Foursquare has just announced some staggering growth stats via an infographic today. The company said that it has now hit 6 million registered users, grew 3400 percent in terms of check-ins and saw a total of 381,576,305 check-ins in 2010.

And it only took the location based social network a month and a half to add another million users. Foursquare’s largest event by check-ins was the Rally To Restore Sanity with 30,525 check-ins. The infographic also includes stats on post popular venues by category, and most popular brands on the network (MTV and Bravo are at the top of the list).

At Le Web last December, co-founder Dennis Crowley announced that Foursquare is seeing 2 million check-ins per day and adding 25K new users a day. At that time, Crowley said that users split up geographically between 60% US and 40% international, with the average Foursquare user checks in 3-4 times day. And less than three weeks after launching a photo uploading feature, the network hit one million photos shared.

Clearly, Facebook Places isn’t having much of an impact on Foursquare’s growth, which has accelerated even after Facebook’s debut of their competitor. New partners, features, and an all-round compelling product has no doubt helped Foursquare remain competitive.

You can read Crowley’s commentary at today’s DLD conference in Munich here.

The Kno is a clever single or dual-screen 14.1-inch tablet aimed at the education market. The Kno was even nominated to the 2010 Crunchies for Best New Device. But the company need to get the word out and so are turning to their potential customers for help.

The Kno Student Ambassador Program is open to any US-based college student looking to gain a unique marketing and communication resume blurb, but also a deep discount on a Kno Tablet. The job responsibilities aren’t lite ;it doesn’t seem like something easily scammed. You’d be required to attend weekly meetings, conduct product demos, work with student clubs and organizations as well as participate in Kno viral marketing campaigns.

But if you’ve been eyeing a single or dual-screen Kno tablet and all that on-campus nonsense sounds more like fun than work to you, why not apply? Think of it as an investment into your future, where the nonsensical phrase means you’ll get one of the hottest tablet for a bit or work.

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These are my notes from a panel on ‘Local Markets’ at the DLD Conference in Germany, which featured Groupon CEO Andrew Mason and Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley.

Q: Two very exciting startups on stage. Dennis and Andrew, what year did you start?

Dennis: March 2009.

Andrew: November 2008.

Q: In my mind, the concept of local is core to both your companies – social as well, but local primarily. Can you talk about that?

Dennis: What we think about when we build products at Foursquare: how do we build things that make cities easier to use? Our software introduces people to other people, lets you discover new places, experience new things. There are the game dymanics to encourage people to go out and do new stuff, and then we started seeing local merchants getting involved.

Andrew: Groupon started as ThePoint.com, a platform where groups of people trying to solve the same problem could gather and coordinate online. We weren’t really getting anywhere, and doing local daily deals came next.

Q: Can you give some examples to what kind of initiatives came in at ThePoint?

Andrew: Early things included stuff like: we want to ‘build a local park’, ‘make election day a national holiday’, and ‘let’s get 80 people together to get a group discount’. So we saw the group buying efforts happening on our platform and took notice.

We’re basically helping consumers discover interesting businesses. But unlike Foursquare, I have to say it’s about the money for a large part, getting that discount, so we’re much less innovative than them.

Q: It’s always been quite hard for local merchants to be found. How do you look at the differences between your companies in trying to solve that problem?

Dennis: We’re more about loyalty, aiding businesses who want to reward regular customers, while Groupon I think is more about new customer acquisition. Foursquare is also users leaving tips for other users, which makes it more of a discovery thing.

Q: Is Foursquare a social company?

Dennis: I’d say social plus location. A lot of people think it is about present tense, but the great thing is that, over time, you get a great, rich profile of users, what type of person they are.

Q: While Groupon is more a simple discount service?

Andrew: We’re not a discounting service, and I don’t know what ‘social commerce even means’. Local ecommerce sounds more relevant to what we do. We’re going to continue to go down that path, bringing offline commerce online, to create a more efficient market for local businesses.

Q: Why do you think both your companies saw such a quick uptake?

Andrew: We cracked that local ecommerce nut, and it’s a serious nut. There wasn’t even a good form of customer acuiqsition before the Internet, for local businesses. I mean, advertising on radio and in local newspapers was about spending money upfront, to buy exposure, and then cross your fingers.

You don’t have a lot of margin to screw up and try again. With Groupon, local businesses can pay for what matters, acquiring new customers.

Q: Okay, but why hasn’t that happened in the past?

Andrew: It wasn’t intuitive to us either, so I don’t really know. We looked at group buying as a concept from a consumer standpoint, but we didn’t fully realize how vital something like this could be to small busienssess in a city. Maybe it could have existed ten years ago, but it wouldn’t have grown this quickly.

Q: You’ve both enjoyed quick growth, gotten lots of attention. What is that like? Before it took some time to build your startup and get exposure, right now it’s happening more quickly.

Dennis: We’re 50 people now, so to me that’s big, if you look at the fact Dodgeball was basically two of us. But we talk to merchants and notice that we could use more people already. There’s so much exposure, and that’s great, but then we need to keep focused and realize that the road is still long.

Q: What’s the biggest misconception about Foursquare?

Dennis: The company’s size is the first. Second is that some people seem to think Foursquare is for hipsters in New York and San Francisco. That’s certainly how we got started, but we have a lot of international usage, all over the world. It’s a big surprise for us.

Q: What are the biggest challenges when growing as fast as Groupon did?

Andrew: Our growth may have been quick, but it was incremental. We started in Chicago, and it took us 5 months before our second city, and then the time shortened each time we launched in a new city. So we took our time to develop the original playbook, and we try to copy that strategy with our international expansion.

By creating a strong cultural foundation, and hiring great people and entrepreneurs. So we provide the playbook, they execute.

Q: What’s the culture like at foursquare?

Dennis: We have lots of fun, and when we recruit, we try to bring in people who are not only good engineers, but also know how social works, are passionate about it. We hired a lot of our friends in the early days, and that translates very well into the culture.

But we need to stay humble, despite all the press coverage. That gets harder the more exposure you get, by the way. We’re at 6 million users, but we still have a long way to go.

Q: Andrew, there’s a distinct culture at Groupon. Where does that come from?

Andrew: Groupon as a business model has a surprising element, which part of the fun, getting a new deal every day. That has given us permission to extend that craziness into other aspects of the business, such as the copywriting.

What I worry about is keeping people from getting overexcited because of all the buzz that we get. We have to rememver we’re only two years old, and the road is still very long.

There’s not time for celebration yet. Even in all hands meeting, we spend a lot of time talking about everything that could go wrong.

Q: Do you beat people with sticks?

Andrew: Not anymore.

Q: What’s your biggest worry as an entrepreneur?

