We’ve all been there before: You’ve just moved to a new city, the fridge is empty, and you need some grub. You pop into the nearest restaurant and.. it’s not bad. So you start branching out. You check out spots a few more blocks from home. Within a few weeks, you find comfort in your favorite spots, and fall into a bit of a rut; two months in and surrounded by new restaurants to try, you’re hitting up the same 4 restaurants every week.

WHERE wants to bust that habit. Today, they’re introducing a new Local Discovery system, which they’re hoping will help them own what they call the “Pre Check-in” space.

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

There’s no question that mobile sales are rapidly growing from eBay, who saw sales in the U.S. from its suite of mobile apps nearly double on Black Friday. Today, eBay is releasing its Cyber Monday data, reporting that mobile sales for the Monday after Thanksgiving were up 146 percent. In conjunction with the announcement eBay is also releasing a new infographic application that provides a visualization of mobile shopping trends from Nov. 22 to Nov. 29 within the top 20 eBay product categories across the United States, Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Australia.

eBay also reported that consumer adoption of its mobile suite of apps increased more than threefold based on items purchased during the week of Thanksgiving and "Cyber Monday" compared to the same period in 2009. Consumers shopped on eBay’s mobile apps primarily for cars & trucks and clothing & accessories during the period.

Mobile data also shows that, unsurprisingly, the iPhone was the leading mobile device on eBay this year, in terms of sales, with two-thirds of its mobile revenue from the holiday week coming from iPhone users. The other third was comprised of Android, BlackBerry and mobile web users combined, as well as Windows Phone 7 users. eBay’s primary iPhone app is by far its most popular mobile offering and has seen over 13 million downloads.

In the U.S., cars & trucks topped the list of products purchased by mobile phones, and cell phone & PDA accessories and women's clothing led in terms of total number of transactions. During November 22 through November 29, the most money was spent using mobile phones in California, Texas, New York, Florida, and Pennsylvania. California was the most active state in both sales volume and number of transactions.

In terms of international mobile trends for the period, cars and trucks led in mobile sales in all of eBay's top markets except for France. French mobile shoppers focused their purchasing mostly on clothing & accessories and toys. The U.K. was by far the strongest in purchases of cars & trucks, which made up 20 percent of mobile sales, while Germany was the only country in which the consumer electronics category appeared in the top five.

The mobile commerce visualization is actually pretty cool. The application features a playable heat map of sales by geography over the period, and allows you to compare sales by category and location, and will show you what’s hot in terms of products by location and date. eBay actually launched a similar application last year for web sales.

Another compelling data point: according to an eBay survey, over half the people who shop regularly on their phones are comfortable spending over $100 on a purchase, with 14 percent willing to spend over a thousand dollars (eBay notes that earlier this year an eBay shopper purchased a Mercedes-Benz for $240,000 using their mobile phone). On the average, mobile shoppers spend over $100 per month.

It looks like the holiday season is treating eBay well this year. eBay has already adjusted its previous forecasts of a total of $1.5 billion in mobile sales for 2010, to report that consumers will spend over $1.5 billion in mobile sales. Of course Black Friday and Cyber Monday tend to be the peak days for holiday shopping, but it should be interesting to see if the company can generate the same sort of growth in sales over the next month.

Well, it’s a strange world out there. It’s been reported that the man accused of passing thousand of secret US documents to WikiLeaks was a tech geek who set up a primitive ‘social network’ at his school, years before Facebook appeared.

Private Bradley Manning joined the US Army in 2007 and was posted to Baghdad, where he worked on classified army networks. He has been linked to the publication by WikiLeaks thousand of US military and diplomatic documents. But before all that, back in 2001, he was a 13 year old boy, newly-arrived in Wales, UK, with his mother, herself recently divorced from a US citizen.

Windows Home Server is easily one of the best products to ever come out of Redmond. It brings most of the functionality of a full-fledged server without any of the hassle. OEMs like HP and Acer quickly jumped on the platform a few years ago and outed fantastic products lines centered around WHS that allowed nearly any consumer to set up a comprehensive back-up solution, media vault, and network-attached storage unit — all on a small form factor PC that sucks less energy than a traditional computer. It’s seemingly a winning product for Microsoft, hardware makers and even us consumers. But that perception is apparently wrong. Microsoft is now prepping the next version of WHS named Vail, which reportable does not include features and functions that previously defined the platform.

