While smartphone adoption continues to pick up steam here in the U.S., new research from Strategy Analytics shows that China is hungrier for smartphones than we are. For the first time ever, China has pulled ahead of the United States in terms of the number of smartphones shipped.

Those expecting a huge blowout may be a bit disappointed by the results: while 23 million smartphones were shipped in the United States during Q3 2011, China squeeked by with nearly 24 million units sold. With that, China has become the world's largest smartphone market by volume. Given that China has the most cell phone users in the world, it may not come as a huge shock, but companies looking to break into the mobile space have yet another reason to consider China carefully.

Strategy Analytics also took a look at the manufacturer break down, and for the most part the winners are who you would expect. The two top vendors in the United States are HTC and Apple, who together account for almost half of all smartphones sold in the country during Q3. Meanwhile in China, Nokia and Samsung take the top two spots, with each company accounting for 28.5% and 17.6% of the market respectively.

Nokia in particular had a good quarter in China, as they shipped more units (6.8 million) than anyone else. The big question for Nokia is whether or not that momentum will continue once they complete their transition to Windows Phone. Microsoft has been eyeing the Chinese market for a while now, and their forthcoming Tango version of Windows Phone is reportedly meant to break into China and other emerging markets.

China's smartphone boom also helps explain why their app downloads have gone through the roof; recent data from Flurry indicates that China is also experiencing a huge uptick in the number of apps downloaded, although the existence of multiple independent app stores certainly doesn't hurt.

Manufacturer market share is great, but what I'd really like to see is a breakdown of mobile OS usage. Strategy Analytics Director Tom Kang notes that the Chinese smartphone surge is thanks in large part to "the aggressive subsidizing by operators of high-end models like the Apple iPhone, and an emerging wave of low-cost Android models from local Chinese brands such as ZTE." I would imagine that those low-end Android devices are beginning to supplant the feature phone as the device of choice for first-time users, but Apple’s smartphones enjoys considerable popularity (even if many of them are being used unofficially).

Hello, what do we have here? A new facial recognition mobile app? Sure looks like it. The company is called Faced.me, and its upcoming app aims to recognize faces and then connect those faces to users’ social networking profiles, allowing you to friend and follow the people you see. The company emerged from November’s Startup Weekend in Brazil, but hasn’t yet launched publicly.

The project reminds me a lot of Recognizr, the facial recognition mobile app from The Astonishing Tribe (TAT), created prior to TAT’s acquisition by RIM. Sadly, Recognizr remained a conceptual demo app only – it never arrived in any mobile app store. Hopefully Faced.me won’t meet the same fate.

The app’s strategy and development team includes Alexandre Resende, Thalis Antunes, Fernando Pauer, Pedro Saad, and Marco Vanossi, who previously created ClickPic, a photo-sharing app that also uses image recognition. Thiago Teodoro, a manager in the Corporate Strategy division at HP, is also helping advise the startup.

According to the company’s investor pitch, the Faced.me app uses proprietary technology to recognize a person’s face in less than 1 second by identifying different facial points. It then matches those faces to the social networking accounts for that user, allowing you to friend them on Facebook, follow them on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn. Patents on the tech have been filed both locally and internationally through the PCT.

For now, the company can only identify the faces of other registered Faced.me users, who are required to provide a photo or video upon signup. But Vanossi says the technology itself is already scalable enough to crawl the photos tagged on Facebook, it just needs additional investment to afford doing so.

The startup was chosen as the best by the Startup Weekend judges. However, the judges, who included Dave McClure of 500 Startups, Haroldo Korte of Atomico Ventures and other top Brazilian VC’s, gave Faced.me second place because it was clear the team had been working on the technology ahead of the weekend hackathon.

Unfortunately for those of us who don’t mind a little creepiness, most companies involved in the facial recognition space limit the use of the tech to tagging photos, not recognizing strangers. Google is rumored to have its own facial recognition technology developed, for example, but has held off on launching due to the ever-problematic “creepy” factor.

Whatever. Creepy can be cool, you know – just ask Facebook. In any event, the lack of other players in this space (TAT was scooped up by RIM, Polar Rose by Apple, PittPatt by Google) has left a great big hole startups can fill if they have the guts to cross the creepy line.

Now, let’s just hope the darned thing from Faced.me actually works if and when it arrives.

Below, a demo video of the app in action this past weekend:

You’ve heard the story before: The Internet forced many offline industries to adapt to new distribution media, find new business models amidst the rubble of old models, and accept the fact that people’s very behavior (and methods of consumption) were changing drastically. Do that or face the consequences. Some sadly thought it was just a fad. The Web has wreaked havoc on some of these industries more so than others, one of those notable victims being the publishing industry.