Andrew: What I care about is not becoming complacent, not being satisfied with what we are today, continuing to innovate. Often, companies that rise quickly, and fail quickly, lose to themselves and not a competitor.

We’re still growing, and things are moving along nicely, so I think if we focus on making customers happy, we’ll continue to find new ways to disrupt ourselves.

Q: Both of you have turned down offers from larger companies to acquire you. What can you say about that?

Dennis: Of course, I had my experience with Dodgeball, so I’m in a good position to keep taking the ideas in my head and build products, and getting them to people. I always say this, but we’re not at 10% to 20% of the roadmap, so it’s far too early to get off the ride.

We want to keep pushing. The toughest part is having confidence in our team to do that. It’s a bit of a gamble sometimes, especially when you’re smaller. Getting from 5 to 50 employees was certainly not easy.

Q: You’ve publicly said that you carry some regrets about your first acquisition. Did that strengthen you in turning down the purchase offers for Foursquare?

Dennis: Well yes, and we also have very supportive investors, they want us to shoot for the moon. There wasn’t much pressure. Someone once told me that when you turn down a deal like that, you think about it every day afterwards, which is probably true but something I’m cool with.

Q: Andrew, Google wanted to acquire Groupon. Can you talk about that?

Andrew: Can you give me some options on how to dodge your questions?

Q: What the hell were you thinking?

Andrew: I can’t comment on any speculation, but I can say that local ecommerce is an exciting space to be in. Awesome alternative answer, isn’t it?

Q: Yes, you said absolutely nothing there. How do you balance what’s right for your team, your investors, how do you make that call?

Andrew: We’re very lucky to have great cofounders and investors, and we talk about all kinds of decisions thoroughly. I’ll stop here … it’s not going to be a good answer.

Q: What’s next? Are you talking to bankers about going public?

Andrew: Yes, we are. We’re learning, because we don’t know what to do. That’s the honest truth. We haven’t made a decision yet.

Q: What’s it like, talking to bankers?

Andrew: It’s like talking to investors. Pretty much the same.

Q: Is an IPO the right thing for you to do?

Andrew: It seems like a reasonable thing to do. And IPOs are juicy for the business community, but I see it as just another step in the direction we’re going. I’m thinking long term.

Q: Dennis, where is Foursquare going?

Dennis: Funnily enough, lots of people look at Foursquare and sees a check-in game. We started off like that, but we would like to prove that we’re now more than that. We’re getting interesting data from users, and we’re thinking of ways to recycle it back to these users in ways that can make their lives richer and more interesting.

Q: What about the third party apps that are using Foursquare as a foundational platform?

Dennis: Outside the products we build, we have this platform that developers can use to create stuff on top of our infrastructure. We see a lot of different things being built by thousands of developers, from review services to dating services.

Andrew: Can I interrupt? I want to say why I wasn’t keen on answering your earlier questions. I don’t want to be corporate douchebag, it’s what I wanted to avoid. But let me explain why I dodge these questions.

First time we acquired a company, we didn’t know what to expect. It’s a very personal process, you’re getting to know each other, it’s very intimate, and then suddenly everyone wants us to do that in the open while we’re still figuring things out.

Q: So you do it out of respect? No kiss and tell?

Andrew: (sighs) Yeah.

Q: What would you like Groupon to become?

Andrew: We want to be the Amazon or eBay for local ecommerce. We want to be what people think about when that business comes up in conversations. There’s a big opportunity for a company to bring offline commerce online, and we’re well positioned to do that.

Photo credit: FLickr/ Florian Krakau

The drama continues between Chinese company Huawei Technologies and Motorola. The company has filed a lawsuit to prevent Motorola from giving Nokia Siemens (which acquired Motorola’s wireless network for $1.2 billion last year) Huawei’s IP information.

Essentially, Huawei is saying that because Motorola and the company has a previous licensing relationship, Motorola’s wireless networking unit was provided with details on Huawei’s confidential intellectual property. Huawei says that since the Nokia acquisition, the company “has tried to ensure that Motorola does not transfer this confidential information to NSN”.

Motorola, Huawei contends, has not provided any assurances that it will prevent disclosure of that IP information to Nokia. As stated in the release, “If Huawei’s proprietary commercial property and information is transferred to a third party, Huawei will suffer irreparable commercial damage,” since Nokia is a major competitor of the Chinese company.

And it gets uglier. In the actual complaint, Huawei is seeking an interim order that a portion of Motorola's business not be transferred to NSN until the issue is resolved.

This isn’t the first time that Huawei and Motorola have sparred. Motorola actually sued Huawei last June for conspiring to steal trade secrets from former Motorola employees.

Motorola is also embroiled in an ongoing patent lawsuit with Microsoft.

There’s no doubt that Facebook is becoming a powerful hub for videos; with more than 2 billion videos watched per month on the network, and 20 million videos uploaded per month. While Facebook allows users to upload and tag videos much like you would with photos on the network, BlipSnips is launching a more feature-rich application suite for uploading and tagging customized for social videos. BlipSnips’ iPhone app and Facebook app allows users to upload video, actually visually mark moments within the video video, tag friends, and post it immediately to Facebook. The company is also announcing that Chris Kelly, former chief privacy officer at Facebook and a lead investor at BlipSnips, is joining the company as a senior advisor to the Board.

There are a number of features that make TechStars-incubated BlipSnips unique from Facebook’s own video uploading features, First, via the Facebook app and the free iPhone app, BlipSnips allows users to mark “moments” within videos that mark specific events. Users can also caption these moments with comments and descriptions.

Another unique capability within BlipSnips is the ability to tag Facebook friends within a video. This differs from Facebook’s tagging features because BlipSnips allows users to tag and mark friends within in the video, so a viewer can see where a friend makes an appearance within the timeline of a video (as opposed to just a general tag). And BlipSnips iPhone app includes all of this functionality. You simply log-in to the app via your Facebook credentials and you’ll be able to post and tag videos on the go.

So why would you use BlipSnips over Facebook’s own iPhone app or video uploader? The main reason would be to add enhanced deep tagging capabilities to Facebook videos, so you can actually mark key moments, add captions and friend appearances within videos. But as Facebook continues to ramp up its own video offerings, it would make sense for the social network to add this functionality.

Monster Offers, an aggregator and publisher of local daily deals, has raised $10 million in equity financing from Auctus Private Equity Fund.

The financing is subject to an S-1 Registration Statement with the SEC, which the publicly-listed company expects to file by January 28, 2011.

Monster Offers says it plans to register existing shares from its treasury for the Auctus Private Equity Fund round to avoid shareholder dilution.

