What you need to know - Friday 11/12/10

Houzz raised $2M; Apple joined Oracle’s OpenJDK; Punchbowl buys rival Socializr

Houzz raised $2 million in its Series A round of funding from Oren Zeev, Donald Katz,Gary Ginsberg, Jeff Fluhr, Amos Wilnai. Austin, Texas-based Houzz is a community of home-design enthusiasts.

Apple announced  it will be joining Oracle’s OpenJDK project, in order to open source Mac OS X. The OpenJDK project is an open source implementation of the Java programming.

Punchbowl just announced that it will be buying Socializr. Socializr is a San Fransisco-based party planning and event startup. The terms of the deal were not released. 

A study by Forrester Research’s North American Technographics survey showed that concerns about privacy on social networks are largely a concern of older users, but they have, on the whole increased drastically since last year.

EA is releasing two download games for players, Gatling Gears and Warp. They will be available for download in Spring in of 2011. The titles will be available for Xbox Live, the PlayStation Network and PC's.

IMVU, the social gaming entertainment game, is launching a European expansion today. The expansion will feature allow the game to be played in seven languages. IMVU's  games allows users to create a 3D avatar to be used in-game.

Facebook announced the creation of a new data center. The location of the data center will be Forest City in North Carolina to help service its 500 million active members.

Apple's Ping and Twitter have announced a  collaboration. This means that end users can share Ping activities on Twitter. They will feature iTunes song previews, and download directly from tweets.

FaceCash will now be accepted at select SUBWAY® locations in California. The mobile payment system will allow consumers to use their cell phones to make purchases.