We were plagued all day today at the TechCrunch offices with a faulty Yammer Air app. Updates weren’t working or were seriously delayed, and most of us just moved over to the web version to get reliable service. We rely heavily on Yammer to communicate asynchronously across our very distributed team (three continents). I didn’t realize how heavily until today when the service wasn’t working properly.

I assumed the problem was Yammer, and emailed for support, but they threw their hands up. We narrowed down the problem - it was affecting only those of us on Macs with the Leopard operating system (not the brand new Snow Leopard, which would make more sense). Other people were discovering the same thing and Tweeting about it.

Adobe was responding promptly to inbound messages to their Twitter account, but didn’t seem to know what the problem was, either. And, oddly, Robin Wauters, who’s on a Vista machine, complained of issues as well.

We’ve heard scattered reports of Tweetdeck and other Air Apps having issues today as well. Anyone else out there notice any problems today? Adobe says they didn’t push any updates to Air today, and nothing changed on our machines. It’s a mystery.

In the meantime, we all downloaded Gabble, a native OSX Yammer client, and everything is smooth sailing again.

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In a coup for online game site Outspark, it’s cut a deal to publish a new online rhythm and dancing game developed by Electronic Arts. The deal illustrates how even EA is embracing a big industry shift toward new online business models.

The as-yet-unnamed game is being developed by EA’s recently acquired studio, J2M in South Korea. It will be launched as an online game on Outspark’s site later this year. Today, the game will enter its first closed beta test in a partnership with EA that is akin to a blessing from the Pope for Outspark.

San Francisco-based Outspark publishes online games that mix elements of casual (short play) games with massively multiplayer online games. It uses the free-to-play business model, where players can start for free and then pay when they want to buy virtual goods such as new weapons or armor. Outspark has succeeded by licensing games from the Chinese and Korean game publishers and making them available to Western audiences.

The five published Outspark games have been successful, generating an audience of more than 5 million unique monthly visitors. The high traffic — and frequent purchases of virtual goods — enabled Outspark to raise $8.3 million in venture funding during the dry month of July. Outspark now has 60 employees and has raised $20 million to date. Investors include DCM, Syncom Venture Partners, SBI Investment, Mille Plateau, Tencent and Altos Ventures. Outspark’s games have done well because they’re social and can be easily customized.

“This is our biggest deal so far on the publishing side,” Choe said.

Outspark has made its online game platform available for other game developers and publishers. Susan Choe, chief executive of Outspark, said in an interview that the online casual rhythm and dancing game is like Konami’s Dance Dance Revolution games, with shopping. The guys get to show off their dance moves and the girls get to form groups for both dancing and shopping.

The game is EA’s first Korea-developed online game that will make its way to North American audiences. Outspark is customizing the game for North Americans, and it is adding design and social networking features aimed at making it more popular. Outspark will operate the game and be responsible for things such as support and customer service.

Most of Outspark’s gamers just enjoy the free games. But around 10 percent or so spend money, and the average revenue among those players is $50 to $60 a month. The new game is Outspark’s first music title, one of fast-growing segments of the past few years. Choe said the game will incorporate the likenesses of celebrities and will also feature top 40 songs.

The music game market has flattened so far this year, but there are big games coming. Next week EA is launching The Beatles Rock Band with MTV Networks and Harmonix, while Activision Blizzard has lined up titles like Guitar Hero 5, Band Hero and DJ Hero.

I can hear the refrain around the world: “See, Mom, I told you so.”

Playing the video game Tetris can rewire your brain to make it more efficient, a new study says. The Mind Research Network is announcing today the findings of a study about how playing the 25-year-old game helped adolescent girls in a three-month-long period.

The study was funded by Blue Planet Software, the current owner of Tetris, and the c0-investigator, Richard Haier of the Mind Research Network, is a paid consultant for the company. But in an interview, Haier said that study was scientific, it had its own control group, and it was performed by an independent research group at the Montreal Neurological Institute. The results will be published in the medical journal Biomedical Central Research Notes.

“We guessed your brain could become more efficient the more you do things like drive a car,” Haier said in an interview. “The more you do it, the more efficient the brain becomes and the less energy it uses. We can measure the energy use now.”

