If you think Google Docs is too barebones, especially for presentations, take a look at the video above. The animation was created by Tu+, Namroc, and Metcalf Anything using only Google Docs. It was their entry in the Google Demo Slam, which showcases creative videos of Google products in action. The video has already been watched more than one million times.

I can barely create a bar chart in PowerPoint, so I find this particularly impressive. Although I must admit that whenever I try to create charts in Google Docs I fail miserably there as well. Maybe we should hire these guys to do our charts.

And as an extra bonus, below is another Demo Slam video featuring the band Weezer demonstrating how Google Voice Search can even pick up a packed hall of fans screaming “Weezer!”

(Hat tip to Marissa Mayer and FlowingData).

http://www.demoslam.com/

We’re live from CES, friends, with both audio and video and CES.CrunchGear.com is where we’re serving up the latest news. Currently we’re streaming the LG press conference live along with liveblogging it. What’s the overall theme? Well, just like the rest of CES, it’s all about smarter appliances, smarter TVs, and smarter tablets.

Directly following the LG event is Monster Cable, Netgear, Intel, and the rest of the major CE companies including Samsung, Panasonic, Cisco, with Sony wrapping up the day at 5:00pm Las Vegas time. We’re here and we’re streaming the whole thing. Click through for the live video feed and more.

The final tally is in. comScore is reporting that retail e-commerce spending for the entire November through December holiday season reached $32.6 billion, up 12 percent and representing an all-time record for the season. comScore had previously predicted that online spending for the season would reach $32.4 billion this year, up 11 percent from the previous year.

comScore reports that fir the first time since 2001, Cyber Monday (Monday, Nov. 29) took the top spot as the heaviest online spending day of the year with $1 billion in sales. And Cyber Monday was the first day to cross the $1 billion mark in sales. Green Monday (Monday, Dec. 13) came in second with $954 million in sales, followed by Monday, December 6 with $943 million in spending.

Of course, other contributing factors to the increase in online spending this holiday season (besides an improved economy) included more free shipping offers, as well as the Northeast Blizzard that kept many shoppers home bound following the Christmas holiday. And comScore chairman and CEO Gian Fulgoni says that retailers began advertising their promotions earlier than usual to consumers this past season.

comScore had previously reported that Computer Hardware ranked as the top growing category for the holiday season with a 23 percent increase versus last year, driven by a growth in sales in tablet devices, e-readers and laptop computers. Books and Magazines as well as computer software also saw strong sales.

It had to happen sooner or later. The mark of a truly ubiquitous social phenomenon is when somebody uses it to propose to someone else. We’ve seen marriage proposals on Twitter, Facebook, and the iPad. Now we have what appears to be the first marriage proposal on Groupon.

And what a deal it is. A guy named Greg in Cincinnati offered to marry a woman named Dana, and it only cost her $1 (total value of the deal is $999,999, which I guess is the maximum allowed on Groupon, but can you really put a price on love?). Looks like she bought it because “the deal is on.” Or else this is could be a marketing stunt—you never know with those jokers at Groupon.

The great thing is that if you click the buy button, you too can become engaged to Greg. It takes you to a page with a heart animation and the message:

Congratulations Dana or Stranger,
You are now unofficially obliged to marry Greg!

Kids today. What ever happened to romance and the pit-in-your-stomach jitters that only comes with a face-to-face proposal?

Earlier today, the official Twitter account of Flattr, the micropayment startup founded by ex-Pirate Bay associates, tweeted that they were "excited excited excited ...", so we knew something was up. Now we've learned that the service, which enables users to 'Like' sites and content but with real money, is indeed rolling out something new: the ability to donate specific amounts of money to Flattr users directly. So rather than relying solely on the albeit innovate model of simply divvying up a pre-allocated monthly pool of cash (starting from €2), no matter how thinly that's spread if a user chooses to "Flattr" a high number of sites, a chunk of that change can now be sliced off at will. And while any user will be able to receive donations, Wikileaks, which amid controversy has been shunned by traditional players MasterCard, PayPal and Visa, stands to benefit from the new feature greatly - donations are anonymous with a minimum payment of 2 euros.