Over the last few years, publishing companies have been forced to accomodate eReaders, tablets, social media, and a bevy of new multimedia channels. Perhaps more than others, they’ve been slow to evolve and they’ve struggled, because, as they say, Rome wasn’t built in a day. (Even though it seems that apps can be.)

Link.me, an Australian startup with headquarters in San Francisco, has been hard at work trying to find creative and cost-effective ways for publishers to retain their print businesses while incorporating the new digital technologies that many readers have come to expect. To do so, Link.me started with QR codes — those pervading black-and-white pixellated squares that have come to represent bar codes 2.0. Publishers have incorporated QR codes onto book jackets for several years now, but due to (their seemingly institutional) hesitation, they’ve been slow to integrate those codes into the actual text of their books, magazines, and so on.

To better connect publishers with their audience (and give them a shot at acquiring new readers), Link.me has been forging partnerships with the top book publishers to launch trials, deals, promotions, and more through QR codes. The startup’s current client roster includes HarperCollins, Hachette Book Group, Penguin, Macmillan, McGraw-Hill and Random House.

In October, Link.me signed with its newest client, McGraw-Hill, and as an example of the kind of work they’re doing, one of the publishing company’s recent publications, “The Zappos Experience”, (written by Joseph Michelli) embedded QR codes in over 15 individual chapters. The goal was, of course, to bring The Zappos Experience “to life”, says Link.me Founder and CEO Antony McGregor Dey, and to allow readers to scan those codes with their smartphones to directly access multimedia content. For example, a scanned code might open a Facebook page devoted to Zappos’ philosophy on “Delivering Happiness” or open video clips that offer a glimpse inside the Zappos conference room, and so on.

Basically, these QR codes allow publishers to begin offering in their books the same extra features that music labels have added to albums over the decades — or that the film industry adds to its DVDs. And with the growing rate of smartphone adoption and the ease of scanning, this kind of bonus content can stay digital and remain easy-to-use.

Link.me uses its mobile tags (along with mobile content) to try to get readers to register directly with the brand. The publishers, then, can gain direct access to their readers and attempt to build and maintain relationships with those readers through interactive content. Link.me essentially wants to give publishers the ability to build out direct marketing databases, propelled by the data gained from readers signing up for various extras and deals through their QR codes.

As publishers aggregate data on customer interests, they can then target their marketing to readers based on their individual interests. And that’s how Link.me is making money; the startup charges publishers for access to their database, while usage remains free to readers.

Through how-to videos on a kitchen appliance, for example, warranty registration, discounts towards future purchases, interviews with an author, free music tracks, Link.me wants to take any special content that a brand may have to offer and turn that into interactive content embedded within books. Dey says that he sees Link.me’s service becoming a replacement for the old cardboard warranty registration cards you used get, but updated for the digital age, coupled with the goal of building direct marketing channels and retaining customers.

And it’s not only QR codes, Link.me also offers these extra features by way of SMS and email. Through these tools, the startup has been building some good traction for their publishing clients. Dey said that response rates among readers have been as high as 20 percent of total books sales. In other words, if a book sells 300,000 copies, 60,000 of those readers are scanning QR codes or clicking through SMS.

Dey said that even their lowest campaigns (in terms of response rate) have been above 4 percent. Compared to other comparable marketing channels, like banner ads, which can average 0.2 percent click through rates and Facebook links which are even lower, Link.me’s solution can have real value.

Link.me, in several incarnations, has been around since 2008 (it was previously known as QMCodes) and has been operating in private beta for most of that time. Since its inception, the startup mostly focused on publishers, and that’s where most of its current marketing efforts are today — as that’s where it’s found market penetration. But the Link.me CEO said that he sees opportunities for Link.me’s model beyond publishing, especially in retail, whether it be for fashion, sporting goods, or kitchen appliances.

Dey said that he and his team have made the Link.me platform adaptable, so that as adoption of NFC and image recognition become mainstream, they will be integrated as well.

Link.me was initially angel funded by Andrew Barlow, the co-founder of online analytics company Hitwise and has also received some investment from the Australian government. The company is currently raising its series A.

For more on Link.me, check ‘em out at home here.

Foursquare, and most of the apps built on top of the location service’s developer platform, are great for exploring the physical world for entertainment. But a new iPhone app called 4sqwifi (download here) offers something that could help those of us who need to be productive remotely — a way to see nearby wifi locations, and the passwords to go with them.

