Editor's note: This guest post was written by Dave Chase, the CEO of Avado.com, a patient portal & relationship management company that was a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist. Previously he was a management consultant for Accenture's healthcare practice and founder of Microsoft's Health platform business. You can follow him on Twitter @chasedave.

“A good scalpel makes a better surgeon. Good communication makes a better doctor."

- Dr. Josh Umbehr

The future of medicine in the U.S. is clear. The days of the “do more, bill more” model of reimbursement are numbered as they have produced one of the most inefficient healthcare systems in the world. While there are many unknowns regarding the future model, one thing is crystal clear — highly effective communication will separate the winners from the losers.

The quantum improvement in the depth and breadth of communication seen in the consumer Internet and in the consumerization of the enterprise (iPhones, Yammer, etc.) has yet to fully impact healthcare. With healthcare representing nearly 20% of the economy, the stakes are so high that it is inevitable that communications will be a key driver separating the winners from the losers as the tectonic shifts in the landscape shake out. This will usher in an array of new technology entrants similar to consumer and enterprise arenas disrupting ineffective and expensive communication methods of the past. The stars are aligning to make this happen.

“I don’t think you can overstate the importance of communication in clinical care. Even with devices, robotics, genomics and personalized care, it all rests, and depends on, clear communication.”

- Dr. Wendy Sue Swanson, MD, MBE, FAAP

The Individual (aka the Patient) is the Most Important Member of the Care Team

It’s long been said that the most important member of the care team is the individual (or their family member).

Quite simply, in a world where one is compensated on value and outcome, it’s nearly impossible to have success without recognizing the importance of the patient. Consider the diagram in this article. It is clear and appropriate that the “system” — i.e., the collection of healthcare providers — is in control of decisions that drive outcomes in high acuity cases such as when one is unconscious in the hospital. In contrast, in low acuity situations such as managing a chronic condition, the individual and/or their family are clearly in control of actions that will drive the ultimate outcome. Whether adhering to an exercise, diet or prescription plan, the patient/family plays the central role in determining the outcome.

The importance of this can’t be overemphasized given that 75% of healthcare spend results from chronic conditions. Decisions made while a condition is in low acuity can rapidly lead to high acuity flare ups that drive large medical bills. As Dr. Swanson states, “the steering wheel should be attended by the patient.” After all, 99+% of an individual’s life is spent away from healthcare providers and no one else besides them is in the driver’s seat.

It is a good thing that there has been great focus put on improving communication between healthcare professionals through standards and incentives related to the new models being driven by private and federal insurance programs. The Patient Centered Medical Home and the Accountable Care Organizations are the two most high profile of these. However, the communication focus has been about the patient not with the patient. Having worked in and seen literally hundreds of healthIT systems, the fact is the fundamental purpose of the patient as envisioned by these systems is that the “patient” is merely a vessel to attach billing codes to — not a core part of the care team. This legacy approach will prove to be a fatal flaw in the new reimbursement models. Throwing bodies (e.g., care coordinators) at the problem can help, but will be at a disadvantage versus approaches that combine the best of human and technology driven communication methods.

There are efforts being made to tweak legacy software to address these requirements. Unfortunately, they are as likely to meet the new imperatives as AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo have been at becoming market leaders in social networking. The reality is Facebook built social networking into their core design from the ground up and bolting a dramatically different approach onto an old system rarely works whether it is social networking or patient-provider communications.

Good News for Forward Looking Healthcare Organizations

I get knowing nods from my physician friends when I exclaim that I hear more frequently from my dog’s vet than my doctor or my kids’ doctor. We realize why the historical reimbursement models have contributed to this dynamic. Considering that people retain less than 20% of what a doctor tells them, this lack of communication and patient retention is a brutal combination driving sub-optimal outcomes. The good news is there is a tremendous competitive advantage that a healthcare provider can realize if they choose to focus on improved communications for the 99+% of the time when a patient isn’t staring them in the face.

Not only can this opportunity provide a competitive advantage, it is imperative in the new models. Simplistic patient portals, however, won’t get the job done. I’ve yet to meet the physician or individual who thinks that just making lab results available to patients or allowing for secure messaging is changing the care paradigm.

Whether out of desire or necessity, consumers are ready for improved communication so they can save on their healthcare costs. It’s expected that roughly one-third of the workforce will be permanent freelancers, contractors, consultants, etc. with zero expectation of employer-provided insurance. Even those with employer-provided insurance, are picking up an ever-growing percentage of the premium. The current average is 30% of the costs are picked up by an employee (up from 10% in the recent past). This coincides with the rise of consumer empowerment that has happened in virtually every other sector. Dr. Patricia Salber wrote about DIY Healthcare  to explain how far things have already come and to assert her opinion that this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Thought-leading Physicians Are Ready

Fortunately the economics and simplicity of the consumer Internet and SaaS have finally come to healthcare. Once upon a time, sophisticated new software was first deployed in large enterprises. Today, greatly improved communication technologies begin with small organizations. Consider a physician like Dr. Craig Koniver who uses various free (e.g., Evernote) and low-cost off-the-shelf software to manage his communications without employing any administrative staff. Dr. Kent Bottles wrote about reverse innovation in healthcare talking about offshore innovation making its way to the U.S., but it’s not just offshore healthcare that can be a source of innovation. Dr. Howard Luks, an orthopedic surgeon, is another example of an innovative individual physician that is more sophisticated than most large healthcare providers by simply using free and low cost software to communicate with current and prospective patients.