Of course these moves have caused the WHS server fan base to erupt in an Internet ragestorm fueled by confusion and abandonment issues. The thought that Windows Home Server is now dead in the water was further defined today when Microsoft confirmed reports that HP, which shipped the first widely adapted WHS, will not produce servers based on the next-gen OS. Dead, canceled, or some other name with synonymous lifeless might not be the correct description as Microsoft is clearly working on the platform, but the next version of WHS is seemingly different enough in its core philosophy and target demographic to warrant a name change or even death decree.

I’ve had a Windows Home Server running in my home since 2007. Before WHS, my server solution consisted of an older Windows XP box with a bunch of different network shares located across a large assortment of PATA hard drives. I think I had seven hard drives ranging in size from 80GB to 250GB stuffed in a full tower. The Drive Extender feature of Windows Home Server flawlessly created one virtual file system that allowed for network shares to span different physical drives. Setup is seriously just two clicks to add more hard drives. Sure, it’s just a JBOD system, but I’ve yet to lose a bit of data in the years I’ve run these servers since 2007. Even if there was an issue, Windows Home Server allows for multi-disk redundancy and drive duplication.

I found that the Drive Extender is just as useful in the off-the-shelf models from HP, Acer, and others. Want more add storage? Pull out one of the sliding hard drive trays, pop in a 2TB hard drive, slid it in, click a couple buttons and in a few minutes, your total storage capacity will be 2TB richer. The solution is completely software dependent and works on nearly any hardware.

But alas. This key feature is no more. Microsoft announced a few days ago that Vail will instead rely on hardware RAID solutions instead of a baked-in software solution like Drive Extender. On one side, using RAID natively will likely increase the data transfer speed, which, let’s be honest, has never been stellar in the current version of Windows Home Server. Transferring between drives or over even a gigabit network is often met with facepalm-type speeds, but the Luddite-simple setup and management still made WHS worthwhile.

Microsoft claims that the move was to increase network load efficiency and I welcome that cause. But Windows Home Server is not the right platform to remove a consumer-focused feature. If anything, Drive Extender with all its flaws was still the best reason to buy a one of the product. Hard drives are constantly dropping in price and increasing in size. Crafting a large, centralized household media vault is a non-affair with Windows Home Server. It’s something that anyone with the ability to open the cardboard box that holds a new hard drive could carry out in about seven minutes.

The Internet is currently speculating that Microsoft is transitioning Windows Home Server into more of a small-business solution. Fair enough, but why not have a separate build that gets rid of the DE in favor of RAID and not kill the support entirely? That’s what most fans are currently wondering over the last week along with whether the platform is simply drifting towards irrelevance.

Then came today’s announcement concerning HP’s MediaSmart line cancellation. These are the models that launched with the platform and suddenly, just days after word broke Drive Extender wasn’t going to be in the next version, HP killed off the line entirely. It’s like watching  Kobe Bryant leave the Lakers as a free agent days after Phil Jackson got fired. (As a Celtic’s fan, that would be my dream scenario, but the point is clear)

This leaves Acer and Tranquil PC as the two notable hardware partners although HP offered more WHSs than both of the remaining companies combined. Suddenly, just like that, the amount of potential Windows Home Servers on the market was cut in half, which seems to state that Windows Home Server is on the fast path to…somewhere bad. There’s always a chance that the Internet outcry will cause the powers at Microsoft to ether reinsert Drive Extender back into the platform or come up with a happy medium. If not, Windows Home Server might as well be dead because that’s how it will be viewed by the majority of its current fans and maybe even hardware partners.

Online ad technology startup Resonate Networks, which has just raised $5 million in financing, has scored a digital media heavyweight as its new chief revenue officer.