Those of you who have been stuck needing to send an urgent work email while experiencing poor smartphone data reception will understand why this app is useful.

Yes, there are a bunch of other web sites and apps that try to help people find nearby wifi locations. All the ones I’ve seen have had various shortcomings, like outdated or incomplete databases, and no passwords. 4sqwifi solves this problem by finding Foursquare venues near to the user, then searching user tips related to getting WiFi connections (“free wifi,” “wifi password is…” etc.).

After downloading the app from the App Store, you log in with your Foursquare ID and see a list of all of the nearby venues. Click on any of the listings and you’ll see the name of the WiFi connection and its password. (Note that the app had some page-loading problems initially, although I got it to work.)

The team behind the app is a pair of young Greek entrepreneurs, Apostolos Papadopoulos and Giannis Poulakas. Apostolos tells me he got the idea while a senior in high school last winter, but had to finish his university exams before getting started over the summer. He’s going to school in Vienna now, and is continuing to develop the service. The app is currently free, but the team is exploring business models like an in-app payment for an offline map of all of the wifi locations and passwords within a city.

He also just posted a few thoughts on launching the app, which you can check out here.

You don’t need to work on Wall Street to have seen this one coming: Today, for the first time since its NASDAQ debut on November 4th, Groupon has fallen below its IPO price, which initially placed the company’s stock at $20 per share. The company’s stock opened (at first trade) at $28 per share, with a market cap of $17.8 billion.

It’s currently hovering at about $17.30 per share, down nearly 14 percent on the day. The daily deal behemoth’s stock has been on a three-day slide, and this marks the third day in a row of double digit declines. This came after the stock hit its all-time (really, all-month since IPO) high on Friday at $26.19 per share.

Welcome to the public markets, Groupon.

Some might say that, although Groupon was up 31 percent before this week, raised $700 million selling 35 million shares at $20 each before going public on November 4th — mind you, the biggest IPO since Google in 2004 — the decline was inevitable. That there’s no way that the company’s current performance (and short-term prospects) work out to a $15 billion+ market cap and sky-high valuation. (You can read our assessment of Groupon’s value in contrast with soon-to-IPO Zynga here.)

But it also seems that the recent decline of Groupon’s stock is a result of just how many shares it sold at IPO. Groupon sold about 5.5 percent of its stock on November 4th (of its 637.3 million shares outstanding), meaning that a relatively small amount of stock was available to short sellers. As Crain’s points out, the premium to borrow shares (in advance of shorting) dropped from 90 percent to 30 percent early this week. And it looks like the short-sellers are moving fast and furiously.

The next few months will no doubt be marked by a series of ups and downs, and it will be fascinating to see where Groupon’s stock bottoms out. I have no dog in the fight and, frankly, am optimistic about the company’s long-term prospects and want to see them be successful, but I think they have a long way to fall yet.

More to come.

Follow GRPN’s movements here.

Excerpt image from Marietta

The entrepreneur was fuming over the phone. He is arguably angry: he had heard of a company had just been raided on trumped up charges and I spoke to him one evening after he returned to the UK.

“Chinese people basically believe that their success in manufacturing is because Chinese people are so smart,” he said. “But why does the world get stuff made in China? Just one reason: it’s cheap.”

“That’s the advantage. And it’s going to be so easy for China to shoot that one advtantage away,” he said.

Foxconn faces two problems in the 21st century: an image problem and an employment problem. Both issues are not easy fixes and, if things don’t change, these problems could spell the death of inexpensive manufacturing on the mainland.

Foxconn’s primary problem, at least as many understand it, is the issue of image in the Western media. A small organization, Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior, prides itself at being the primary thorn in Foxconn’s paw. But even SACOM agrees that Foxconn is a target because it is so big.

“Labor conditions are worse in small, home-based factories,” said Debby Chan, SACOM’s project officer. “But many brand name companies like Apple and Nokia have a code of conduct and they promise their products will be manufactured under legal standards.” By aiming at Goliath, the group hopes to point out abuses inside an ostensibly “good” manufacturer to force change in the smaller manufacturers.

SACOM’s accusations are quite inflammatory. In interviews and plant investigations, the group found the workers are often told “If you cannot endure this kind of hardship then we have plenty of workers” and that “A majority of workers have to stand for 10 hours during work shifts.” Workers multiply these long days by six days a week, even longer during run-ups to large shipments, and often complain of leg cramps and exhaustion after work.

“The managers can be psychotic,” said an exporter I spoke to.

