What you need to know - Thursday 12/2/10

Awarepoint raised $9M; Betterment $3M,Gowalla launched version 3.0, Apple gets a 3D patent

RIM is  buying a UI developer know as The Astonishing Tribe (or TAT for short).  The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Gowalla 3.0 launched Thursday for the iPhone.  The new version of Gowalla focuses on check-in's and pusing them to your friends on sites such as Twitter, Foursquare and Facebook.

Viber, a VOIP application for iPhone, is launching onThursday.  The application is free, and could become a competitor to Skype for iPhone.

Betterment, a financial savings startup, has raised $3 million in a series A financing. The round was led by led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Other investors in this round included The Anthemis Group and Thomas Lehrman.

There was $1 billion dollars spent on Cyber Monday, according to data released by comScore. For the holiday season-to-date, $13.55 billion has been spent online, which represents a 13% increase when compared to the same days last year. Cyber Monday reached $1.028 billion in online spending.

Samsung’s app store has just hit the 1 million downloaded app milestone from the Samsung app store. Some of the most commonly downloads apps include: Hulu Plus, ESPN Next Level, CinemaNow and Texas Holdem. U.S. General Services Administration has moved to Google Apps. The GSA is the first U.S. federal agency to do so. This move represents a switch off of Microsoft.

WikiLeaks has confirmed that it will no longer hosting its files on Amazon’s servers. This happened after the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut called for Amazon cut its ties to Wikileaks.

Apple has been granted a patent for a 3D screen that does not require special glasses. In this patent,  each pixel is projected onto a reflective, textured surface, and then bounced into each eye separately to produce the 3D effect.

Awarepoint, a real-time location systems (RTLS) provider for hospitals raised $9 million. The funds were raised from existing Awarepoint investors.

YouTube launched TrueView, an ad format which will give users the choice to choose between, or skip ads entirely. Advertisers will only pay for ads that are actually viewed.