We’re still waiting to get Android 2.1 on our Droids, but at least Verizon has shared the details of what’s coming: More »

Argentinian social gaming company MetroGames, has just raised $5 million in series A funding from game developer Playdom. According to a release, the investment will be used to expand MetroGames’ development of games and its social gaming platform. Playdom’s CEO, John Pleasants will join MetroGames’ board.

MetroGames has over 30 games on both Facebook and its own standalone social gaming site. In the release, Pleasants said that he believes that the company will become a “big player in the social gaming market.”

It’s no secret that Playdom is eying the Facebook gaming market that Zynga dominates. The social gaming company just bought Facebook game developer Offbeat Creations. In November, Playdom raised a massive $43 million at a $260 million valuation. As we reported at that time, Playdom’s presence on MySpace was strong. Their Mob Wars game has 14 million or so users there, and the company was likely pulling in $60 million or more in revenue at that time. According to our stats from November, Playdom had 28 million monthly game users with 60% of traffic is from MySpace v. 40% from Facebook.

If you’re still running XP after all these years, odds are you’ve settled in nicely and don’t plan to leave until you have no choice. Well, that might be happening sooner than you expected. Microsoft announced today that they were working on Internet Explorer 9, and that it would not support Windows XP. This could be a sign that Redmond is putting XP development permanently on the back burner.

The new browser will be heavily dependent on hardware acceleration that just isn’t possible on Windows XP. IE General Manager Dean Hachamovitch even went so far as to day that a “modern browser” would require “modern operating system”. Those in the know were fully aware this might happen, as Microsoft announced the need for hardware acceleration at last year’s PDC. In the end, when IE9 hits next year, XP will be ten years old. It might be time to give Windows 7 a shot. Take it as a sign.

Today at MIX10 Microsoft told our sibling site WMExperts that there would be no cut, copy, and paste in Windows Phone 7 Series, which follows on the news of an Apple iPhone-style closed app market and lack of 3rd party multitasking. When the original iPhone 2G debuted in 2007 without cut, copy, and paste, multitasking, and most importantly a third-party app platform, it led certain editors-in-chief who shall remain nameless (though not pictured-less) wondered — and not unjustifiably — if the iPhone could be considered a smartphone?

iPhone 2.0 brought the 3rd party apps. iPhone 3.0 brought cut, copy, paste and a host of other “missing” features. iPhone 4.0 may even bring multitasking. Regardless, we thought the iPhone 2G certainly was a smartphone then, and now, and certainly think the same about Windows Phone 7 Series, and Palm webOS when it debuted lacking certain features. It takes an incredible amount of effort to launch a new mobile OS and no company, not Apple, not Google, not even Microsoft have unlimited time, talent, and resources to nail everything in version 1.0. Our question remains, to get cut, copy, and paste (or whatever feature you think is missing), what other feature would you give up? Notifications? The new user experience? There’s an opportunity cost to everything.

Of course, when Apple launched iPhone 1.0 it wasn’t leaving behind a large existing user base accustomed to many of those now missing features the way Microsoft is with Windows Phone 7 Series. So, yeah, it’ll be interesting to see if they can grab enough new users to make up for all the ones they’re gone to lose. Because, if all those Windows 6.x users are suddenly faced with something new and different, it may not be too far a stretch to go for a different platform entirely. Including an iPhone. Which has cut, copy, and paste and may just have multitasking by then. So to them, to you, potential iPhone switchers:

Welcome! How you doing?

No Cut and Paste in Windows Phone 7 Series. So is it a Smartphone? is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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It’s amazing what the high profile launch of a smartphone can do for a mobile platform. According to numbers that come straight from The Big G, the number of Android apps has more than doubled since December. This leaves it hovering somewhere around 30,000. Most of this growth is almost certainly thanks to the massive number of Droid sales. The Android Market may not have 150,000 apps like the iPhone App Store, but still quite a feat.

Android tends to have a higher ratio of free to paid apps than other application stores, so many of these new apps are available free of charge. Will the trend continue, or are we likely to see short bursts of app development around big phone releases? Google is doing their part by handing out Droids and Nexus Ones to successful developers. Where’s the tipping point where number don’t matter anymore? There will be a point that everything you need will be on various mobile platforms. The question is: does Android have what you need?

