Digital Chocolate a social games developer announced it has closed $12 million in Series D financing. This round was led by Intel Capital and includes participation from prior investors Sutter Hill Ventures and Bridgescale Partners. The new funding comes on the heels of Digital Chocolate’s 2010 during which it became one of the top five global games publishers on Facebook. The company has also achieved more than 100 million mobile downloads, and has brought its social games to the smartphone and tablet platforms.

Paydiant, a new Boston-based mobile payments venture, today announced that it closed a $7.6M round of funding led by North Bridge Venture Partners and General Catalyst Partners. The investment will be used to accelerate product development, sales and marketing for Paydiant, which plans to formally launch later this year. Jim Moran, General Partner at North Bridge and John Simon, Managing Director at General Catalyst have joined Paydiant's Board of Directors.

The comScore Video Metrix service showing that 171 million U.S. Internet users watched online video content in January for an average of 14.5 hours per viewer. The total U.S. Internet audience engaged in nearly 4.9 billion viewing sessions during the course of the month.

Apple today announced a new subscription service available to all publishers of content-based apps on the App Store, including magazines, newspapers, video, music, etc. This is the same digital subscription billing service that Apple recently launched with News Corp.’s “The Daily” app.

GetJar, which claims to be the world’s largest open app store with over 1.5 billion downloads to date, announced it has raised $25 million in Series C funding from Tiger Global Management. Accel Partners, which provided its series A and B rounds, will also participate in the series C funding. The new capital will be used to expand sales, marketing and engineering initiatives.

Pearl Research is pleased to announce its exclusive market research report "Online Games Publishers and Market in Asia" is available. This study analyzes more than 25 top online game publishers in Asia. Pearl Research's "Online Game Publishers in Asia" study contains profiles of key market players including market share, financial data, key metrics, product analysis; and strategic outlook.

Visa (NYSE: V) today announced an agreement to acquire PlaySpan, a privately held company whose payments platform handles transactions for digital goods in online games, digital media and social networks around the world. Last year, global eCommerce sales reached an estimated $948 billion and they remain a significant growth opportunity for Visa. Approximately 45 percent of U.S. online spend takes place on Visa’s network today. For Visa’s fiscal first quarter 2011, the company reported 25 percent year-over-year growth in eCommerce payment volumes globally.

Taiwanese mobile firm HTC is investing $40 millionin OnLive, an on-demand, instant-play video games company. OnLive delivers game titles to any HDTV via the OnLive Game System or nearly any PC and Mac via a small browser download. The OnLive Viewer app is available for the iPad and is coming soon for Android tablets. The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California. OnLive investors include Warner Bros., Autodesk, Maverick Capital, AT&T, British Telecommunications (BT) and The Belgacom Group.

For the three month average period ending in December, 234 million Americans ages 13 and older used mobile devices according to comScore. Device manufacturer Samsung ranked as the top OEM with 24.8 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers, up 1.3 percentage points from the three month period ending in September. LG ranked second with 20.9 percent share, followed by Motorola (16.7 percent), RIM (8.5 percent) and Nokia (7.0 percent).

SOFTBANK CORP announces that it has acquired 35% stake (voting right base after dilution) into Synacast Corporation, also known as PPLive, the operator of "PPTV", an online TV service in China (http://www.pptv.com/).