George Stewart, former Executive Vice President of Media Sales at Demand Media and previously SVP of Advertising Sales at Next New Networks, will work directly with Resonate clients to build brands online by leveraging the fledgling company’s “Attitudinal Targeting” technology.

He will work from New York City.

Stewart began his digital media career in 1999 at online music startup LAUNCH.com, where he was VP of Advertising Sales – the startup was acquired by Yahoo in 2001. While at Yahoo, Stewart served as National Director of Sales and Category Development Officer.

Launched in 2009, Resonate claims to have pioneered an entirely new method for reaching consumers based on their values, beliefs, and attitudes, independent of cookie-based behavioral data. The company has stamped a fancy label on said solution and refers to it as ‘attitudinal targeting’ (more about how it works here).

Earlier this year, AuroraFeint launched the private beta of OpenFeint X (OFX), which offers indie developers the ability to create Zynga-like free-to-play games including microtransactions and virtual goods. Today, the gaming platform is opening up OFX to all developers and as an incentive to use the new features, is announcing a $1 million free-to-play mobile games challenge.

With OFX, developers can create Farmville-like games with a chat wall where players can interact with each other, a newsfeed showing recent in-game activity, and game nudges. OFX’s premium services allows developers to use a cloud-based infrastructure to build and run a full virtual goods store, access detailed analytics, and include game-specific currency wallet. OpenFeint says that future updates will allow game developers to offer virtual currency and virtual goods for sale in their games.

OFX is completely free for game developers to download and implement in their games and only shares in revenue earned from the sale of paid downloadable content in games sold with OFX.

The OFX Freemium Challenge waives the revenue share on the OPX SDK for up to $10,000 per developer, available to the first 100 developers who use it. So developers can implement the publicly launched OFX and sell up to $10,000 in downloadable content in game before sharing any revenue.

OpenFeint is betting on in-game purchases being a big attractor for developers to build on its platform. According to a Juniper Research report, revenues from in-game purchases are expected to surpass $11 billion by 2015, nearly double what they were in 2009. Clearly this is a potentially lucrative business for OpenFeint.

The startup just raised $3 million from Intel Capital, and has added 3,400 games and over 45 million mobile gamers to its platform in just over a year.

Groupon is expanding its presence in Silicon Valley with a brand new office and the acquisition of San Mateo-based Ludic Labs, the local marketing services startup behind offerfoundry.com and diddit.com.

Offer Foundry is a self-service advertising and deals platform for local businesses. Diddit is an online community connecting “millions of users” with targeted local attractions and interests.

The Ludic Labs team includes Paul Gauthier, who was co-founder of Inktomi, and David Gourley who was CTO at Endeca. As a part of the acquisition, Dr. Brian Totty, CEO of Ludic Labs, will take on the role of head of engineering for the daily deal site, overseeing international product development and innovation.

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but according to CrunchBase, Ludic Labs was operating on $5 million of venture capital, which was injected by Accel Partners and KPG Ventures. It’s worth noting Accel Partners is also a major investor in Groupon.

The operator of the popular daily deals site has raised $170 million so far.

Groupon's brand new, 12,000 square feet Silicon Valley office is located in the California Avenue neighborhood of downtown Palo Alto and, according to the press release, previously served its “Data and Mobile” needs.

Its local staff is projected to grow from 25 people to more than 100 within the next year, and the office will expand its scope of work to collaborate with the Chicago development team on all product technology.

Groupon says it will also continue to expand its existing product team at its Chicago headquarters.

Funny quote from Groupon founder and CEO Andrew Mason, straight from the press release:

"Unfortunately we cannot comment on speculation or rumors about our business," said Andrew Mason, founder and chief executive officer of Groupon, for some reason.

Groupon is of course the subject of a rumored $6 billion buy-out by Google, which is being discussed between Groupon’s board members today.

And just yesterday, Groupon announced that it has acquired three deal websites in Asia (uBuyiBuy, Beeconomic and Atlaspost) in an effort to expand its reach across East and Southeast Asia. Earlier this year, Groupon has also expanded to Europe, Latin America, Russia and Japan through acquisitions of smaller rivals.