The startup has introduced what it refers to as the ‘Social Network Channel’, a technology platform that “places Social Marketing at the center of the marketing world and the hub of today’s business enterprise”.

I’ve reread that a couple of times, but still don’t really understand what this company does.

And then I kept reading and it got worse:

It’s also a framework for integrating information, people and processes across organizational boundaries. It provides a secure single sign-on & unified access point, in the form of a web-based user interface and is designed to aggregate and personalize information through application-specific components & portlets.

They’ve lost me completely at this point.

Lots of ‘freelance’ there in the title, but it was difficult to avoid. Outsourcing marketplace Freelancer.com (formerly GetAFreelancer) has acquired its much smaller German counterpart, Freelancer.de.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Just a couple of days ago, Freelancer.com also acquired EUFreelance, a euro-denominated freelancing marketplace servicing the European Union.

Sponsored with funds from the EU, Freelancer.de (or as the company is named, Freelancer Bookingcenter) was launched in the Summer of 2007 to increase online recruitment for microbusinesses and self employed freelancers in Germany.

Over 120 categories of freelance work are currently listed through Freelancer.de, servicing thousands of businesses across Germany.

Every major music artist these days seems to have their own iPhone app, but the latest app from the Black Eyed Peas is like nothing you’ve ever seen before. The app (iTunes link, $2.99) lets you follow each band member’s Twitter feed with photos, pose the band members in a 3D photo shoot, and even does an augmented-reality trick (when you point the iPhone camera at the Black Eyed Peas’ latest album cover, a character representing one of the band members pops out and shows his latest Tweet in a speech balloon). But what is really original about the app, is the 360-degree music video.

The video for the song “The Time: The Dirty Bit,” puts you in the center of a dance party with the Black Eyed Peas and a bunch of fans. (An iPhone 4 is recommended to get the full effect with no jitters). As you turn around while looking at the screen, you are surrounded by dancers and the band members. You can pan left or right, all while the video is playing. It’s like Google Street View filled with hot dancers, but in video.

“You are submerged and engulfed in a party,” says will.i.am, who spoke with me recently about the app. “You as a director can focus on things behind you.” He thinks 360-degree music videos will become part of many entertainment apps. In fact, he is forming a new company called—what else?—will.i.apps with Edo Segal of Futurity Ventures to create a platform for other artists to create their own 360-degree video apps. (Another Futurity Ventures company called 3d360 developed the 3D video technology). Segal believes that apps in general will become the center of media consumption.

But don’t try to call it just video. “It is so not video” says will.i.am, “that is so 2008. You cannot even compare it to yesterday. It is something brand new.” Adds Segal: “When you think about what a good app should do is put you closer to the artists.”

For will.i.am, these apps represent the future of music: “The concept of an album is dead. What the hell is an album nowadays? This allows artists to add more layers onto that 4-minute song that is audio only. Songwriting changes.” To illustrate this to me, he starts to sing, “as she was walking down the hallway and she seen that little girl and I told her to turn left—you can do all that and turn left—and I look up to the sky and saw the rainbow—you can look up at the sky in the app. You couldn't do that yesterday, it was linear. Now it is directional. If I knew we were going to do this app when I wrote the song, I would have wrote the song totally different.”

Now he can put his fans in the music videos right alongside him, putting them in the center of his world. Here is a promotional video showing the app in action, and below are screenshots.

Video formats on the Web are a mess right now. Apple supports H.264, but not Flash. Google recently declared that its Chrome browser will soon stop supporting H.264 in favor of its own WebM. To make a video play on an iPhone or iPad requires support for different formats than for an Android phone, and other phones require yet other formats.

Today, Encoding.com is trying to simplify this mess by launching Vid.ly, a service which creates a single short URL for any video and plays it appropriately across 14 different browsers and devices. The vid.ly link can be shared via SMS, Twitter, or Facebook. If you would like to try Vid.ly, we have 1,000 invites for TechCrunch readers (use the beta test code: TCRUNCH2011).

Jeff Malkin, the president of Encoding.com, came by the TC San Francisco offices on Friday to talk to me about the new service and why Web video formats are so confusing right now. Just as H.264 is becoming a standard—about 93 percent of all videos which go through Encoding.com are output in H.264 versus 66 percent last May.

My interview with Malkin is in the video above, and he demos Vid.ly in the video below.

Auditude, a video management and monetization technology provider, has raised $11 million in second-round funding from Granite Ventures, Greylock Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Silicon Valley Bank.

In addition, the company this morning announced that it has appointed Jeremy Helfand, former president of United Online Media Group and Advertising.com senior executive, as its new CEO.

Adam Cahan, who has led Auditude as chief exec for the past three and a half years, will continue to serve as an advisor. He is also moving into a new role as CEO of IntoNow, a technology startup also backed by Greylock Partners and Redpoint Ventures.

Auditude says it intends to use the extra capital to further expand into mobile video, IP-enabled devices and premium distribution channels.

Already, the company claims, its platform manages billions of monthly video impressions, with clients such as Comcast, Dailymotion, Lionsgate, Major League Baseball, Sony Music and Yahoo.

Chris Hollenbeck, managing director at Granite Ventures, has joined Auditude's board.

A New York City co-working space called General Assemb.ly has been lending its desks to highly regarded startups and serial entrepreneurs for several months now, including: Postling, Art.sy, SeatGeek; and the co-founders of Etsy and Vimeo respectively, Chris Maguire and Zach Klein.

This weekend, the company replaced their single web page with a full-fledged site. Today, the company announced that it has received a $200,000 grant from NYC’s Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) to offer design, technology and business classes to the public.

Located in Manhattan’s Flatiron District, General Assemb.ly includes an event space with capacity for 200 attendees, a 35-person classroom, a library, seminar rooms, a media facility, kitchen and bar, mailroom, lockers, a bike storage area and two work spaces for its invited members. It’s designed as an “urban campus.” School will open there on February 1, 2011 with classes priced from free, sponsored sessions to several-thousand-dollar, ten week workshops according to company co-founder Adam Pritzker.

The NYCEDC and city mayor Michael Bloomberg give grant funding to New York’s venerable, public and private academic institutions, too — on Friday, they launched a multi-school effort to foster clean tech sector development in the Big Apple. NYCEDC funded General Assemb.ly’s for-profit education and events business, Pritzker believes, because:

“The mayor's office understands that education around technology and design, and educating a workforce is just a positive thing for the city as a whole. Where big educational institutions aren’t doing a sufficient job of educating the public, I hope we can be a complementary type of pedagogy.”