As was highlighted in The Rise of Nimble Medicine, there is an explosion of disruptive innovators as well as innovation groups inside established healthcare organizations. In many respects, healthcare has been measured on production with an almost factory floor-like model of producing as many “widgets” (i.e., procedures, appointments, tests, prescriptions, etc.) as possible. However with a shift to a service model where success will be driven by factors such as satisfaction and health outcomes, smart healthcare providers recognize that systems optimized for production are ill-equipped to optimize for outcome. With that in mind, recognition grows that communication becomes the most important medical instrument of the future.

As mentioned in yesterday’s earnings call, Zynga revealed that the company’s zCloud, its private cloud infrastructure has been scaling significantly in the past year. At the start of 2011, only 20% of Zynga’s daily active users (DAU) were in the zCloud. A year later, nearly 80% of Zynga games' DAU reside in zCloud, and 20% in the public cloud (powered by AWS). Today the company is revealing additional information about the zCloud and how much data is being transmitted through its infrastructure.

Zynga has been quietly investing in powering up the zCloud over the past few years, explains Allan Leinwand, Zynga’s CTO of Infrastructure. As Leinwand explains, the infrastructure looks, feels, and operates similar to the AWS public cloud, but allows for greater performance, scale and reliability. zCloud physically resides in Zynga’s private datacenters and is designed specifically for social games in terms of availability and performance. And Zynga has created tailored automation tools for large server environments and built custom monitoring and management tools.

As GigaOm reported last year, xCloud was built using Cloud.com's CloudStack software. And startup RightScale provides a management console for Zynga’s public cloud (powered by AWS) and the private cloud.

Between 2009 and 2011, Zynga says that it doubled down on increasing physical server capacity in order to move games over to the private cloud. For Zynga, this increased not only the ability to scale but also reliability. For social games specifically, zCloud offers 3x the efficiency of standard public cloud infrastructure. For example, games in the public cloud would require three physical servers, zCloud only uses one.

Last year, Zynga began to launch games directly in zCloud instead of in the public cloud. The first new Zynga game to launch in zCloud was CityVille Hometown in June 2011. Since then, every Zynga game has launched in zCloud. For example, CastleVille, which holds the record for the fastest growing Zynga game was launched and scaled in zCloud.

Currently, Zynga stores 1.4 Petabytes of data at any time and has the ability to deploy up to 1,000 servers in a 24 hour period. The company says the power they deployed for zCloud alone during the second half of 2011 could've kept 166 international space stations in orbit. 36 billion gifts were gifted during the holiday season in 2011, and Zynga has increased its server capacity by a 100 times over the past year (see infographic below).

For now, Zynga has no plans to eliminate public cloud powered by AWS. But clearly, this infrastructure is being used sparingly.

Tablet publishing platform Onswipe is launching its content recommendation throughout its network of publishers today — introducing a Outbrain like feature where readers are given choices of articles from its thousands of partners in realtime. (Readers can access the feature by tapping on the Rocketship in the bottom right corner of the page.)

This move could mean a double digit % lift to publishers according to Onswipe founder Jason Baptiste. The Onswipe network manages tablet publishing for companies like BBC, Ziff Davis, Moguldom, Slate, Thomson Reuters, NY Times, Conde Nast and brands like Amex, Verizon, Tom Ford, Sprint and Lincoln and its readership is in the millions.

“This is really the first time we’re launching a feature that is a glimpse into a big part of our mission of connecting the web together through experience,” Baptiste tells me, “If the tablet is the TV of this generation, we see Onswipe as the platform powering and connecting all the channels together.  Today’s release lets us finally do this – start driving traffic between all of the sites in our network.”

Baptiste holds that content recommendation is the first step in his plan to solidify Onswipe as a network of touch-friendly sites, “We always ask ourselves this question:  ’How can we leverage all of our publishers to start bringing them more traffic?.’  Everyone also thinks the app store is a driver of distribution for publishers, when it’s really not.  We can now tell publishers: publish with Onswipe and we can also get you new distribution+more traffic.”

The startup has a few more network-themed releases slated for 2012. “ We’ve never seen Onswipe as a tools company that lets people just build sites.  We see Onswipe as a connected network of sites,” Baptiste said.

Motorola has already confirmed that the Xooms, Droid Bionic, Razr, Razr Maxx and the Droid 4 will get a hefty helping of Ice Cream Sandwich this year, but the company has added a few more devices to its ICS upgrade schedule. The Photon 4G, Atrix 4G, Atrix 2, and the Electrify will all see Android 4.0 at some point during the course of 2012.

Motorola lists most of the devices for a Q3 release, with just a few getting Q2 treatment, so there’s still quite a road ahead for you Gingerbread-packing phandroids.

That is, if you even own a device slated for the update. There are quite a few Motorola handsets that will never see Ice Cream Sandwich at all.

