What you need to know - Thursday 12/23/10

The Gifts Project raised $1M; Lookout $19.5M; Rovi buys Sonic Solutions for $720M; Skype outage

About 26% of Americans used a Web-enabled cell phone to access information about, or to participate in, the 2010 elections, according to research conducted by the Pew Research Center.

The Gifts Project, an Israel-based social group-gifting platform,  raised $1 million. The round was led by Gemini Israel Funds.

Lookout, a security services company that focuses on smartphones, raised $19.5 million in Series C funding. The round was led by Index Ventures.  Accel Partners and Khosla Ventures also participated in the round.

Rovi announced it will acquire Sonic Solutions for $720 million. Sonic Solutions is a digital media company, best known as the makers of Roxio media creation software.  Rovi was formerly known as Macrovision.

Google bought a New York City office for $1.9 billion. The building, known as  111 Eighth Avenue, is already being used as an office by Google staff.

Motorola Mobility has bought  Mountain View, California-based Zecter. The amount of the sale was not disclosed. Zector is the maker of Zumo Cast, a mobile streaming media application.   

Mark Zuckerberg met with several tech gurus in China, including Charles Chao, the CEO of Sina, one of Chinas leading portals; China Mobile Chairman Wang Jianzhou, and the CEO of search firm Baidu, Robin Li. Even though Facebook said Zuckerberg was on vacation, it's widely believed that his visit was to explore opportunities to bring his social network to China. 

Skype went down Wednesday, leaving many users without service. Repairs took several hours.

Sony launched a new streaming-music service called Music Unlimited. The service, which is currently available in the U.K. and Ireland, will be available in the U.S. next year.