Google is announcing a big addition to Google Analytics today — Mobile App Analytics.

As with the social media-focused reports launched earlier this year, the interest in mobile analytics is obvious — if anything, it might seem that Google is a little late in chasing these trends. In this case, Product Manager JiaJing Wang says the goal was to create a “holistic app analytics.” While there are other mobile analytics services out there, Wang says none of them really tracks all of the relevant data, so developers end up stitching different services together into a “disparate and taxing experience.”

Wang says Google’s new analytics cover the three main stages of an app’s relationship with users — acquisition and user metrics, engagement, and outcome. When it comes to user acquisition, developers can now track new and active users, and how that breaks down across different app versions, devices, and operating system. On engagement, Google Analytics includes data like usage frequency, engagement flow, and crash reports. Finally, on outcomes, Mobile App Analytics will show conversions (to whatever goal is important to the developer) and in-app purchases.

Google Analytics already included data on mobile traffic, but nothing until now that was specific to app developers, so Wang expects that this could bring the product to a big new audience. One obvious indicator of the change — when users sign-up for Google Analytics, one of the first things they’re going to be asked is whether they want to track a website or a mobile app.

The new mobile data will be available to both iOS and Android app developers, who will get the same reports, with one exception — developers making their apps available through Google Play will be able to track which traffic sources are driving new downloads and conversions. Wang says he wants to provide deeper integration with Google play in the future.

Mobile App Analytics is currently in beta testing, with developers admitted to the program in waves. You can sign-up here. The service should be available to everyone by the end of the summer, Wang says.

The company is also launching a Google Analytics Android app, which brings makes data about both website and mobile apps viewable on smartphones. Wang says the team is “definitely thinking” about releasing an iOS app too.

Nike has been quietly transforming itself from an apparel company to an apparel company that builds sensors into everything… blending man and machine so that we’ll all be able to track our every move and figure out what we’re doing right or wrong on our journey to greater personal fitness.

Path to greater fitness, I suppose (har). Because the private social network has a new update out today, that pairs its mobile-only app with the Nike+ Fuelband so that the device on your wrist can use the device in your pocket to tell your close friends just how active you are each day.

Once you’ve synced Path and the Fuelband iPhone app, you’ll start generating a slick sparkline-style graphic of Fuelband data once a day, that shows when you were active and when you weren’t. Red for resting and green is for high-energy activity. The X axis is time (as illustrated by little top icons for sun, moon, etc.) and the Y axis the amount of “Nike Fuel” you burn (its basic unit of activity). It’s also interactive — you and your friends can click around on the white dots in each graph to see specific highlights, like when somebody walks to work then checks in.

Yes, not everybody wants to share their exercise patterns, or lack thereof, but Path founder Dave Morin tells me that in testing, the company has found that the more you’re measuring and sharing your habits, the more you’re trying to improve them. Small things, like walking to a meeting instead of driving or taking a cab, that will boost your overall activity and help you meet your personal goal at the end of the day.

And for those of you who like to post status updates about your runs on Facebook, this sort of feature will blow your mind.

The concept has actually been on the roadmap since Path’s early days, Morin says, when the company was inspired by a Mary Meeker presentation from a couple years back. It described a mobile-first world — which led to the company’s first iteration as a mobile photo-sharing site — but it also talked about a new world of Internet-connected sensors telling us about everything happening around us.

The company’s big transition last fall to a private social network has made it an especially good fit for this type of integration. Nike may be the only third-party developer building on Path for now, but Morin adds that he’s looking hard at other companies working on sensor-driven products, and says to stay tuned.

Mio made some fairly cool heart-rate watches a few years ago but they required you to place a finger on two little pads while running in order to take the measurements. It was interesting, and when you consider that most other heart-rate watches require a chest strap, fairly unique. However, nobody wanted to touch a little thinger just to get their heart rate.

Enter the Mio Alpha. This new product uses a precise light sensor to sense your heart rate on the go. No straps, no muss, no fuss. It’s pretty ingenious.

I got a chance to sit down with the watch a few days ago and I was really impressed. They’re tooling up right now to start manufacturing them and they will cost $99 when you pre-order through Kickstarter. The watches work by sensing changes in blood volume moving through the skin. It takes a moment to begin sensing but once it’s figured out your heart rate it’s ready to go. A small LED on the top tells you if you’re in the proper heart-rate zone and you can program it for various activity levels.

They’re looking for $100,000 and they’ve already hit $30K so things look good for an on-time arrival. Given that this watch does away with annoying straps and futzing, I’m pretty excited.

Project Page

Craftsvilla, a Mumbai-based startup that wants to become the “Etsy of Asia,” is announcing it has received a $1.5 million in new funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Nexus Venture Partners in India. The new round, closed in April, is an addition to a smaller, seed stage investment back in June 2011.

Like Etsy, Craftsvilla is a large, online marketplace unique handmade and handcrafted products. Currently, there are over 50,000 products from over 1,000 Indian sellers on its site, and it’s shipping to over 20 countries worldwide.

The site was founded in January 2011 by husband and wife team Manoj Gupta and Monica Gupta. Manoj says that they were inspired to create Craftsvilla after travelling to local villages in India and seeing the unique products made there which were not available in urban stores. “We realized there is a huge opportunity to bring all these supplies to global customers through a tech-enabled platform driven on Internet,” says Manoj. “India is a land with amazing diversity and no attempt has been made until now to bring all this diversity on a single platform. Craftsvilla.com is an endeavour by us in that direction.”

However, building an Etsy-type of service in India has a different set of challenges than a similar service would face in the U.S. Manoj explains that India has low penetration of Internet access and less awareness about selling things online in general. “This means that we need to innovate on how to bring all the artisans and designers online,” says Manoj. “We thought the best way is to take the Internet to them.”

To do so, the company set up what it calls “Craftsvilla Studios” in different parts of the country where they now help the local artisans with photo shoots of their products, content writing, uploads and dispatch. Thanks to this process, Craftsvilla is able to bring products online that would have never been online before without the hand-holding services being provided.

When products are sold, Craftsvilla also helps with the shipping process. The artisans send the company the product and the company then packs and ships it for global shipment in order to “ensure a certain level of quality” in the experience. They even tuck in a hand-written “thank you” note and a small free gift with the order. Currently, of the 20+ countries Craftsvilla serves, 25% of its orders are sent to the U.S. and Canada.