It’s also worth noting that both the Q2 and Q3 releases are best-scenario projections. The updates must go through testing with both Motorola and the carriers before being sent out to the masses, and a single slip-up somewhere down the line could slow things up considerably.

For more information on Motorola’s update plans, check out their massive chart of who gets what when.

Following five months of work, location-based Q&A platform Localmind is launching its biggest release today since its original debut with the arrival of Localmind 2.0. The newly revamped platform represents a shift for the company, which, as you may remember, sits on top of Foursquare, allowing you to pose questions in real-time to those checked in at local venues.

Today, the company is expanding its focus by allowing users to ask questions of local “experts,” even if they’re not currently checked in to a given location. However, answers can still be replied to in real-time, preserving the sense of immediacy found in the original product.

The problem with Localmind’s previous version, as anyone who used the product could tell you, is that the people checked in to a given location may not necessarily be the best ones to answer your question. While, sure, they could tell you whether the bar was crowded or whether the tuna was the special for the night, the limited use cases (and, frankly, the need) for this feature limited the product’s growth. Outside of buzzy events like SXSW where Localmind first took off among the early adopter crowd, the real-world need to ping someone with immediate questions about local businesses was far less pressing.

What people more often want to know are broader questions than those relating to the current situation found in a given venue. They want to know if it’s true that this food cart has the best tacos, or if that French place is family-friendly or more often frequented by couples having a quiet night out. They want to know about parking situations, outdoor activities and general “things-to-do” type recommendations.

More importantly, they want answers they can actually trust. The latter is the hardest part of the equation, and something that user ratings and reviews sites have always struggled with. Does that unhappy customer have an ax to grind? Was that review or tip slyly posted by the business owner himself?

Although Localmind is not a user review site per se, it offers some similarities as it also relies on crowdsourced opinions as its main value driver. So, in order to make the A’s of Localmind’s Q&A’s more trustworthy, the service uses a suite of algorithms to surface experts based on their actual activities – going out, checking in, leaving tips, etc. – as opposed to the Facebook graph of “likes.”

Over time, Localmind learns who’s an expert in what, and what types of questions they prefer to answer, then routes those questions appropriately. Today, the Localmind experts answer 90% of questions, typically in three minutes time.

While the new focus on a broader reacher is an important step for the company, there’s still the potential issue of growing the service’s expert network. For Localmind to prove its value outside of dense urban areas like NY, or tech hotspots like San Francisco, it may need to find ways to surface answers through less real-time means.

The new version of Localmind is live in the iTunes App Store here.

Not yet familiar with digital storytelling platform Cowbird, despite recent glowing coverage from the likes of Wired and The Washington Post?

Well, if you like reading, seeing or listening to a good story as much as I do, you will be mighty glad I’m introducing you to the site today.

On a sidenote: I’m very happy that my last TechCrunch post is about something like Cowbird, because it’s one of those things that make me ever so grateful for the existence of the Internet.

Simply put, Cowbird is a place where you can go to tell a story that you think is worth sharing with a wider community of lovers of good stories. The idea is for people to tell short location-tagged stories based on their own experience using text, photos and sound or a mix thereof. The more personal and authentic your story, the more it will resonate with the still relatively small Cowbird community.

I added some screenshots below to give you an idea of what it looks like.

I signed up a few weeks ago after seeing the founder of the project, nauseatingly interesting American digital artist and entrepreneur Jonathan Harris, talk about Cowbird at the recent DLD Conference in Munich. I’ve since received some truly amazing stories in my inbox every day.

And it’s not just that the stories are great, it’s also the fact that Cowbird is beautifully designed, simple but interactive, a repository that seems to be in motion constantly, a place where depth is welcomed.

If I haven’t convinced you to request an invite to join the project yet, there’s no hope for you.

Did I say project? As of yesterday, Cowbird is a company.

I asked Harris to tell me more about Cowbird, and this is what he sent me back:

We have three main goals: The first is to create a space for a deeper, longer-lasting kind of self-expression than you’re likely to find anywhere else on the Web. The second is to pioneer a new form of participatory journalism, grounded in the simple human stories behind major news events. The third is to build a public library of human experience — a kind of Wikipedia for life experience.

We take a slow and measured approach to everything. Prospective authors can request an invitation by telling us a little bit about who they are and what kind of stories they would like to tell. We personally contact each new author to welcome them into our community. Telling stories on Cowbird asks a little more of you than dashing off tweets from a cell phone, but we think it gives back a lot more, too.

It’s soul food, not fast food.

Check it out folks, you won’t regret it.

Remember when that Samsung product marketing manager Ryan Bidan let slip a few details on the next-gen GalTab and/or Galaxy Note? He mentioned the inclusion of an S-Pen, 3D gestures (courtesy of a front-facing camera), and voice controls. Well, it would seem that further proof of the product he was detailing has trickled out, and just like the last time, it’s coming straight from the horse’s mouth.

According to the Verge, Samsung posted an invitation to its Samsung Developer Day at MWC which just so happened to mention a Galaxy Note 10.1. Presumably, this would be a larger version of the Galaxy Note that excludes a 3G/4G radio but keeps the S-Pen.

It’s possible that this is a mistake, but we don’t believe that to be the case. The mention of this device’s specific name alongside comments made by Mr. Bidan is pretty solid evidence as it is, but there’s more.