And yesterday, the company also announced its Groupon 2.0 platform, the next phase of its core service.

How much busier can things get for the fast-growing Internet startup?

It’s no surprise that the mobile advertising market is growing like gangbusters. Today, BIA/Kelsey is releasing a new report that shows that U.S. mobile advertising revenues will grow from $491 million in 2009 to $2.9 billion in 2014.

The study evaluates any advertising placed in mobile search (text advertising applied to search queries on mobile devices), display (display advertising applied to app and mobile Web inventory) and SMS (commercial SMS messaging). During the forecast period, BIA/Kelsey expects U.S. mobile search ad revenues to grow from $59 million to $1.6 billion, U.S. mobile display ad revenues to grow from $206 million to $803 million, and U.S. mobile SMS ad revenues to grow from $226 million to $562 million.

In terms of the local breakdown, BIA/Kelsey expects U.S. mobile local advertising revenues to grow from $213 million in 2009 to $2.03 billion in 2014. This represents 44 percent of total U.S. mobile ad revenues in 2009, growing to 69 percent in 2014. BIA/Kelsey defines mobile local advertising as ads that are targeted based on a user's location.

In a statement, the company said that as mobile advertising movies to the SMB and mid-market segments, there will be an increase in advertisers adoption as well as a growth in geo-targeted (i.e. local) ad spends.

It’s interesting to see that mobile search advertising has the biggest potential to grow over the next few years. This represents a huge opportunity for Google, who dominates web search advertising. Of course, Bing could also stand to reap the benefits of mobile search ads as well.

It’s important to note that steady increases in the use of smartphones and new innovations in mobile ad formats also are contributing to an rapidly growing market.

Transactis, a Charlotte, North Carolina-based provider of electronic billing, payment, and marketing solutions has raised $7 million in Series B financing in a round led by New York-based StarVest Partners, with previous investors and management participating. The capital will be used to drive adoption of the company's BillMail, BillerExpress and (recently acquired) OfferIQ and LoyaltyIQ software-as-a-service platforms.

Online retailers rejoice! According to comScore’s latest stats, U.S. online spending surpassed $1 billion on CyberMonday (the Monday after Thanksgiving and Black Friday), up 16 percent versus year ago. The day also marked the the heaviest online spending day in history and the first day to surpass a billion dollars in spending.

As comScore reported over the weekend, U.S. online shoppers spent $648 million in online sales on Black Friday, which was a 9 percent increase from last year and also set records for the heaviest spending day in e-commerce history. For the holiday season-to-date, the company reports that $13.55 billion has been spent online, which is a 13 percent increase comapared to the same period last year.

comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni said in a statement that the “early strength in consumer spending is almost certainly the result of retailers' heavier-than-normal promotional and discounting activity at this early point in the season.” It should be interesting to see of retailers continue to promote discounts and sales as we near the holidays.

The record-breaking billion dollar day was primarily attributed to an increase in the average spending per buyer (up 12 percent) as opposed to the number of buyers which only grew by 4 percent to 9 million. The average spending per transaction grew 10 percent to $60.05, while the total number of transactions increased 6 percent to 17.1 million.

Of course CyberMonday’s sales are helped by the fact that many consumers can shop online from work. Nearly half of dollars spent online at U.S. Web sites originated from work computers (48.9 percent). That’s actually a decline of 3.8 percentage points from last year. Buying from home comprised the majority of the remaining share (45.4 percent) while buying at U.S. Web sites from international locations accounted for 5.8 percent of sales.

The dramatic increase in spending isn’t entirely surprising. The economy is in a slightly better position than last year and retailers are continuing to mark down goods and promote these deals as well. comScore forecasted a few weeks ago that online spending for the holiday season would reach $32.4 billion, which is up 11 percent from last year. But with the record-breaking Cyber Monday and Black Friday spending, this number could increase as the weeks pass.

Effective immediately, Ketera Technologies is now part of e-commerce platform company Rearden Commerce.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Ketera aims to transform corporate buying and selling via the Ketera Network, an online spend management solution and business community of nearly 1 million companies.

