Facebook and Social Startups Meme.

As I recently wrote about Microsoft announcing in the PDC, that it’s LiveID’s will now be supporting the OpenID initiative meaning that only a single sign on required for users having not to remember multiple sign in user id’s and password and seamlessly integrating a single centralized initiative for accessing services on different websites and portals.

Feeling left out, today Google joins that OpenID initiative, and now your Google ID(Gmail etc) is your OpenID. Via this initiative, millions of users will be able to use their credentials be it yahoo, Microsoft, Google, Zoho etc(which ever supporting this initiative). But there is a catch to Google’s approach, it wants to be a provider rather being a “Relying party”, meaning that you wont be able to sign into Gmail with your Yahoo ID.

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Gaming giant Electronic Arts is said to layoff 6% of its employees in line with the on going financial crisis. The company lost $0.97 per share in the second quarter but had a 40% sales increase. Overall the company lost $310 million in the second quarter. The layoffs will save the company $50 million per year but the restructuring charges next year will cost around $37 million. According to the company’s CEO, John Riccitiello:

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access360 Media, the leading multi-platform media network has raised an amount of $8 million in the Series B of funding. The round was led by Mission Ventures along with Bessemer Venture Partners. The current user base of the company is 170,000,000 and is increasing with a rate of 14,000 users per month.

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Jupiterimages is now allowing users to buy individual images from its library on Photos.com. The company announced that instead of taking a monthly subscription fee ($99.95 for one month) to access the images, they’re doing this. The move could be among some of the changes under works as Getty agreed to acquire Jupiterimages for $96 million. All photos available in the library can be purchased as single images, in any desired resolution, with prices starting from $5 for multimedia resolution images of 1MB to 2MB sizes. Alan M. Meckler, Chairman and Chief Executive Jupitermedia, a parent company of Jupiterimages said:

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Prominent venture capitalist, John Doerr, has come up with 10 tips for the startups to sustain the current economic crisis. He was talking at the VentureBeat’s round table event. The tips are very simple and it took him just over 4 minutes to explain them.

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As the Yen gained substantially on the Euro and the Dollar recently, Nintendo earnings report showed profits were 16% below expectations. Still the company insists that this (fiscal) year more people are going to buy a Wii than they did three months ago. Previously the company had stated (in August) that it would sell 26.5 million Wiis, and now they have increased that tally to 27.5 million. Until recently, Wii was cheaper than the XBox 360 and PS3, and has been a popular selling item among casual-gaming buyers as well as hardcore gamers.

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Google has released the beta version 3 of its browser, Chrome. The latest release contains better security and enhanced performance. A number of issues including scrolling with laptop touchpads have also been fixed. The browser also contains a security update.Though there was no word from Google regarding the performance, yet the performance has improved according to ReadWriteWeb.

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AT&T announced a good news for BlackBerry users, if you have an unlimited data plan the company is offering free usage of WiFi. Soon other WiFi enabled devices shall receive the same feature as well. Whereas free WiFi is also being offered to users that have the AT&T small business broadband plans, AT&T High Speed Internet plans, and also to users signed on to the qualified AT&T LaptopConnect plans. The company is also offering WiFi subscriptions for $20 a month. David Christopher, Chief Marketing Officer of AT&T’s mobility business unit stated:

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TiVo and Netflix announced plans to finally roll out the ‘watch instantly’ feature to TiVo set top boxes. The announcement comes after a partnership of 4 years, where TiVo and Netflix worked together to stream video to TiVo set top boxes. The system works as first of all you’re required to be a paying TiVo and Netflix subscriber, thereby you’re able to browse a library of 12,000 movies and TV episodes from your couch, using just a TiVo Remote control. Though, the service’s only available to TiVo Series3 and TiVo HD users, and older TiVo units don’t support the video codecs Netflix uses to encode video.

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The online health solution provider, Diet.com, has announced its partnership with the online instructional video site, Graspr. According to the deal, the later will distribute original video content of the prior on its site and to its network that contains 2,000 partners. On the partnership, the senior video producer of Diet.com, Sarah Dussault said:

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