Social gaming startup Playdom is putting this past fall’s $43 million funding round to quick work lately. The San Francisco company is investing $5 million in Argentina-based social gamer MetroGames as part of the South American company’s first round. The investment comes a barely two weeks after Playdom acquired Offbeat Creations, the developer of several Facebook-based titles, including dice game Super Farkle.

Universal Music Group was early to tap into the whole music gaming phenomenon by partnering with Tapulous to make iPhone apps for artists such as Lady Gaga and Souja Boy Tell ‘Em.

Now it’s branching off and working with others to create even more gaming applications. The record label’s latest app is called Six-String and is now available for $4.99 from the App Store for the iPhone or iPod touch. The game was developed by Frontier, which makes popular guitar simulators for the iPhone. The app will be used to highlight new releases, such as The Scorpions’ “Raised on Rock,” which can already be played on the phone, even though the album isn’t due out until March 23.

News Corp.-owned IGN Entertainment, which includes both the video game network of the same name, as well as sites like AskMen, is going through a major round of layoffs. In an all-staff memo sent today, IGN president Roy Bahat says that while the company has been “doing well—we’re profitable and our audience continues to grow,” it’s “still feeling the effects of the economy, and we need to make sure we can invest where there is opportunity.” He says jobs are being cut “in every part of the company.” The memo—which we obtained our own copy of and which is included in its entirety after the jump—was first posted by Joystiq.

Rovi, formerly Macrovision (NSDQ: MVSN), has acquired a small content personalization and recommendation software firm, MediaUnbound, for an undisclosed sum. MU was founded in 2000 by Harvard undergraduates and its clients have included Napster, MTV, NTT DoCoMo and HMV (LSE: HMV). Rovi owns All Media Guide and of course its IPG service, and this new acquisition could help refine and add to those media services. MU has focused on music till now, but could be extended to other kinds of media as well. Some more info from NTV, here.

Public relations news monitor Meltwater, which is still refusing to pay UK newspapers for crawling their websites, has now been blocked from indexing Times Online, the most serious of Rupert Murdoch’s UK newspapers.

The news site, which is due to go behind a paywall this spring and which had already blocked the NewsNow news monitor in January, enacted the block via the standard robots.txt protocol on Tuesday. It means thousands of Meltwater customers around the world won’t get to inform clients when their company is mentioned in The Times.

A few weeks after reporting that its net loss grew in Q4, Blockbuster’s 10-k presents some stark details about its debt struggles. The movie rental chain’s SEC filing served as a warning of sorts, with Blockbuster (NYSE: BBI) saying that its roughly $1 billion in debt could become more difficult to pay down. As a result, Blockbuster may consider diverting more cash flow from operations to debt service payments. The company added it was pursuing an exchange of all or part of its senior subordinated notes for Class A common stock—something that could force it to seek Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

»  New Ning CEO Jason Rosenthal discusses fundraising, profits and reasons for Gina Bianchini’s departure. [peHUB]

»  A look at budding online news ventures in Seattle. [seattlepi.com]

»  Facebook experiments with QR codes, which can store links, video, photos and text [TechCrunch]

»  Hate groups, including violent, terrorist and homophobic ones, have grown across social nets by 20 percent in 2009. [ars technica]

»  Entrepreneurs (still) question the value of social media. [WSJ]

»  Why Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) researcher Bill Buxton says devices need to “play nice” with each other. [Beyond Binary]

While Google (NSDQ: GOOG) continues work on reaching its $1 billion in display revenue goal, the latest blip in the search giant’s strategy involves getting more smaller marketers to use in-video ad overlays on YouTube. In a blog post, concedes that most small spenders don’t have access to the tools needed to create an animated display unit that appears across the bottom of a video stream. So Google has tweaked one of its AdWords tools, the Display Ad Builder, which offers font and template options for advertisers to now provide a space to add some animation for overlays.

Comcast’s domination of sports in its headquarters city of Philadelphia now extends to the local sports blogosphere. Regional sports network Comcast SportsNet has purchased The700Level.com, a top sports blog in the city. Enrico Campitelli Jr.—who started the site seven years ago and has been running it during his free-time—tells us he’ll now be working on it blog full-time, while the site’s three other contributors have been given freelance deals. In a blog post announcing the sale, Campitelli assures his readers that the blog will remain largely the same and also keep its “editorial independence.”

If you were hoping that Spotify CEO Daniel Ek would use his South by Southwest Interactive keynote to announce a launch date for the U.S., no such luck (although Rafat has a source who says possibly end of May). Ek’s biggest bit of news: Spotify now has more than 320,000 paid subscribers, up from the 250,000 number the company last acknowledged earlier this year. Nothing specific on the pace.

What’s holding Spotify back in the U.S.? “We are seeing a lot of support. We want to get all of our ducks in a row to make maximum impact” when we do launch.” Work in progress.

Google has confirmed that there are now 30,000 free and paid applications in the Android Market.

TechCrunch reports that the number of applications has nearly doubled from 16,000 in just three months. Other figures were provided by third-party developer AndroLib, which said it was only six months ago when Google’s Android Market had 10,000 applications.

Google’s Android Market growth has not been as fast or furious as Apple’s App Store. In fact, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) said in January that it had more than 140,000 applications, or almost twice as more as Google (NSDQ: GOOG).