BlackBerry maker RIM has just announced it will be investing $3.2 million from the $150 million strong BlackBerry Partners Fund in popular email/contact management tool Xobni. The investment comes as RIM faces increased competition from the iPhone and among other phone makers. The investment could be an indication that Xobni could be going mobile to the BlackBerry as RIM tries to make its BB more social. Read the full story

Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers has cut current quarter (Q3) revenue forecasts by up to 20%, below Wall Street expectations. Reports indicate the company may axe up to 2,000 jobs as part of a cost cutting move to better position itself with slumping demand during this tuff economic time. The Cisco stock is down about 5% after hours. Cisco earned $9.1 billion in the last second-quarter, above expectations.

Xobni, the popular e-mail/contact management Outlook addon, has now closed a $7 million Series B VC round of financing. The company has now received $11.4 million in VC financing as of today. The round was led by Cisco, previous investors including Baseline Ventures, First Round Capital and Atomico also participated. Via

There are more signs of rough economic times. Cisco has just announced it will completely freeze hiring in this entire quarter after completely flat earnings despite a marginal 8% increase in sales. CEO John Chambers estimated total revenue for this quarter will be a maximum of 10% below levels two years ago in the same time. Chambers also points out that the slow down in demand isn’t only in North America and aggregate demand is declining in Europe and Asia as well, further indicating global economic uncertainty and volatility. Chambers still remains optimistic and says the company is still expected to grow by about 15% by next year. Cisco (CC) stock price (doesn’t pay dividends) has fallen by 5% subsequent to the news in after hours trading. Also, most recently, Cisco acquired Jabber.

There are also other reports of job losses in the web 2.0 realm, video start-up Veoh and LinkedIn are also cutting their workforce by 18 and 10 percent, respectively.

In other news, the Toronto Real-estate Board has released new home price figures which show the average house in Toronto now sells for about $353,000 compared to almost $400,000 last October. The report also says houses took longer to sell. Home prices also declined in Vancouver, from about $568,000 to $518,000 YoY. Condo prices also declined in Edmonton, which saw the biggest decline YoY in real estate prices. The real estate market in Toronto has particularly been a sellers market, though now as prices are falling and demand is decreasing while supply has increased by 32% year over year, it is clearly a buyers market in this volatile time which will probably see yet more declines in home values in Canada.

Yuuguu is the service that makes online collaboration with meetings and file sharing easy and free. It supports collaboration of up to 30 people and other features include the ability to share documents such as Powerpoint files that can be viewed directly from you browser with colleagues. The service also lets you remotely help friends. You can also make local and international calls. Yuuguu generates revenue from conference calls you make. They’ve recently added new features such as IM integration with Windows Live, Gtalk, Yahoo, ICQ, and AIM so you don’t have to sign in with multiple accounts and networks to IM or even download a client. There is a lot of copmetition in this space, including comparable services offerred by Microsoft’s Live Meeting and Ciscos WebEx Via