These outrages, seen in the light of their value of propaganda, point to a certain paternalism and, while I wouldn’t want to work 10 hours a day on an assembly line, it’s clear that many of the complaints are weak sauce. While “Water and electricity suspensions occur on regular basis in the dormitory” sounds bad, the related complaint (“There are unreasonable prohibitions against activities such as washing clothes or using hair
dryers in the dormitory”) is a reaching a bit.

Foxconn long made its money with secrecy and scale. They had the biggest lines in China, the most employees, and they could pump out thousands or millions of pieces in relative secrecy. By hiring Western-trained managers straight out of Silicon Valley central casting, the company has been able to work with the biggest names in hardware: Apple, Nokia, Cisco, Dell. Not bad for a firm that originally wanted to be the “best hardware connector company in the world” back in the 1970s.

Now, that scale is falling and the secrecy, as evidenced by the many leaks that wind their way out of Shenzhen every day, is hitting a wall. The scale is also the major cause of many issues SACOM has with the company. If Foxconn didn’t have massive contracts that required thousands of employees to stand ten hours a day to manufacture phones, then those workers would be out of a job. The alternative – that Foxconn “clean up” is to ignore the business cases that can be made for an efficient workforce trained and drilled in what amounts to a “Foxconn methodology.” Not everyone on the floor is an engineer, so the training must obviously aim at the lowest common denominator. Someone with a bit of initiative and education will chafe at sticking screws into a cellphone all day long. Someone who may have been destined to work the fields and farms of rural China may find it wildly enticing.

The tragedy of American manufacturing is heart-breaking. Towns like Flint were decimated by a few strokes of a pen on a business plan. But does the son of a wheel-fitter at the old Chevy plant want to be a wheel-fitter, especially once the (relative) good life has been attained through the hard work of the unions? The same holds true of the various factory employees and managers I met in China. Even as we criticize, things change.

I close this point with a quote from our own Devin Coldewey in his post “Our Great Sin.” He writes: “Everything follows from our own unwillingness to pay for the true cost of a device. People want a better world, but they don't want to pay for it.”

Foxconn workers have started voting with their feet. In Country Driving by Peter Hessler, the New Yorker China correspondent visited out-of-the-way towns that, in the end, had be decimated by the exodus of young people to factories like Foxconn City. He wrote of one town, the poetically named Slaughter The Hu:

The main street was little more than a truck stop—a sleepy row of cheap restaurants and auto repair shops that served people going somewhere else. That was all that remained of the local economy; the lure of southern factory jobs had defeated this place in a way the nomads never had.

This exodus has an interesting side-effect. As I noted in my first post, Foxconn is facing a world of workers who want more. As one wag suggested in comments, the original Foxconn model, like the original Matrix, was too perfect. A dorm, three meals a day, and socializing on campus was, at best, insulting to modern Chinese. The introduction of freedom, however scant, will keep workers happy for only so long, however.

“Workers are warned that they may be replaced by robots if they are not efficient enough,” said Chan in a SACOM report. Interestingly, this is truer than even the workers realize.

As employees begin to look around and assess alternate forms of income, Foxconn has begun an impressive push into research and development. As one product designer in Shenzhen explained it, the days of selling a thousand pieces of knock-off junk for a profit are over. The real value in the Chinese manufacturing chain, he said, came from the design. Sure, it can contain all the same guts – the PCBs, the batteries – but the case, the UI, all of that is now of tantamount importance.

“You can’t just buy a crate of tablets and make a profit. There’s no money in it,” he said.

Foxconn’s Louis Woo noted that the company now has a database of materials and systems that it can easily address, using its vast wealth of manufacturing experience to build new products.

“We can pick up some data and tell you if your product will work. We’ll say ‘We tried it last year, and this happened.’ That will save you a lot of time,” he said.

Included in this is a reinvestment in robots.

“I believe in the next two years we will be one of the largest automated manufacturers. We will definitely be one of the largest users of robots in the world. More testing, more examination, more R&D, more automation,” he said.

He was careful to point out that smaller devices still required human hands to put things together. “No matter what people tell you, we’re not getting rid of humans entirely,” he said. “Whether we like it or not.”

This is part one of a four part series that will run this week about Foxconn. You can read the whole series here.

Tomorrow: The Final Part Of This Series, Ten Thousand Horses Galloping.

When Bonfire went live last month we had high hopes for this tiny startup which planned to bring instant messaging to the Twitter web site, Facebook-chat style.

With this IM presence, now you would know if your Twitter friends were online or not. The horror…

Except, it didn’t work.

Bonfire crashed under the weight of TechCrunch’s readership and we didn’t hear from them again for some time. Well, it happens.