And the site is growing in popularity, too. Manoj says that it’s now growing 50% month-over-month in terms of revenue and ships over 5,000 products each month worldwide. They also have a Pinterest and Facebook page.

Currently a 60-person team, with the new funding, Craftsvilla is looking to expand to Indonesia and Thailand next and will be soon announcing its launch in these two countries.

A new chapter today for Rutube, the YouTube of Russia: the user-generated video site, long competing against YouTube in its home market and losing, has redesigned and is now turning itself into more of an aggregator that will host content from Google’s video giant as well as Vimeo, as part of a new content injection that will also include full-length feature films. Rutube has also announced an integration with Facebook that will let users watch videos on Rutube that have been shared on the social network. Similar deals with Facebook’s Russian rival, Vkontakte, and Twitter will be following in the autumn.

The moves are part of a new beta version of the site that Rutube, owned by the Russian conglomerate Gazprom, will also include the addition of premium, branded content — a move that it hopes will increase engagement and page views among its 7.1 million unique monthly users, and help it better compete against YouTube, which has 24.9 million uniques, according to comScore.

All players concerned are going after a market that some have estimated is Europe’s biggest for Internet use, with 53 million users according to figures from GP Bullhound. It also says it’s growing the fastest — currently at 14 percent compared to the European average of six percent. Within that, there is a fast-rising middle class of users, with disposable income to go towards premium content, and other goods sold via online ads.

By tapping into Facebook’s open graph, Rutube users will be able to watch videos on Rutube that have been shared on Facebook, and subsequently share viewed selections with their friends. Vkontakte and Twitter will come on with a similar integration in the autumn. “Further integrations will allow us to become a unifier of all video that one's friends are viewing on social networks,” Rutube’s deputy director general, Alexander Dunaevskiy says.

Rutube is sweetening the pot for Facebook sharing by offering users of the sharing feature free access to Russian feature films and TV programs before their network release. (Today’s release: a musical comedy, Chapiteau-show.)

Alongside these new video offerings, Rutube says it will continue to be a home to user-generated content, which it will now organise into curated channels.

Rutube is sensitive to the idea that its pivot into aggregation — from its original roots as a home for its own user-generated content — will be seen as a pure traffic-play.

“The reason for the pivot is ambition and leveraging social networks and the user graph to provide better recommendations of videos, stuff that people will be more likely to enjoy, not for a lack of traffic,” said Dunaevskiy. “We believe this approach is key to providing our users with an improved experience and to grow the business more aggressively.”

Dunaevskiy says that it chose Facebook as its first partner over Vkontakte, despite the latter being the biggest social network in Russia, because “We believe it is growing quickly and will become the leader in the social space in the near future in Russia.” He adds that Rutube has “a good working relationship with the folks in the Facebook Russia office and have a similar philosophy and approach as Facebook does.”

The Facebook/Rutube relationship has actually extended in another way, too — Rutube chose the same designer as Facebook, the Cuban Council, for its new logo.

For Facebook, any content relationship that helps it grow its Russian business can only help, and the focus on video here is right in line with Facebook’s bigger strategy to offer more content to users and become the platform for curated content — an ambition that also got a boost yesterday from an Olympics streaming deal with the BBC.

“There is a huge amount of interesting videos on the web, and people sometimes get lost amongst such a wide variety of choices,” says Ekatirina Skorobogatova, growth manager of Facebook Russia, in a statement. “If your friends like a video or recommended a video, it is likely that you will like it as well.”

Sites like Facebook and Google have yet to gain ground over local competitors in Russia: Vkontakte has around 60 percent of the market, according to LiveInternet; Yandex has more than 80 percent of all search).

Ironically, in online video, YouTube has run away with the crown: in addition to having more monthly uniques, it’s dwarfing Rutube in pageviews, with YouTube having 1,540 million per month, compared to only 40 million per month for Rutube. To reach parity on numbers like those, Rutube will need all the help it can get.

It’s been a few months since Orbotix's pearlescent smart ball finally started making its way out into the real world, and the team behind it has just announced that another major retailer will be carrying their slightly-pointless gadget.

Move over, Brookstone — the Sphero is now available in Apple's online store and in a handful of their carefully-crafted altars of consumerism.

The Sphero, if you've managed to miss our previous coverage, is a small robotic ball that you can control from your smartphone or tablet. In addition to being able to take the thing for aimless drives around the house, users can fire up (or even develop) apps for the Sphero that turn it into a mobile gaming accessory rather than just a $129 toy.

And really, I imagine that’s where most of the fun will come from down the line. Orbotix is currently criss-crossing the country to drum up developer support for the Sphero, so with any luck the smartphone-controlled-robotic-ball-that-could will only get better with time.

Still, its usefulness is downright questionable, but the pint-sized robo-sphere has managed to please both preschoolers and presidents alike. That’s got to count for something, right?

If this rumor is true – and it certainly sounds true – then HP and other OEMs are about to pull the plug on their own Windows on ARM RT (WART) devices thanks to Microsoft essentially beating them to market with potentially superior hardware. SemiAccurate writes:

You’ll notice a few things there: first, Microsoft expects OEMs to make certain types of hardware at certain times. Remember all those all-in-one touchscreen PCs nobody bought? That was a Microsoft effort that forced OEMs to make at least two touchscreen devices per line. The same thing happened whenever manufacturers tried to build a Windows tablet and the same thing will happen when Windows 8 ships.

Oddly, however, this time Microsoft is doing its own handcuffing, forcing manufacturers to compete against a Platonic ideal of future Microsoft tablets. While OEMs rarely have much spine, this may end up being the straw that broke the HPs back.

There’s been a lot of talk about how mobile video applications are poised to break out and become mainstream over the next few years, as users take advantage of the cameras they have in their pockets and share the videos they shoot with others on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. This has given rise to the whole “Instagram for video” meme, in which app makers compete to be the next billion-dollar company to make sharing beautiful media easy. There’s just one problem — the videos being produced by today’s generation of social mobile video apps just aren’t really that beautiful or compelling.