On a site called BackStage (a casting call website for acting jobs), the Galaxy Note 10.1 made another appearance as Samsung is apparently looking for a teenage guy to “take pictures, record, edit, copy,” and more, I’m sure. According to the listing, the target demographic for this XL GalNote will be in the education, financial planning, and art industries.

While I’m not entirely familiar with the process of creating and distributing a commercial, it would seem that the listing posted on January 17 leaves the company enough time to be up and running with the ad by MWC. According to the invitation, that’s when we’ll see this rumored, even-more-giant Note.

Buck, the mobile payments company formerly known as Billing Revolution, is launching its new, single-click credit card checkout today, which allows shoppers to pay for goods or services without an account, username or password. Coinciding with the launch is news of where you can actually use the service: the company has lined up several new high-profile customers, including Glamour, SpyderLynk, Papaya Mobile and credit card processor Braintree.

The way Buck works is that, at first, it does require a more traditional checkout process, including entry of the appropriate data like credit card number, expiration date, etc. The difference is that after that initial transaction, your phone then becomes a mobile wallet in the sense that any other Buck-enabled merchant will automatically recognize that you’re a member of the Buck network. You won’t have to type in your information again the next time you check out on a Buck-powered site.

The platform also supports SMS notifications for receipts, and all major card types (MC, VS, Amex, Discover) are supported.

In addition, Buck doesn’t have to be only for web-only merchants. With the new Glamour integration, for example, Buck will be powering the purchases of beauty products advertised in the pages of the magazine’s March issue, tying together print and mobile. Meanwhile, thanks to the deal with credit card processor and payment gateway Braintree, Buck will be offered to the company’s thousands of merchants as another payment option.

Obviously, a solution like Buck’s is only truly helpful when multiple merchants adopt the same platform, so today’s news of at least a few more major brands getting on board is a promising step for the young company. Other Buck customers include Condé Nast, L’Oreal, Mocospace, Grindr, Thornton’s, Big Fish Games and more.

Launched in 2008, the startup raised $6.6 million in Series B funding last spring, led by DCM and SK Telecom Ventures. In October, it was also one of the companies selected for DCM’s A-Fund investment, which aimed to encourage Android entrepreneurs.

You can’t call StackMob a “backend service provider for mobile” anymore, because as of now, it’s a full end-to-end solution. The cloud-based platform for mobile developers is today launching hosted HTML5 services that tie to StackMob’s backend, making it the first platform offering integrated HTML5.

Developers can use the new service to host full HTML5 apps for desktop, tablet or mobile, or can use it to host the HTML5 running within their native apps.

“We had to start with backend first because it takes much longer to build in the flexibility and scalability,” explains StackMob CEO Ty Amell, “but now that we have that system down, now we’re launching our hosted HTML5 solution.”

What this means is that developers can now upload and run their HTML5 from StackMob. The company is also offering GitHub integration to make doing so even easier. There’s a service hook for StackMob, so when developers push changes to their GitHub account, StackMob will pull those changes and put them onto Amazon’s S3. The company has also created a streaming API, where it will stream and cache those resources for its developers.

The benefit for developers is two-fold. First, they no longer have to worry about hosting their own HTML5, it’s just a part of the StackMob service. (And there’s no fee increase to use the feature). Secondly, with hosted HTML5, there’s the ability to tie in to other StackMob features, both current and forthcoming.

For example, thanks to the GitHub integration, StackMob can keep track of the history of the HTML5 deployments, and offer developers the ability to roll back changes. But in the long run, there are other benefits to hosted HTML5.

“There’s a lot we can do to increase the performance of HTML5,” says Amell. “We can push these out to CDNs, we can do a lot of internal caching, we can do adaptive serving where we look at what URLs are being served and we pre-fetch the next one,” he explains. “We can do things around developer tools where we add JS templates, making your app use HTML5 app cache out of the box. There are a lot of different technologies that we can add in the future that we can do because we host [HTML5].”

Also planned for the future is a build service, where developers can add native wrappers to their HTML5 apps (iOS, Android, BlackBerry Windows Phone). This will arrive by Q1, followed by advanced access controls, the use of CDNs, and auto minifying.

For StackMob, going the HTML5 route has always been on the roadmap. The company envisioned itself being an end-to-end service from the beginning, but now was the right time to make that shift, according to Amell. “We’re getting very close to where there’s a massive increase in network-connected devices,” he says. “It’s smartphones, tablets, cars, thermostats, cars, TV, even consoles – so when we think mobile that’s what we’re thinking.”

He’s also a big supporter of HTML5 as a platform. “Eventually, HTML5 is going to win because of this network-connected device world. You’re not going to have the ability to write for whatever proprietary language all these platform devices are going to be on,” he explains. ”Even your toaster is going to be network-connected and have to talk to the cloud.”

Wait? Even my toaster? Oh dear lord.

“I bet you it will happen. Less burned toast.”

Local Response, a social advertising platform that allows local businesses to respond to the “check-in” with marketing campaigns, is launching a pro version of its analytics and action platform for marketers.