But, boys and girls, Bonfire is back and appears to be working just fine. Unless of course this post kills it again in 3…2..1…

Here in the States, Google’s doodle greets us with a blinking turkey in anticipation of tomorrow’s impending gorgefest. Not bad, but Europe clearly has us beat today: instead of a turkey, they get an amazing HTML5-powered game to commemorate acclaimed science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem. The occasion? Lem’s first book, “The Cyberiad,” was published 60 years ago today.

Sadly, Lem himself isn’t around to celebrate the milestone: he passed away in March 2006. He is survived by a considerable body of work that includes, among others, Solaris — which has been adapted into three different films (one of which stars George Clooney) over the years.

It’s certainly one of the more ambitious Google doodles I’ve seen in a while, and it’s surprisingly long so approach carefully unless you’ve got a few minutes to burn. The ornate cross-hatched look is inspired by the works of artist Daniel Mroz, whose funky illustrations graced many of Lem’s books.

Puzzle game fans need not apply, though: the game sees your avatar traversing a trippy alien landscape and solving problems in order to collect parts for… well, you’ll see. Eagle-eyed players will also be glad to know that there are a handful of easter eggs just waiting to be spotted. If you’ve got the time to spare today, check it out — it definitely puts our turkey to shame.

Among yesterday's service shutdowns at Google, which included underperforming and deprecated Web properties like Knol, Wave and Gears, there was also news of the end of RE<C. What's RE<C? Just one of those ambitious "we can save the world with Google money!" type projects that gave the search giant the appearance for caring about more than the influx of ad dollars. In this case, RE<C was focused on lowering the cost of renewable energy. Or, as the acronym indicates, to make "renewable energy" (RE) less than (cheaper than) coal (C).

As it turns out, that was easier said than done.

RE<C was announced back in 2007 by Google.org, the philanthropy arm of Google. The company made several investments in companies in the greentech/cleantech space, including Brightsource Energy, eSolar, and the geothermal drilling innovators Potter Drilling. The project's funding helped sponsor research that was used to develop the first Geothermal Map of the U.S.

The funding was also put towards the development of a type of concentrating solar power technology called the solar power tower which works using a field of mirrors (heliostats) to concentrate the rays on the top of the tower. Via the RE<C initiative, Google poured $168 million into the world's largest tower project – Brightsource's Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System (ISEGS), now set for completion in 2013. The tower will generate 392 MW of clean solar energy. Google says it learned a lot about solar power technology over the years, and is publishing its results to help others in the field.

What's interesting about the RE<C project, is how unceremoniously it was lumped in with duds like "Knol" (Google's wannabe Wikipedia) and outdated tech like Google Gears (a stopgap solution for the pre-HTML5 days). Unlike those abandoned Web technologies, RE<C represented a not-so-insignificant source of investment in the green tech space.

When the initiative was announced in 2007, Google said it expected to spend "tens of millions on research and development and related investments in renewable energy." And that was only the beginning. Google also claimed that it anticipated investing "hundreds of millions of dollars in breakthrough renewable energy projects which generate positive returns."

Over RE<C's run, Google.org invested over $10 million in Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) technology, $38.8 million in wind farms developed by NextEra Energy Resources, and an undisclosed amount for a 37.5% equity stake in the Atlantic Wind Connection (AWC) backbone, which aims to connect to 6,000 MW of offshore wind turbines in the Atlantic Ocean.

To date, the company says it invested over $850 million in the renewable energy sector, including renewable energy projects capable of generating 1.7 GW of power and the electricity equivalent of that used by 350,000 homes. Other investments have included $280 million in Solar City, $157 million in a wind farm in the Mojave, $100 million for Oregon's Shepard's Flat wind farm, approximately $5 million for a solar facility in Germany, $75 million to create a fund with Clean Power Finance (CPF) and others listed here.

It is unclear to what extent this level of investing will continue with the shuttering of the RE<C initiative, which Google Co-founder, now CEO, Larry Page once spoke of so highly:

We want to apply the same creativity and innovation to the challenge of generating renewable electricity at globally significant scale, and produce it cheaper than from coal. With talented technologists, great partners and significant investments, we hope to rapidly push forward. Our goal is to produce one gigawatt of renewable energy capacity that is cheaper than coal. We are optimistic this can be done in years, not decades.

If we meet this goal, and large-scale renewable deployments are cheaper than coal, the world will have the option to meet a substantial portion of electricity needs from renewable sources and significantly reduce carbon emissions.

We expect this would be a good business for us as well.

Sadly, it seems that some $850 million later, Google doesn’t think green tech is a good business after all.

