appealing picture for the jury, but it failed to lay a solid foundation sufficient to support important elements it was required to establish under the law,” U.S. District Judge Leonard Davis wrote. (Bloomberg)
- Yelp now draws 50 million monthly users to some 17 million reviews. (TechCrunch)
- And in case you were wondering, Hulu’s still on track to make $500 million in sales this year. (Silicon Alley Insider)
- According to a new survey, 56% of Android app developers said that developing for the popular operating system in its various iterations posed a “meaningful” or “huge” problem, a percentage that’s actually increased over the last three months. (Fortune)
- Scvnger, the gamified check-in mobile app, which recently launched its own local deals service LevelUp, is now catering to fledgeling entrepreneurs with the new deal, “LevelUp Your Startup.” Available in Boston and Philadelphia, entrepreneurs can buy into three levels of deals: Level 1 for $250 (normally $2,800) offers legal services, Level 2 for $150 (valued at $2,000) nabs buyers accounting services, and Level 3 at $1 (priceless?) promises a lunch with VCs and investors like Google Ventures’ Rich Miner and Alex Taussig of Highland Capital Partners. (Scvngr and LaunchSquad)
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