Patrick Grady, founder and CEO of Rearden Commerce, commented on the acquisition thusly:

"We believe that for the first time, a single company can deliver a comprehensive offering of both goods and services to businesses and consumers. The marriage of these two solutions will be game changing not only for procurement, finance and travel professionals, but for anyone who does business on the web.

Rearden Commerce has raised a whopping $240 million in venture capital to date, and we’ve tipped them as an IPO candidate before (for 2010, admittedly, and it hasn’t happened yet).

Ketera had raised $14 million from notable investors such as Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, DAG Ventures, American Express and Foundation Capital. Its founding CEO is Stephen Savignano, former vice president of AOL.

“Check out Opera.com“, a spokesperson for the eponymous Norwegian software company asks of me. I oblige, and what I see seems to be Opera Software co-founder Jon S. von Tetzchner‘s email inbox, browseable and all.

Evidently, this isn’t the man’s actual email inbox, but seemingly the result of a night of drunken brainstorming by the marketing team at the wacky browser software maker.

Nevertheless, the actual news can be gathered by browsing the emails to von Tetzchner: Opera has apparently hit the 150 million user milestone.

That is up from 140 million last September, if you’re keeping count.

For the record, this is the total number of users, across the board, which means that they’re counting both their desktop and mobile browsers’ users as well as people using its products on connected devices other than phones and computers, e.g. television sets.

Obviously, that means there’s some overlap in users, but nevertheless, it represents tremendous growth for the oft-underestimated company.

Google’s Android OS continues to grow in popularity, possibly at the expense of Apple’s iOS and RIM’s BlackBerry, according to Nielsen data released today. The company reports that in an October survey, Apple's iOS and Android were tied for "most desired" operating system” when mobile users who planned to upgrade to a smartphone in the next year were asked about their next phone.

Apple's iPhone and Android deviceswere the "most desired" among likely smartphone upgraders, with Apple showing a slight lead among those age 55+ , 18 to 24, and 25 to 34. And women planning to get a smartphone are more likely to want an iPhone as their next device, with more males preferring Android devices.

Among users who already had a smartphone and were planning to get a new device, these respondents leaned towards buying an Apple iPhone (35 percent), while 28 percent of both smartphone and featurephone planned smartphone upgraders indicated they wanted a device with an Android operating system as their next mobile phone.

Smartphone usage continues to grow in popularity, with 29.7 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers now owning smartphones that run full operating systems. The Apple iPhone and RIM Blackberry are the most popular smartphones, each with a 27 percent of smartphone market share in the U.S. Twenty-two percent of smartphone owners have devices with the Android operating system.

Featurephone owners planning to get a smartphone are less likely to have made up their mind about the OS they will choose: 25 percent were "not sure" what their next desired OS might be compared to 13 percent of smartphone owners. This “undecided” group could be a pretty influential market for smartphone OS companies who are looking to sway consumers.

Those over 55 were markedly less certain than younger mobile users, with 27.8 saying they weren't sure what kind of device they wanted next, compared to 12.2 percent of those 18 to 24.

In October, Nielsen reported that Android had passed the iPhone and BlackBerry to become the popular operating system for people who bought a smartphone in the past six months.

Cisco this morning said it intends to purchase LineSider Technologies, a privately-held network management software based out of Danvers, Massachusetts. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed, and Cisco said it aims to complete the acquisition in the second quarter of its fiscal year 2011. LineSider markets software that enables companies to build network services and securely create and deploy cloud computing infrastructure. Cisco says LineSider will enhance its ability to rapidly provision network services to its clients.

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has invested in Santa Barbara based FindTheBest, a comparison engine founded by DoubleClick cofounder Kevin O’Connor. This is the first outside funding for the new startup, and one of the first investments made by Kleiner’s sFund, announced in October. Randy Komisar from Kleiner will join FindTheBest’s board of directors.

So what does FindTheBest do? “It’s Kayak for the other thousand things,” says O’Connor.

Want to compare smartphones, and filter by reviews, price, carriers, etc.? Go here. Or take a look at ski resorts and filter by vertical drop and average snowfall. Users can also edit and add data on their own as well. The site is just starting to also take direct user ratings.