LocalResponse’s DirectResponse product aggregates real-­time social media check-­‐ins from Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram and dozens of other services to provide a simple interface for local businesses to directly respond to their most influential and valuable customers. What makes LocalResponse compelling is that it analyzes massive amounts of data in addition to check-ins from the Twitter firehose, photo sharing sites and more to find other forms of check-ins. These could be posting a picture on Instagram of a dish from a restaurant or Tweeting that you are visiting a particular bar.

LocalResponse’s proprietary technology collects and prioritizes social data both explicitly (i.e. check-ins on Foursquare) and implicitly (by analyzing natural language on Facebook, Twitter, etc.; e.g. "I'm headed to ShakeShack").

For example, in a recent campaign, Walgreens used Direct Response to respond to customers in-store to disseminate store promotions, such as flu shots and HALLS coupons. Average click-through-rates for LocalResponse's Direct Response product are greater than 50%, says the company.

Another LocalResponse product is Intent Retargeting allows marketers to deliver mobile display ads against various real-time intent data points. The product can serve ads to explicit check-ins, implicit check-ins, competitive check-ins, as well as relevant sentiment. For example, Intuit's TurboTax uses Intent Retargeting to serve TurboTax banner ads to people who have expressed challenges in doing their taxes on Twitter. Average clickthrough-rates for LocalResponse's Intent Retargeting are 1%.

The PRO Dashboard provides real-time analysis for brand's and brand's competitor's consumer foot traffic, intent, and sentiment. The PRO version basically allows marketers to access this in-depth data and then activate contextual and targeted advertising easily.

To date, LocalResponse has worked with a number of high-profile advertisers including Audi, Coca-Cola, Dell, Estee Lauder, FedEx, General Electric, General Mills, General Motors, H&M, Hersheys, Kmart, Lowes, McDonald's, NBC-Universal, Pepsi, Pizza Hut, Verizon, and Walgreens.

LocalResponse has raised $6.5 million Cava Capital, Vodafone Ventures, Progress Ventures, Verizon Ventures, Metamorphic Ventures, Extreme Venture Partners, Charles River Ventures, BOLDstart Ventures, Jim Pallotta, Greycroft Partners, and others. The startup also recently acquired social TV check-in and advertising platform Philo.

Flash memory maker and storage system technologies provider SanDisk announced today that it has acquired FlashSoft, a company focused on caching software products. Going forward, SanDisk will sell FlashSoft’s products both as standalone software, as well as offer them in combination with its other products, including SAS, PCIe and SATA enterprise solutions.

The company says that it expects the acquisition to be neutral to its earnings in 2012 and accretive in 2013, but additional details were not provided.

FlashSoft is currently the maker of software for Flash Virtualization which lets customers increase application performance and virtualization capability while reducing hardware and operational costs. The software is available for Windows, Linux and VMWare platforms.

With SSD-based caching, the most frequently accessed data resides close to the CPU in high-performance memory – this is how it offers the touted performance improvements. For customers, the end result is smaller, more cost effective storage configurations, which, in turn, allows them to deploy more virtual machines per server.

Through the acquisition, SanDisk is moving towards becoming a complete solution provider for enterprise and cloud customers by offering SSD-optimized software, including those from third party providers.

MTV is unveiling an update to its Music Meter mobile app today. This is version 2.0, and also the first version to abandon the “beta testing” label, suggesting that MTV has worked out any early kinks — and is ready to make money.

The app first launched in March 2011 as the mobile equivalent of MTV’s Music Meter website. The goal is to track the online buzz for musicians, and to use that data to create a daily ranking that helps fans find new music. If you see an artist who interests you, the app offers songs, photos, and videos, as well as news and a brief biography. Senior Director of Product Development Mark Mezrich calls it an “artistic snacking” experience that should give you everything you need to get acquainted with a musician. Nor is that snacking limited to the daily list — Mezrich says there are more than 1 million artists in the system.

The app, which is available for iOS and Android has already been downloaded 1 million times. The new version includes integration with Songkick’s concert listings, as well as the ability to browse the app based on genre.

MTV is also introducing advertising to the app through an exclusive sponsorship from Wrigley’s 5 gum. When asked about what she expects from future Music Meter ads, Vice President of Digital Music Strategy Shannon Connolly says she’s “open to exploring different scenarios.”

“Obviously, it’s important that the apps be free,” she says. “Any payments within the apps should be supporting the artists — buying music and buying tickets.”

If for some reason you were to mosey on over to Amazon’s Chinese website and perform a search for the iPad, you know what you’d find? No iPad.

Now, you might think to yourself, “Wow, Proview pulled it off,” but that’s not the case at all. In fact, an Amazon spokesperson said that the Apple was the one who requested that the iPad be taken off the site. Proview hasn’t even requested an online sales ban.

Yep, this is tricky, so let’s parse through it together.

The trademark battle between Chinese tech company Proview and Apple has been heating up in recent months, with the Shenzen-based company asking for import and export bans of the iPad in China. Apple contends that it purchased the Chinese trademark rights to the iPad several years ago in ten different countries, but Proview and its lawyers have deemed that those trademark rights don’t extend into China.

“Proview refuses to honor their agreement with Apple in China and a Hong Kong court has sided with Apple in this matter,” said an Apple spokeswoman.