Directr seeks to change all that, with a mobile app that helps average users to create beautiful videos that their friends will actually want to watch. And to do so, it’s raised a $1.1 million seed round from NextView Ventures, Boston Seed Capital, Advancit Capital, and Initialized Capital, as well as from angels like Thomas Lehrman, Ron Shah, and Joe Caruso.

While Viddy, Socialcam, Klip, and others are chasing the Instagram dream, Directr founders Max Goldman and Eli Schleifer very definitively DO NOT want to be thought of as the Instagram of video. In fact, the whole idea that you can shoot a short, 15-second video, throw a filter on it and call it a day is a bit anathema to them. They believe that videos become compelling because of the story that they tell, not the filters that get added after the fact.

“The challenge is how do you help create something that other people want to watch,” Goldman told me in a phone call explaining their plans. “The idea is to take all the hard parts out of creating a video, and… guiding people through the process of what makes a great movie.”

In short, and without giving too much away, the Directr team is building an app that will help create interesting stories based on videos they shoot with their phones. It will help automate all the editing, titles, and music syncing that typically keeps amateur video enthusiasts from going beyond just uploading a short video to the web.

Schleifer was a Software Engineer at Microsoft for much of the last decade, working in its Mobile and Xbox divisions. But before that, he had a background in visual arts. The birth of his first child led him to re-think how most users are capturing and building stories on their mobile devices. Goldman, meanwhile, was formerly director of product marketing at SuccessFactors. They have a total of six people working on the Directr team now.

The app isn’t quite ready yet — the guys at Directr say they expect it to be released later this summer — but those of you who are interested in trying it out can reserve a username here.

Earlier this month Yahoo! became officially DMARC compliant. That’s supposed to mean your Yahoo! email inbox should be heavily armoured against phishing attacks and spam. The Domain-Based Message Authentication consortium is a group of Silicon Valley companies like Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and PayPal who all pledge to use tools to identify and authenticate an email's sender, and report any issues.

However, in the last 24 hours we’ve started getting reports from readers that, at least for some, Yahoo’s email is filling up with spam. But not the spoofed stuff – these spam emails are coming from within verified accounts.

A few days ago one TechCrunch contact who works in tech said they started receiving spam from their own ‘contacts’. Finally he got some from his wife. He checked all the victims and were all from Yahoo accounts. To double-check he logged-in to his wife’s account, since in Yahoo you can see where the logins came from. The log-ins were from all over the world. In other words, the account had been hacked.

That suggests either that she was unlucky, or that some mail account passwords have been hacked at Yahoo. However, we’ve heard from other Yahoo users who have had the same thing happen. Right now it’s hard to gauge the scale of this problem, and there is no suggestion at this stage that Yahoo Mail has suffered a significant security breach.

Now, normally the spam you get is spoofed from a victim’s account: but spam filters generally recognize the spoof approach and usually do a good job of filtering it.

What is different about what we’ve seen is the spam being sent from someone logged into a victim’s account. Being logged-in when you send emails to contacts bypasses the standard filters.

On Twitter, there is a lot of buzz about this issue. But commenters don’t seem to realise that this is not normal spam, rather that it may well be a full blown hack on the sender’s account, not mere spoofing.

We’ve reached out to Yahoo for comment.

Meanwhile here’s just a taster of what people are saying on Twitter right now.

Google+ Events, Google’s alternative to services like Evite or Facebook’s Events, was announced at this week’s Google I/O conference. And it immediately went viral…but not in good way. You see, Google made a slight miscalculation in terms of the Events’ privacy settings. (Insert joke about Facebook envy.) By default, other people have been able to “invite” you to events, and these automatically showed up on your Calendar – even if you had not yet confirmed that you would be attending.

The result? Some users were getting invited to dozens upon dozens of unwanted events from people they barely knew. In the case of more popular users, they were inundated with hundreds of requests from their wide audience of online friends. The good news is there’s a fix for this in the works, and another which you can implement right now.

It’s too bad that Google+ Events got started on the wrong foot like this, because the service had potential to be useful. One of the nicer features about Google+ Events, in fact, is its ability to integrate with your Google Calendar. It’s not often that Google integrates its services so seamlessly – case in point: those awful widgets on the left side of Gmail for Calendar and Chat. Really? It’s 2012 and we’re still using widgets? But I digress…

However, in the case of Events, Google went just a bit too far with its integrations. Immediately, people began adding others to Google+ Events right and left. Yes, some of it was just to experiment with the service, sometimes it was a joke, other times it was for “marketing purposes.” But yikes, the notifications really started to add up. Google just allowed people to spam each other’s calendars! News flash to Google: our calendars are our own and we should be the ones in control of it.

One of the more high-profile cases was that of popular G+’er Wil Wheaton who made a public stink about the situation, and now reports that Google has responded and will be taking action. According to his post, Google+ SVP Vic Gundotra replied to Wheaton’s complaints, saying:

We are doing exactly what you requested. We should have contemplated and anticipated how people would abuse this and how painful this could be for celebrities with large followings.

We have pushed a number of fixes yesterday (some were bug fixes that showed up at scale). Expect more fixes today. Sorry for the trouble Will.

There has been some confusion on who can add you to an event. Wheaton says, quote: “To be clear: People who I have in a circle can send me an event. People who have me in a circle, but who are not circled by me, can not.” Others say they have been “relentlessly spammed by strangers.” Here’s an example of some really awful event spam. (Notice the spammer had invited Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Linus Torvalds!)

In the meantime, you can take matters into your own hands. Head into your Calendar settings, and turn “Show event’s you’ve declined” to “No,” then switch the “Automatically add invitations to my calendar” setting from “Yes” to “No, only show events to which I’ve responded.” That will stop the influx until the changes Google is promising roll out to everyone.

Image credit, event pages: Wheaton’s G+, Lisa Bimmerz’s G+; event spam: Scott Beale

Some may think the end is nigh for email — with services like Facebook coming to replace it as a one-stop communications hub for consumers — but going by the numbers out today from SendGrid, the email delivery company, thoughts like that may be a bit premature.

The company — which now works with 60,000 businesses, including buzzy brands like foursquare, Pinterest, Airbnb, Twilio, Spotify and Pandora to send out email communications to their users — says that it has now sent 45 billion emails since opening for business in 2009 — and use is accelerating. Twenty billion of those emails were sent in 2012 alone — a sign that no matter what innovations are coming to the web and mobile, many users (and companies) are still looking to email as a solid touchpoint.