Coop’s Troops writes “An exploit writer at Core Security Technologies has discovered a serious vulnerability that exposes users of Microsoft’s Virtual PC virtualization software to malicious hacker attacks. The vulnerability, which is unpatched, essentially allows an attacker to bypass several major security mitigations — DEP, SafeSEH and ASLR — to exploit the Windows operating system. As a result, some applications with bugs that are not exploitable when running in a not-virtualized operating system are rendered exploitable if running within a guest OS in Virtual PC.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Surprised? Well, you shoudn’t be as this is exactly what we told you last week. T-Mobile has officially announced the HTC HD2 for March 24 at $199.99 with a new two-year contract with a data plan. Thi…

href="http://api.tweetmeme.com/share?url=http://mashable.com/2010/03/16/icon-video-series/&service=bit.ly"> width="51" height="61" src="http://api.tweetmeme.com/imagebutton.gif?url=http://mashable.com/2010/03/16/icon-video-series/" align="right"/> class='feedflare' href="http://www.google.com/reader/link?url=http://mashable.com/2010/03/16/icon-video-series/&title=Fake%20Steve%20Jobs%20and%20“Seinfeld”%20Writer%20to%20Satirize%20Silicon%20Valley%20in%20Online%20TV%20Series&srcTitle=Mashable&srcUrl=http://mashable.com"> src="http://cdn.mashable.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-digg-this/i/gbuzz-feed.png" align="right" />

src="http://cdn.mashable.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/fakestevejobs.jpg" alt="" title="fakestevejobs" width="260" height="190" class="alignright size-full wp-image-228869" />Web-enabled film and TV network href="http://mashable.com/tag/epix">EPIX has signed Emmy award-winning comedy writer href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0153078/" >Larry Charles to make an original, single-camera, half-hour comedy series called iCON. The series will take place in and poke fun at the Silicon Valley tech culture. href="http://realdanlyons.com/" >Dan Lyons will also write for the series.

Dan Lyons is the author of the href="http://mashable.com/2009/12/14/operation-chokehold/">satirical blog “ href="http://www.fakesteve.net/" >The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs,” so he seems a strong match for the Silicon Valley satire genre. Larry Charles is best known as a writer for Seinfeld, Entourage and Curb Your Enthusiasm.

He describes iCON as “nothing less than a modern Citizen Kane” (way to manage expectations!). The show will air on all of EPIX’s distribution channels — the cable TV channel, the streaming video site and the video-on-demand service. Judging from the title of the show and Dan Lyons’s background, it’s easy to guess what this new series will be about. Stay tuned — there’s been no announcement about iCON’s premiere date, but we’ll report it when we hear it.

Tags: href="http://mashable.com/tag/cable/">cable, href="http://mashable.com/tag/curb-your-enthusiasm/">curb your enthusiasm, href="http://mashable.com/tag/dan-lyons/">dan lyons, href="http://mashable.com/tag/entourage/">entourage, href="http://mashable.com/tag/epix/">Epix, href="http://mashable.com/tag/icon/">icon, href="http://mashable.com/tag/larry-charles/">larry charles, href="http://mashable.com/tag/seinfeld/">Seinfeld, href="http://mashable.com/tag/television/">television, href="http://mashable.com/tag/the-secret-diary-of-steve-jobs/">the secret diary of steve jobs, href="http://mashable.com/tag/tv/">tv, href="http://mashable.com/tag/web-series/">web series

It took almost a year, but Xobni finally released its email app for the Blackberry. It works as a standalone app integrated with the email on your Blackberry, but similar to Xobni’s Outlook plugin, it ranks your contacts by importance and pulls in social data from Facebook, LinkedIn and other places.

Along with the Blackberry app, Xobni is introducing another product which may turn out to be more important in the long run. It is called Xobni One, and it syncs your Xobni contacts in Outlook with your contacts on your Blackberry, all in the cloud. As Xobni rolls out more apps in the future, Xobni One should be able to sync contacts across those as well (very Mesh-like).

Xobni One is a way to sync your desktop and mobile contacts. If you use Outlook on your desktop at work, but Gmail on your Blackberry, Xobni One reconciles the two. And when you leave your job, your contacts stay with you. Xobni One isn’t free. It costs $4 a month or $40 a year, bundled with the Blackberry app. Keeping your contacts in sync is expensive. Doesn’t it seem that Google or Microsoft will eventually just do this for free?

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