An advisor to General Assemb.ly, Chris Hughes, chief executive of Jumo, and a co-founder of Facebook, said on Monday:

“In a city like New York, it’s still very difficult to work and live around other people who share a sense of creativity, and want to have an impact on the world whether it’s in the sphere of technology, design or business. [GA is] a physical space for creative people to learn from one another and conspire. I haven’t seen anything like it in or around New York.

[My company] Jumo is a network to help people find non-profits of interest, keep up with their work, and eventually support them. I would have loved to have the General Assembly space open to us when we got started a little less than a year ago, but unfortunately it didn’t exist yet.”

General Assemb.ly is also supported by corporations including design and innovation consultants IDEO, Skype, Silicon Valley Bank, Rackspace and Wilson Sonsini.

The co-founders of General Assemb.ly — Brad Hargreaves, Adam Pritzker, Matthew O. Brimer and Jake Schwartz (left to right in photo, above) — initially determined the members of their club by word of mouth recruiting and personal interviews. Demand was so strong that the space already boasts a waiting list of 100 entrepreneurs hoping to become communal members.

Pritzker reported that in the next wave, his company will adopt a more formalized process, including an application and review by an advisory board to bring in future tenants and communal members. Startups currently pay $500 per desk for dedicated memberships; communal members pay $300 per month; and Programming Members pay $25 per month for levels of access to the space and some of its events.

General Assemb.ly plans to offer 30 to 50 classes a month, including one keynote lecture each week when its business is up and running in full.

Images courtesy: General Assemb.ly

TransferWise launches its online currency exchange today, which hopes to give the banks a run for their money, along with disrupting the consumer-end of the money exchange market as a whole. The headline proposition is that the platform gives anyone access to the same mid-market exchange rates that banks get on their interbank market, with TransferWise charging a flat fee of £1 for each transaction regardless of the amount being exchanged. That's potentially a big deal. But what's equally notable is the company's founders, which includes Skype employee number one Taavet Hinrikus.

In a panel on ‘Open Innovation’ at the DLD Conference, moderated by Fast Company’s Linda Tischler, Google’s Marissa Mayer was asked about Eric Schmidt‘s transition to a new role at the company, handing over the reins to co-founder Larry Page.

Mayer:

For a long time, Google has been run by a triumvirate, and last week we announced a reshuffling. It’s important to stress that roles have changed, but Larry, Eric and Sergey will continue to lead the company.

There’s been a lot of speculation about this in the press and beyond, but we’re genuinely excited about the changes. Let’s not forget Larry has been CEO of Google before.

Schmidt tweeted something amusing about the reshuffle, saying ‘adult supervision was no longer needed’. It was meant as a joke, but I’m personally really excited to see the more mature management side of Larry.

Larry’s passion has always been products, so he’ll be focused a lot on the technical part of the equation, and execution across the board.

(Other panel members included Beth Comstock, the CMO of GE, Kohei Nishiyama, founder of Elephant Design and Jens Martin Skibsted, partner of KiBiSi.)

Dan Rose, VP of Partnerships and Platform Marketing at Facebook, took the stage at DLD Conference in Munich this morning in a conversation with David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect.

After Kirkpatrick was done promoting his book a couple of times, he commenced the interview as follows:

Q: You primarily work with large platform partners like Zynga. What other categories besides games gets most of your attention?

A: Game developers are obviously a large chunk of our partners, but don’t underestimate the many media companies on Facebook.

Q: You were at Amazon for a couple of years, mostly in business development. How long have you been at Facebook now?

A: About four and a half years.

Q: You’re quite an expert in monetization, so I know you like data. Facebook has long been working with Nielsen on marketing research – what has been the discovery so far?

A: At Facebook, we think of advertising as a unique opportunity. Digital advertising was different from everything that came before because of the sheer scale, the possibilities for two-way communication, and so on.

But early Internet advertising initiatives were rudimentary in our view – we think about advertising in a unique way because of the social aspect.

To answer your question, Nielsen has been actively measuring the impact of advertising efforts on Facebook, and what we’ve found is that when people see ads with their friends’ names in them, there’s a 60% uptake in brand advertising value.

Q: Has that translated into research on a purchasing level?

A: In our partnership with Nielsen, we haven’t gone down to the purchase level yet. What we can do, however, is measure the effect of advertising through user polls, not panels, and completely objectively at that. The concept of word of mouth is still very powerful, so rather than just put banners up, our advertising is about implementing word of mouth at scale.

Essentially, we’re moving from the wisdom of crowds to the wisdom of friends.

Q: I’ve been thinking about this for a while. With the data and platform Facebook currently has, advertising could easily be transported outside of the site, on the network of third parties. Is that something you’ve been looking at?

A: We get that question a lot, and the answer is always the same: there are no plans for that at this point. One of the real benefits of advertising on Facebook today is that you can target people based on who they really are. We obviously have a lot of usage, so we’re focused on trying to make ads relevant and personal for every user.

Q: There’s been a lot of discussion if Facebook is really worth $50 billion or even $70 billion, but I think most people underestimate the revenue opportunities Facebook has outside of the site. I just wanted to throw that out there.

Q: Going back to the partnership with Zynga, which is a huge platform partner of course, but what are the others?

A: We try to build capabilities to support all types of partners, from small startups asking about our Social Graph API to Zynga.

Our vision is: we believe we’re in the middle of a transformation, and we think that the games category is a leading indicator, but we’re equally excited about the next categories that will emerge, whether they’re coming from large companies or startups in a garage somewhere. We encourage disruption in all fields.

As such, we’re really quite indifferent to whether Zynga games are played on Facebook or on their website.

Q: Almost literally, there’s nothing you can do on Facebook you can do on your own website using all the capabilities and reach Facebook is capable of. Don’t you think taking the platform externally is a much larger opportunity?

A: That may be the outcome, but it’s early days.

Q: Apart from gaming, what’s an unexpected industry you would expect the next Zynga to emerge out of?

A: I think definitely the media and content space, primarily because that’s the kind of thing users want to engage in a social way around. Games are no doubt a leading indicator, but media is definitely something we’re very focused on.

Other categories include music, video, potentially retail – we believe every one of those categories will see disruption in the next decade.

Q: Game developers are what made Facebook the largest platform on the Web, but media companies still want people to essentially come of them. Do they need to experiment more on how to use Facebook, in your view?

A: True enough, media companies use mostly our social plugins so far on their own websites. What’s interesting about Zynga and other game developers, is that they have essentially reinvented what social games can look like. Most of these companies started with people, content came second.

Look at Flipboard on the iPad as another example – they are doing interesting things in this space, e.g. putting the friend who shared the article with you as the byline for articles you’re reading. That’s compelling.

Q: Would Facebook be interested in providing radically new facilities for media companies?