Currently, SendGrid is working at a rate of sending 3 billion emails per month, and 90,000 per minute (my inbox and I are crying as we write this), covering such actions as signups, password changes, check-ins, notifications and follower requests.

There is some growing competition in the space, in the form of Amazon’s Simple Email Service and PostMark.

To combat that, SendGrid is looking to scale itself up as fast as possible: in January it raised $21 million in its bid to outpace the others, with total funding around $38 million.

It has recently expanded its operations to offices in San Francisco, New York, Anaheim and Germany, in addition to its base in Boulder, Colorado. And it says employee headcount is up by 70 percent this year (100 employees total), with its customer base up by 50 percent, according to Robert Phillips, VP of marketing for the company.

Its business model rests on the fact that before SendGrid existed, tech companies had to build their own custom email systems from scratch, which was expensive, time consuming and difficult, notes Phillips. SendGrid’s cloud-based service offers and API that lets developers integrate the email directly into their services — costing a “fraction” of a custom build.

And the email portion of a site is more important than you might initially think. Social networking sites like Twitter and Pinterest have a big pull in their own rights because of the content draw and the fact that this content is constantly changing. But if you’re a user that has pulled away from going there regularly, an email can serve as a reminder of the service and your activity in it — I’ve noticed, for example, Twitter starting to send out a weekly update in the last couple of months that notes my new followers and other activity on the site. I’m a big fan of Twitter, so perhaps don’t need the updates, but those emails are great for another site that does the same thing, Pinterest, which I hardly ever visit, but may be more likely to as a result of their weekly updated emails.

SendGrid says that web applications are sending around 631,000 emails every month, with half of them coming from user actions triggering email alerts — meaning not all of the email that is getting sent out there is being pushed by companies, but requested by the users, as well.

The cost to acquire users for mobile apps declined last month as ad networks and other channels scrambled to find a replacement for UDIDs, according to Fiksu.

Unique device ID numbers were a way that Apple used to tag users by their devices. This was a foolproof way to make sure networks were targeting the same users as they moved from app to app, but it raised privacy concerns because UDIDs couldn’t be cleared from a device. Apple said they would deprecate them and didn’t unveil a replacement until earlier this month.

What that has meant is that targeting and marketing spending has become far less efficient on mobile platforms over the past few months. Fiksu said the cost to acquire a “loyal user,” or one that opens an app three times fell to $1.26 in May, from $1.46 the previous month. Anecdotally, app marketers also tell me it’s just much harder to effectively get downloads from multiple networks right now.

At the same time, the number of downloads for the top 200 free U.S. iPhone apps rose to 4.54 million daily downloads in May, from 4.23 million in April.

“Amid concern around Apple's speculated deprecation of UDID, compounded by a host of confusing alternative UDID-less tracking technologies, we observed inertia,” said Fiksu’s CEO Micah Adler. ”It appears that brands' caution may have contributed to the dip in acquisition costs."

This may change back later this fall with iOS6. Apple said it is allowing new unique identifiers for advertising, that will help marketers target but also give users privacy, since they can clear these ID numbers from their devices.

Crowdfunding has become a big industry, as people are increasingly seeking ways to finance new creative projects and technology ideas. But one crowdfunding startup is focusing more on helping people raise money for personal needs, and is starting to process some serious funding in the meantime.

That startup, called GoFundMe, was actually founded in 2008, long before Kickstarter made it big and around the same time that IndieGoGo first hit the scene. But even though it’s less well known than those others, it’s still the number three crowdfunding site in the world, based on its current traffic… And it’s still entirely bootstrapped.

GoFundMe might not have the cachet of the traffic of some of the other crowdfunding platforms, but it’s also going for a different demographic and a different use case. While Kickstarter is quickly becoming a place for creatives to fund new independent films or albums, as well as a place for startups to fund their hardware ambitions, GoFundMe continues to operate mostly as a place where users can ask friends and family to help fund major life events.

So for instance, users can solicit funds when they’re planning a major trip overseas, or if they’ve gotten into a car accident and don’t have insurance. Maybe they lost their job and are in need of some rent money. Or maybe they’re raising money for their local youth sports league. You know, that sort of thing. Another difference between GoFundMe and other platforms is that users keep all the cash they pull in, without having to worry about time limits for campaigns that are set up or hitting a minimum funding requirement.

Today, campaigns that raise money for medical funds make up about 17 percent of all user activity. Campaigns for school tuition, which make up 11 percent of activity, and those for volunteer trips, at 10 percent, round out the top three use cases.

While it has gotten a slow start relative to some other platforms, GoFundMe has seen 20 percent growth month-over-month since last October. It charges a 5 percent fee for its campaigns and last month pulled in more than $2 million. Based on its current growth trajectory, GoFundMe expects to raise more than $37 million in for 2012.

Of course, crowdfunding has become extremely popular over the past year or so. When asked why GoFundMe and others are seeing such tremendous growth lately, CEO Brad Damphousse told me it was mainly due to the maturation of payment processing — allowing individual users to accept credit card payments — as well as social platforms like Facebook, which tie campaigns to identity and link them to people users know.

GoFundMe was founded in San Diego, Calif., and currently has just four employees, having never taken any funding. The site currently operates in the U.S., Canada, Australia, U.K. and all European Union countries that use the Euro as their local currency.

For whatever reason, the Nexus 7 tablet lacks a rear-facing camera. This makes Google’s tablet incompatible with many Android camera apps including Instagram, a fact Asus recently confirmed to The Inquirer. According to Tim Smalley, digital marketing manager at Asus, Google Play will throw an error if an owner tries to add the app to their Nexus 7.

This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. The Nexus 7 only features a front-facing 1.2MP camera primarily designed for video chatting and not taking pictures. The rear facing camera was probably axed as a cost-cutting measure. After all the Nexus 7 is only $200 but still manages to sport a Tegra 3 SoC and a 7-inch screen with an impressive 1280 x 800 resolution.

There’s probably an argument to be made that Instagram could default to the front-facing camera. But then again, this incompatibility is probably best for the human race. Taking pictures with tablets is dumb.