Please look at this video and tell me it is not magic. Displair, a Russian company from Astrakhan has come up with a technology to project images into the thin air, and use gestures to move them.

They say that fools and their money are soon parted, and no one knows that better than the sports junk hucksters at Power Balance. Despite filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in federal court on Friday, the company has high hopes for their new product, something called Performance Mouth Gear.

Let’s clear up one thing first: it’s a mouth guard. That’s it. Of course, the marketing wizards at Power Balance aren’t content to leave it at that; oh no, it’s supposedly much more. According to the company, Performance Mouth Gear incorporates “innovative technology to properly align the jaw and the spine through optimal positioning of the bite.” They even go as far as citing a a handful reputable journal articles to make their case.

Sounds great, no? They’re fighting for all the credibility they can get, considering they have a history of just making things up. Case in point: their Power Balance bracelets claimed to endow users with “up to a 500% increase in strength, power and flexibility.” The bracelet’s key ingredient? A holographic sticker.

Australia’s Competition and Consumer Commission called them out on the obvious BS, and among other things, made publicly retract their claims. Here’s a gem from one of their corrective ads:

We admit that there is no credible scientific evidence that supports our claims and therefore we engaged in misleading conduct in breach of s52 of the Trade Practices Act 1974.

So, they lied. I’m sure that’s going to inspire tons of people to buy their new mouth guards! Credit where credit is due though, this new pitch is just a hair more believable than saying their holographic bracelets can affect the user’s “natural energy.” They’re learning!

It’s always a shame when a company falls on hard times, but I can’t help but look at this situation with a little bit of schadenfreude. Power Balance is swimming in both debt and bad feelings, but it’s their own fault, and I’m looking forward to seeing how their new plan pans out.

By now you probably know there’s a hidden camera feature that people can enable on iOS 5 devices, allowing users to snap photos in panorama mode (see video).

However, to enable the hidden feature your device needed to be jailbroken. But as it turns out, you can actually get panorama mode working on your iOS 5 device without jailbreaking it.

As the folks over at 360cities found out, there’s a way to do this by fiddling with your iPhone's backup file and then restoring it. As the video below shows, you will need to install the iBackupBot application (needless to say, you need to proceed with caution).

The 360cities guys also show the feature in action, in case you hadn’t seen it yet. They’re using the camera app with panorama mode on an iPhone 4S, but it should work on an iPhone 4 and iPad 2 as well (feel free to let us know if it does or doesn’t in the comments).

Also note that the panorama feature is apparently quite clunky in its current form, which is probably why it hasn’t been publicly released or touted by Apple yet.

It’s been an interesting journey for mydeco, the home design and furnishings startup founded by the management team behind lastminute.com, one of Europe's most successful ever online businesses. Back in 2008 the site was ground-breaking in its use of 3D imaging to allow for interactive planning and visualisation tools. It even had a social network. But although doing well enough, the game has changed. Consumers are now assaulted by choice – and the 3D design tools were always slightly more functional than the average person needed or wanted. Instead of designing an infinite number of rooms, and purchase the items therein, mydeco now wants to woo its users by becoming a retailer specialising in curation. As CEO Nicole Vanderbilt told me “We’re a bit like ASOS. We started with an aggregator, we’re now becoming more of a retailer. Retailers own the customer and there are higher margins in that. But we eventually want to be the Google Maps of Interiors – anywhere you want to create beautiful rooms we will be there.”

Chances are you’ve already heard about the beef between Amazon and Penguin over the sales and lending terms of Penguin e-titles through Amazon’s Kindle lending program. If not, we can recap quickly. A few days ago Penguin came out with a statement saying that it would suspend making digital editions of new books for libraries and that libraries are to lock down any e-titles for Amazon’s Kindle ereader.

“We have always placed a high value on the role that libraries can play in connecting our authors with our readers,” said Penguin in an official statement on Monday, reports HuffPo. “However, due to new concerns about the security of our digital editions, we find it necessary to delay the availability of our new titles in the digital format while we resolve these concerns with our business partners.”

While many are blaming Amazon for the revocation of already-sold titles, it may not be the digital retailer’s fault. Amazon has released a statement saying that it was totally uninvolved in the actions that Penguin took in collaboration with OverDrive, an e-book supplier service, to freeze the titles. According to BoingBoing, The American Library Association had said the following:

Penguin Group's recent action to limit access to new e-book titles to libraries has serious ramifications. The issue for library patrons is loss of access to books, period. Once again, readers are the losers.

If Penguin has an issue with Amazon, we ask that they deal with Amazon directly and not hold libraries hostage to a conflict of business models.

