This guest post is by Eric Schwamberger, President, Zezza Network. Zezza helped the staid old whiskey brand, Canadian Club, create an online game called the Canadian Club Hide A Case contest. It’s an interesting look at how to build engagement without resorting to retweets.

When leveraged correctly, social media is an undeniably powerful tool for contest promotion. It's important to strike the right balance between contest promotion and organic conversation. Consumers want to feel they are part of something, not just on a list with numerous other people. Facebook is a great place for brands to help create a real connection with their consumers, and, in turn, create valuable loyalists.

Through our experience we've identified a few simple strategies and considerations that nearly all successful contest-focused social media campaigns have in common.

Have a plan

When you set out to engage your fans through social media, the logical place to start is by thinking through your overall goals.

When Zezza Network took on the social media management of Canadian Club's Hide a Case campaign, we evaluated the online footprint of Canadian Club and learned the brand needed a strong dose of social media to get online whisky enthusiasts talking. Equally important, we needed to grow a base of consumers to talk to. We started with three core objectives to provide a sustainable impact on Canadian Club's digital presence:
• Expand the overall reach of the brand
• Drive user engagement
• Create and grow connections with the online whisky community

Chances are, if your brand has a presence on Facebook, it will likely have at least a small following. Growing this audience will be a critical factor in the success of your campaign.

When the Hide A Case campaign launched in late April, we had grown the group to about 16,000 loyal fans. To keep growth steady throughout the course of the campaign, we offered an incentive – giveaways are a great way to create buzz and grow connections. We launched the friend-get-friend Facebook application to encourage users to invite their friends to the fan page. For each five friends a user converts through the app, they get a free Canadian Club t-shirt.

To date we've gathered nearly 30,000 fans and are growing at a rate of about 4,000/week – not bad for a brand that had fewer than 9,000 a few months ago. This fan base has given the page well over a million impressions since the campaign launched – a metric that literally increases exponentially with fan growth.
Know your audience and find your brand's voice: Each brand needs to find its own social media "voice." To learn the voice of your brand, you must listen to your audience. To get the audience talking, you need a call to action in the form of a question.

We knew a simple post to Canadian Club's Facebook page about the campaign wouldn't engage the audience. Instead of posting self-serving campaign plugs, we asked the fans to share details about their journey, which, in turn, created engagement and excitement. We also talked to the fans about a variety of topics, not just the Hide A Case campaign. It's important to maintain the organic conversation to keep the dialogue authentic.

Keep your audience interested and engaged

Regular involvement with your audience and creating opportunities for them to engage increases their investment in the campaign. This increases the likelihood that they will talk about it, which is the ultimate goal.

The Hide A Case campaign included a set of "weekly missions" (puzzles, brain teasers, etc.) that contestants need to complete to move to the next round. We took advantage of this structure by tapping into the conversational nature of Facebook and asked the fans questions about their experiences with the "missions" along the way. We found many of the participants started sharing their experiences organically on the brand's Facebook page. Also, allowing users to register for the contest via Facebook made it easier to participate and a smaller "ask" for most people, thus increasing the likelihood of participation.

A low barrier to entry is also an important consideration. For example, for the Red Stag by Jim Beam's "Call of the Wild Sweepstakes," in partnership with Kid Rock, users were able to register via multiple platforms, including a mobile website, SMS, Facebook and the contest website. Mobile registration isn't a perfect fit for every contest, but it's a great way to turn on-premise promotion into online connections.

Another example that illustrates engagement well is Jim Beam's "The Remake" video contest. The contest was the first user-generated video contest for a bourbon brand and was promoted heavily on Facebook. As with any campaign relying on user-generated content, it is critical to make it easy for those that participate to share their experiences with their network. We gave participants the tools to promote their own videos and earn votes. By allowing participants to take the odds of winning into their own hands, we unleashed an army of brand evangelists and received hundreds of submissions.

Build buzz and keep the conversation going: Encouraging ongoing participation by leveraging influencers is central to keeping the conversation going.

In addition to asking your fans questions on a regular basis to keep them talking, contests and giveaways are another way to add additional excitement – and ultimately buzz. But if the budget doesn't permit hosting giveaways, leveraging important online influencers is an important way to get your message out through additional conversations.

Knowing your ambassadors/influencers and communicating with them in an authentic voice will ensure that they are able to effectively spread your campaign's message and help to bring your campaign to the next level. Influencers can play such an important role in the success of your campaign. When identifying influencers, it's important to not only consider the friends/followers/visitors they have, but also the value of their audience and that audience's connections and relevance.