After yesterday’s $400 million share buyback, some more news today from our owners, AOL: it’s reorganizing into three operating units, plus a separate one for corporate support of all three:  they will be called AOL Membership, Brand Group (which includes content like TechCrunch and Huffington Post), and the Advertising.com Group.

Tim Armstrong, the CEO, has also appointed Artie Minson to the role of Chief Operating Officer overseeing the three operating units. Before this, he had been the CFO, a position where he already had some control over operations, for example leading its legacy dial-up business.

This will be seen as a reward for Minson, who has been picking up increasing operations under his control in the last several months (they included the company’s mobile, search and content businesses as well), and under Minson, “our trends in these areas of our business have significantly improved,” writes Armstrong. The COO appointment is effective immediately, but Minson will continue on as CFO too until a replacement is found; the company is actively recruiting now.

Today’s is the latest shuffle at AOL, which last reorganized in December into a dial-up/online services division; a local business; media; and advertising divisions.

In some ways, today’s pared-down reorganization may speak to attempts at a more simplified approach to the business as well:

AOL Membership is all about loyal AOL users, whether paying or free. It makes sense for them to live together, as AOL thinks of more ways of upselling its most loyal users to spend a bit more time and money with them.

Content and brands, meanwhile, looks like it will be giving a bit more autonomy to individual sites to sort out their profitability as they see fit. Again, this makes great sense because no one wants to be part of a cookie-cutter, assembly line, and I suspect fewer would want to engage with such content, as well.

Advertising.com, will be an interesting one to watch. This is the space where AOL is pinning a lot of hope for revenue growth — online ads not just on its own properties but throughout the web — but it’s also hugely challenged with players like Google and Facebook commanding huge leads on overall online ad revenue share. There is a possible future in technology development and getting an edge on other companies that way.

As you can see in the memo below, Patch and other previously-categorized local businesses like MapQuest, and initiatives like mobile content, are not specifically mentioned in the new plan. We’ve written back to Tim Armstrong to ask about this, and whether there are any asset sales or closures planned as a result of this most recent reorg.

Ultimately, AOL is trying to balance Armstrong’s long-term fightback strategy, based around a strong content business and sophisticated display advertising around that, with activist shareholders who want to see more decisive and short-term actions to turn the company’s business around.

Originally AOL thrived in the early days of the internet with a robust dial-up business. More recently, and post a merger and subsequent spinoff from Time Warner, it has pivoted into a more challenged content business based around online advertising as a revenue generator (with significant dial-up revenue, remarkably, still thrown in).

Armstrong had a vote of confidence earlier this month, when shareholders elected to keep the current board. Starboard Value, the most outspoken shareholder critics of AOL’s strategy, had wanted to replace three people.

“We all agree that AOL is undervalued. We also all agree that AOL can achieve substantial revenue growth and far more profitability. The challenge is how to get that accomplished,” Starboard’s CEO Jeffrey Smith said in remarks at the shareholder meeting — echoing the basic complaints Starboard has had for months now. Some of their suggestions for how to achieve that — like selling patents — have been implemented; others — like selling off the costly content business — have not. Yet. Starboard is the fifth-largest shareholder in AOL and has a 5.3% stake in the company.

The full memo from CEO Tim Armstrong is below.

AOLers –

As we approach the halfway point for 2012, we are well positioned to reach a huge milestone in the turnaround of our company – returning to growth in 2013. AOL has faced and met a gauntlet of challenges and we will continue to take aggressive operational steps forward during the second half of 2012 against our strategy.

As we have discussed over the last several months, we are building AOL into "The Brand Company". We will continue to unleash the power and talent within each of our brands to pursue the global consumer and business disruption by digital services. Brands are at the center of our company and we are structuring our talent and organization around our brands. Our brand strategy not only touches the brands we own, it extends to helping the world's best content and advertising brands by sharing our technology and monetization with them.

During the many meetings we had last week in Cannes, France for the advertising festival, it was a powerful reminder that our brands have deep opportunities in all major categories of consumer and commercial usage. While AOL is a global brand, we now have the opportunity to build other global brands and to go deeper into our strategy of serving influential audiences. A highlight at Cannes was the reaction to Huff Post Live (that Arianna and Roy shared on stage at Cannes), some of the innovative follow-up from AOL Autos, TechCrunch and Engadget's growing global footprint, the progress of the Ad.com platform, and the partner interest in Patch.

To kick-off the second half of 2012, today, the company is announcing the plan to organize into three operating groups and a corporate group that supports those three operating units. The operating units will be AOL Membership, Brand Group, and the Advertising.com Group. The goals of organizing around these operating units are the following:

1. Build and distribute the world’s best digital brands (B2C and B2B)

2. Center our measurement, resource allocation, and drive to profitability around brands

3. Focus our technology and product development on building brand platforms

4. Improve our O&O and network advertising and commerce revenue

5. Go faster, unleash talent, and have fun

Supporting the three operating units of our business will be a shared technology and sales platform, as well as AOL corporate functions. As a company and a culture, brands (including the AOL brand) will be the central focus and measurement point for us and we will continue to move the supporting resources closer to the brands. We want our brands to be driven by leaders who will achieve an even greater focus on our consumer experiences while also driving increased accountability, financial performance, and execution.

Here is a deeper look at the operating units:

• The AOL Membership Group will house the businesses that serve AOL account holders – our free and paid members. From AOL.com to AOL Mail to our consumer products that our users rely on, the AOL Membership group will be focused on delivering world-class experiences to our loyal users who rely on these AOL products and properties everyday.
• The Content Brand Group will house our portfolio of distinct and unique content and service brands. We have a valuable portfolio of world-class content brands, and we want each of these brands to have distinct plans for innovation and profitable growth. Our brand portfolio delivers unique content experiences to their audiences daily, and the leaders in this operating unit will be laser-focused on driving profitable brands that serve real consumer needs.
• The Advertising.com Group will house our B2B services and network businesses (the platforms we provide to our partners). The Advertising.com Group had our strongest revenue growth for the past couple of quarters and the product innovation and scale we are driving for our partners both on the publisher and advertiser side demonstrate that the Advertising.com Group is positioned for continued growth and acceleration of their business.

As part of our organizational structure around brands, we are announcing today that Artie Minson will be promoted to take on the role of Chief Operating Officer, a critical new leadership position at our company. In this role, Artie will oversee our three operating units and coordinate a cohesive operating model to deliver strong P&L performance across all three operating groups.

