“We must do whatever we can to stop cold calling each other’s employees and other competitive recruiting efforts between the companies.” This quote from Steve Jobs to Palm’s CEO was central to a San Jose court ruling today for why a class-action antitrust lawsuit against Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe, Intuit, Pixar, and Lucasfilm won’t be dismissed and will move on towards a June 2013 trial. The tech giants put up a flimsy defense at a January court hearing, attempting to secure a motion to dismiss on the grounds that “no poach” agreements between them were isolated and not a conspiracy to keep employee salaries down.

Mayfield Fund managing partner Tim Chang is going long on the idea of the “quantified self,” which is about using the latest in both hardware and software technology to keep detailed tabs of people’s daily habits in the hopes of gradually improving their lives.

Titan Gaming , the makers of a gaming platform that enables content sites and social networks to offer cash and prize-based game tournaments, is today announcing that it is embarking on a complete makeover that includes its rebranding as Playsino , along with a new focus, CEO, and some new funding. Under its new moniker, Playsino will look to leverage its traction in the tournaments and virtual rewards space and double down on another emerging vertical: social casino games

The NYC-based Wander is today announcing a raise of $1.2 million from Rob Go’s  NextView Ventures , Jeff Clavier and Stephanie Pameri’s  SoftTech VC ,  SV Angel , Rich Miner’s  Google Ventures ,  Collaborative Fund ,  Red Swan  and TechStars. Wander, which co-founder Jeremy Fisher describes as a “a way to the see the world through other people eyes” is still under wraps but Fisher reveals that the final product will be “adjacent” to both the curation and location space, a combination of Tumblr and Pinterest, Yelp, Tripadvisor and Foursquare. The five person Wander team, which boasts one of if not the best startup swag shirts I have ever seen, works out of the  TechStars  office in Soho while its in “mystery mode.” The startup generated some buzz early on with this  utterly pointless leaderboard ,” a meta-joke which has brought in over 43K signups thus far.

Microsoft just released its earnings report for the third quarter of its fiscal year. The company came out slightly ahead of analyst estimates , with $17.41 billion in revenue (compared to the predicted $17.16 billion) and earnings of 60 cents per share (compared to 58 cents). Microsoft says this is a record for third-quarter revenue, up 6 percent from the same period last year

We first wrote about Chocomize not realizing the importance of disruption in the bespoke chocolate space.

TinyCo , a mobile gaming startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz , is yet another major game developer that has come forward to show that revenue per user on Amazon’s appstore is tracking much higher than it is on Google Play. The company looked at its title Tiny Village , a prehistoric-themed simulation game that’s available on iOS, Google Play and Amazon Appstore, and found that when you break it out by platform, Amazon’s store monetizes 80 percent better per user than iTunes.

BranchOut , a professional networking app built on top of Facebook, announced today that it raised $25 million in a Series C round lead by Mayfield Fund. The app lets users organize their professional connections, see which friends have worked at companies their interested in and search for jobs.  Launched in July 2010 , BranchOut is growing faster than ever since the release of its Open Graph integration that posts users’ activity to Timeline, Ticker and News Feed.

Mozilla and Spain-based Telefonica officially announced their intentions to work together on an open web device at this year’s Mobile World Congress, but I’m not sure anyone expected the launch market Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs just announced. According to the Brazilian blog ZTop (Google Translated here ), Kovacs just recently revealed the the world’s first consumer-ready Boot to Gecko devices are expected to launch in Brazil either at the end of the year or in early 2013. Sadly, Kovacs made no mention of the juiciest tidbit: what kind of hardware we’ll get to see Boot To Gecko running on

Cloud note and storage app Evernote is raising a massive fifth round of funding of between $50 to $100 million at a valuation that tops $1 billion, according to multiple sources close to the company. Contrary to what Business Insider  is reporting , the round has not yet closed; While the final details of which investors will participate are still being finalized, there’s strong interest in the Valley and beyond. Investor Meritech is believed to be in the lead, having already dropped a term sheet according to one source.