Swedish music company X5 Music has secured a 7 million Euro ($9m) investment from Northzone Ventures, which also happens to the be the lead investor in that other Scandinavian music startup you’ve probably heard of, Spotify.

X5 Music is a digital record label operating largely in Europe. It plans to use the funding to sign American artists and to increase X5 Music´s current catalogue. This USA expansion makes them the first Swedish "record label" in 50 years to do so. It’s kind’ve odd to see a VC invest in a record label but Northzone wants to get a deeper involvement into the value chain within the digital music area, a market they believe has lots of growth potential.

One of the recent startup trends that we’ve been seeing involves an industry that doesn’t immediately come to mind when you talk about Silicon Valley: the fashion scene. One fairly new entrant to the space is Moxsie, a community-driven indie clothing and apparel store that focuses on indy fashion. Today, the company is announcing that it’s landed a partnership to feature some of its items on Beyond The Rack, a ‘private’ shopping site with 3 million members that sells fashion apparel in flash sales (it’s in the same vein as Gilt Groupe).

Through the deal, every month Beyond The Rack will be having a four-day set during which some of the firesales will feature apparel designed by Moxsie designers. That could prove to be quite helpful for Moxsie, which is still a very young site and is eager to get in front of fashion-savvy users. It’s also a win for Moxsie designers, who will similarly get much larger exposure.

Moxsie, which we haven’t covered before, has taken an interesting approach to growing its community: it’s done it almost exclusively through Twitter. Ten months ago, the company’s Twitter account had around 800 followers — it’s now up to over 120,000. To help accelerate its growth Moxsie initially reached out to some key fashion bloggers, and since then the account has surged in popularity.

One of the keys, says CEO (and early Zappos employee) Jon Fahrner, is that Moxsie is letting its followers into its merchandising meetings, where the company meets with designers to figure out which items it wants to offer on the store. Instead of holding these meetings behind closed doors, Moxsie will take photos of each piece the designer shows off and tweets them, allowing the community to offer real-time feedback (these meetings are also sometimes broadcast on USTEAM). This obviously helps Moxsie determine which items to offer, and Fahrner says feedback can also be invaluable to the designer. Moxsie recently implemented BadgeVille to help engage more of its audience.

My one gripe with this system is that it’s currently unstructured — there isn’t really a central hub for users to go to participate in these BuyerChat sessions. Sure, they can always participate on Twitter and USTREAM as they have in the past, but Moxsie could really flesh out the experience. That said, Fahrner says that the company is definitely considering its options here, and it will likely be making improvements to make the experience better.

Opera Software on Monday teased a preview of Opera for Tablets, a custom browser for hybrid touch devices, which it said would be debuting at CES this week.

In a video, embedded below, the company briefly showed the product in action on an Android tablet, a Samsung Galaxy Tab to be more specific.

TechCrunch has now learned that the company will also show off some Windows 7 tablets and netbooks running its latest browser at CES – we’ll see if the CrunchGear team can shoot some videos of those at the annual show.

Unlike Opera’s other mobile browsers, which are custom-built for smartphone devices (including Android phones), Opera for Tablets seems to be more fit for larger touch screens, including the ability to smoothly scroll and zoom Web pages.

Opera has confirmed to us that the touch browser will also by shown running on Windows 7 notebooks at CES, but says it will only demonstrate a public preview, and that a public download release will be something for the future. Same goes for the Android version.

Don’t hold your breath for the browser to come to the iPad; although many expected never to witness Apple approve Opera Mini for the iPhone either, of course, so who knows?

File sharing service YouSendIt has just announced the acquisitions of email collaboration startup Attassa and e-signature service Zosh. Terms of the deals were not disclosed.

Attassa’s SDK adds a collaborative layer on top of Microsoft Outlook. Features include file-sharing, synchronization and backup service. Attassa’s nifty iPhone app, which we wrote about here, also synchronizes users’ email from Outlook and other Webmail servers. Zosh’s e-signature service, which launched at DEMO, allows users to view, fill, sign and transmit documents from a mobile phone. You can then email the completed documents as standard PDF files.

YouSendIt, which recently raised $15 million in new funding, allows users to easily send and receive files and folders as large as 2 gigabytes in size (rather than send the file itself via email, you send a link to the file that is hosted on YouSendIt’s servers). These acquisitions should help boost YouSendIt’s functionality beyond just file sharing.