If Proview were to win, it could be a serious issue for Apple. China remains a huge manufacturing hub for Apple, and if Cupertino can’t get its iPads out of China it could deal a heavy blow to the company’s worldwide sales numbers. In fact, it could deal a significant blow to Apple’s Chinese sales numbers, which came in around $13 billion last year. On the other hand, it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.

Proview Technology Chairman Yang Long-san told Reuters that “customs have told us that it will be difficult to implement a ban because many Chinese consumers love Apple products. The sheer size of the market is very big.”

According to Reuters, Apple lost to Proview in late 2011 after a court ruled that Proview had rights to the iPad trademark. True to Apple fashion, Cupertino appealed the decision and the next hearing, which will yield a final decision from the courts, is set to begin on February 29.

So that’s what’s going on between Apple and Proview, which brings us back to Amazon China.

M.I.C. Gadgets reports that Apple has made no comment regarding the removal of the iPad on Amazon’s website, and Proview’s lawyers admit they didn’t see it coming either. As I said, Proview never filed for the administrative ban of online sales in Beijing, where Amazon China is based.

Other retailers within various regions of China have been asked by officials to pull the tablet as the dispute heats up, but this is the first instance in which we’ve seen Apple yank its products off of virtual shelves.

But this is undoubtedly tied to the Proview case in some way. See, Apple has limited options when it comes to dealing with this mess. It could try its hand with this appeal, but the decision on February 29 will be as final as an answer on “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” — there’s no turning back. The other option is to settle with Proview, but as it stands now that would be a rather large payout.

MicGadget speculates that this may be a part of Apple’s strategy. If Apple can demonstrate that its iPad branding is only valuable because its tied to the Apple iPad, the company might be able to bring down a proposed settlement figure. Or Apple’s twenty steps ahead of all of us and we have absolutely no idea how this one move fits into the grand scheme of things.

Has this happened to you? You’re trapped on a pirate ship with your pregnant wife and Bluebeard the Pirate wants you to walk the plank but after your wife has given birth to the baby boy that he will adopt as his pirate son and train in pirate ways. You want to tell your family – and an army of ninja warriors – about your new arrival so they can congratulate/save you but you’re only able to move one finger every hour because of some strange poison Bluebeard gave you. So you need a one-button way to notify the world of your child’s arrival (and maybe get saved and give old Bluebeard a taste of cold steel) as well as a method to let the in-laws know they can buy you the Quinny Buzz now.

BabyNotify has your freaking back.

That’s right: BabyNotify a website that lets you notify people with on click that you’ve given birth. To be fair, if you’re giving birth you probably won’t want to press that button during the cord cutting but if you’re a modern, plugged in dad you’re probably totally fine with turning away from your plump new baby boy or girl and your angelic wife and calling up a website. Note: if you’re Lt. Garp and all you can say is Arp and then Arrrr, this probably isn’t for you. You’d need to be able to move and own an iPhone or Android device.

Andy Schwarz-Gulley and his wife founded the site after discovering there was no easy way to tell all their friends that they reproduced. Necessity, they say, is the mother of websites dedicated to granulated activities.

Generally web services solve one simple problem: I need to put my bank statements in one place, I need to send a short message to my friends, I need to kill a pirate, I need to let people know about something. At these last two, BabyNotify excels. It’s a simple idea and I can’t imagine it took longer than a few hours to code up and get out the door. They have iOS and Android apps for folks who can’t be bothered to log into a website and it supports Twitter, Facebook, text message, and email updates. You simply enter the pertinent data, a list of recipients, and you’re good to go.

But why leave it at babies? Why not make a system for all medical conditions (post-flu announcements, post-gout emails) or life events (first spray tan, maybe?). Monetizing those would be simple, as is monetizing this site.

Anyway, it’s clear that BabyNotify is a niche product – how many people are born each day? Like three? – but it’s a fun idea and I love me some babies. I may set it up for when our little one arrives in a few weeks but I’ll probably swap the weight and the length and tell everyone the baby is 48 pounds and 7 inches long.

When Groupon was gearing up for its IPO last year, there was a lot of talk about whether the company would be able to sustain its business on a diet that mainly consisted of daily deals. Today, a little sign of what Groupon might be cooking up for its next course.

Over in Germany, Groupon has launched a new site, Groupon Deals, an Amazon-like storefront that sells a range of goods, from boots to bodysuits.

Like Groupon’s mainstay-daily deals, the products are being sold at big discounts, of up to 70 percent on some items. Unlike the daily deals, these products do not have timeouts on buying them.

According to the site, Groupon Deals offers consumers a "complete shopping experience," although at the moment, the selection of goods on offer is pretty small. That points to this being a local experiment more than anything else for now.

But even so, it is already starting to market the service in some form: A reader tells us that offers from Groupon Deals started appearing in his Facebook feed earlier today.

It is unclear at this point whether this is something that Groupon is planning on offering only in Germany, or whether it intends to roll out similar storefronts in other regions, which currently serve 33 million active users.

We have contacted Groupon to ask questions and will update this post as we learn more.

Extending out its services to a more conventional model of selling goods online is not exactly disruptive and cutting-edge, but it is probably also a natural move for Groupon: the company already has extensive relationships with retailers and brands for its time-based daily deals, which cover not only events and services, but a range of physical products, too. Each product on the site comes with a list of “supplier details”: that might mean Groupon has a platform for third parties to upload products for sale.