We've found research tools such as Flowtown, TweetReach, Sysomos Heartbeat and Klout very helpful indentifying the right matrix of influencers.

In summary, by adhering to the recommendations above and focusing on engagement over visits and conversations over impressions, you empower the online community to take the promotion of your contest into their own hands. A good rule to remember: your brand's Facebook page should be about facilitating genuine conversation among fans, not about spamming marketing messages.

Shifting digital metrics from old school page views to connections is at the core of Zezza's social media strategy, promoting contests and across the board. If no one is talking about your contest, then no one cares. If they don't care, your brand is destined to be viewed less favorably than a Fail Whale.

Mobile ad network AdMob (now part of Google) released its final Mobile Metrics report today (embedded below), at least for a while. AdMob gathers data from millions of phones and mobile devices which serve up its ad impressions, including almost 44 million iOS devices (iPhones, iPod Touches, and iPads). The decision to stop disclosing the data may have something to do with its new owner, Google, wanting to assess what it wants to let out there, but it could also be tied to the fact that AdMob might no longer have access to any iPhone data since Apple is specifically threatening to block it.

Whatever the reason, AdMob’s reports have proven to be a rich source of data on the mobile Web across platforms since mobile ad impressions on the mobile Web and in mobile apps are a decent proxy for mobile Web/app usage overall. So let’s dig in.

Over the past two years, mobile ad impressions from smartphones have grown from 22 percent of the total to 46 percent in May, 2010.  Apple iOS devices account for the largest portion worldwide, with 40 percent share. But as you can see in the chart above, that share has been declining since it peaked above 50 percent in November, 2009.  Over that time, Android has been steadily taking share, rising to 26 percent.

The ratio of handset market share to mobile Web and app usage is not directly correlated. Nokia’s Symbian has a 44 percent share of handsets worldwide, but only 24 percent of of mobile Web/app usage. In contrast, Apple only has 15 percent handset market share, and Android has 10 percent, but together they account for two thirds of mobile Web and app usage.

On a worldwide basis, Apple devices still outnumber Android in terms of mobile ad impressions by a factor of almost 3.5 to 1. In the U.S., that ratio is about 2 to 1.  According to an AdMob survey, iPhone users are more satisfied (91 percent) than Android (84 percent) or Palm’s WebOS users (69 percent).  Android’s 84 percent satisfaction is pretty good, but there is still a gap with the iPhone.

Some other interesting stats from the report:

• While the iPhone is the single biggest device driving mobile ad impressions, Android phones account for 7 of the top 10 handsets (the other two are Nokias).
• Only 58% of iPad users are in the U.S. The next biggest countries are Japan (5%), UK (4%), China(4%), and Canada (3%).
• Android is less international, with 66% of users in the U.S.  But the No. 2 country for Android is China (13%), followed by the UK (4%).
• HTC and Motorola phones account for 83% of Android usage.
• Twice as many iPhone users download paid apps as Android users.
• WiFi is huge.  Nearly a quarter of U.S. mobile traffic comes over WiFi. The biggest percentage of WiFi requests (nearly two thirds) comes from the iPod Touch—which is a WiFi-only device—but 35% of iPhone traffic goes over WiFi as well

Mobile applications discovery and sharing service provider Appsfire has just launched a new product called AppTrends, which essentially delivers near real-time rankings of iPhone apps based on the chatter on Twitter.

Rankings – currently limited to the top 20 apps on the website – are based on what Appsfire determines are noteworthy items in the App Store virtually in real-time. Appsfire crawls Twitter for links to iPhone apps, regardless of whether the iTunes URLs are shortened or not, and determines which apps are hot and which are not based on their popularity on the micro-sharing service.

To do so, Appsfire looks at the number of mentions of applications, all while filtering out bots, repeat tweets from the same users, updates from seemingly fake accounts and activity tweets such as leaderboard or points sharing. In addition, the startup looks at the influence of users talking about certain iPhone apps (based on Klout) to keep its rankings as relevant, clean and trustworthy as possible.

The company tells us it’s capable of also determining sentiment through automated analysis, but intentionally does not use that data for the rankings because it claims the large majority of tweets about apps are positive of tone, according to one month’s worth of research.

AppTrends gets updated on an hourly basis, and you can view evolution for the apps in the top list for the past hour, 12 hours or full day.

All in all, for power users this could be very useful, given how the rankings coming from Apple are relatively similar from day to day – with AppTrends users can spot up and coming apps more rapidly and this stay ahead of the curve when it comes to downloading and testing new apps. For non-power users, the added value is less clear.

If you’re an app developer or publisher, you can also use the service to track what’s being said on Twitter about your app – provided you made the top 20 list – in real-time via a sidebar.

