Today in Tech: Why the Kindle Fire is good for Apple

* Barclays analyst Ben Reitzes met with Apple (AAPL) CEO Tim Cook and CFO Peter Oppenheimer. According to Reitzes, the company believes Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet could actually be good for them, fueling further fracturing, or fragmentation, of the Android platform and driving potential consumers to the iPad. (Business Insider)

* Groupon priced its initial public offering (IPO) at $20 a share, well above the predicted price range of between $16 to $18 a share, and also added an additional 5 million shares, bringing the total IPO value to $700 million and making it the biggest Internet IPO since Google (GOOG). (All Things D)

* AMD (AMD)will lay off 10% of its workforce next year as part of its restructuring efforts. (AMD)

* Engadget reports that Barnes & Noble (BKS) is readying a $249 hardware update to its Nook Color tablet with a dual-core processor, 16 GB of storage, and 1 GB of RAM for pre-order November 7. We’ll see if all that pans out when the book chain holds its event this Monday in New York City. (Engadget)

* Zynga launched CastleVille, the latest simulation game that lets users build their own kingdom with castles, but also tosses in a healthy dose of massive multiplayer online role-play game (MMORPG) elements like player customization, a reputation system, and a trade system, the last of which will roll out in an update due out within the next few weeks. (Zynga)

* Oink, the first product from Digg co-founder Kevin Rose’s new startup lab Milk, just launched on iTunes. According to TechCrunch, the app lets users rank specific things at different places — a type of tea at a particular lounge, for instance. (TechCrunch)

* Dial-up Internet isn’t totally, utterly dead, after all. Dan Frommer over at SplatF reports that AOL (AOL) still has 3.5 million dial-up subscribers who go online the old-fashioned way. (SplatF)

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