This is the kind of data curation and slicing that’s extremely useful (we do some of this on CrunchBase, for example, and see gdgt). And in certain commerce areas it’s incredibly profitable. It still feels like we’re in the nascent stages of all this, though. And it isn’t just great technology that will win – Eventually someone will have the depth of data to create a gravitational pull and win this space for good. And that will be one heck of a useful service.

Web analytics company StatCounter has a knack for pushing attention-grabbing press releases based on data collected by its research arm, StatCounter Global Stats. This time, the company claims BlackBerry has overtaken Apple’s iOS in terms of mobile Internet usage for the first time in the United States in November (see chart below).

Based on aggregate data that the company says it has collected on a sample exceeding 15 billion page views per month, StatCounter claims BlackBerry OS last month, at 34.3 percent, effectively trumped Apple's iOS, which recorded 33 percent in November.

BlackBerry's US lead is not replicated in terms of worldwide share, according to the same StatCounter data. Globally, Symbian OS leads with 31.9 percent followed by iOS (21.9 percent), BlackBerry OS (19.3 percent) and Android (11.6 percent).

Besides the evident conclusion that developers should look at other platforms rather than focusing solely on building apps for iOS devices, StatCounter adds that, according to its research, Apple's iOS has dropped from 51.9 percent to 33 percent from November 2009 to November 2010.

Based on its data, Android is rapidly gaining and has almost tripled Internet usage market share from 8.2 percent to 23.8 percent in the same period.

StatCounter founder and CEO Aodhan Cullen says, provided current trends continue, BlackBerry and Android combined are on course to become twice the size of iOS with regards to mobile Internet usage in the next year.

Microsoft's new Windows Phone 7, meanwhile, hasn’t come up on the radar so far, but StatCounter says it’s keen on observing how it performs in 2011 and beyond.

For another analytics provider’s perspective, check out this post, based on Quantcast data: Android's Mobile Web Consumption Share In The US Is Surging, iOS Share Dropping

Click the image for a more complete view:

RendezVous353.com, the social network for Irish expats, saw its UK launch last week with a typically Irish party in London. And at a time when Ireland has little to celebrate and many of the country's working population are said to be heading elsewhere, a dedicated community online for the 80 million-strong "global Irish Diaspora" is perhaps fitting. That tiresome expression "never let a recession go to waste" also comes to mind.

We last covered mobile advertising network Jumptap in August 2008, when the Massachusetts-based company raised $26 million to penetrate the rapidly growing mobile web market. Although another ad startup emerged as the winner in that race, Jumptap today calls itself “the largest independent mobile ad network in North America and Europe”.

And now Jumptap has set its sight on the Japanese market, through a deal it just inked with Tokyo-based cyber communications (cci). The Japanese media company is a subsidiary of Dentsu (the country’s biggest advertising agency). It will integrate Jumptap’s technology into its existing mobile ad solutions.

The goal for cci is to boost the targeting capability of mobile ads in the Japanese market, especially in those delivered through smartphones and tablets. (cci is the same company that teamed up with Apple to bring the iAd mobile advertising network to the Japanese market in early 2011.)

While smartphone penetration is still relatively low in Japan, the world’s most sophisticated mobile market is worth several billion dollars and is poised to see more and more smartphones made by local makers in the near future.

cci seems to be so convinced by Jumptap’s targeted ad technology that it also announced a strategic investment (for an undisclosed sum) in the American company. So far, Jumptap raised a total of $69 million from investors like investors General Catalyst Partners, Summerhill Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Valhalla Partners, and WPP.

Early last month, we noted that Quora was doing something rather interesting. They were using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to mass-create Twitter accounts. That may sound shady, but it really isn’t. They’re doing it as an alternative to RSS feeds. And Twitter is totally cool with it.

Those feeds are now live and ready to roll. As Quora engineer Belinda Gu writes on (where else) Quora:

There are now official Quora Twitter accounts for the majority of topics on Quora, e.g. q_startups, q_food, q_quora.  Each topic Twitter account tweets out a stream of the new questions being asked on Quora in the given topic.