Appsfire intends to go from a top 20 to a top 100 list in the near future, and also offer localized rankings per country/store. Also in the works: lists per vertical, access to rankings from the past and notification services for developers.

Coinciding with the launch of the new service, Appsfire has announced that a new investor joined the group of angels backing the company and brought an extension to its seed funding round. The new investor’s name is Lerer Ventures, the New York-based investment firm that has backed startups like (Twitter shareholder) Betaworks, GDGT and just recently, Seeing Interactive.

The icing on the cake: Appsfire has persuaded Jyri Engeström (formerly at Google after selling his startup Jaiku to the Internet giant) to join its board of advisors.

Warner Music Group (WMG) has partnered with MTV’s Music Group to give MTV exclusive rights to sell ad inventory around WMG’s music video content in the U.S. across MTV Music Group digital properties and mobile services, as well as on WMG’s artist sites and third-party affiliate sites.

Through the new partnership, WMG artists will also be able to to promote their music through MTV’s content channels (MTV, VH1 etc), including the on network’s Unplugged series, VH1′s Behind the Music and CMT’s Crossroads.

Under the terms of the deal, MTVN and WMG will partner to sell advertising on WMG mobile apps and sites, as well as sign up sponsors for WMG artist tours and live events. MTVN will also provide ad sales services for all WMG labels, including marketing, strategy and planning, pipeline management and reporting, and the management of agency relationships.

Last fall, WMG negotiated a deal with YouTube to regain control over their ad sales on music videos, with the lions share of revenue going to the music company. This is a big win for MTV, but it’s unclear what the rev share is for this partnership. And of course to complicate matters, MTV parent Viacom just has its copyright infringement case against YouTube thrown out.

Some auto racing news for your Wednesday morning. Formula One, the fancy circuit that, like soccer, is popular everywhere but the U.S., plans to cut emissions by some 15 percent within three years. That's a remarkable goal seeing as though Formula One cars (and all supercars, for that matter) are about as green as a smokestack from 1900.

And so it begins. The European Commission this morning launched a consultation on key questions regarding the contentious issues of net neutrality and the open Internet. The consultation covers such issues as whether ISPs should be allowed to adopt traffic management practices, prioritizing one kind of Internet traffic over another. This has become an issue with the onset of broadband and Internet services which require more bandwidth, such as VoIP or online TV. Essentially, the EC wants to find out whether these practices would create any problems (economical, technical or otherwise) and have 'unfair effects' for users.

Right off the heels of announcing an expansion of its Kindle Digital Text Platform to authors and publishers around the world, Amazon announced back in January that it would introduce a new 70 percent royalty option in the program that will allow them to to earn a larger share of revenue from each Kindle book they sell.

Well, it’s the middle of the year, and it has now landed.

For the record: the new royalty option comes will not replace the existing DTP standard royalty option but rather complement it.

As could be expected, option is currently only available for books sold to United States customers.

The new royalty option basically means that for each book sold from the Kindle Store for Kindle, Kindle DX, or one of the Kindle apps for iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, BlackBerry, PC, Mac and Android phones, authors and publishers who choose the new royalty option will receive 70 percent of the list price, net of delivery costs.

Those costs are based on file size (pricing is set at $0.15/MB), and Amazon claims today's median DTP file size to be 368KB, which means delivery costs would be less than $0.06 per unit sold.

To qualify for the 70 percent royalty option, books must satisfy the following set of requirements:

- The author or publisher-supplied list price must be between $2.99 and $9.99.
- The list price must be at least 20 percent below the lowest list price for the physical book.
- The title is made available for sale in all geographies for which the author or publisher has rights.
- The title will be included in a broad set of features in the Kindle Store, such as text-to-speech. This list of features will grow over time as Amazon continues to add more functionality to Kindle and the Kindle Store.
- Under this royalty option, books must be offered at or below price parity with competition, including physical book prices.

In addition to the 70 percent royalty option, Amazon also announced improvements in DTP such as a more intuitive "Bookshelf" feature and a simplified two-step process for publishing.

Tell me “I told you so” in six months, but Bloomberg’s exciting news that two dudes said something about the iPhone coming to Verizon is false until we see hardware and there has been no hardware.

Apple picked GSM because it is an international standard. CDMA, the system used by Verizon and Sprint, is about as international as American beer – both are considered weak and both are reviled. Picking AT&T in this case was the only way Apple could reach a mass audience quickly without having two separate phone SKUs on the books – one for us and one for the rest of the world. AT&T has also been a good partner in terms of odd pricing systems including a la carte data. From a business perspective, it made sense.