Haier used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to study brain activity in the subjects who played Tetris regularly over three months. He compared the differences in 26 girls to another control group of girls who did not play the game. The girls who practiced Tetris showed greater brain efficiency. That is, the brain used less energy when it worked on familiar processing patterns. The girls who played Tetris also had a thicker cortex, meaning the game play triggered a structural change in the brain beyond the areas that became more efficient.

[Caption: Relative to controls, red areas show where practice led to a thicker cortex; blue areas show more efficient brain function after practice; right image is right hemisphere; left image is the left hemisphere]

“We did our Tetris study to see if mental practice increased cortical thickness, a sign of more gray matter,” said Rex Jung, co-investigator on the Tetris study and a clinical neuropsychologist. “If it did, it could be an explanation for why previous studies have shown that mental practice increases brain efficiency. More gray matter in an area could mean that the area would not need to work as hard during Tetris play.”

Haier (right) was the lead author of a 1992 study that found practicing Tetris led to greater brain efficiency. This new study reinforces that finding, but the results surprised him because it showed that the brain changed in other ways as a result of the Tetris play.

Haier said he remains interested in the subject of brain-training games, which some people contend can sharpen mental acuity and improve brain health of senior citizens. Those games have gotten a big boost since Nintendo launched Brain Age for the Nintendo DS a few years ago. But Haier said more research has to be done in that area.

The NY Times is now confirming our report last week the sale of Skype to an investor group led by Andreessen Horowitz is imminent. The deal will be announced Tuesday, says Brad Stone and Claire Cain Miller, citing unnamed sources (perhaps people that…read our post last week).

As we reported, Index Ventures is also participating in the acquisition. And the unnamed private equity firm is apparently Silver Lake Partners, who is likely supplying the bulk of the capital needed to pay the $2 billion price tag.

eBay announced earlier this year that they would be spinning off the company in an initial public offering in 2010. These announcements are often made to generate acquisition offers from potential suitors.

The Andreeseen Horowitz fund can make single commitments of up to $50 million.

It isn’t clear if current Skype CEO Josh Silverman would continue to lead the company after any acquisition. Sources we’ve spoken with have said he is generally well thought of both within Skype/eBay as well as the possible investors.

More from our post last week:

Skype, under Silverman, grew revenue to $551 million last year, and eBay has said it expects the company to top $1 billion in revenue in 2011.

Presumably, the investor group, if successful in acquiring Skype, would run it privately and eventually prepare it for an initial public offering.

Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, were also reportedly in talks with several private equity firms earlier this year to make a bid for the company.

Recent news that Skype is now in litigation with a company controlled by those founders over key Skype technology only complicates the picture further.

eBay acquired Skype in 2005 for $4.1 billion, although about $1 billion of that, an earnout, was never paid.

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[Update: the investor group has since announced it would buy 65 percent of Skype for $1.9 billion, valuing Skype at $2.75 billion]

eBay is expected to announce a deal on Tuesday to sell its Skype web-calling division to a group that includes Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, the New York Times reported.

The report cited two anonymous sources that said the investor buyout group includes Andreessen Horowitz, the new firm launched by Andreessen and Ben Horowitz this summer. The rumors, as yet unconfirmed, say that Other investors include London’s Index Ventures and the private equity firm Silver Lake Partners and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. This echoes last week’s rumor that an investor group including Andreessen was interested in buying Skype.

[Update: The deal places a value on Skype of $2.75 billion]

Andreessen is on eBay’s board. eBay bought Skype in 2005 for $3.1 billion. It outbid Google and Yahoo in a deal that ultimately has been viewed as one of the worst tech transactions of the decade. eBay has written off $900 million of Skype’s value, and eBay’s new chief executive, John Donahoe, has said that Skype isn’t a good fit with eBay’s e-commerce business.

Earlier this year, eBay announced it would spin Skype out in an initial public offering in 2010. Skype’s founders, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, reportedly approached firms this year to make a bid. Google apparently walked away from a bid out of concern over litigation exposure, as well as the fact that owning Skype would alienate wireless carriers who are adopting Google’s Android cell phone software.

Opera Software just released the final version of Opera 10, the latest revamp of its pioneering-but-not-terribly-popular web browser.

Could this be the breakthrough Opera needs to reach a big audience in the United States? We’ve already written about how Opera is doing all right financially, but in the United States, it accounts for only 1.18 percent of the browser market, according to the W3Counter. (Opera accounts for a slightly higher percentage of VentureBeat visitors, but not much higher.) The company will need to make a big splash, or strike some big deals with computer makers, if it wants to grow much beyond that. I’m not sure there’s anything earth-shattering enough about Opera 10 to do that.