A: We work with our media partners and talk about a lot of ideas, and some are doing more than others, other we hope will follow suit.

Q: Moving over to Facebook Pages, I think these are very constrained. You get imposed a lot of limits. There’s a lot of work to be done there, in my opinion, especially when you expand to retail. How long will it take for Facebook to seriously take on retail?

A: We’re starting to see that, looking at experiments from my former employer, Amazon, and eBay. Retail is definitely an exciting category with lots of potential – we’ll almost certainly see much innovation there in the next few years.

Today, we make money from advertising, so more time spent on the site today means more income. But ultimately Facebook’s mission is making the world more open and connected.

Q: Zynga is one of, if not the biggest advertiser on Facebook, so revenue from them comes in two forms. Do you presume other companes will also start advertising on Facebook to lead people to what they’re actually doing on Facebook?

A: For a company like Zynga, it made a lot of sense, and it performs really well. It could prove to be a good opportunity for other types of companies too.

Q: Moving on to Facebook Credits, which you’re in charge of. I heard a senior marketer from Coke recently say the day will come soon that people can buy a soda using Credits. When is this going to happen?

A: We’re focused on making credits a virtual currency for virtual goods first and foremost. But obviously, you’re right, we can create a lot of value by expanding it across different platforms.

Q: Facebook is getting a lot of attention because of the movie, the Goldman Sachs investments and so on. Is there any negative aspect to all that attention?

A: It’s incredibly important to have a founder / CEO that’s consistent, and that was experience at Amazon and has been at Facebook so far. Mark Zuckerberg has a singularity of focus, and has had it from the start.

We’re starting to become a big company now, so that means sometimes people get smaller roles in a sense as times moves on, but at the same bigger because the scope widens. I think that has had the most impact on Facebook’s culture to date.

Q: Has Zuckerberg changed at all because of the enormous growth?

A: No, Zuckerberg is very similar to how he was when Facebook had only 100 million users; we’re at over 600 million today and not much has changed.

Q: Nevertheless, a large number of people in senior roles recently left the company. Was that a big deal inside Facebook – and how long do you plan to hang around yourself?

A: We still see ourselves as a startup, so some of the more entrepreneurial people will always end up leaving when their urge to start something new emerges. Scaling to a company the size of Facebook today means narrower roles for some employees over time. Some people are excited about that, others inevitably aren’t.

Hmm … Maybe RSS isn’t dead after all? After the replacement of the Google Reader link in Gmail with a link to Google Photos caused a user revolt on Friday, Google has vowed to bring the beloved RSS product back and tells TechCrunch its removal was accidental.

And while Google is uncertain as to exactly when the highly dramaticized link will be back, the Gmail team is working hard on a fix and is targeting Monday morning, according to representative Victoria Katsarou.

So why remove the link in the first place? Google decides what links appear in the Gmail navigation bar based on popularity, i.e. page views, number of users and clicks from the bar. New products needing promotion are also considered. According to Katsarou, Google Photos (Picasa) had made the cut and was to join Reader in elite navigation bar status, with a fifth top level link added to the bar. Apparently someone somewhere made an error and the Reader link was dropped into the “More” menu instead.

The official Google Reader Twitter account tweeted about the mistake on Friday, but that hasn’t stopped people from emailing us about how upset they are about the change. Reader fan Craig Cosmo went as far as integrating the link back, in his Better Gmail browser extension.

So for those of you who can’t wait until the Google fix, you can get your precious Reader link back into Gmail here. You’re welcome.

So here's an odd thing. Since TechCrunch was acquired by AOL, there has been a slight but appreciable uptick in the number of stories we've run about our new parent company. In the last month alone, we've reported their Q1 goals, three new content partnerships, their new SVP of technologies and even their latest billboard.

None of this, I should hasten to add, is because AOL has told us to write about them; so far the company has remained true to its promise of staying editorially hands-off. Instead, I suspect our new-found interest in the goings on at 770 Broadway is more a variation of availability bias: we hear a story about AOL and, whereas a year ago we might have (perhaps unfairly) shrugged off the thought of covering a dying company, today we think "oh, yeah, I wonder what Mom and Dad are up to now".

So then, given that our editorial ears prick up at every squeak of our corporate overlords' floorboards, it's an odd thing that this week's New Yorker profile of CEO Tim Armstrong failed to get even the most cursory mention on these pages. Not least because it was pretty damn favourable about Armstrong; describing his rise from entrepreneurial genius to potential “savior” for AOL and even quoting Eric Schmidt saying: "He is among the best and most inspirational sales managers I have ever worked with".

The profile got loads of coverage elsewhere, so why did no-one here comment on it? Maybe the rest of the article provides a clue….

"AOL does not seem to be saving journalism, and journalism does not yet seem to be saving AOL…. The company has hired many talented journalists… much of what AOL publishes, though is piffle…”

Uh oh.

“Perhaps Tim Armstrong will be able to make AOL rise again, but there's a much more common path followed by digital companies – like Wang, DEC, Starwave, Excite, and Lycos. They rise, then they sputter, and then they crash."

I’ll get my coat.

In fact, in contrast to the profile’s love for Daddy Tim, writer Ken Auletta’s verdict on the fate of the company as a whole is damning. As he points out, for all of AOL's insistence that they are a content business, the fact remains that 80% of the company's profits still comes from subscriptions. Editorial operations play a quiet second fiddle to the four million people who inexplicably still pay AOL in order to check their email.

'[M]any of [AOL's subscribers] are older people who have cable or DSL service but don't realize that they need not pay an additional twenty-five dollars a month to get online and check their email. "The dirty little secret," a former AOL executive says, "is that seventy-five per cent of the people who subscribe to AOL's dial-up service don't need it"'

And Auletta's dismissal of our – yeah, hoo boy, I guess it really should be ‘our’ now – content operation doesn't stop there. Sure, he acknowledges, AOL employs 900 journalists, but even the promise of a steady paycheck in the current hideous media employment climate isn't enough stop "tensions between the writers and executives". One reporter at AOL explains the problem thus: "when I started here it was all about page views. Then they decided on a different metric, S.E.O [search engine optimisation]. What they never realized is that you can't build a real jounalistic brand that way."

To underscore that point, Auletta takes a quick dance around AOL.com's much-vaunted home page – skipping over headlines like "KATIE AND TOM MAY BOYCOTT OSCARS", "CURLED LASHES WITH NO MASCARA AT ALL" and "VIDEOS: HILARIOUS PETS" before alighting on the fact that the company doesn't employ a single overseas news correspondent. By way of contrast, he cites the New York Times which pays seven million dollars annually just to cover Iraq and Afghanistan. (So don't expect to see headlines like "HAMID KARZAI MAY BOYCOTT OSCARS" or “VIDEOS: HILARIOUS HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES” gracing AOL.com any time soon).