This situation is one more log thrown onto the fire of libraries' abilities to provide access to books – in this case titles they've already purchased. Penguin should restore access for library patrons now.

It looks like will be a joyful holiday season for many online retailers this year. comScore is reporting that holiday retail e-commerce spending for the first 20 days of the November to December 2011 season is already up 14 percent from the same period last year. Wednesday, November 16 was the heaviest online spending day of the season to date at $688 million.

comScore is forecasting that total online retail spending for the holiday season will reach $37.6 billion, 15 percent increase from last year’s season. For background, the 2010 holiday shopping period saw a 12 percent increase from 2009.

In a recent survey conducted with consumers, holiday shoppers say that retailers’ promotional activity for the early part of the season has increased in relation to last year. Specifically, 33 percent of respondents indicated that they are seeing more discounts, sales and promotions vs. last year compared to just 7 percent who said there were fewer.

Unsurprisingly, one of the major incentives for online purchases is free shipping. When asked how important free shipping is for making an online purchase this holiday season, 76 percent of consumers said that it was important and 47 percent indicated they would abandon a purchase if they got to checkout and found that free shipping was not included. And 40 percent of retail e-commerce purchases in Q3 2011 included free shipping. This is expected to spike in Q4 of 2011.

comScore’s chairman Gian Fulgoni attributes the increase to more consumers looking online for better deals, and the shipping convenience considering the current economic conditions. He adds that there is a shift happening from offline retail to online retail channels for price comparisons and browsing. This could also contribute to more conversions on online retail sites.

And we know mobile shopping will be on the rise as well—we’ll start seeing mobile transaction numbers coming in from retailers and companies like eBay, PayPal following Thanksgiving.

We’ll get a clearer picture of just how strong this holiday shopping season will be, both for brick and mortar and online retailers, following Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday. Stay tuned.

Yesterday morning, we reported that Microsoft had acquired Israeli video startup, VideoSurf, for approximately $70 million. The deal indeed has been greenlighted, as Microsoft confirmed in its blog post yesterday. However, at the time, the price of the acquisition was unclear; several sources (who wished to remain anonymous) pegged the number at $70 million. But, today we’ve heard from a solid source that the actual price of the acquisition was actually just under $100 million — in cash.

Sure, it’s not quite the $8.5 billion Microsoft paid for popular voice and video-over-IP service, Skype, but for a relatively young startup, this is a big win. As to its backstory, VideoSurf was founded by four Israeli entrepreneurs, Eitan Sharon, Lior Delgo, Shai Deljo, and Achi Brandt in 2006, and the San Mateo-based startup has since raised $28 million from a bunch of notable investors, which include Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and her husband, SurveyMonkey CEO David Goldberg, along with Al Gore and Current Media CEO Joel Hyatt (as well as a few others, like Pitango VC and Verizon Ventures.)

Why did Microsoft make this acquisition? Well, just as Microsoft plans to integrate Skype into Xbox Live and VideoKinect for Xbox Live to allow gamers to Skype from their consoles, the tech giant plans to add VideoSurf’s technology into the Xbox 360 ecosystem (specifically Xbox Live) as well. Microsoft will be rolling out voice search over the holiday season and is currently in the process of integrating content from video and cable providers (like Verizon, Comcast, HBO and Epix, for example) into Xbox Live.

Microsoft is also adding a search layer over the platform to let users search for content from apps and beyond, so that one searching for Lord Of The Rings might get results from Netflix, or Comcast’s library, or apps from its Zune Marketplace. Because VideoSurf’s platform is all about video discovery and allowing users to quickly find video content from a wide range of websites (like Hulu, Dailymotion, Metacafe, etc.), this will amp up Xbox Live’s search criteria, which, at this point, just relies on metadata offered up by the content provider.

Not only that, but VideoSurf also implements some cool audio recognition technology along with facial recognition functionality that allows the startup to pull from specific frames within videos, which, when combined, the company (and Microsoft clearly agrees) can provide better search results (and relevancy) coupled with an enhanced user experience.

This is also a smart move play by Microsoft when looking at its future ambitions for both Xbox Live and search on the whole. As Xbox Live adds content from other independent video providers, VideoSurf’s multifaceted search technology can provide a much-improved means of parsing video content from these indie providers that typically don’t have the same amount of data tied to their videos as the larger, premium content providers. If and when Microsoft adds YouTube to Xbox Live, they will need an enhanced search mechanism to serve refined results from the some-billion-odd videos YouTube counts in its bullpen.

