Obama campaign staffer Ashley Arenson, who served as director of innovation and integration during the recent presidential election, has joined Soho Tech Labs in the role of general manager. [AllThingsD]

StumbleUpon is laying off 30 percent of its staff in a move to achieve profitability in the first quarter of this year. [TechCrunch]

A British government agency fined Playboy about $160,000 for failing to install adequate controls to prevent minors from accessing pornographic videos. Seems like a slap on the ... wrist. [Ofcom]

Private equity firm Silver Lake Management is said to be close to lining up financing to take Dell private, with a deal possible as early as next week. [Bloomberg]

Hunch also thinks they're able to start making spot-on recommendations right away by requiring Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare or LinkedIn authentication; if the user doesn't have those things, Hunch asks them ten questions and starts building a taste profile based on those. StumbleUpon is hip to social authentication as well, but users can still sign up with just an email address.

The questions--"Tell Hunch About You"--are another notable difference between the sites. Rather than asking you to select verticals you're interested in, Hunch asks you to play a little game. The questions are so quick and easy that I had apparently already answered 218,  which I don't really remember doing. I also just answered two more. The average user has answered 113 questions, according to Hunch.

Hunch thinks their strategy gives them a better chance of predicting taste for anyone, including people outside the majority demographic of Hunch users (male, college-educated, white, is what we're guessing it looks like at this point).

StumbleUpon may have many more users and thus a more robust database of social data and user feedback at this point, but Hunch's technical foundation is more hardcore. It takes Hunch two days to fully refresh its taste graph, despite running it on a 48-processor supercomputer with a terabyte of memory. Further: Hunch's taste graph infographic, posted last week, is way more complicated than StumbleUpon's corresponding "recommendation technology" infographic.