RIM has announced that it will be taking over half a billion dollars in charges related to two major failures this fiscal year. First is the immense overproduction of the Playbook tablet, the writedown of which inventory amounted to $485M on its own, or $360M after tax. The second charge is related to the prolonged network outage in early October, though it’s unclear whether that money is directly related or being reserved for dealing with ongoing costs like lawsuits

The Kindle Fire looks like a bona fide hit right out of the gate. New estimates from IHS iSuppli have Amazon shipping 3.9 million Kindle Fires this quarter, which would make it the No. 2 tablet after the iPad 2 (with an estimated 18.6 million shipments).

The floor of Silicon Valley is littered with the carcasses of failed search startups. Without billions of dollars in resources like Microsoft or a tight vertical focus like travel site Kayak to help attract users, would-be competitors haven’t been able to pull people away from Google. Helioid is a small startup out of New York that’s trying to change that, by delivering results tied to categories of information

Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger is on stage right now, talking about innovative mobile design at the Warm Gun conference in San Francisco. If anybody has some thing to say about mobile design it’s the founders of the popular - startup which has had a great year, adding twelve million users in twelve months according to Krieger, and another two million in November (when we checked in at the beginning of November  it was at 12 million downloads , and Krieger just confirmed to me that it is now at 14 million). “I often think about mobile experience as filling in the gaps while you wait

Realtime data startup Metamarkets is announcing the launch of its analytics offering for mobile platforms and publishers. Metamarkets provides price data and predictive analytics to publishers and web companies. Launched in late 2009, the company aims to solve the problem of ad price discovery on web platforms for media companies.

The healthcare industry is in the middle of a number of crises, not the least of which is the modernization of its internal infrastructure. Having worked in the industry myself, I can attest that the amount of faxing, carbon copies, and redundancy are mind blowing, especially at overworked, underfunded hospitals. We’ve seen a lot of health startups over the last two years, though naturally many of the ones we’ve covered are more user-facing, like Disrupt finalist Cake Health

Toronto-based deal provider Dealfind , which recently became one of the first half-dozen or so partners to be featured within Google Offers , is now available as its own standalone mobile application. The new app works on both iPhone and Android , allowing deal hunters to locate, purchase and store offers on their mobile phone. There’s nothing all that remarkable about the app itself – you pick your city, find a deal you like and tap “Buy.” The app will also keep a record of your vouchers, whether new, used, pending or “gifted” (that is, given to someone else).

Intuilabs is showing off their proof-of-concept HTML5-based multi-touch smartboard in an effort to prove a) that HTML5 is pretty rocking and b) that someday we may all have smart tabletops in our home. To see the big screen in action you can fast forward to about 3 minutes in .

The Gillmor Gang – Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, John Borthwick, and Steve Gillmor – are recording live today at 1pm PT. Recording is over.

Electronic Arts has bought social game developer KlickNation , and is turning it into a studio within BioWare, its role-playing developer division. The move is a relatively inexpensive way for EA to build up Facebook versions of its hits like Mass Effect and titles for hardcore gamers using its extensive IP line. The acquisition price wasn’t announced, but it cost $35 million, a source tells Inside Social Games