Still, Opera has also as led the way for other web browsers with some features — it was one of the first to adopt tabbed browsing, and also created the “speed dial” now also available in Chrome and Safari. So even if you don’t plan to download Opera 10 yourself, you may want to check out the company’s list of things you have to try (copied below), if only to see what features may be added to your browser of choice a few years down the road.

1. Opera Turbo, a new compression technology that solves the pain of slow connections. Whether you are an on-the-go business traveler, you rely on 3G cards in your netbook, or you find yourself stuck on a sluggish Wi-Fi connection Opera Turbo gives you a major browsing boost. If your network speed slows to a crawl, simply enable Opera Turbo to browse the Web at broadband-like speeds. Opera Turbo will automatically detect when network speeds will enable you to benefit. Once you turn it on, Opera Turbo instantly compresses pages, so less data needs to be transferred over a limited connection. Take the Opera Turbo test today. In our laboratory trials, Opera Turbo gives up to eight times faster Web surfing over slow connections than other browsers.
2. A sleek and beautiful interface. You have never seen an Opera browser that looks like this. For Opera 10 we gave the browser a streamlined and elegant new interface. The world-class design complements Opera’s world-class features that help you get even more out of your Web browsing.
3. Better tabs, from the original pioneer. Opera continues pioneering new ways to use tabs. In Opera 10, resize your tab bar by pulling down on it or double-clicking the handle, revealing a surprise: Opera now shows you full thumbnails of all your open tabs.

I’ve only had a copy of Opera 10 for a couple of hours, not enough to form any kind of informed opinion. But combine the features list, my limited experience playing with the browser so far, and some of my frustrations with Firefox 3.5’s bugs, and I’m intrigued. So I’m definitely going to continue giving Opera a try.

It’s also worth remembering that the Norwegian company’s hopes aren’t just invested in its PC web browser. It also has mobile browsers including Opera Mini, supposedly the most-downloaded app ever, and is developing Opera Unite, a service that’s supposed to turn your computer into a server.

Silicon Mitus raised a second round of funding for its business of making power management chips. The Seoul-based company stands out since relatively few chip startups are getting funding these days. Theamount wasn’t disclosed.

The firm is headed by Youm Huh, chief executive, and it makes custom chips for flat panel displays, mobile applications and energy-related hardware.

The round was led by ePlanet Ventures and participants included Walden International. Lip-Bu Tan, chairman of Walden, said in a statement that Silicon Mitus exceeded his expectations for financial performance. The company raises its first round of institutional funding in 2007.

The Walt Disney Co. says it is acquiring Marvel Entertainment Inc. for $4 billion in cash and stock, bringing characters like Iron Man and Spider-Man into the Disney family.

Apple Inc said on Monday that it would host a media event next week, when the company is widely expected to unveil an updated line of iPod media players.

Looks like not everyone’s afraid of the ongoing shakeup of the venture capital industry. Khosla Ventures, the firm headed by Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla, has raised two funds totaling $1.1 billion to invest mostly into companies seeking to clean up the environment.

We already wrote that Khosla was raising the funds, but the New York Times has confirmed that he’s pulled together the money.

There’s a primary $800 million fund that Khosla will use to make investments of between $5 million and $15 million, plus a seed-stage fund of $275 million, from which he’ll make investments of around $2 million. Khosla Ventures previously invested Khosla’s own money, but this is the first time it has raised a fund from limited partners, making it the largest first-time venture capital fund raised since 1999. Both funds will focus on cleantech and information technology (IT).

This news is further evidence of Khosla’s contrarian streak: Not only is he talking about making big investments at a time when everyone is emphasizing smaller, safer deals, but he’s focusing on cleantech in a year when cleantech funding has fallen dramatically. Many observers had started to wonder whether Khola’s huge bets on cleantech in recent years were at risk. But after raising such a huge fund, he now arguably has the reserves to protect many of his investments. In his comments to The Times, Khosla downplays the risk.

“Clean-tech companies taking large amounts of money — that’s project finance, not technical risk,” he says.

Khosla also has announced two new general partners: former Facebook Chief Financial Officer Gideon Yu (whose move to the firm had previously been reported but unconfirmed) and James Kim of CMEA Ventures.

I’ve emailed Khosla Ventures for confirmation and comment.