LivingSocial, the Groupon competitor, has announced that they’ve raised $25 million in Venture Capital series B round from U.S. Venture Partners, Grotech Ventures, and Revolution, LLC.

LivingSocial are best known for their Facebook apps like Visual Bookshelf, Pick Your 5, and Polls. They’re now moving into deals and daily deals market, which is dominated by Groupon, which recently announced that they’ve raised $30 million.

Sonos, makers of home theater solutions (and some good ones, too), has announced that they’ve raised $25 million in Venture Capital from Index Ventures Partners, bringing the total funding Sonos has got to $65 million.

The company makes home theater and music solutions, and have recently launched an iPhone application where users can control their home theaters from their phones.

Twitter has added new security features to its systems in order to fight an increasingly aggressive phishing threat. Twitter will scan each link for malicious destinations, as they put it in a blog post: “routing all links submitted to Twitter through this new service … even if a bad link is already sent out in an email notification and somebody clicks on it, we’ll be able keep that user safe.” For starters, Twitter will start using its own URL shortening service “twt.tl” for DMs and email notifications.

After being rumored for a while, Google has launched its Google Apps Marketplace, where developers can sell and distribute their web-apps. Google offers APIs for developers to offer their cloud-based apps in the store.

Google Aps has over 25 million users, and it offers app makers a decent deal: 80/20 revenue split, where Google keeps 20% (on the Android, Google keeps 30%), + a one time fee of $100 to enroll on the program.

Yahoo’s popular Contacts service has added Facebook connect as a standard feature now, and Facebook connect will almost take over the whole process now, with easy import of friends and their details from Facebook.

Last month, Yahoo added Twitter support as well, and we’ll see how much else they’re going to integrate in their systems.

WordPress has just given a great, new feature to the over 10 million blogs it hosts on WordPress.com. The new feature, called PuSH, short for Pubsubhubbub, is a protocol to speed up RSS feeds and new posts.

From now on, when new blog posts are published, they are “pushed” to RSS feedreaders like Feedburner, instead of waiting for the reader to “ping” the blog.

Norwegian browser maker Opera has released version 10.5 of their Opera browser, the company claims that it’s the “fastest browser in the world”. The browser can be downloaded here for free.

We’ve given it a try, and for sure, it’s quick, but it also depends on what kind of page you’re loading, and honestly, we could see much of a speed difference between Opera and other browsers.

Google’s Chrome browser continues its growth over the competitors, according to latest numbers. In January, Chrome grew as well while Firefox and Internet Explorer declined, and it’s the same situation for February as well, where Chrome upped its market share to 5.61%.