Auletta's piece must – and should – have made painful reading at AOLHQ. After all, he's right that the majority of AOL's editorial output is total horseshit. And yet, and yet – his critique lacks an important punchline: so is everybody else's.

The fact is, it's almost impossible to find a single ‘content’ company on the web that maintains a horseshit:quality ratio better than 10:1. Just look at the homepages of Yahoo! and MSN, boasting the respective top stories: "Why Clooney Won't Marry" and "Five Things You Shouldn’t Do When You Propose". For all its lofty ideals, even The Huffington Post has succumbed to the temptation of bolstering costly and time consuming think-pieces with an avalanche of linkbait crap and blatant cut-and-paste jobs from other blogs. "We always provide a link!" they protest, as if that's an excuse. ("At least I'm proud of myself!" cried the kitten killer.)

Tina Brown's Huffpo-rival, The Daily Beast, is at it too. Sure, today's top stories include a piece on a possible Egyptian revolution, but what's that right underneath? A slideshow of "Ashton Kutcher’s 10 Best Shirtless Moments". Hell, even Salon – whose journalism I praised the other week – isn't immune to the page-view boosting lure of the slideshow: today their front page boasts a pictorial guide to "Hotels with a dark past" (including the Bates Motel, which doesn't even exist) while on Friday they bravely addressed the issue of the child sexualisation with a gallery of "shocking" but  "sexy" child images. Wowsers.

But while it would be easy to attack Tim or Carol or Arriana or Tina for the dumbing down of Internet content, let's assign the blame where it really belongs. If most Internet content is horseshit, it's because most Internet users want it to be.

Auletta’s source derides AOL for its obsession with SEO – an obsession it shares with every other content company – but, for good or ill, all SEO does is gives the people what they want. AOL's (and HuffPo's and Yahoo's) front pages are packed with celebrity-obsessed crap because that's what people are searching for, and that’s what they click on. It’s a problem at TechCrunch too: in the past seven days, almost three times as many people clicked on our headline about famous people using Twitter as cared about Mike’s interview with Google’s three most senior executives.

For free, ad-supported content, pageviews are king – and pageviews are what slideshows and celebrity fluff and SEO generate. Those horseshit pageviews are then magically transformed into money which is used to hire more staffers to produce more horseshit in order to generate more pageviews. And so the world wide web keeps turning.

If Armstrong – or any other CEO or Editor In Chief – decided it was time to reverse the ratio; hiring foreign correspondents, axing slideshows and investing in quality over quantity, the result would be amazing. For about a week. Then pageviews would take a dramatic hit as search engines stopped unloading their daily cargo of drooling, eyelash-curling morons. That drop in pageviews would cause a commensurate drop in revenue which would result in the rapid firing of all of those costly journalists and a return to business as usual. The public gets what the public wants, as the Jam so accurately sang.

The only surprising thing, really, is that Auletta talks about AOL's – and by extension the whole of the web's – crappy SEO “piffle” like it's a bad thing. Hell, if I were a writer at the New Yorker, or any other publication that's rooted in print, I'd be fucking overjoyed.

In print, things are different. For a start, there's no SEO; not least because – generally speaking – people don't know exactly what they're looking for when they pick up a magazine or newspaper. In that regard, periodicals like the New Yorker actually have a lot more in common with cable TV than they do with the web.

As the web gets more pandering and fawning to the precise whims of the masses, cable and magazines provide a welcome break from the tyranny of search, allowing users to passively browse the newstand – or flip through channels – letting content wash over them until they’re struck by something interesting. People might not know they're looking for an episode of NCIS, or an article about AOL's fortunes, but they're glad when they find it. No-one – absolutely no-one – knew they were looking for Seymour Hersh's expose of Abu Ghraib, but by God did they pay attention when it appeared in the pages of the New Yorker.

(In the unlikely event that a writer at AOL or Yahoo had stumbled across the Abu Ghraib story, the throw-up-the-facts-and-iterate-later culture of web editorial would have slain it in the womb. Also: who buys banner ads against prisoner abuse photos? Maybe if it were a slideshow…)

Moreover, as the scramble for advertiser dollars continues to take its toll online, there exists a real opportunity for old-fashioned editorial curation to thrive on other platforms, both old and new. The joy I felt today flicking through the New Yorker – stumbling across Tad Friend's wonderful piece about Lenny Bruce tribute actor, Steve Cuiffo and a short story by Woody Allen (Woody Allen!) before reaching the Armstrong profile – was easily the highlight of my day. After I've finished writing this, I'll probably switch on HBO and let them curate my entertainment for an hour or so.

In both cases I'm more than happy to pay; in part for the privilege of not having to think and search, but also for the tantalising prospect of discovering something I didn't know I was looking for. And, lest you think this is another Luddite – ALL TECHNOLOGY IS BAD – screed, it isn't; the New Yorker I was flicking through was on my Kindle – an electronic edition delivered last Monday morning (at a total cost of nearly forty bucks a year). I would have read it sooner but first I had to work my way through my iPad subscriptions to the Times (of London) ($150) and the Economist (another $150). In the digital age, print isn’t so much a medium as a state of mind: a place where people browse rather than search, and are quite happy to read an article that spans three pages let alone three lines.

Earlier this week, we reported that AOL is preparing to launch a new iPad app – called “Editions” and taglined “The magazine that reads you”. Educated best-guesses suggest a kind of Flipboard-esque app which allows users to curate their own magazine. If that is what “Editions” turns out to be – because God knows the world needs another user-powered content aggregator – then I have a modest suggestion for what AOL might do next.

Perhaps instead of pandering solely to the ‘wisdom’ of the web-based masses, the company could use some of its millions of subscription dollars to develop a few high-quality, subscription-based - professionally curated - publications, specifically for the iPad and Kindle platforms. Its own digitally-native, original-content-filled equivalent to the New Yorker… or at least to Esquire or Cosmopolitan.

Maybe then in a few years, when those four million Internet access subscribers have either met their maker or come to their senses, the 80% of profits they once provided will be replaced by subscription revenues of a different, more defensible, kind.

On Friday, President Obama appointed General Electric’s chief executive, Jeff Immelt — an advocate for carbon cap-and-trade — chairman of his panel of outside economic advisors, the newly branded Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.

This council was formerly known as PERAB (the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board). Immelt was a founding member, and takes the chairman reigns from Paul Volcker.

GE is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of clean energy and related technologies. The company makes everything from large wind turbines, to electric vehicle charging stations, to good old lights and appliances.