Yep, nearly every single Quora topic now has a Twitter feed. No words on how many that is, but it’s a lot. In fact, I’m going to venture to say that Quora has the most Twitter accounts of anyone now. Though Google was trying to give them a run for their money for a while. But they were doing it the hard way — manually.

If you have a Quora account that is connected to your Twitter account, you can get a list of all the topics you follow on Quora with Twitter accounts here. As you can see, there’s also easy one-click follow buttons to get going with those accounts.

It would seem that an obvious idea for those would be to create a Quora list on Twitter so you can follow these feeds without having to have them all clog up your main feed. Unfortunately, the way it works right now is that @QuoraQuestions accounts tweet out the info and the Quora topic account you subscribe to retweets it if the question is about that topic.

In other words, if you followed these accounts in a list, nothing would show up. Because retweets don’t show up in lists (at least not yet).

Oh well, it’s still an awesome use of Twitter for the spread of information quickly. Meanwhile, Twitter just likely added tens of thousands of “users” to their stats — perfect for massive valuations!

[Thanks Peter]

I don’t know if this is genius timing or the opposite (leaning towards the latter), but daily deals site Groupon, which is rumored to be holding a board meeting tomorrow about a possible Google deal, has chosen tonight of all nights to launch its Groupon 2.0 platform which truth be told is pretty forward thinking. Everything else aside, the whole concept is extremely smart especially with regards to how we will all probably be shopping in the future, i.e. socially.

Taking off on the whole Facebook-initiated user personalization thing, Groupon has launched two new forward thinking features in terms of e-commerce, Groupon Stores and the Deal Feed.

Groupon Stores is pretty remarkable when you realize that merchants can now offer customizable Groupon deals whenever they want, with no middleman and just a 10% commission on all sales, as opposed to the 50% the company usually takes off.

From today on merchants in select cities can set up their own Groupon distribution presence as well as run their own offers. In addition, merchants can submit deals for Groupon promotions and perform hardcore customer retention management by getting customers to follow their individual stores on Groupon, Twitter style — a total boon for advertisers.

And just like Facebook has its Newsfeed, Groupon will now have Deal Feed for merchants, allowing a casual user to follow all the individualized deals that pertain to them. Groupon’s Deal Feed lets you see a stream of deals personalized to you including daily deals in your area, merchants you follow and recommendations for merchants you should be following.

Groupon CEO Andrew Mason says that the company’s recent pivot is the most logical thing to do when thinking about its massive scale (the company is reportedly making $500 million in annualized revenue), “Today things are different – our biggest problem is that demand is so high, merchants often wait months to be featured. And while we once only had a few thousand customers per city, now we have hundreds of thousands – making it increasingly difficult to find one deal that satisfies everyone.”

With its most recent expansion, Groupon, which has 33 million subscribers in 35 countries,  is poised to satisfy almost every merchant or advertiser who wants a slot. The new features launch as of today in Chicago, Dallas, and Seattle, and should be rolling out to rest of us plebes shortly.

Two weeks ago we reported that Twitter was mulling over raising a big new round of financing and the expected valuation was in the $3 billion range. Things have developed since then, it seems.

The bidding has gotten more intense from what we’re hearing. Russian firm DST, among others, submitted offers to invest valuing the company above $3 billion, say multiple sources. But the current leader, and likely winner, is Kleiner Perkins, say multiple sources. And the likely valuation when the smoke clears will be close to $4 billion.

Alpha investor and Kleiner investor John Doerr is personally leading the charge, we’ve heard, and is acting something like a dog with a bone that won’t let go. “Doerr wants to own part of Twitter, And Doerr generally gets what he wants” says one person with knowledge of the negotiations.

Is the deal done? No. Another investor could step up with an even higher valuation, forcing Twitter to make a difficult (even legally difficult) decision to pass on Kleiner. But as things stand right now, our understanding is Kleiner is in the pole position on the round, and unless something dramatic happens, they’ll soon be an investor.

This fits in neatly with Kleiner’s push to invest in the “third wave” of technology disruption. See his April guest post here on TechCrunch for more details on how they’re thinking about their current investment strategy.