Read more…

We’ve all come across our share of amusing Captchas that make no sense. And existing Captcha technologies, such as Google’s reCAPTCHA are not immune to security attacks. NuCaptcha is launching today with the hopes of disrupting the existing Captcha space. The platform uses video to determine if people are really human, not machines.

As you may know, Captchas are those security questions you find on Web sites that require you to decipher and type words or numbers and detects whether the user is a human or a spambot. Most Captchas you see are transcription, text-based Captchas. But NuCaptcha says that as computer hacks and spam bots become more commonplace, companies have made captchas more difficult to read and non user-friendly.

NuCaptcha’s video animation Captcha technology claim to be both easy to read and secure, with animation that makes the captcha far easier for humans to solve (You can test it out below). In addition, the NuCaptcha Platform uses behavioral intelligence to deliver very easy Captchas to legitimate users and increasingly difficult Captchas to attackers.

This product is free for websites and blogs provides up to 25,000 Captchas per month. NuCaptcha Basic offers captchas of various themes, currently including Environmental, Sports and Abstract. Sites can choose to display one or more themes to best suit their look-and-feel and content.

NuCaptcha’s competition are the existing captcha technologies that exist in the space, such as Google’s reCAPTCHA or Microsoft’s KittenAuth. While the fledgling startup is competing against tech giants and more established players, NuCaptcha’s technology may be able to add a compelling option to the mix.

Tradeshift, which has been described as the "Skype for invoicing", has announced a raft of new partners in the SaaS accounting space, along with plans to open up its API to enable more third-parties to tie into its free invoicing system. The launch partners who have had access to a beta version of Tradeshift's API include: ERPLY (free ERP system), E-conomics (a SaaS accounting solution provider), Workbook (a specialized platform for the media business), Office123 (an open-source ERP system), Continia (bank payments systems), Winfinans (Windows-based desktop accounting), and Ibistic (the leading e-invoicing workflow system in Scandinavia). This, says the company, in which early Skype investor Morten Lund is an adviser, puts it on track to bring "directly integrated electronic invoicing" to more than 100,000 small European businesses over the next 6 months.

eBay and RIM this morning jointly announced that the free eBay Application for BlackBerry smartphones is now available through BlackBerry App World in six more countries: Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK. The application is also now officially available to BlackBerry smartphone users in North-America after a beta preview period. The eBay application supports BlackBerry smartphones running BlackBerry OS version 4.5 or higher. With the app, users can search, bid, buy and check their eBay buying and selling activity on the go.

Yahoo this morning announced that it will start offering customer care services for future Arabic-language versions of its products, plus support in eight more languages: Spanish, German, French, Italian, Turkish, Polish, Romanian, and Russian.

The Internet company’s new support services will be operated by IBM out of its service delivery center in Cairo, Egypt.

Initial support for Arabic, French, German, Italian, and Spanish is planned and will ultimately also encompass Turkish, Polish, Romanian, and Russian through the recruitment of a “significant number” of multi-lingual Egyptian workers.

The move comes almost a year after Yahoo acquired Arab Internet portal Maktoob, to my knowledge the only Yahoo product that’s currently available in Arabic. From the looks of it, the company aims to expand the number of services available in that language in the near future.

No word on if the center, which will deliver support services to Yahoo users across the Middle East, North Africa and Europe, will result in job losses in those regions.

Apple recently posted job openings for not one, not two but eight Antenna Engineers, according to its website. Some of those engineers would be working on the antenna system architecture of the iPhone and iPad, according to the job postings, in order to “optimize the radiation performance for wireless portable devices”.

Still according to the postings, candidates will be expected to “performance (sic) radiation performance measurements, create test plans, execute them, publish test reports, provide feedback to the other design engineers, and lead some of the manufacturing of antenna”. You’d need 10+ years of experience and possess “strong problem solving skills and strong working knowledge of radiation performance” if you want the job.

In addition, Apple is looking for two people to fill the role of ‘iPhone OTA Wireless Systems Engineer’, who would be “validating the radiation performance of wireless portable devices” and three people to serve as ‘RF Systems Validation Engineer iPhone’.

Update: Engadget also got tipped about (some of) the job postings.

It’s hard not to see the job postings in relation to the recent antenna / reception problems with the new iPhone, which are plaguing a subset of owners. Conspiracy theorists will even point out that some of the jobs were posted on the exact same day Gizmodo and others starting reporting that users were having reception issues when holding the iPhone 4 in a certain way (June 23).