Artie's new role as COO is designed to push continued improvements in the operation and performance of our brands. Artie is a world-class leader and proven operator who has played a key partnership role with me over the last three years at AOL. Artie has garnered an impressive list of financial and operating accomplishments. He has significantly improved our balance sheet, cost structure and tax profile, helped unlock significant value for shareholders via asset sales at great prices. Artie has also led a number of acquisitions which have been and will continue to be drivers of future growth. He has played and will continue to play a critical role in our capital allocation process as we continue to ensure that our resources are being allocated to the areas where we see the greatest opportunities for returns for our consumers and customers. In addition to his CFO responsibilities, Artie has also taken on a significant operating role in the company as he has been overseeing our subscription, search, mail, mobile and, most recently, AOL content operations and our trends in these areas of our business have significantly improved during this time period. As we move to a segmented approach to operating the business, Artie has already been working with the senior leadership on plans to further optimize our operations.

Artie will become COO effective immediately and will continue as CFO while we progress with an external search for a new CFO, reporting to me. We have engaged one of the top CFO recruiters in the country, Peter Crist, and we have a list of world-class candidates we are interviewing for the position.

We are also promoting Maureen Sullivan to the role of leading a newly created Women's Content and Lifestyle Brands group within the Content Brands operating unit. This team will develop and launch brands that serve women – one of our most important audiences in our 80/80/80 focus – by delivering captivating experiences across the style, food, shelter, and lifestyle categories. Maureen is already engaged in building out a portfolio of women's properties, including planning new experiences for Stylelist, Stylelist Home and KitchenDaily, with the goal of attracting new consumers to our brand offerings and enabling custom solutions for our advertisers trying to reach our valuable female audience.

Throughout her career, including her time at Google, Maureen has expertly driven brands forward – including understanding how to help partners drive their brands successfully. In her three years at AOL, Maureen has been the architect of our AOL brand reinvention, and she and her team have been widely recognized for the game-changing work they have done on our AOL brand identity and creative consumer campaigns. Almost a year ago, we asked Maureen to take on an additional responsibility in launching new brands for the company targeted at the women's space as part of our 80/80/80 strategy. Under that charter, Maureen launched MAKERS.com for AOL during Q1, and now MAKERS is one of our most successful and profitable brands in only its first few months. Creating powerful brands that are successful businesses is something we know Maureen will lead expertly for us in this new role in the very important women's content space.

We have engaged Spencer Stuart to backfill for Maureen's current role and she will continue to work on the AOL Brand through Q3 as we launch a continued set of creative work around the comeback of the company and an AOL Brand campaign targeted to consumers.

As part of our effort to align the corporate areas to support our brands, we are also broadening Julie Jacobs' role. Currently overseeing Legal, Corporate Services, and Mergers & Acquisitions, Julie's remit will now grow to include Business Development. Drawing on her strong commercial acumen, expert partnership skills, her extensive deal experience, and some 10 years immersed in the AOL business, Julie was the primary architect of the patent transaction with Microsoft, generating more than $1 billion in value for the company. Julie's incredible track record of leadership and execution will prove incredibly valuable in this expansion of her responsibilities. Julie will be building a full business process around our current and future investments and partnerships that will span both Business Development and M&A.

The company is already operating within "The Brand Company" structure. All AOL brands will be presenting their Q3/Q4 strategy and product roadmaps on July 2nd and we will publish the Q3/Q4 commitments next week. Earlier this week we reviewed all of the engineering allocations across the company and I will be working directly with Curtis Brown to optimize any allocation areas in technology to match the business strategy and resource needs. The sales team has had major improvements in the core operations and data process during Q2 around our brands and we will continue deep improvements to sales during Q3. Technology and sales will continue to report to me and we will continue to improve the leverage of these teams across the company.

Our brands provide the news, information, and services that improve peoples' lives. Our brands are also are the source of sustainable long-term growth for our consumers, customers, employees, and investors. We are organized and ready for the 2nd half of 2012 and we will continue pressing forward aggressively to accelerate our growth across our businesses. Looking forward to seeing you all live shortly during our Global Company Meeting at 12pm ET today.

Go AOL! – TA

Last week we were alerted to an interesting tweak that had appeared in the Apple App Store: searches for apps were suddenly ranking results higher by user ratings and app descriptions, rather than the names of the apps themselves. Today, one developer says he’s started to notice another change: Apple is now putting a bigger emphasis on keywords plus names.

Tomasz Kolinko, a developer and one of the founders for App Store analysts Appcod.es, says that he discovered the change because his own app, Love Letter Writing, had “advice” in the keywords and hadn’t been showing up in a search for “writing advice”. Today, they noticed that it has come back.

This has some impact on more popular apps as well, he notes in a blog post: “Instagram Camera” now has Instagram as its top result — although he points out to me that Instagram just pushed through an update, where they most likely tweaked their keywords anyway. Back on his app, “writing advice” now gives you the Love Letter Writer app as the top choice. “So do other searches we’ve tested.”

We reached out to Matthäus Krzykowski, co-founder of app search and data company Xyologic, to get his reaction, and he’s confirmed what Kolinko has found: “The Appcod.es guys are right, things are back to ‘normal,’” he told me in an email.

He believes that we may see more of these small changes as Apple continues to tinker with the concept of search and discovery in a store that is now teetering at more than 850,000 approved apps, with over 600,000 active (Appsfire’s founder Ouriel Ohayon notes it’s actually more like 650,000). “It’s hard to read Apple’s cards, of course. However we are not surprised to see Apple tweaking their algorithms. App Discovery on iOS, while still better than Google’s, continues to decrease,” Krzykowski says. “Less and less new apps and developers benefit from the current approach each month. They clearly know they need to tackle this and we are expecting them to continue to tweak their algorithm and test things out.”

“The change seems not that drastic, just a couple of apps appearing back on the search results. I doubt most iOS users would notice the change,” he notes. “It is important for the developers, though. Last week plenty of iOS devs were pushing the updates to fix their keywords, because many of them stopped appearing on the search result list. Now it seems it that the most important SEO rule is not there.”