Could the rising political influence of Jeff Immelt (image, below) be a good thing for green innovators in the U.S.? Could clean tech newcomers, small businesses and competitors suffer from policy endorsed by the CEO of the established giant?

The Christian Science Monitor’s Mark Trumbull reported:

“[Immelt's selection] opens the door to potential conflicts of interest. GE’s future profits are intertwined with government policies in the US and elsewhere. It makes equipment used in energy, infrastructure, health care, and defense. On Wednesday, when Obama sang the praises of export-related contracts that US firms have won in China recently, GE deals figured prominently. [While] economists say growing exports – for GE and other firms – are one vital way for the US to grow jobs…Even in a best-case scenario for exports, America will need lots of other jobs, as well.

Some business leaders worry that an expected move by the Environmental Protection Agency to limit carbon emissions could impose damaging costs on the economy.”

Noting GE’s plans to develop a net-zero home with solar and wind power, its competition for clean tech startups and inventors, Ecomagination, and its recent efforts to put small wind turbines in homes and businesses, CleanTechnica contributor Tina Casey saw Immelt’s role as a good thing for all that’s green and clean in the U.S. She even defended his company’s earlier habit of outsourcing jobs, copiously:

“The initial reaction to President Obama's announcement has been mixed, mainly due to GE's past record of outsourcing jobs. However [since] 2009 you'll find Immelt admitting that too much outsourcing… hurt the U.S. economy, and calling for a domestic manufacturing revival to get us out of the doldrums. That puts him squarely in line with Obama's call for an economy ‘fueled by what we invent and what we build…’”

President Obama gushed about Immelt in a weekly address on Saturday:

“…GE's CEO [is] one of the most imaginative and visionary business leaders in America. [He] has agreed to head up our new Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. The purpose of this council is to help us find ways to grow our economy by investing in our businesses here at home. And under Jeff's leadership, I'm confident that they'll generate good ideas about how we can spur hiring, educate our workers to compete in the 21st century, and attract the best jobs and businesses to America rather than seeing them spring up overseas.”

Check out the rest of the president’s remarks on Immelt, and let us know if you think he’s the right man for the job(s) and a good thing for green sector innovation.

Images via: Whitehouse.gov

Week One of the Age of iPad was barely weekended when Keith Olbermann was removed from his position at NBC/Comcast. I missed his final show, mostly because I stopped watching it and all the cable news channels once the election was over. But then I remembered we are now in the Age of iPad, and guess what I found when I turned on Apple TV. There it was right in the podcasts section, ready to stream.

Parsing the language I heard the same thing we heard earlier when Steve Ballmer fired Bob Muglia, when Eric Schmidt was kicked "upstairs," when I was asked to leave along with my wife and a friend from the Crunchies because the room was too full. In the last case, I refused to move, waiting until the venue manager moved on to people more her size. I wonder what would have happened if Muglia just said, no, Steve. I'm not going anywhere.

We'll get back to Eric and the boys in a minute, but in the Age of iPad, all is not as it seems. Take Olbermann for instance: firing him seems like exactly what NBC doesn't want. It dredges up the recent Leno fiasco in a visceral way, suggesting that even if Conan's new show might as well be emanating from Siberia, at least he suffered no bad will for telling NBC where they should get off. By contrast, I wouldn't touch NBC at 11:30 with someone else's hard disk.

I don't put much stock in Comcast being behind the Olbermann firing, because showing him the door doesn't just hurt MSNBC, it hurts CNN and Fox as well. First of all, the only cable news coverage of the number one story of last night was on CNN and Fox. Tonight's NBC Nightly News studiously ignored it, and somehow I doubt the Today Show will touch it either. Without any credible reporting from one of the 4 major networks, the other three have little to pivot off of, no comparable story about how cable news is being squeezed out by the Age of the iPad. That's what happens when you become the story.

The unreported story is that a new network has emerged with new rules of engagement. Once the hall monitors had retreated from the Crunchies auditorium, I pinged my former overlords at TechCrunch and soon we were escorted backstage to an empty sofa. The sound was difficult, and I didn't much feel like standing in the wings. But then I realized that combining the audio in the room and the sound of the crowd with Twitter produced an excellent new medium. I could hear Dick Costolo and Mike Arrington toss a few softballs around, and knowing Dick's background as a standup comedian, wait a few seconds after the laugh for the punchline to appear on my iPhone.

Bear in mind that this is not the Golden Globes or the Grammies but an industry tech event being streamed live worldwide in realtime over Twitter and Ustream. Given the people I follow and the @Mention Cloud, we now have a microcast network that levels the playing field between all such events. Already the networks are bending to the new iPad reality, broadcasting the Ricky Gervais pummeling of Hollywood live at 5 on the West Coast, because Twitter has already eviscerated the results on the East Coast if they are embargoed. Gervais' jokes cut to the bone all the more because his victims knew this was going out in realtime. He said what?

Actors or anchors, it doesn't matter. When someone bypasses the big network to get straight to the audience in realtime, something big has changed. Olbermann had a 4 year contract worth a reported $30 million, or something north of $7 million a year. Let's say he goes direct to iPad once a day, and takes Rachel Maddow with him. Push notify the audience of a rundown of each show along with headlines as they occur. Oh my, suddenly Comcast is happy to charge for the increased download bandwidth to support the model. And they don't have to split the rate increase with the network, especially nice since they own one now.

Of course, Disney is ABC is Apple, so they might have some interest in bypassing the cable network business and going directly to revenue. That will bring Fox in, who are already playing ball with Apple TV on a test basis, and new power houses like whatever network produces Mad Men. Mad Men, by the way, is now the flagship of our go-to realtime network. We're just starting Season Three, which I paid 22 bucks for and downloaded to my iPad for Airplay in whatever room the kids haven't commandeered for Xbox Kinect. It's realtime, just 1962.

Chatting with Dick Costolo after the Crunchies, I told him what he already knows, namely that the Twitter iPad app rocks. Then he said a very smart thing, that he thinks they should use the iPad implementation as the base platform and conform the other apps — web, iPhone, Android — to it. I couldn't agree more. The iPhone may have started the revolution, but now it is a peripheral to the iPad. As is Apple TV, which is way more than a hobby.

Gone are the traditional networks. They are not dead, but rather absorbed into a new state of mind, one where we view our time as more valuable to us if we can sculpture it. I resisted Mad Men for years because I was already years behind. But AirPlay gave me the ability to try the first one, then "save" money on the first season, then let the mediocrity of the network offerings slowly but surely be routed around by streaming the now-addicted time machine of 1960. The year Kennedy was elected, the first television president, the dawn of realtime crisis, political and social upheaval, you know what I mean.

