What you need to know – 04/01/11

It’s April Fool’s Day–so be very careful what you read today…

Bessemer Venture Partners closed a new $1.6 billion fund, its largest to date.

GameSalad, developer of a free game creation tool, raised $6.1 million in Series B funding led by Steamboat Ventures, with participation from Greycroft Partners, DFJ Mercury, DFJ Frontier and ff Asset Management.

Multichannel video game retailer GameStop acquired Spawn Labs, a peer-to-peer game streaming technology company, as well as Impulse, Inc., a subsidiary of Stardock Systems. GameStop did not disclose the terms of either deal.

Bob Parsons, CEO and founder of domain registrar GoDaddy.com (and the Go Daddy Group), is coming under fire for shooting and killing an elephant in Zimbabwe–and even moreso for posting a video of it on YouTube, with AC/DC’s “Hell’s Bells” playing in the background and Zimbabwean villagers wearing Go Daddy swag.

Email ad network ividence raised a $4.2 million round of financing from A Plus Financing. The new funds will be used to power ividence’s international expansion and hiring efforts.

In a supreme twist of irony, Microsoft has filed a formal complaint with the European Commission to claim that Google is anti-competitive..

OfficeDrop raised a $1 million round of angel funding led by White Owl Capita, for the company’s digital filing and scanning software.

Qwiki, the rich media site that seeks to “forever improve the way people experience information,” added another $1 million to its previous $8 million Seres A round, bringing the company’s total raised to $10.5 million  

Twitter has issued a new version of its iPhone app that removes one of the most publicly detested features from a previous update: the QuickBar, or, as it was lovingly nicknamed by iPhone tweeters, the #DickBar.

Today’s featured entrepreneur is Bill Tai, a sponsored athlete and an early-stage investor.