What you need to know - 05/26/11

Twitter acquires TweetDeck for rumored $40+ million; AOL to relaunch AOL TV

Peter Thiel’s inaugural class of “20 Under 20” fellows was announced Wednesday morning.

Hours after Barnes & Noble unveiled the All-New Nook, which is has the longest battery life of any other eReader on the market, Amazon announced a Kindle 3G with “special offers” (advertisements) for just $164.

In its latest effort to reinvent itself as a content and media company, AOL has relaunched AOL TV and teamed up with i.TV to create a mobile AOL TV app for iPhone and iPad.

Some six weeks after Glenn Beck and Fox News jointly announced that the Glenn Beck show would be ending, Beck is now said to be planning to launch a new Web-based TV channel called GBTV, with the very Glenn Beck tagline, “The truth lives here."

Project Slice, a startup emerging from stealth, completed raising $9.4 million in Series A financing in a round led by DCM and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Other participants include Bebo creator Michael Birch, FLOODGATE (Mike Maples), Innovation Endeavors (Eric Schmidt) and Playdom founder Rick Thompson.

As was reported again and again and again over the past two months, Twitter has acquired TweetDeck, one of the most popular third-party Twitter applications for desktop, Web and mobile. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

 Zozi, which offers deals on unique local activities, raised $7 million in Series B financing from existing investors, including LaunchCapital, the Pritzker/Vlock Family Office, 500Startups, ZIG Capital, Thomas & Peter Lehrman, David Tisch and others.