The social gaming industry has been getting more and more interested in a potentially big new way to make money: online gambling. And investors, who are now able to buy stock in market leader Zynga , are following suit

We’ve been hearing rumbles about Groupon taking its Groupon Goods initiative more seriously, including rumors that it was talking with various eCommerce companies about partnering up. Those rumbles have a little more weight today, as the company has acquired YCombinator startup Mertado , the social shopping service that uses Facebook as a distribution platform

The controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) has been pulled  and its Senate counterpart, the Protect IP Act (PIPA) is on hold . The Internet won this round, it seems. But don’t celebrate just yet.

Another day, another hack. The company whose data was compromised this time? DreamHost

Last year, New York City-based Grovo raised a round of funding with an honorable, if not lofty pursuit for all the web novices out there. Grovo was looking to become “the field guide to the Internet,” as much as there could be such a thing; in other words, the startup was building an online education and training platform to enable Web users to find and learn how to use the Web’s most-frequented sites (and vice versa) — beginning with sites like Twitter, Mint, and Amazon.

Have you voted for your favorite startups of 2011? Well what are you waiting for? Vote NOW .

Imagine you’re a hunter-killer robot, hovering over the broken wasteland that used to be the world of men. You have surprised a group of biologicals in an act of petty insurrection, and they have split into two groups and begun to flee. You can only pursue and eliminate one group, but you don’t have the spare milliseconds to analyze your high-definition imagery; yet you must determine which group is greater if you want to meet your termination quota.

Newt Gingrich got a boost in new Facebook Likes since Rick Perry endorsed him Thursday, according to our  Inside Facebook Election Tracker . Rick Santorum is also on an upswing ahead of the South Carolina primary on Saturday. Mitt Romney, who has fallen in the polls, had erratic growth on Facebook this week

Big-box retailer Home Depot has acquired home services marketplace and TechCrunch50 winner Redbeacon . Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Redbeacon lets users search, browse and book local home service providers, including plumbers, roofers, painters, and house cleaners, on its website

With a reported 30 million monthly unique users, the bragging rights of being the top iOS music app  last October and a slew of newly released auto integrations at CES , the under-the-radar TuneIn  is sitting pretty. The service, which like iheartradio takes terrestrial radio stations and streams them online, differentiates itself from other contenders in the music space like Pandora and Spotify by offering up traditional radio mainstays like DJs and contests, etc.