It also puts Groupon even more directly in competition with the likes of more established players like Amazon and eBay, to mention nothing of more local online retailing operations.

International is a division where Groupon is focusing hard, but at a price. In the company’s Q4 earnings reported last week, Groupon reported a loss of $350 million, with $137 million of that attributable to international expansion costs.

Groupon's European operation was kick-started back in May 2010, when it bought Germany-based competitor Citydeal for an undisclosed sum. At that time Citydeal was already active in several European markets.

You’d be forgiven if you haven’t heard of Kobo’s Android-powered Vox eReader before — it has a tendency to get glossed over in favor of bigger names like the Kindle or the Nook. Kobo’s hoping to remedy that with another retail push, and this time they’ve inked a deal to get those Vox readers into Best Buy stores across the country.

The Vox is probably best known for its Pulse social reading service, which comes off as something like a virtual book club. It allows users to interact with each other while reading through the month’s bestsellers, with a bright visual indicator to let readers know how active a particular page is.

Being Android-based, users are also able to pore through and download apps, but forget about unfettered access to the Android Market — Vox readers can choose from a curated selection of about 15,000 apps.

I’m sure Kobo is glad to have nabbed another big physical retail deal, but I wonder how much good it’ll do them in the long-run. Best Buy counts the Kindle and Nook families among their wares, and the Vox is likely to be a tough sell against known quantities like the immensely-popular Kindle Fire. I’d definitely give the Vox the style advantage with its four arguably handsome color variants, but a pretty paint job does not a bestseller make.

Still, the Vox has enough going for it that it’s worth at least a second glance from consumers, and that’s probably exactly what Kobo wanted out of this deal.

Popular sports startup Bleacher Report was announced as of YouTube’s new content partners late last year. Now it’s actually ready to debut its new channel and announce the initial slate of shows.

Bleacher Report allows regular sports fans to offer commentary on teams and games, an approach that leads to much more content than a traditional sports site — the company says it has 1,000 featured columnists and 6,000 contributors total. In some ways, it seems like a good match for YouTube, since it’s taking a similar approach to sports writing as the one YouTube took to video.

Which isn’t to say that these are going to be purely crowdsourced shows. Instead, Bleacher Report’s shows will mostly be hosted by established names from the sports and entertainment world. Here’s the lineup:

• B/R5 — A rundown of the five biggest sports stories of the day, hosted by Desi Sanchez (of E! News Now and MTV). Broadcasts every Monday to Friday, starting today.
• NFL Draft 365 — A weekly discussion of the NFL draft, hosted by Alex Panos (HGTV's Run My Money and SNY's Beer Money), with a different current or former NFL player as guest analyst in each episode. Starts later this week.
• Why We Watch — A weekly show featuring short-form sports documentaries, supposedly highlighting a small story with big significance, or offering a new take on more well-known news. Starts later this week.
• Full Ride — A weekly look at college football recruiting, starting in March.

We first covered Sell Simp.ly in November last year, as it looked to capitalize on the increasing interest in social media as not only a place to advertise and build an online presence for brands, but as a platform for conducting social commerce. Most of that interest has surrounded Facebook, as a host of solutions and services have emerged that allow big brands and startups alike to create retail storefronts on Facebook, sell to customers, and to a certain extent, manage their transactions.

With an enormous reach in its own right, one might expect that Twitter would look to leverage its platform (which has also become popular among celebrities and brands looking to hawk their wares) to throw its weight around in the emerging social eCommerce marketplace. As of now, Twitter has shown no interest in building this into its repetoire, with CEO Dick Costolo saying that the company is making enough money on advertising, thank you very much.

That’s why one-man-show Chris Teso launched Sell Simply — as a simple way to take advantage of this big market opportunity — and enable consumers to buy, sell, donate, and transact right on Twitter. The goal was to turn Sell Simply into a digital marketplace, making it possible for any Twitter user to buy and sell their products or items, just by replying “buy” to any tweet listing.

While the idea has a lot of potential, Teso was operating as a solo founder, and to really make it work, he says, he knew that he needed help. The Founder turned to a new Portland-based accelerator called Upstart Labs, which offered him $50K in seed funding and access to a team of designers and developers that would assist in scaling the business.

A by-product of joining UpStart Labs has been that the startup will no longer be known as Sell Simp.ly, as the team changed the name to Chirpify, in turn offering a new logo, a rebranded site, and a whole lot more functionality (along with some changes) to the original model.

After launching last year, Teso says, he came to the realization that if he wanted to roll out the Twitter commerce service to millions of users, the platform itself would have to be inherently scalable. In its prior incarnation, Sell Simply just didn’t quite have the foundation and infrastructure to do that, but with help from his new Portland friends, things are looking up.

Under the prior model, to kick off the transactional process on a tweet, users essentially had to “reply all” on that tweet with the word “buy” included. Teso said that, simply put, users found this proces confusing, and they didn’t really understand the concept of the reply all. And to that point, Teso said that many users saw Sell Simply as a competitor to Etsy or craigslist, or, in other words, just a virtual storefront for Etsy merchants to sell their wares on Twitter. Many weren’t quite understanding that the platform was meant simply to be a way to facilitate direct transactions and purchasing on Twitter.