Which makes it possible Apple posted the engineering jobs after seeing media reports on the hardware design flaws, but it would’t explain why the other 3 antenna-related positions were posted on June 16. Food for speculation abound, but I’m skeptic.

Just yesterday, Boy Genius Report published Apple's internal iPhone 4 antenna troubleshooting procedures it had obtained from a source. The documents show that the company is keen on continuing to say there is absolutely nothing wrong with the antenna.

If anything, these job postings may suggest they’re effectively aware of the issues at hand and that they need fixing – or they want to make really sure the iPhone 5 can’t be held “the wrong way” anymore.

Stay tuned ;)

(Thanks to @tuuukka for the tip)

This won’t be news to all you cool kids out there, but I hadn’t seen it yet and it popped up in my Twitter stream this morning (you’d be amazed what else goes on down there, but I’ll spare you … for now). Swedish recording artist Robyn (Carlsson) has launched a wicked interactive 3D video, complete with Twitter integration, for her delightfully titled new track, ‘Don’t Fucking Tell Me What To Do’, and you should totally check it out.

Unless you’re epileptic.

To do so, simply head to Robyn.com/killingme. Written completely in code, the video/website features words from the electro track at first, and after a while starts pulling in random messages posted on Twitter.

If you want your insightful tweets to appear in the trippy video as well, just post something on Twitter like “The decline of TechCrunch as a serious tech news blog is #killingme” (the hashtag is key, of course) and you should see it appear on the left at the bottom of the screen – including your Twitter username. The word that comes before ‘is’ or ‘are’ will be shown in the center of the animation.

Tip: put on 3D glasses for full effect. (What do you mean you don’t have any?)

Sidenote: can you effin’ believe this is the same Robyn from the 1996 hit ‘Show me love’?

(Top image via Zoinks Online)

DriveGain, a new startup that opens its doors today, aims to help users learn to drive more efficiently and, in doing so, save on their fuel consumption. It's founded by Simon East, an ex-Psion exec and former VP, Technology of Symbian who subsequently founded Cognima (ShoZu), and Dr. Phil Dixon, who has a background in racing car simulations and was a recent Vehicle Performance Engineer with the Renault Formula 1 team. DriveGain's first offering is an iPhone app of the same name that, unlike the plethora of sat-nav apps available for Apple's smartphone, doesn't bark out turn-by-turn directions but gives a range of visual and audio feedback on what changes are required by the driver to burn less fuel.

Since the launch of the original iPhone, there’s been a nice market for screen protectors. Well, at least until Apple started banning them from stores. But what about protectors that go around the edge of your phone? Well, thanks to the iPhone 4, there may be a market for that as well.

The iPhone 4 hasn’t even been out a week and already awrapforthat.com has popped up to make vinyl skins that wrap around the perimeter of the device. Why would anyone want that? Because of the iPhone 4 antenna issues — the so-called “Death Grip” problem.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs has suggested you buy one of Apple’s new iPhone 4 bumpers to alleviate the problem. But those are $29.99. Why not just buy this iPhone 4 wrap for $9.99?

Also, these skins are also going to be much thinner than the bumper, and as such, undoubtedly less of an eyesore on an otherwise beautiful device. Plus, they’re apparently thin enough that the iPhone 4 can fit in the dock with them on. These skins are made with 3M vinyl and come with holes cut out for the various iPhone 4 perimeter openings. They also come in several different colors and patterns.

This site/company, the work of Daniel Newman, just popped up after the iPhone antenna issue starting coming up again and again over the past few days. But it’s not yet entirely clear what is causing the issue (which, at least in my experience, is very real) and if a thin layer of vinyl is really going to help solve it. As far as I can tell, not even the thicker bumper fully alleviates the issue. But does help it — so these vinyl coatings likely will as well.

Plus, clever name.

Well that didn’t take long. Halfway into their big 15 importers in 15 days campaign, Posterous has managed to make one of their competitors very angry. Twitpic is so angry, in fact, that they’re blocking the service and threatening legal action.

This morning, Posterous introduced their new “Rescue your photos from TwitPic” tool — a one-click way to import your photos from Twitpic over to your Posterous blog. This is the same type of importer Posterous has already made for Ning, Vox, Tumblr and a host of other services — as I said, they’re about halfway through the 15 of these tools they intend to make.

The idea, of course, is that if they make it easy enough to get your existing content on to Posterous, they think you’ll like their service so much that you’ll permanently switch. Twitpic, doesn’t like that idea one bit.

According to Posterous, Twitpic had some idea such a tool might be coming and sent a letter last Thursday threatening to sue the company if they launched it. “Their claims are completely bogus,” Posterous co-founder Sachin Agarwal tells us. “Posterous is simply acting as an agent to the user who owns the photos. We authenticate the user’s Twitter credentials and then download the images on their behalf,” he continues.

