Daily Dispatch: Groupon raises almost $1 Billion more; Kinect hacked to control World of Warcraft

In today's Digital Dispatch:

Groupon Closing $950 Million Round, Valued At $4.75 Billion (TechCrunch)

...Our expectation is that much of this new round of financing, if not all of it, will also be used to cash out existing investors.

Kinect Hacked to Play World of Warcraft: Welcome to the Future of Gaming (Fast Company)

...The tech is coming from the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies, where a team has built a toolkit, dubbed the Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit, which lets them quickly harness Kinect's various image processing and motion-sensing powers to whatever bits of code they desire.

Angry Birds creator praises iPhone as a platform, talks Android fragmentation (TiPb)

...Apple will be the number one platform for a long time from a developer perspective, they have gotten so many things right. And they know what they are doing and they call the shots. Android is growing, but it's also growing complexity at the same time.

Researchers eavesdrop on encrypted GSM call: all you need is a $15 phone and 180 seconds (engadget)

...According to them, it's not terribly difficult to use a $15 handset to "sniff out" location data used to correctly route calls and texts, and once you've nailed that down, you could use modified firmware to feed raw data into a laptop for decryption.

Irony: Read Kindle Books On Your Rooted NookColor (CrunchGear)

...This process also adds GMail, YouTube, and a number of other standard Android goodies to your previously stripped-down NookColor.

Kids are what their dads eat (Futurity)

A new study published in Cell shows that environmental cues, including diet, influence genes in mammals from one generation to the next, suggesting paternal environmental effects may play a more important role in complex diseases such as diabetes and heart disease than previously believed.

Eat this drink: Pepsi creates liquid fruit 'snack' in bid to expand (Mail Online)

...The mix of juice and puree has been adjusted without the use of gums or starches and ingredients include apple puree, filtered water, banana puree concentrate and three other kinds of fruit concentrate. But Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition at New York University, said the product was simply sugar.

About Digital Dirk's Dispatches
Dirk Klingner, our technology-trend watcher, sifts through hundreds of blog posts and news articles daily to bring you the Digital Dispatch—a compilation of the most important and interesting tech news for consumers. If you have a tip on a story you want to share, leave a comment below.