Giant Interactive Group Inc. (NYSE: GA) announced that it plans to commence official closed beta testing for ZT Online 2 on April 8, 2011. ZT Online 2 is the Company's new internally developed, martial arts, massively multiplayer online role playing game ("MMORPG"), which features both traditional ZT Online gameplay and new casual gameplay such as pet-raising, attractive 2D graphical effects, and support for 40,000 concurrent gamers per shard.

Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) announced the launch of Amazon Cloud Drive (www.amazon.com/clouddrive), Amazon Cloud Player for Web (www.amazon.com/cloudplayer) and Amazon Cloud Player for Android (www.amazon.com/cloudplayerandroid). Together, these services enable customers to securely store music in the cloud and play it on any Android phone, Android tablet, Mac or PC, wherever they are.

Games2win, a casual and social online games company has announced a Series B investment round from Clearstone Venture Partners and Silicon Valley Bank, raising $6 million in financing. Alok Kejriwal and Mahesh Khambadkone founded Games2win in 2007. The company has more than 400 games that are played by over 20 million consumers each month, claims the company. Rajan Mehra of Clearstone Venture Partners has joined the board of Games2win. Based in Mumbai, Games2win has 70 employees.

Total Immersion, which focuses on augmented reality, announced today that it has secured USD $5.5M in a funding round led by Intel Capital joined by existing investors Partech, iSource and Elaia Partners. The new funding will be used towards further development of the D’Fusion platform and to drive new usage of augmented reality (AR) for end-users.

Evergreen Events, organizers of the 2011 LOGIN Conference, has secured the creator of the Ultima series, Richard Garriott, as the keynote speaker. Held on May 16-18, 2011 in Bellevue, Wash., the LOGIN Conference annually attracts hundreds of individuals in the development and business side of the online game industry to the Seattle area.

Leading market research and consulting firm Pearl Research is pleased to announce the release of its new “Internet Cafes in Asia” study. This Internet cafe report is part of Pearl Research’s “Online Games in Asia” subscription series, which covers China, Korea, Taiwan, India and Vietnam. Highlights from the study:

Online photo site Shutterfly (NASDAQ:SFLY), service, announced today that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Tiny Prints, Inc., a privately-held company based in Sunnyvale, CA. Tiny Prints operates tinyprints.com and weddingpaperdivas.com, two fast growing ecommerce brands offering cards, invitations, personalized stationery and photo books. Upon the closing of this transaction, the three co-founders, together with the entire Tiny Prints team will join Shutterfly.

London based Just-Eat, the world’s largest takeaway ordering service, today announced the closure of a financing round of $48 million co-led by two leading venture capitalists, Greylock Partners and Redpoint Ventures with substantial support from existing investor Index Ventures. Just-Eat is currently represented in ten countries, across three continents and works with over 15,000 restaurants.

A new survey, produced with Pew Internet and American Life Project in association with the Knight Foundation, finds that in December 2010, 41% of Americans cited the internet as the place where they got “most of their news about national and international issues,” up 17% from a year earlier. When it came to any kind of news, 46% of people now say they get news online at least three times a week, surpassing newspapers (40%) for the first time. Only local TV news is a more popular platform in America now (50%).

Twitter was started five years ago. This week the company released a few statistics.

- 50 million. The average number of Tweets people sent per day, one year ago.

- 140 million. The average number of Tweets people sent per day, in the last month.