“Our lawyer sent a response to TwitPic this morning indicating that we aren’t breaking any laws here, but simply giving users a way to access their own photos and then decide which service they like best. Nevertheless, TwitPic banned our servers within a couple hours of the importer launch,” Agarwal says.

Twitpic has since responded to that letter from Posterous. We’ve had a chance to see them all. Twitpic seems most concerned about Posterous’ methods for accessing this data. The user privacy issue is brought up a number of times — and they also wonder if Posterous isn’t access Twitpic “trade secrets” with this importer.

“We are simply using their public RSS feed to pull images on the user’s behalf. There are no privacy violations here,” Agarwal says.

Twitpic says they’re not going to stop users from exporting their data, but prefer users do so manually, rather than with the use of this tool. Of course, if this really is just pulling the pictures through users’ RSS feeds, it’s hard to argue that this tool is anymore more than useful for people who are looking to switch. Plenty of other blogging sites offer similar import tools.

Between the iPad’s blocking of Flash earlier this year and the huge wave of ad campaigns, open letters, and debates that followed, it seems that everyone has an opinion on the merits (or lack thereof) of Flash on the modern web. Today, YouTube software engineer John Harding took to the site’s official blog to weigh on the current status of HTML5 video support. The gist of it: while HTML5 is great, it can’t do everything YouTube (or most mainstream video sites) need.

Harding explains his thesis point by point, beginning with the need for a standard video format for HTML5. Politics, codec quality, and patent disputes have kept HTML5 from adopting a single standard for video content (H.264, the industry standard, has licensing issues). Google hopes to remedy this with the WebM project and VP8, which were unveiled last month. But VP8 is still a long way from becoming the industry standard.

Next, Harding spells out issues with video streaming — namely, the fact that HTML5 doesn’t really have anything that matches Flash when it comes to dynamically adjusting quality control and buffering. There’s also the fact that HTML5 can’t offer protect copyrighted content from being copied (Flash can through RTMPE). And there isn’t a way to take an HTML5 video and embed it on another site, at least not the way YouTube does with annotations and other associated data. Other issues include the inability to play HTML5 full-screen, and no standard for Camera and Microphone access from the browser.

Of course, this doesn’t come as a big surprise. YouTube started offering an HTML5 video player earlier this year, but the default player is still in Flash. And Google has made it quite clear that despite its general advocacy of open standards, it believes there’s still quite a bit of life left in Flash. In fact, it’s even baking it into its Chrome browser.

Startup Bling Nation has landed a pretty major deal with PayPal, we’ve learned. Bling Nation’s payment systems addresses physical goods in merchant stores and will now allow consumers to use their payment chips to deduct funds from a PayPal account.

Here’s how Bling Nation works. The startup partners with banks, who then offer the consumers who use their services a Bling Nation and “Bank” branded chip that can be stuck onto any cell phone device. The chip will allow any user to make a payment directly out of their checking account similar to a debit payment. Bling Nation also partners with all of the local merchants in given town, to give them special “Bling Nation” credit card machines that will scan the chips.

The payment device will calculate the number of times a payee has made a transaction and as an added bonus, will automatically award the user with coupons, points or discounts, which the merchant determines. The device will read the chip and deduct the money for a purchase out of the payee’s bank account. Bling Nation even allows merchants to implement a security feature, in which upon purchase, the customer will have to enter a PIN code for larger transactions.

With the deal with PayPal, anyone will be use Bling Nation to link a PayPal account and receive tags that they can then stick to their cell phones. You may also be able to enroll during the checkout process as well. And Bling Nation in turn will equip merchants in given areas with payment devices that work with the chip.

This is a big win for Bling Nation’s system, which originally had ambitions of solely focusing on hyperlocal banks in small communities. The PayPal integration is currently being tested in Palo Alto and is steadily being rolled out nationally. Most of the work involves distributing the payments devices to local merchants.

Enrollment is limited for now, says co-founder Meyer Malka. Consumers can sign up for the service at participating merchants and eventually through the web. The deal also represents a way for consumers to start paying for physical goods, not just online purchases, with their PayPal accounts.

Bling Nation recently raised a whopping $20 million in funding to scale its system. Armed with a deal with PayPal, the startup is well on its way to making it into stores nationwide.

And PayPal is one step closer to fulfilling its futuristic vision for the payments platform, as shown in this video.

