Earlier today I called a friend for his birthday. I would not have known it was his birthday unless I logged into Facebook and checked the bottom right side-bar of the homepage. Facebook does not give prime homepage real estate to birthdays and that seems pretty inconvenient to those who like using that feature often. This is why I started searching for ways to import my friends’ birthdays into my iCal.

I just started using iCal recently and now I’m hooked on it. As long as my computer is booted up, iCal has to be open for me too. Here are some ways to import Facebook birthdays into your iCal or Google Calendar. I tried finding an easy way for Outlook but did not have any luck.

iCal
1. Open up your iCal
2. Create a new calendar by selecting the + sign at the bottom left and call it Birthdays
3. Visit the Birthdays to iCalendar (.ics) Exporter application page. Click “Download your iCal file” and set the import to your “Birthdays” calendar on iCal.

Google Calendar
1. Visit the Birthdays to iCalendar (.ics) Exporter application page. Click “Download your iCal file” and save the .ics file to the desktop.
2. Visit Google Calendar at http://www.google.com/calendar/.
3. At the bottom left click where it says “Add” under “Other Calendar.”
4. Click Import Calendar
5. Select the .ics file after on the desktop after clicking browse.

India currently has a population of 1.14 billion people. One of the fast growing mobile market segments in the subcontinent are the rural areas. As a matter of fact Manoj Kohli of Bharti Airtel is predicting that there will be about a billion mobile phone users in India by 2015. His company alone plans to have about 200 million customers in the next few years.

“Achieving a billion plus (Indian mobile users) by 2015 is possible,” stated Kohli at the Mobile Asia Congress event. “The largest growth will happen in the rural market.” Currently there are about 400 million mobile phone users in India and about 600 million in China.

When Call of Duty: Modern Warfare was released, the game made $310 million in 24 hours and $600 million in 5 days. The first question that might be on a financial analyst’s minds may be, “how much of that was profit?” It turns out that the game costed roughly $40-$50 million to produce. For a video game this is a massive budget. But it took only 2 years for Activision to put together. Gran Turismo 5 took about 5 years and costed about $60 million to put together so far as a comparison.

The launch budget of the game was about $200 million which is about the same cost as a summer movie. That $200 million included producing, distributing, and marketing. “My goal was to create a launch that would compare very favorably to the biggest box offices of all time,” stated Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick in an interview with the L.A. Times. It looks like Kotick met his goal based on the sales the game made thus far.

The Verizon Droid has not been out for that long, but retailers want to capitalize on the hype around the new Google Android phone, designed by Motorola. Verizon is selling the phone for $200. Then Amazon.com decided to chop the price to $150. And now Dell.com decided to beat Amazon’s prices by offering it for $120.

Dell had a rough third quarter caused by a 54% net income drop so the company probably wants to attract more buyers to their website. Most likely Dell will be subsidizing the price drop out of their own pockets, but the commission from selling Verizon contracts might be worth the drop.

The newest Palm smartphone with 3G connection, QWERTY keyboard, social networking applications built-in, EV-DO connectivity, GPS through Sprint Navigation, Sprint TV, Amazon.com MP3 store, and 5 hours of talk time has been reduced to a mere $25 on Amazon.com with a 2 year contract of course. This is about $75 less than buying the phone from Sprint itself. This is the perfect deal for Palm fans that want to save a few bucks this holiday season.

Like.com has acquired Weardrobe.com. Weardrobe is a website that allows visitors to upload pictures of themselves and follow other users whose wardrobes they like. Like.com will be rolling their technology into Weardrobe. Weardrobe started as one of the eighteen companies from the Facebook incubator program this past summer. This is the first of those eighteen companies to have made an exit. Overall Like.com raised $54 million in funding.

Vevo is an upcoming music video website that will be similar to Hulu. Rio Caraeff is the head of Vevo and the company is rumored to have raised $300 million. The company expects to stream about 450 million videos per month. The company will be ran by about 45 people initially.

Vevo is co-owned by Universal Music Group, Sony Music, and Abu Dhabi Media. Vevo will be powered by YouTube’s technology and they will be sharing ad revenue with each other. Vevo will be launching officially on December 8.

Torrent search engine service Mininova.org has hit a major milestone. The company hit about 10 billion torrent downloads earlier this week. Mininova started in January 2005. “We never really expected anything. We don’t really tend to focus on these numbers, we are just trying to run the site the best way we can,” stated Mininova co-founder Erik Dubbelboer in an interview with TorrentFreak.

Nick Scott Studio designed an animation video of The Story of Google starting from the time that Sergey and Larry met each other to the point of the Google Chrome OS. The Studio put together the animation video using After Effects, Cinema 4d, and a little bit of film. The video was a mixture of stills photography as well. The Nick Scott Studio has done some work for Ford and MTV as well.

AOL has hired Allen & Company along with Morgan Stanley to try and find a buyer for ICQ. ICQ is an instant messaging software that competed with AOL Instant Messenger before being bought out. There are supposedly two non-U.S. based firms that already have an interest in buying out ICQ from AOL. The deal will most likely take place when AOL spins off from Time Warner in December.

AOL is seeking around $300 million for ICQ according to a source with AllThingsD. AOL bought ICQ for $287 million in 1998 with about $125 million in earnouts. Tel Aviv based firm Mirabilis was the company that originally developed ICQ.

ICQ has lost quite many users in the United States since they launched originally, but their service is still strong in countries such as Germany and Russia. AOL Instant Messenger still has a strong user base in the United States.