While Kolinko agrees with Krzykowski’s assessment that this shows Apple is still ironing out the details of the search — possibly integrating elements from its Chomp acquisition, possibly not — he also points out another issue with these changes. “After months (or years) of the search being very, very stable, Apple now does three changes” — there was another minor change around Wednesday — “within a week. Is it a new modus operandi, or are they just ironing out the details, and will settle with the new algorithm?”

An algorithm in flux is bad news for developers who have up to now relied on SEO to position their apps. “In the past, you had a nice search position, and it was like a good real estate. You just profited from it. If Apple will now change the search more often, developers won’t feel as secure from now on.”

[He does point out that means good news for companies like Appcod.es because developers will need to turn to other methods to track these things.]

Kolinko laid out a useful SlideShare on how the changes are working, with a little update at the beginning for the changes from today, which we’ve embedded here.

This is a guest post by Mehrunisa Qayyum, a consultant on the Middle East / North Africa region, founder of PitaPolicy and Huffington Post Blogger.

“Here's a mobile app that rates the restaurant/bar/club based on the how many attractive women are there,” explained an Arab Net Summit attendee to me in a Hamraa neighborhood hotspot of Beirut. I had to contain myself. Here I was in Lebanon, attending the Arab Net conference, and trying to challenge another blogger's belief that innovation in Arab countries is limited to localizing the application of existing startups. Clones, in other words. And the conversation had shifted from “who's hot” rather than "what's hot”.

In any case, those arguing that the Arab region can’t innovate may have a case, if you believe the reports that is. A 55 country study reviewing technology & innovation released in early March by the Kauffman Foundation of Entrepreneurship did not mention a single Arab country. Only two came from the MENA region: Turkey and Israel.

But let's put the non-Arab countries in MENA to the side for a moment. Instead, let's refocus on reviewing the three factors that jumpstart technology entrepreneurship and innovation: 1) talent; 2) people networks, and 3) funding.

Factors #1 & #2: Talent and People

Talent and great people networks exist in many MENA countries, as was evidenced by the debate by Arab Technology CEOs speaking at the Arab Net Conference. Indeed, Arab Net is a real-life example of this. Arab Net Summit, founded by Omar Christidis, holds technology entrepreneur competitions on both the individual and business level. For example, Qordoba's online program to create Arabic content online, beat nine other startups–each representing different interests ranging from online gaming to educational missions.

From March 27th to 31st, I met with CEOs and business managers from Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the US – many of whom argued that many Western countries overlook innovation here. Those who criticize the state of innovation in the broader Middle East & North Africa (MENA) region tend to label the technology developments they see as ‘local imitations’. On the downside, the term 'imitation' might downplay an opportunity for non-Arabs to invest in the Arabian technology sector.

But, there is an upside: localizing the applications can be a good ‘first step’ business. Good or bad, as Rabea Ataya, CEO of Bayt.com, tells me, "this is the first step towards developing innovative technologies that may be exported globally." So, the clones may be first, but the innovation tech companies should follow.

Factor #3: Funding

Funding for tech startups is also available in many Arab countries, but linking that with the networks of people presents the biggest challenge.

Take the example of Osama Natto, who is the Founder of Innovative Business Solutions. As a Saudi national, he has made it his business to identify technology innovators and link them to financial capital.

In addition, Arab governments can sometimes easily step in with simple measures. Natto says the Saudi Kingdom has budgeted for "technology cities" where the "Bader" initiative meets with King Abdullah University of Science & Technology and provides seed funding to startups.

Ataya, who represents the hundreds in his generation that traveled abroad for university education, says that the mass exodus for better educational opportunities is no longer necessary. Human capital, coupled with intellectual capital is no longer a challenge in countries like Lebanon, Jordan or Egypt. An oil poor, but people rich country, like Jordan, retains its talent by setting up local technology training facilities. Jordan's Faculty of Engineering & Technology Training Office is a prime example of a public-private partnership in the tech sector. As a result, Jordan's public-private partnership plan combines two of our three factors: talent and people networks.

What comes after the clones?

It’s true that there will be plenty of clones in the next few years. But what happens after that? It’s still hard to pinpoint the magic number of startups that need to exist in Arab countries that allow it to become seen as more like the "Silicon Valley" of MENA. Each country varies by population size, local investment trajectory and government regulation. But as George ElKhabbaz, Head of Digital Planning at Born Interactive (Lebanon), Ziad Matar Head of Middle East & Central Asia at Qualcomm (UAE), and Rabea Ataya (Lebanon) argue: we are already there in Lebanon. In fact, Ossama Natto believes that Saudi Arabia is positioning itself to take the lead in facilitating innovation by developing technology clusters.

"They're not comfortable because they don't understand the (technology) industry," says El Khabaz. He shared a local example of how a small Arab based company had to go abroad to grow. Foreign direct investment is government driven. Woopra is a company that developed analytics that had to move to the United States because they could not obtain funding locally in Lebanon.

Israel presents a model where public-private partnerships between governments and business succeed in the technology sector. Israel views technology advances as a national interest. However, Arab governments do not engage the technology sector in this way. As El Khabaz says about Lebanon, "our government should look at this as a primary model." Look at Israel's telecommunications sector and defense – they collaborate.

A country with less financial resources, like Jordan, is trying out the public-private partnership model to invest in its local talent. Jordan's Ministry of Information and Communication Technology (MoICT) implemented a partnership between MoICT and UNESCO Cairo (UCO) to train Jordanian government employees. Who knows? Maybe with additional training, Jordanian government employees will gain the confidence to develop an idea and risk into a private venture? Unfortunately it’s too early to tell.

That might explain why there were many Jordanian tech entrepreneurs competing for startup prizes. In fact, Amman, Jordan ranks in the top 10 cities of the world to launch a tech startup, according to Finaventures.

El Khabaz says” "If Arab and other MENA governments could just give even 10 percent financing," then this would signal to local private investors to financially support Arab innovation. The 10 percent financing also sends a signal to the small to medium enterprises, which have become a key focus in development plans post Arab uprisings.

But back to the hot app story. The designer I was chatting to may well do ok with his find the "hottest people" app. The question is, where’s the sustainability going to come from Arab innovators?

The answer is that where there is talent, there is innovation. And Arabia has plenty of talent.