Energy efficiency tracking company OPOWER added Hadi Partovi to its Technology Advisory Board and will open new offices in San Francisco next month. The Arlington, VA based company’s 10,000 square foot office in San Francisco’s South Park neighborhood will have room for between 75 and 100 employees, a large part of which will be engineers. “We signed a two-year sublease because we hope to grow out of that space,” says CEO Daniel Yates.

In Partovi, OPOWER is getting an experienced advisor who will help build the company in its plans to grow from 95 to 150 employees total in the coming year. Partovi co-founded online music service iLike with his brother Ali, which they sold to MySpace, before leaving in April. Previously, Partovi founded Tellme Networks, which was acquired by Microsoft for a reported $800 million. Partovi also worked on IE5.

OPOWER provides utility companies with a way to engage customers with easy-to-understand home energy reports designed to inspire them to reduce consumption. OPOWER uses behavioral economics to provide each customer with a personalized analysis of their usage, taking into account their circumstances and lifestyle.

“Instead of saying ‘you used this many kilowatts’, we say ‘you use 5% less or 20% more than your neighbors,’” says Senior Director of Marketing and Strategy Ogi Kavazovic.

The company has signed on 35 utility companies in 15 states across the country, including seven of the 10 biggest players. Yates says that by the end of this year, OPOWER will be saving more energy than the entire U.S. solar power industry is producing. The company is targeting north of $30 million in annual recurring revenue.

Facebook is great for keeping up with friends. And of course brands are using it as marketing tool by creating Fan pages. But it can also be used by companies as a recruiting tool. I’ve written before anecdotally about how Citysearch uses Facebook ads for recruiting by targeting the ads at the hiring manager’s friends. Well, now there is a full-fledged Facebook app for that called Work For Us

Work For Us creates a tab on a company’s Fan page which turns it into a mini-job board. You can see an example here for BuildASign or SPG Creative Marketing. People can apply for the job right inside Facebook, or Like a job and therefore spread it to their friends as a social referral. Recruiters can also create a Facebook ad for any job and target it accordingly.

The company behind Work For Us is Work4Labs, a startup funded by French angel investors Stephane Le Viet and Gautier Machelon. Already, 2,000 companies have added the Work For Us tab to their Facebook Fan page, including State Street and the French divisions of Accenture and Grant Thorton. The app is free for the first 30 days, then Work4Labs scharges, with plans starting at $9 a month (5 job postings) and going up to $500 a month (for unlimited job postings). More details at AppBistro.

After a brief hiatus, the founder of Etsy Rob Kalin reclaimed the CEO title in January of this year. During a brief interview at Etsy’s Brooklyn headquarters, I asked Kalin, “Why do you think you deserve to be back as CEO?…Is  there anything really unique about your vision that will take Etsy to the next stage?”

Kalin responded:

“Sure, so why do I deserve to be CEO is something that you gotta earn every day, so I definitely don’t take that title for granted. As far as where we want to go, to me the most important part of commerce is the social aspect of it. Social aspect drives the marketplace.”

The five-year old marketplace for handmade goods is growing quickly each year, last year it pulled in nearly $200 million in gross merchandise sales. This year, Kalin says they’re on track to reach approximately $400 million in gross merchandise sales. That doesn’t translate into significant profits for Etsy— which only takes about 3.5% of each transaction— but Kalin says profits are secondary to the more important goal of increasing traffic and dialogue on the site.

In the next few years, he expects gross merchandise sales to be in the multi-billion-dollar range, but in order to get there, he says they will need to succeed in their social ambitions.

In the next 12-18 months, Kalin plans to roll out a social strategy that will go beyond the site’s current offerings, which include forums and chat rooms for members. He didn’t want to give away all the details, but he did say:

“Markets are conversations. For us at Etsy we want to figure out how buying an item from someone is a conversation. So Facebook’s message is to connect and share, and so Etsy is taking that one further, where it’s connect, share and exchange things. We’re playing with ways to create more, more social layers inside that experience so one would be being able to have a conversation with people who you’re buying from inside of your shopping cart another one would be using search queries not just to connect people to items but to connect people to other people.

To me this is the power of the web, so you know that quote from Aristotle, ‘Man is a political animal?’ is actually mistranslated. It’s ‘Man is a polis making animal,’ and not man, humans. Humans are village making species and we want to connect with other people.”

In episode two of our company profiles series, Kalin gives us a tour of Etsy, discusses profits, his social vision and why he stepped down in the first place.

You often hear about Amazon Web Services having some downtime issues, but it’s rare to see Amazon.com itself have major issues. In fact, I can’t ever remember it happening the past couple of years. But that’s very much the case today as for the past couple of hours the service has been switching back and forth between being totally down and being up, but showing no products.