GetJar, the largest independent mobile app store, has just released its forecast for mobile trends in 2011. The app store, which has seen over 1 billion downloads to date, is also seeing more than three million downloads per day (which makes the App Store’s scale second only to Apple’s iTunes).

GetJar projects consolidation amongst app stores, writing that in the next five years, only six major app store players will be around with that number dwindling to two or three in ten years. The startup also predicts that closed app systems (i.e. Apple’s iTunes) will open up or fail as these stores feel pressure from developers and consumers.

In the next five years, the startup says URLs will become obsolete, as consumers access more services via apps than the on the web. GetJar predicts that successful mobile app companies will be raking in $100 million or more in revenue in 2011.

Brands will continue to flick to mobile platforms, developing apps for the iPhone and Android platforms. GetJar says that the brand spend on apps will be roughly equivalent to today's spend on web presence.

Last but not least, GetJar predicts that tablet devices will explode in popularity, with Android OS tablets in particular benefiting from lower price points, and open platform, and wide spread availability from common retailers.

Some of these predications are necessarily ground breaking (i.e. tablet growth) but it’s definitely interesting to see if popular app stores will in fact consolidate and become more open.

The Logitech Revue has been out for a few months now and it’s already been cracked wide open. The new hack allows “root” access, thereby allowing anyone to load their own apps into the box and have access to the full filesystem. The bad news? You need a soldering iron.

Read more…

You’ve probably heard of Qualcomm, chip maker for almost every non-GSM device in existence and, recently, builder of well-known mobile processors, but Atheros? These guys have been quiet for years.

Atheros makes almost all wi-fi chips built into mobile devices. In short, anything that doesn’t use a cellular network, they’re on top of, and they’ve spurred the evolution of Wi-Fi over the past few years. Now, however, they’re part of Qualcomm, putting that company into a new, extremely lucrative position. In short, Qualcomm now owns a vast swathe of the mobile semiconductor space.

Read more…

Walker Digital, the “invention company” founded by Priceline.com co-inventor Jay S. Walker, isn’t just suing Facebook, he’s also trying to take on some giant game publishers.

More specifically, Walker Digital has just filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Zynga, Activision and the latter’s subsidiary Blizzard Entertainment.

As you can see in the complaint embedded below, the patent-in-suit is U.S. patent no. 6,425,828, which was issued on July 30, 2002. The patent is entitled ‘DATABASE DRIVEN ONLINE DISTRIBUTED TOURNAMENT SYSTEM’.

Walker Digital argues that this gaming patent concerns a product and method of distributed electronic tournaments for a plurality of players that exchanges information with a central controller to influence game play while a player plays in the tournament, and stores player information to influence game play in a subsequent tournament.

According to the “invention company”, a whole slew of games from the aforementioned publishers, including Zynga’s Mafia Wars, Wolfenstein, the Call of Duty series and World Of Warcraft, among others, infringe on the patent.

Hence the image on top (it’s a WoW troll).

We’ll keep an eye on the case.

We’ve learned exclusively that mobile ad network Millennial Media has raised $27.5 million in new funding from Bessemer Venture Partners, Columbia Capital, Charles River Ventures, and New Enterprise Associates. This investment has brought the Baltimore-based company’s total funding to more than $65 million.

Millennial, which is the largest remaining independent ad network (AdMob was bought by Google and Apple acquired Quattro), has had a banner year as the mobile advertising market explodes. In terms of mobile advertising marketshare, the IDC estimates Millennial follows in a close third to both Google and Apple. Millennial's ads reach 63 million of a total of 77 million mobile web users in the U.S., or 81 percent of the U.S. mobile web.

Co-founded by ad exec Paul Palmieri, Millennial Media has flown relatively under the radar for how prominent the company is in the mobile ad space. And the company has avoided some of the drama that took place between AdMob and Apple last year.

While Millennial has a fairly thriving independent ad network, the company also operates and manages private mobile ad networks for large media companies and conglomerates that have multiple apps and sites, essentially powering a self-service ad network for these companies. Millennial also has a deal with a "prominent internet media company" (but declines to name the company) that has completely outsourced its mobile advertising to Millennial.