A while back we wrote about a flaw in Groupon’s email link encryption, which revealed the emails of some Groupon users when “addx” was added into a Google search of Groupon’s site. We’ve been alerted that is still happening, with about 170 emails coming up when we searched (last time around it was less than 80).

When this last happened, Groupon director of engineering Shinji Kuwayama told us that the emails were made public because some subscribers had “pasted their deals into publicly-crawlable pages around the Web,” but also that it was working on a solution to exclude those results. So why these are appearing now is unclear. We’re contacting Groupon to see if there is an explanation.

To put this in one kind of perspective, the number of emails here is a very small percentage of Groupon’s overall active customer base, reported as 36.9 million users its last quarterly results in May. The company’s email subscriber list will number in the hundreds of millions.

On the other hand, not everyone wants their browsing or purchasing histories, linked to their email addresses, made public. Even with that small number, it’s bad privacy PR for Groupon, which has ambitions to go beyond the daily deal to become a wider e-commerce platform.

From what I’ve seen so far, the search results (found by entering allinurl: addx site:groupon.com in a Google search) all appear to be from deals that expired in 2011 and earlier. That might sound out of date, but our tipster, Robby Delaware, noted to us that even starting simple searches on those addresses can lead to more information about those users. Delaware has also used Twitter to alert Groupon’s Andrew Mason about the issue. The email leak has also been noted on a GetSatisfaction page for Groupon.

Also: this seems to be limited to Google searches; entering the same search string into Bing and Topsy produce no results.

Google I/O is in full swing, and stories have been pouring out at a fairly steady pace: Tony Stark Sergey finally demoed Google Glass, Google Drive passed 10 million users and is available on iOS, and we all got a look at Jelly Bean — to name a few.

Yet, overshadowed and buried in lengthy liveblogs is one piece of news that deserves some more attention — and it’s all about NFC. During yesterday’s keynote, Hugo Barra, the director of Android product management, revealed that Google is now shipping 1 million NFC-enabled Android devices every week. That’s pretty significant.

For some context, the company said that 400 million Android devices have now been activated, with activations currently flying in at a rate of 1 million per day. This means that phones with NFC built in represent nearly 15 percent of all new Android devices.

As a result, Android Beam, which was introduced with Ice Cream Sandwich, is getting some cool new features, including the ability to share video by way of NFC as well as the chance to pair phones to other devices just by tapping it. That’s pretty big, as it seems that, in spite of the arguments against NFC, the technology seems to be making it into a not-so-insignificant number of devices people buy every day.

On the flip side, as Jay (and many other experts) remind us that, media chatter notwithstanding, NFC technology likely isn’t on the brink of ubiquity — that in fact it’s still four or five years from reaching critical mass.

This has been the general consensus for awhile now, and probably still holds. Unfortunately, despite great effort to the contrary, I can’t see into the future. However, it’s probably safe to say that Google’s disclosure is a prime indication that things could be changing far more rapidly than many had expected.

After all, Nokia recently launched its first Windows-based NFC phone, along with Orange, and Foursquare added NFC support to its Android app, to name a few recent examples.

But the tipping point for NFC may be on an accelerated timeline if, on top of Google’s NFC Android shipments, the recent rumors swirling around Apple’s plans for the iPhone 5 prove to be true. 9To5Mac reported earlier this week that it had managed to get its hands on some iPhone 5 prototypes, which apparently reveal that the new phone will include an NFC chip and antenna.

Obviously, as 9To5 points out, the implications of this would be pretty huge, setting Apple up to launch its own mobile payment competitor to Google Wallet and Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8 feature and give iOS users an easy way to share files between devices.

If come October, when Apple is expected to reveal the new iPhone 5, it has NFC built-in, and Google continues shipping NFC-enabled Android phones at its current rate, that means that the major phones consumers will be buying will have this technology. As Jim Peters told 9To5, retailers might want to get ready.

Image Credit: Robupupu

The team behind SwipeGood first stepped on the tech scene back in November 2010, when they launched their software platform for enabling people to donate small amounts of money to charity with each purchase they made.

For a while, things after that went pretty well. In early 2011 SwipeGood graduated from the winter class of top-tier startup incubator program Y Combinator, and it went on to land $500,000 in seed funding from a reputable group of angel investors. But in the months following, the company ran into a problem — it found that it couldn’t truly compete and grow the business, largely because it lacked the kind of sales force it would need to play in the big leagues. And that led co-founder and CEO Steli Efti and his co-founders Thomas Steinacher and Anthony Nemitz to an “a-ha” moment of sorts.

“The more big customers came on board, the worse the conversion numbers worked out at the rate we were going. To have it really make sense and be sustainable, we would have to build an internal sales force, which was beyond our means. We said, wait a minute: If this is a challenge that we’ve had, and other small companies we know that are enterprise business startups are having it too, maybe we should be working on tackling this.”

So nine months ago, SwipeGood quietly pivoted its focus to start working on just that, and Elastic was born. Elastic is a “sales-as-a-service” platform that provides both software and manpower that lets startups outsource their sales functions on demand. Efti sums it up thusly:

“We have a tech component and a sales component. We’ve built a sales communication platform that’s sort of our secret sauce, and that’s what our sales people use. The next part is the services business, where we let startups to essentially rent sales people in the cloud.”

Elastic has been received pretty well. “We’ve closed more than 300 deals for 10 different startups,” Efti said, noting that this has meant “millions” in dollars in top-line new sales for its clients. The team has grown from its 3 co-founders to a staff of 15, equally divided between “hackers” who build the company’s software platform and “hustlers” who help with the human-powered sales aspect. The headcount growth has been purely from Elastic’s own reinvested revenues (it takes a commission on the sales it helps companies generate) and Efti is looking to double the staff over the coming months. Elastic has started to field interest from venture capital firms looking to provide funding, Efti says, but for now the company is focusing on the business.

Elastic’s vision is ambitious but certainly worthwhile. Essentially, it aims to be the sales version of LiveOps, which provides a platform for businesses to outsource their customer service operations. “A startup should never again fail because of a lack of sales expertise. We work with startups that have great technology and cutting edge products but don’t have the know-how or capabilities to put a big sales force out on the streets to sell it.” That’s something that it seems many Silicon Valley firms could find a use for — so it’ll be interesting to see if Elastic will be the one to really deliver on the challenge.