Microsoft could also leverage VideoSurf technology for Bing’s video search, making search a less-painful experience across its devices. Considering the startup’s technology will allow Kinect users to search and discover content across multiple entertainment providers within Xbox Live and use Kinect’s voice search powered by Bing, you can see the sizable value proposition inherent in this acquisition. This could allow Microsoft, via Kinect’s unique interface, to offer rich web-based search through TV — potentially leaping over Google based on its current efforts to do the same with Google TV.

It will be interesting to see how the Xbox ecosystem improves with Skype and VideoSurf integration, but the future is definitely looking somewhat bright — something that’s not always said in when referring to the tech old timer.

For more, check out Microsoft’s press release here, and VideoSurf at home here.

If full HD resolution isn’t enough for you, then how about 16 times the resolution of full HD? Japan’s national public broadcasting organization NHK has been working on so-called Ultra HD technology for years, and now it’s ready for the first big test in public.

NHK is planning public screenings of some events at the London Olympics next year in Ultra HD resolution (7,680×4,320 pixels) – not only in Japan, but also in the UK and the US. A first test of actually transmitting that amount of data internationally was completed back in March this year.

The video embedded below doesn’t go into details as far as the public screenings are concerned, but it does deliver some interesting tidbits about Ultra-HD, for example the ability to produce surround sound with 22.2 channel audio:

Video courtesy of Diginfo TV

Nokia Siemens Networks would like you to know that it “puts mobile broadband and services at the heart of its strategy”, and to demonstrate this they plan to fire roughly 17,000 people worldwide before the end of 2013 as part of ‘an extensive global restructuring program’. Says Rajeev Suri, CEO of Nokia Siemens Networks:

“We believe that the future of our industry is in mobile broadband and services – and we aim to be an undisputed leader in these areas. At the same time, we need to take the necessary steps to maintain long term competitiveness and improve profitability in a challenging telecommunications market.”

In other words, Nokia Siemens Network is apparently too much of a dog to be interesting to potential buyers. Nokia and Siemens have been trying to sell their network equipment joint venture, which was originally formed in 2007, for some time now (it sold a piece a few weeks ago).

The company says it plans to reduce its operating expenses and production overheads by 1 billion euros by the end of 2013, compared to the end of this year. Aside from laying off people, the company will also look at real estate and general expenses, as well as – ironically – IT spending.

Nokia Siemens Networks employed approximately 75,000 people as of September 30, 2011.

The full press release is available here.

Never troll a troll, say men and women much wiser than moi.

To them, I say no, in this case it’s perfectly fine to troll the troll.

From the funny dude who brought you the Mark by Mark Zuckerberg collection, now comes a website where you can, basically, send him $9 via PayPal.

But in return, the funny dude will package and send an actual troll doll to Intellectual Ventures, the patent-holding firm that manages to claim that it’s in the business of creating “a more efficient and dynamic invention economy” without breaking out in loud, slightly evil-sounding laughter.

Here’s how the funny dude explains it, albeit more eloquently than I ever could:

how it works: you donate $9. we package and ship a troll doll to intellectual ventures. intellectual ventures frowns. we smile.

why trolls, why intellectual ventures: IV is like the 6th grade bully thieving lunch money. but worse. because this lunch money would otherwise go to building the next paypal/farmville mashup.

TechCrunch would be in dire straits without the possibility for a next generation of such mashups to blossom, so please donate. Or not, which is cool too.

It’s not the first cell phone that has been designed specifically for women, but it’s certainly one of the most interesting, as far as features and specs are concerned. Fujitsu’s so-called ARROWS Kiss F-03D for the Japanese market runs on Android 2.3, is targeted at women aged between 20 and 30, and comes with “elegant and glimmering jewelry design”.

The area around the “gem-cut” buttons on the front starts lighting up in one of 23 illumination patterns when users receive a call or message. Fujitsu also provides a small stylus that’s supposed to make it easier to write Japanese characters. The Kiss F-03D is waterproof (and ready for use in the bathtub), too.

Users can choose between a set of different fonts, icons, and wallpapers. They can decorate pictures with a “special photo enhancement function”, control their body posture with a special app, or optimize their sleep with the Sukkiri Alarm app (which wakes them up when sleep is detected to be at its lightest point).

Spec-wise, buyers get a 3.7-inch TFT screen with 480 × 800 resolution, a single-core CPU with 1.5Ghz, 1GB RAM, an 8MP outer camera, a 1.3MP inner camera, a microSDHC slot, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, infrared, a digital TV tuner, e-wallet function, wireless charging (Qi) support, etc.

The Kiss F-03D goes on sale in Japan on Friday with an open price model.