Palmieri says that while competing with the likes of Google and Apple is challenging, the company’s focus on bringing advertising cross-platform to a variety of mobile devices has helped the network compete (as opposed to Apple which is focused on the iOS platform).

And all of this business has helped the company grow its top line. Millennial tripled revenue in 2010 from 2009 and achieved profitability. According to IDC research published last December, Millennial Media was on target to make $35 million in U.S. mobile advertising revenue for 2009, so revenues could be well over $100 million. Last year the company acquired analytics startup TapMetrics and plans to “acquire aggressively this year.”

And Palmieri has expressed his commitment to remaining independent and has ambitions to take the company public, possibly becoming the largest publicly traded independent advertising network in the space.

He adds that Millennial didn’t need to raise funding at this time but saw the opportunity to use the money to grow aggressively (particularly in international markets like Asia and Europe). “In the end, this is more about how we are going to win,” he says.

Mobile entertainment startup mSpot is launching its music and movie services on Google TVs today. mSpot’s free music cloud service allows you sync your entire music collection across a variety of devices; and the startup’s movie service streams full-length movie rentals between devices.

Once you have an mSpot account, you can then login to mspot.com from Google TV's browser and can access all of your online music. mSpot offers free storage for the first two gigabytes (approximately 1600 songs), with additional storage available for purchase at 40 gigabytes for $3.99 per month. You can read how mSpot’s service works here.

You can access movies by clicking on an mSpot Movies icon in the Spotlight section on Google TV, or by visiting mSpotMovies.com. mSpot has struck deals with Paramount, Universal, Image Entertainment, and Screen Media Ventures to stream full-length movie rentals to users' PCs and cell phones, allowing you to switch between both devices as you pick up and leave off throughout a movie. The startup has also optimized its movies to be viewed on the larger interface of a television. Movies range from $2.99 to $3.99 each.

Of course one possible competitor to mSpot’s integration into Google TV is Google’s own planned music service, which will surely be accessible across devices.

Symplified, which provides identity and access management tools for cloud applications, has secured $9 million in Series B funding, bringing its total financing to $18.8 million. The round was led by existing Symplified investors Granite Ventures and Allegis Capital, and included a strategic investment by Quest Software.

AOL (which owns TechCrunch, at the risk of repeating ourselves indefinitely), this morning announced that it has recruited Eric Singleton to lead technology within AOL's Paid Services division.

According to the press release, Singleton will be responsible for overseeing the creation of a “unified platform” for the discovery, trial, purchase and management of AOL's Paid Services offerings while also overseeing the group's technology roadmap.

Singleton will report to new AOL CTO Alex Gounares.

So what’s AOL's Paid Services division? It’s the group that manages access subscriptions as well as WOW! Deal of the Day (that’s right, our parent company thinks it can score with an umpteenth Groupon clone) and dozens of other premium subscription services.

Singleton comes to AOL after a number of years as an independent IT strategy executive and consultant. Previously, he served as the CIO for Tommy Hilfiger, and before that he was with Raytheon Company as head of worldwide E-Commerce.

Twitter search and advertising startup PostUp (formerly TweetUp) has bought Twitter application developer Echofon, according to a release issued today. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Echofon, which used to be called TwitterFon, is used by over 3 million people. The startup offers a Twitter app for the iPhone, a native Twitter clients, a Facebook app for the iPhone, and a Twitter iPad app.

One of Echofon’s most compelling features is that it can determine which Tweets you’ve already seen between your mobile apps, so you don’t end up rereading the same content.

PostUp, which was incubated by idealab, opened registration for its bidded marketplace for real-time search last year and along the way has acquired a number of Twitter clients. The startup recently bought Twitter Android client Twidroid and news aggregator service popurls. PostUp’s search algorithms and marketplace has been integrated on a number of sites, including here at TechCrunch, Topix.com, and Businessinsider.com.

PostUp plans to expand the features and functions of EchoFon and says that the developer’s offerings are a “natural complement” to the company’s Twitter app for Android phones, Twidroyd.