With some road behind it, Chirpify is now launching its direct and P2P payments and donations (and retail sales) service with additional functionality for brands. Going forward, Chirpify users will be able to use Twitter as a direct sales channel, as the platform offers businesses an easy way to turn Tweets into transactions, opening up a new channel that combines social marketing with commerce.

But, how does it work, you ask? Chirpify taps directly into PayPal to facilitate secure transactions on Twitter, allowing users to make purchases or donate just by replying to a tweet, a thus: “@BarackObama Donate.” Another cool bonus is that Chirpify is trying to build some deep integration into existing eCommerce solutions, like Magento “for back-end fulfillment, listing, and transaction management,” Teso says.

When Chirpify merchants want to sell something, they just click the “List on Twitter” button when drafting a listing in their new eCommerce dashboards. Then, inbound sales info appears as an email or “as part of the retailer’s back-end system, or via a direct message on Twitter.”

How it works: Chirpify integrates directly with PayPal to offer secure transactions on Twitter. Purchases and donations are as simple as replying to a Tweet: “@favoritebrand Buy,” or “@politician Donate,” for example.

Additionally, Chirpify offers deep integration with existing e-commerce storefronts, including Magento, for back-end fulfillment, listing and transaction management. To use Chirpify, merchants simply click the “list on Twitter” button when drafting an item listing for sale in their e-commerce dashboard. Inbound sales information appears as either an email or as part of the retailer’s back-end system, as well as via a DM on Twitter.

It may be a bit confusing at first, but in the end, the concept is deceptively simple. Chirpify works everywhere Twitter does, which means that its device agnostic.

When I asked the Founder about where Chirpify will be going next, he told me that social commerce adoption has been slow, especially on Facebook. But what really surprises him is that things like flash sales haven’t yet been applied to social commerce and Facebook. So, next the founder says he wants to offer flash sales, time-limited sales, and give brands the option to serve all manner of deals to their customers.

Although he wouldn’t cite specifics, the Chirpify Founder did say he’s in talks with some big brands (potential partners), and more news will be forthcoming. So stay tuned.

For more, check out Chirpify at home here.

While the hand-wringing over the future of journalism, blogging, the nature of conflicts of interest, yada yada, has been deeply interesting (alongside the personal attacks – we all like a good public fight don’t we?), it’s worth recalling that the furore was kicked off by a fairly pertinent point. To whit: Path was uploading user’s address books without their explicit permission.

Yes it was a rare omission by Nick Bilton to not call out the 50 or so other apps that often do this by default. But his essential point remains correct, and it’s kicked off a wave of excellent reporting into which apps behave like this, and why Apple has allowed this to go on for so long.

But while we continue to point the finger at startups with smartphone apps designed to be social, I’d like to remind Silicon Valley about another business which, despite claims to the contrary, is deeply interested in our private affairs, and is unlikely ever to be as contrite as Dave Morin was just recently.

I speak of the sector known as Deep Packet Inspection.

From Redbox and Verizon teaming up to take on Netflix to Connected TV and Netflix's premier of Lillyhammer, offering consumers video content where and when they want it is no longer just a second thought. Serving content across platforms has become essential for publishers and brands that want to grow their audiences and earn more revenue with online video.

Ooyala, the online video provider, today released its fourth quarter review of web video, in which it analyzes the viewing behavior of 100 million monthly unique users. (You can find the full report here.)

As we learned in Q3, the rabid adoption of mobile devices has been leading to increased engagement with online video. Not only that, but connected TVs are really beginning to make waves, Google TV in particular. Ooyala’s report found that video plays on tablets, mobile devices, and connected TVs nearly doubled in the fourth quarter (from Q3).

What’s more, viewers are now twice as likely to compete a video when watching on a tablet or connected TV, as compared to watching video on a desktop. And, unsurprisingly, when viewers plop down on their couch in front of their connected TV, they’re watching four times as many long videos compared to short videos, as videos longer than 10 minutes now account for more than half the hours played on connected TVs.

While the average conversion rate across all devices increased from 35.1 percent in Q3 to 39.6 percent in Q4 (with viewers watching longer on all platforms), it seems that connected TVs saw the biggest growth in Q4, as their viewers proved to be the most engaged of all the platforms, completing videos at a rate of 47 percent (with tablet viewers following close behind at 38 percent.)

What’s more, users of connected TV devices and gaming consoles were 70 percent more likely to watch three-quarters of a video. And, in terms of name brands in connected TVs, Google TV’s share of video plays increased by 91 percent this quarter.

Tablet viewers were the most engaged in Q3, and they certainly remained an attentive audience in Q4, proving to be 45 percent more likely to complete three-quarters of a video than those watching on a desktop. Not only that, but tablet viewers watched 21.9 percent longer per video in Q4 than the prior quarter.

Another interesting tidbit from Ooyala: Though this may not be particularly surprising, Facebook remains a much more active source of online video sharing than Twitter: For every video shared via Twitter in Q4, more than 10 were shared on Facebook.

Image credit: OnlineVideoMarketingTips.com