Obviously, Twitter is abuzz about this — though there’s no word from Amazon on Twitter yet about the downtime. Amazon Web Services, meanwhile, all seem to be a go, according to their dashboard. The mobile apps on the iPhone, iPad and Android devices are sort of working, but it doesn’t appear you can go to actual product pages.

Foursquare, the geo-mobile startup everybody tried to invest in or buy, now has officially closed its Series B funding round. The “wire transfer heard ’round the world,” as board member Bryce Roberts puts it, was for $20 million, giving the company a $95 million pre-money valuation. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, as previously reported, with existing investors Union Square Ventures and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures participating.

CEO Dennis Crowley says the fundraising was “a lot of work” and plans to use the money to staff up and keep adding to the product. “It’s all about building a team that can churn out new product,” he tells me. “We’ve been dreaming up these things for the past 10 years and now we have the opportunity to build them all.” The money will also help pay for more office space. His 27 employees are already too big for the startup’s current New York City offices, and Foursquare is about to move into new digs upstairs in the same building. “It’s awesome,” he says, “we can hear them building it upstairs right now!” He plans on hiring a lot more engineers.

The whole funding process has been drawn out. Crowley was deciding between suitors last Spring, when buyout interest started to come, first from Yahoo, and then from Facebook. The VC deal was put on hold. But Andreessen Horowitz felt so yanked around by the process that partner Ben Horowitz very publicly “withdrew” from the bidding. That turned out to be nothing more than a rebuke. And now Horowitz says of course they invested. Foursquare has a “great Founder/CEO,” a “killer product,” and is going after a “gigantic market.” In Crowley, specifically, Horowitz sees the leadership traits they like to invest in: a CEO who is a “keeper of the product vision.”

Selling to Yahoo would have been a mistake. Facebook would have been more interesting. In any case, Foursquare will go it alone for now, and develop the product unencumbered by a larger organization with a different set of goals. But remember, Marc Andreessen is on Facebook’s board, so that avenue is not entirely shut off.

Leaving Foursquare independent will allow it to find its own way. The geo check-in service that lets you broadcast your location to all your friends is hitting a nice growth curve, adding 15,000 users a day. It is now up to 1.8 million registered users, up from one million just last April. Why mess up a good thing when you can buy it later?

Horowitz dismisses the notion that Crowley picked them to get to Facebook later. “I think that is reading too much into it,” he says. “Dennis has a primary relationship with Mark Zuckerberg. He doesn't need us or Marc to do that. The reason for them going with us, at least in my belief, is that they thought we would help them go from a great product to a great company.”

Walking away from M&A negotiations was not easy. “It is a really cathartic and emotional decision to make,” says Horowitz. “If you look at what those guys had to walk away from—generations of your people being set financially in order to try to build a great company—that takes a lot of courage.”

As far as making Foursquare a great company that makes a lot of money, Horowitz says the “monetization” opportunities are “very obvious and straightforward.” There are many ways Foursquare can start charging businesses once it reaches a larger scale. “Would you pay to know your most frequent customer?,” Horowitz asks rhetorically. “Probably.” The bigger issue is how to take Foursquare from nearly 2 million users to tens of millions of users and beyond.

The value of Foursquare is not location, says Horowitz, which he thinks will become “a feature of maybe every product.” The real value is in the network effects that start to unfold as more people you know and more places you go are all on Foursquare. “If everyone you know is on Foursquare, everywhere you go, the more valuable it is,” he points out. In other words, Foursquare isn’t only about the check-in. That is only the starting point.

Big news from Foursquare today. No, not that news (just yet). And okay, not really that big. Still, very useful.

Foursquare has given its friend request emails a nice upgrade today. Previously, all you would see is a text note that someone wanted to be your friend. If you wanted to learn anything about them, you had to click-through to their profile page on foursquare.com. But starting today, Foursquare has a new notification email system that includes the user’s profile picture and more importantly, an area noting what friends you have in common.

Right above the button to add that person as a friend (which takes you to your pending friend requests page), you’ll see a new area that reads “Also, it looks like you have some friends in common:” Below that, you’ll see a picture of the friends you have in common. This is very helpful for a service like Foursquare because you’re likely only going to want to follow people you really know. And friends in common is a great way to tell that — something which Facebook uses to great effect as well.

Of course, not everyone uses Foursquare that way. For example, Robert Scoble has about 8,500 stalkers (I mean, “friends”). Not surprisingly, the first new Foursquare notification I received showed that we had Scoble in common as a friend. So basically, Scoble may have broken this system before it even started.