Angry Birds, the wildly popular game on a raft of smartphones, has made its way to the PC. Sometime overnight a version for Windows XP/7 became available via Intel's AppUp store, which specifically targets Netbooks. The app costs $9.99/£5.99/€7.99, although for a limited time gamers can get in on the action for $4.99. The choice to launch on Intel's desktop app store, which very much borrows from the smartphone model of 'on-deck' offerings, is also interesting in light of Apple's own pending Mac store. Angry Birds has established itself as an iPhone classic so we'll likely see it fly off the shelves (pun intended) if or when it lands (sorry, again) on Macbooks and the like.

ContactZilla is another take on the unified address book. Or more specifically, it's being pitched as an online 'Contact Management System' for businesses designed with the Social Web in mind and the ability to merge contacts from the likes of Twitter and LinkedIn with more traditional sources. The service, built by Bristol, UK-based web development agency Simpleweb, is currently in private Beta but TechCrunch Europe has 200 invites. Of course, this kind of offering has been tried before - and many startups are playing in and around the social CRM space. However, ContactZilla hopes to differentiate itself by remaining free compared to the likes of more traditional offerings such as Gist or Capsule.

RootMusic, a San Francisco-based startup that essentially makes it easier for bands and musicians to set up phenomenal-looking pages on Facebook, has raised $2.3 million in financing according to an SEC filing.

If you’d like to learn more about RootMusic, check out Orli’s post, but basically, RootMusic lets musicians and bands establish fancy Facebook pages, featuring artwork, music, photos, videos, a concert calendar and whatnot.

There’s a free option and a paid option for bands who want to dive deeper into the customization of their so-called ‘BandPage’.

This is the BandPage for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers if you’re interested in an example, or check out RootMusic’s tour.

We reached out to RootMusic about the financing round, but they declined to provide more details at this point. We’ll update their CrunchBase profile when they get around to do so.

33Across, a provider of social targeting technology for online marketing, has landed $9 million in Series B financing in a round led by Flybridge Capital Partners with participation from Series A investors First Round Capital and QED Investors.

As part of the funding, Flybridge Capital's Jon Karlen will join the company’s board.

The funding aims to provide 33Across some leverage to grow its SocialDNA targeting platform, build and enhance products and step up sales and marketing activities.

The company, which is led by CEO and Ogilvy vet Eric Wheeler, basically aims to help marketers identify high-potential prospects who are socially connected to existing customers and brand advocates.

33Across customers include Sprint, eBay, and Gilt Groupe.

Fragmentation. Curation. Recommendations. Take your pick: Android is getting all three, compliments of a new Amazon-run application marketplace due to launch later this year.  Today, Amazon has launched the developer-facing part of the store, inviting devs to submit their applications so that they’re ready when the app store is ready for its consumer debut later this year (Amazon isn’t giving a firm date on the full launch). The developer portal is at http://developer.amazon.com.

We reported on this impending news back in September, so it isn’t a huge surprise. But it’s going to bring some very interesting dynamics to the way Android applications are purchased and distributed. In some senses, this is the Android equivalent of Apple’s App Store — even more so than Google’s official Android Market.

I spoke with Aaron Rubenson, category leader for Amazon Mobile Services, and
Ameesh Paleja, general manager for the Engineering Division of Mobile Services, about the new store, and it clearly has the potential to be a big deal.

First, some background for those who don’t follow Android too closely. All Google-endorsed Android devices ship with the Android Market, along with a suite of other Google-made applications like Gmail. Android Market is a lot like Apple’s App Store with a few key differences: it doesn’t have an approval system, so developers can quickly submit and iterate on their applications. It also tends to have a lot of junky applications that Apple would reject — things that crash on launch on certain devices, or apps with that occasionally have features that don’t work as expected. While Google’s terms do require descriptions to be accurate, the general attitude is to let the market decide what works, and it surfaces the top rated applications (most of the time) while letting the junk sink.

Amazon is taking an approach that is more in line with Apple’s. Developers who wish to appear on Amazon’s store have to get approval (Amazon says that the process is currently taking about a week). And Amazon is going to have slightly more stringent guidelines: your application has to work properly (i.e. it can’t crash right off the bat) and it has to do what you say it does. It also has to be safe. Android Market has many of these same requirements, but the difference here is that Amazon checks apps before they’re deployed to its store, while Google does so after problematic applications are reported.