Today, SoundCloud, an audio platform that has concentrated on music makers so far, makes a significant pivot into the wider sphere of audio sharing. Up until now SoundCloud has done a pretty incredible job of attracting well known artists to its platform such as The Foo Fighters, Kylie, Deadmau5, Moby and Caribou, who have used it to effectively socialise their music. But today Soundcloud releases the ability to record sound direct via the site, and via it’s updated iPhone app. That puts it into the realm of pure audio sharing platforms such as Cinch and Audioboo. In other news SoundCloud has also passed two million users.

SoundCloud’s new record facility on the site or iPhone apps lets users capture sound anywhere and put it into their waveform player to share it across social networks, websites, the SoundCloud community or privately between friends. The iPhone app also has the ability to add an image and location to the sound recording. This is exactly what Audioboo and Cinch do already for instance, but the social features on SoundCloud may well trump any existing player right now. Check out the screen grabs below. Having looked at the app I can see that I may shift my own audio recording to SoundCloud because the experience is really very good.

It’s already taken over the English-speaking world, and it’s ready for more. Zynga’s juggernaut FarmVille will soon be launching in Japan, marking the first time the game has been translated into another language. A localized, mobile version of the game, which will be called FarmVillage, is slated to launch in Japan in “early December”.

FarmVillage is going to be available on Mixi, which is the top Japanese social network.  But it will only be available for mobile ‘feature-phones’ — there’s no web-based version, at least for now, which could impact adoption. Update: Actually, most people access Mixi via their mobile phones, so this may not matter as much. The release is the first from Zynga Japan, the social gaming company’s joint venture with Softbank that was announced over the summer (in addition to a Softbank investment of $150 million).

This is the latest round of Zynga’s international expansion. The company launched Texas Poker in traditional Chinese over the summer, and will soon be launching CityVille simultaneously in English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish (that will also mark the first time Zynga has had an international launch for a game’s initial release).

Back in about 2002 or so when Toshiba and a few others tried to sell tablets to businesses and consumers. This was around when Bill Gates was flogging Windows Tablet PC Edition and we all realized that tablets weren’t quite the trick. Among those tablets were the so-called convertibles – laptops that folded around to become thick tablets. When you wanted to tap on the screen you could and when you wanted to type you could do that, too. They were awful.

Now, suddenly, Dell comes out with the Duo and Apple is patenting something that looks like a MacBook Air with a clever folding screen. Sadly, the Duo is a dud and the Apple patents probably won’t make it to market, but here’s what I’d like to see in the convertible department.

There are some times when you totally need a keyboard. I’d love to see a MacBook Air or Vostro-sized tablet with a slide down keyboard that can also act as a stand. Obviously the stand would have to be able to support the thin piece of glass that is the screen, but the goal would be to add a very thin, very light keyboard to an equally thin and light tablet device.

The problem with most convertibles was an untoward attraction to legacy ports and parts. They were there because laptop manufacturers felt that users needed to have an Ethernet port hanging out in their convertibles like an gaping abscess. This is no longer the case. Something like the Dell Streak melded to a nice, full slide-down keyboard would be ideal and it would force manufacturers to really think about tablet usability versus laptop usability.

This is not to say that the traditional-style convertible doesn’t have a place. I’m sure someone thinks they need it. I’d just like the 7-inch plus tablets to go the way of smartphones like the Droid and offer a physical keyboard plus an on-screen keyboard. It makes sense and it would change the tablet use case immensely.

Will this ever happen? Most probably. Dell kind of did it with the ultra-light Duo and there’s no telling what HP is working on with Palm. Things are looking up, especially when compared to the dark days of the proto-convertibles back at the turn of the century.

I’m not really sure this research is as revealing as it seems to be. Take a look at the diagram. The take-away is that since the introduction of the iPad, the Kindle’s share of the e-reader market has dropped from 68% to 40%. This suggests that sales of the Kindle are dropping, or that Amazon is losing ground to Apple. But the simple nature of the study suggests a different conclusion.

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