For those of you too young to remember, this was the time of not just Walter Cronkite but Huntley and Brinkley, not just the Beatles but the Stones, not just Miles but Hendrix. When Olbermann quits, he's firing Glenn Beck. And when Steve Jobs steps aside he's firing Schmidt too. Google's job is to provide competition for Apple, to slipstream alongside the economic juggernaut Jobs has unleashed. Muglia's ousting appears to be payback for Ozzie quitting, and in so doing Ray fired Ballmer, not the other way around.

The Age of the iPad has launched a wave of desperate moves, of actors and anchors testing the waters of the emerging economic model, of CEOs acting like COOs when what is needed is real leadership and insight. Costolo is one of the new breed, tempered in the crucible of the comedy circuit and the RSS politics of Feedburner and Google acquisition indigestion. Nothing about the Google realignment suggests any material change in the equation, and Microsoft's retrenching around Sinofsky may prove the same kind of miscalculation NBC made in betting on Leno 2.0.

At the end of Season Two, Don Draper beats back a move to demote him or worse by pointing out that he has no contract with which to contain him, no non-compete to keep him away from the competition. Suddenly they serve at his pleasure. According to reports, Olbermann can't go on television for some period of time, but can do anything he wants on radio and the Internet. The AirPlay Network awaits.

I bumped into a cool startup in the hallways at the DLD Conference in Munich, and figured there’s only one good way to share what they’re building with you: shooting a quick video.

The name of the startup is Impossible Software, and their game is, essentially, dynamically bringing product placement to the digital video advertising industry.

Best way of learning more is by watching the video demos, really.

On a sidenote: I’ve covered upstarts that try to pull this type of video advertising off in the past, though I’ve sadly forgotten the names of those companies. I do remember that I was really critical of what they were doing, which in my view would essentially ruin much of the authenticity that makes – ok, some – user-generated videos great to watch, at least to a degree.

I’m still not so sure whether this is the future of video advertising or just the next generation of annoying video advertising, but I do think the technology behind this is very innovative.

A real eye-catcher, so to speak.

In this week’s episode of Fly or Die, the show where CrunchGear editor John Biggs and I attempt to predict the survival chances of hot new products, we did a special Crunchies edition. Each of the companies we feature—GroupMe, Uber, and Square—was nominated for a Crunchie award. At some point in the show, a founder of one of the three companies comes on to respond to our verdicts (we don’t know who it is until he shows up, which is part of the fun).

You can watch the entire 20-minutes show above, which starts with GroupMe, or skip directly to the segments about Uber or Square.

GroupMe is one of the new group texting apps that have popped up this year (see also Beluga and Fast Society). Group texting is nothing new, but the combination of smart phones in everybody’s pockets (which make it easier to set up ad hoc texting groups) and a reaction against the public nature of other messaging systems like Twitter or Facebook, is making group texting increasingly popular. GroupMe, which was born at a TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon last year, does a decent job of helping you create groups on the fly from your phone’s address book. The app only sets up the group, and then all the messaging happens through SMS, which is fine, but I just wish that you could use the app as well to see all the messages and reply, and even to archive messages. SMS is ubiquitous (you don’t need a fancy iPhone or Android to use it), but it can also be expensive if you are not on the right plan.

One of the most fascinating companies we are tracking right now is Uber, which helps you get a car in San Francisco through an app on your iPhone. I was able to use it on during my trip, and once the app located me in cab-less downtown San Francisco, a car came within two minutes, and I could see where it was on a map as it was getting closer.

Uber has nailed the back-end dispatch problem with its fleet of participating drivers, but the app itself needs some work. I mistakenly entered my email when I was registering (which is not hard to do on an iPhone), and then couldn’t start over again because Uber associated my phone number, and thus my account, with the wrong email. This is a problem the company is aware of and fixing. Once I got that squared away, though, the app thought I was in Kansas for some reason and I had to manually move the pin over to San Francisco to get started. Getting the front-end right is key if Uber wants to capture more customers. The bigger challenge, however, remains the resistance of the entrenched taxi industry in different cities which will fight Uber tooth and nail as it tries it expand. I want Uber to fly, but I argue the other side in this episode.

Finally, Square is putting a cash register in everyone’s pocket by transforming iPhones into credit-card swipers. Small businesses and even individuals can now take credit card payments, and they get sophisticated analytics on the back-end. There are a lot of companies going after this space, including Intuit and other larger financial institutions. Can Square survive the onslaught by being more nimble?

Tell us what products you’d like to see covered in future episodes.

Tomorrow at the DLD Conference in Munich, mobile apps developer Outfit7 is set to announce that its iOS and Android apps have hit the 60 million downloads milestone, mere weeks after hitting 41 million. In fact, over 1 million downloads were logged on Christmas day alone, netting the company nearly $200,000.

Outfit7, which makes the hugely popular Talking Friends series of apps, says it expects to exceed 100 million total iOS and Android apps before the end of Q2 2011.

The company informs me that since its launch in July 2010, Talking Tom Cat – the first and most successful app in its catalog – has clocked 40 million downloads on its own. Outfit7 is also seeing decent conversion rates on in-app purchases, exceeding 10% on average.

This is a company that’s definitely on a roll, and like Angry Birds developer Rovio, it has strong European roots. The startup has no less than 18 apps scheduled for a 2011 release.

Keep an eye on this one; we certainly will.

SheFinds Media is a blog network and buying guide that helps busy women shop online. SheFinds, which includes MomFinds and recently launched BrideFinds, publishes editorial content featuring click-to-buy items applicable to its specific vertical audience. Editors curate shopping guides for products within each vertical. For example, MomFinds will publish editorial guides for the best toys for kids under 3 years old.

Founded in 2004 by Michelle Madhok, SheFinds aims to be a one-stop shop for women’s shopping needs. Madhok was part of the founding team of CBS.com, and headed AOL’s women’s channel, and found there was a need for a women’s-focused site that used human editors to curate the Web for interesting and useful products.

Flash forward seven years and Madhok’s network is generating over $1 million in annual revenues has been profitable almost every year since inception. In 2010, revenues jumped 135 percent and the media network saw record profits.

SheFinds, which has raised $1.3 million in funding, has a similar model to other women’s focused e-commerce sites such as Refinery29. But Madhok says that the company is hoping to differentiate itself by being able to generate revenue through advertising, product placement, and affiliate channels as well as through featuring quality content for the modern woman.

And most recently SheFinds launched BrideFinds, as a shopping guide for brides to be, featuring content on everything from flower girl dresses to satin wedding shoes. And the network started featuring online sales and deals for each vertical, making it easy for shoppers to track deals and events on their favorite retail and flash sale sites.