However, unlike Apple’s screening policies (which were largely a mystery for years and are still pretty wishy-washy), Amazon says it’s going to take a more liberal stance as far as what’s allowed on the store. Porn and illegal apps are not allowed, but your satire apps should be okay. And developers won’t have to make any changes to their .apk files, either — it sounds like you can upload the same ones to both Google’s and Amazon’s marketplaces (neither has any exclusivity requirements).

The biggest departure from the mobile app stores we’ve grown accustomed to involves pricing. Unlike Apple’s App Store and Android Market, where developers can set their price to whatever they’d like, Amazon retains full control over how it wants to price your application. The setup is a bit confusing: upon submitting your application, you can set a ‘List Price’, which is the price you’d normally sell it at. Amazon will use a variety of market factors to determine what price it wants to use, and you get a 70% cut of the proceeds of each sale (which is the industry standard). In the event that Amazon steeply discounts your application, or offers it for free, you’re guaranteed to get 20% of the List Price.

The bottom line here is that Amazon will be offering discounts on some applications (possibly making them much cheaper than the same application on Android Market or elsewhere). That sounds like it could be a recipe for frustration for some developers, but Rubenson and Paleja say that they’re going to do everything they can to maximize the amount of money developers make, and that sometimes that involves adjusting pricing. They also say that Amazon has an incentive to keep developers happy — and that developers can remove their apps from the store with ten day’s notice. We’ll have to wait and see if the system works.

So why, aside from these pricing differences, would consumers want to use this Amazon App Store at all? There are a few answers to that question.

The first is that there are manufacturers making Android devices that decide not to partner with Google to offer the official suite of Google applications (including Android Market). Amazon is happy to offer their store to these manufacturers, and it will work on any Android device version 1.6 or up. So if, for example, Facebook releases its own flavor of Android down the line, they could include Amazon’s App Store.

Reason number two: Amazon says that it can offer recommendations using the technology that already exists on Amazon.com. This includes the obvious example of showing applications that are similar to each other, but Amazon will also be looking for correlations between physical products and apps — it might start recommending a popular baseball app to someone browsing for a baseball bat, for example. And it’s going to be promoting these applications as users browse Amazon.com.

Amazon says it’s premature to talk about what the store itself will look like, but they did share a few details about the consumer experience. First, payments unsurprisingly will be done using Amazon’s one-click payment system (which already has tens of millions of credit cards on file), though developers can integrate whatever transaction system they want into the app itself.

Customers will be able to browse through applications from their phone or on Amazon.com using their desktop computers, and they’ll be able to ‘send’ applications they buy to their mobile device. This sounds similar to what Google showed off at Google I/O, but with one minor caveat: the apps won’t actually be pushed and installed immediately, it sounds like you’ll have to fire up the Amazon application to do that.

So how will people actually get access to this Amazon marketplace from their Android device? This is going to prove a bit tricky for some users — Amazon will offer a walkthrough instructing users on how to do this, but it will require you dig into the settings menu on the device and allow installation from “Unknown Sources”. It’s easy to find if you know what you’re doing, but it sounds a bit scary. However, Amazon is also in talks with various partners, and we’ll likely be seeing plenty of applications shipping with the market pre-installed.

Now, Amazon isn’t the only company that’s making alternative Android App Stores — Verizon is also doing one of its own, and there will surely be more to follow. But Amazon is in a position to establish itself as the de facto non-Google App Store — and that could prove to be very important. As Kevin Marks wrote recently (and we discussed further), Android is going to increasingly fragment into flavors that aren’t as closely tied to Google, and we’ll start seeing more alternative versions of the core ‘Google Apps’. Amazon’s App Store would fit in nicely as one part of this alternative suite.

This will also bring pricing battles over the same applications into the equation (which hasn’t really been possible when app distribution is monopolized by a single storefront). And, yes, it could lead to some user confusion, though Amazon has a strong incentive to keep this as straightforward as it can.

Make no mistake — this isn’t going to replace Google’s Android Market by any means. Google’s store will have better international support for some time (Amazon is US-only at launch) and it will still be shipping on plenty of phones by default. But given how many Android devices are going to be out there in the near future (they’re activating over 300,000 a day), there’s certainly going to be enough customers to keep more than one store in business.

I asked a few times about timing for the consumer launch but couldn’t get anything more specific than “this year”. However, the team did say that the mobile storefront is being built with tablets in mind, so my guess is that we can expect this to launch after Android tablets running Honeycomb are on the market (which will probably be around April or later).

I asked the Amazon team how Google felt about the launch — there was an audible chuckle, and they said something about Android being on an amazing growth trajectory and that they were fond of its openness.

Reached for comment, Google gave this statement:

Android is an open platform – and entities other than Google are free to create their own content and marketplaces, much like the web.

I bet they’re thrilled.

Social discovery service StumbleUpon made headlines yesterday when CEO Garrett Camp tweeted out that it had surpassed Facebook in terms of referral traffic on StatCounter.

According to Statcounter, StumbleUpon is now responsible for 43% of all major social media site (StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, Myspace and Digg) traffic on the 15 billion pageviews that the analytics service tracks. Facebook is at 38%.

When a company with 13 million users is outpacing one with 500 million on one specific metric,  additional context is needed to understand exactly what is going on.

I spoke with Camp earlier today about what exactly this recent news means for the company and why StumbleUpon seems to be killing it since August, clocking in about 1.9 million unique visitors in November according to Comscore. The site has served up over 700 million “Stumbles” (referral pageviews to other websites) in December 2010 compared to 400 million Stumbles in December of 2009, according to internal analytics.

Camp says that the service has been growing at 20% month over month for the last couple of months, partially because it introduced StumbleUpon for the iPhone and Android in August and an iPad app in April. Mobile engagement, which represents 5% of all Stumbles, is growing at 40%. Web-only Stumbling, as opposed to the vast oeuvre of browser plugins and toolbars, is growing at a 25% rate. The site also gains around 500-600K new registered users monthly on average and boasts a 40% daily active user rate.

“We’re becoming a little more useful” says Camp on the recent traffic spikes, “Discovery as opposed to keyword search is just a better way to find information.” Camp also explains the discrepancy between Facebook and StumbleUpon’s end goals in contributing to referral traffic, “Facebook is by design trying to keep you on Facebook, but with us every time you click we’re sending referrals to other sites,” he continues, “like Google our goal is to take you to a new site.”

A confluence of factors led to the latest milestones, says StumbleUpon VP of Business Development Marc Leibowitz:

“The growth curve has also steepened recently because of the introduction of more overtly social features (eg, finding & inviting real-world friends) to complement the less obvious but long-standing social aspects of StumbleUpon (eg, algorithmically determined like-minded users); the improving usability of the service (eg, “show me more from [this domain, topic, user]“; better onboarding); and probably the overall proliferation of content, which has increased the demand for easy-to-use, adaptive curation tools like StumbleUpon (see also Google’s experiments w News & Reader).”

StumbleUpon is also breaking even according to Camp, and at around 65 employees that means revenue is in the ballbark of 10 million annually (When asked if this guess was accurate, Leibowitz told me “You’re not bad at math.” This is not true.). In any case, beating Facebook at anything is a hell of a way to start 2011 strong. Congrats guys.

Hey you know what’s happening right now? #LessAmbitiousMovies, the craziest Twitter hashtag meme I’ve ever seen, pacing at around 200 tweets per minute. The basic premise is to tweet out the titles of popular films but watered down and less ambitious, get it?

What’s notable about the meme is a) for some inexplicable reason it is not trending and b) that since it started a couple of hours ago the hashtag has suddenly saturated my (and probably your) entire Twitter stream with hilarious faux movie titles like “Being John Stamos,”Harry Potter and the Chamber of Nothing,” and “The Devil Wears Zara.”

Maybe because it’s the first work week after the holidays and we all need to let off a little steam, but there something deeply satisfying about coming up with these. Go ahead try one.

And yeah, someone really should make posters for all the movies.

Update: It’s now trending — I’ve contacted Twitter for more information on how rapidly this is scaling as this as this seems to be the fastest growing hashtag in awhile.

Update #2: Twitter’s response at 9:14 PST, “We don’t have this info easily accessible.” I don’t blame them. In the meantime, here’s the Google Trends graph of the frequency in realtime updates including the hashtag.

And here’s some of my favorites, below: