Around the globe, mobile technology is reshaping lives. For the affluent, the smartphone and the tablet have emerged as the dominant means of communication. The introduction of the iPhone six years ago forever changed what was imagined possible, and Apple now faces stiff competition from Google’s Android and such would-be rivals as Microsoft and Mozilla. On the device side, the pioneers of computing are pitted against traditional phone makers as well as startups that have emerged in the smartphone era. Meanwhile, in other parts of the world, the rise of sub-$100 smartphones means that billions more will have their first connection to the Internet. And the basic cellphone not only delivers communication but also provides a channel for previously unavailable information about health care, weather and crops.

Like the signature D: All Things Digital event, D: Dive Into Mobile, running today and tomorrow, pointedly avoids the usual slides and speeches, instead spotlighting candid interviews with an array of the most interesting and outspoken execs in the business.

The first D: Dive Into Mobile event, held in 2010, explored the dawn of the smartphone era. This year’s Global Edition will look at the broader impact mobile technology is having on how day-to-day life is carried on across the world. This event was originally slated for last October, but Hurricane Sandy forced a sudden change in plans. We are immensely grateful to all of the speakers, sponsors and attendees who stuck by us. We promise that things will be even better than what we originally had planned for last fall.

D: All Things Digital founders Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher will spend time in the red chairs, to be sure. But they have graciously allowed much of the conference programming to be crafted by the two of us, Ina Fried and Liz Gannes, who spend much of our time reporting on and writing about the world of mobile. Together with Walt, Kara and the growing AllThingsD staff, we look forward to bringing you the stories and strategies behind this global mobile shift. Over the next two days, you’ll hear from some of the biggest names in mobile technology. Fresh from his travels to North Korea and beyond, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt will be able to address Google’s wide-ranging mobile efforts, from Android and Chrome to AdMob and YouTube. Long dominant on the desktop, Microsoft and Intel have each had their own struggles in mobile. Intel’s Mike Bell and Microsoft’s Terry Myerson will appear separately to make the case why their company shouldn’t be counted out.

Facebook’s newly minted Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer will address the challenge — one that’s now closely watched by Wall Street — of following the migration of his company’s users from Web to mobile. Meanwhile, browser maker Mozilla is trying to shake up the phone market like it did the Web browser market, by introducing an open alternative to dominant operating systems. You will also hear from a range of speakers who will talk firsthand about how mobile is changing the lives of the young, the poor and those in crisis. We’ve invited Nancy Lublin from the teen activism organization DoSomething.org, along with Juliana Rotich, the Kenyan founder of open source crisis-information service Ushahidi.

Our Global Voices segment will give a place onstage to individuals whose lives have been personally transformed by mobile technology. This is a new project for D that aims to share some of our business and tech spotlight with the real-world people who are the reason all this technology is created in the first place.

And, of course, D: Dive Into Mobile will bring together some of the smartest people in the industry — in the audience. Our hope is that the talks onstage will be the start of a dialogue that continues into the breaks, over the meals, and long after the red chairs have been hauled away.

Carlos Domingo

While it was heartbreaking to have to postpone the conference due to Hurricane Sandy, we’ve been using the extra time to add a number of additional speakers and demos to cover even more ground for the rescheduled event, set for April 15 and 16 in New York.

Continuing our pledge to make this the global edition of the conference, we’re adding executives from two international carriers: Carlos Domingo of Telefonica and Michael Hecker of Mobile TeleSystems (MTS), the largest carrier in Russia.

Michael Hecker

Domingo has been spearheading a number of initiatives for the Spain-based carrier, most recently leading its efforts around Firefox OS. Hecker, as vice president of strategy, M&A and corporate development, has overseen an aggressive acquisition spree that has helped MTS grow beyond just providing mobile access and become one of the leading telecommunications companies in the region.

Hecker and Domingo join executives from Brazil, China and Israel, among other locales, as well as top executives from Microsoft, Intel, Google, Facebook and Twitter — all part of a jam-packed lineup for the conference.

Mollie Spilman

Of course, what good is all this mobile stuff if you can’t make some money? So we’re also adding two prominent figures in mobile advertising: Google’s Jason Spero and Milllennial Media’s Mollie Spilman.

Jason Spero

Spero came to the search giant via AdMob and is now Google’s head of global mobile solutions (which means mobile ads). Spilman is Millennial’s EVP of North America, where she is responsible for leading the sales and operations, marketing and business development efforts; previously, she was CMO of Yahoo.

We’ll also have a new lineup of demos, as well as a revamped array of Global Voices — tales from around the world about people whose lives are being transformed through mobile technology.

Of course, we will have lots of coverage on AllThingsD, but if you want to be there in person you should hurry. The conference was sold out for October, and is likely to sell out again soon as just a handful of seats remain.

And if you combine the two? You get Vungle, a barely hatched start-up that just raised a $2 million seed round.

Vungle’s pitch is straightforward: They help app developers make video promo reels for their stuff, and turn them into “in-app” ads (you can see a sample below). There are a whole lot of ways to buy in-app advertising for other apps already — it’s a big chunk of the mobile ad business right now — but the Vungle guys argue that they make it easy. And that unlike iAd, AdMob, Millenial, etc., it’s all they do.

Fair enough. No way to really tell now, as the company is only in “alpha,” with a handful of paying customers that include Path, the buzzy next-gen social network, and Pocket Games, a game developer. A more open beta comes this summer.

At least as interesting as the pitch is the backstory, which has co-founders Zain Jeffer, 24, and Jack Smith, 23, leaving London on a whim to join the AngelPad start-up factory last fall, then finding themselves in a whirlwind round of financing. For instance, they pitched Crosslink’s David Silverman at his home on a weekend, and got a commitment a day later.

Multimillion dollar seed rounds would have been unheard of a couple years ago. Now they’re increasingly commonplace (here’s one for $4.2 million), at least for a certain class of incubator-blessed start-ups. And they’re part of the reason that you’re hearing lots of bubble talk right now.

For the record, the Vungle guys say they had no intention of raising so much out of the gate. But “as soon as you tell people you don’t want money, that’s when they want to give you money,” Smith says. Among those chipping in: Google Ventures, AOL Ventures, Ron Conway, Dave McClure, Charles Hudson, Maynard Webb, Scott McNealy and Tim Draper.

If debates rage about the meaning of the past year in the Middle East, one would not sense much doubt among over 1,000 young regional entrepreneurs and early stage investors gathered here in Beirut. Their message is clear: There is no turning back, and the demographically young, wired, connected new generation in this region plan to take business opportunities into their own hands.

ArabNet Digital Summit is the brainchild of Yale MBA and Lebanese entrepreneur Omar Christidis. His vision has remained throughout to create a hub of shared ideas, experiences and connections among the nascent but rapidly growing start-up communities throughout the Middle East. Innovators from 22 countries are networking, competing in start-up competitions and participating in sessions familiar to any entrepreneur in the United States — e-commerce, big data, mobile, the cloud and social networks — but with sensitivity to local and regional opportunities as yet untapped.

Saad Khan, one of the few American VCs here, is a young veteran of Silicon Valley — having been a part of one of the world’s first incubators at Garage.com (which launched Pandora) and now at CMEA Ventures (where he sits on Blekko’s board). He has travelled extensively throughout the region over the last two years, and he believes that something pivotal is happening in the Middle East. “This is not about looking for ways to transport Silicon Valley here,” he notes, “MENA is a different market. Building connections with tech smart people in the Valley is great — shared, reciprocal learning both ways can be more powerful. Mobile is on fire in this region, everyone has a cellphone and smartphone penetration is deploying rapidly as pricing has dropped. Look for mobile innovation here to come from MENA, even leap-frogging the US.” He adds that some of best innovations in the cloud computing and ad analytics (like Cloudera, Revenue Science, AdMob and Bre.ad) are coming from Arabs and Arab Americans connected to the States and globally.

Moderator Alex Tohme, entrepreneur and Digital Strategist for Ogilvy One in Dubai, argues that while she prefers to run a company with the team under one roof, technology facilitates connections among skills around the region. “My ideal start-up would have tech engineers from Jordan, creatives from Egypt and have Lebanese sell it,” Alex Tohme notes. “ArabNet is great, as we’ve all connected regularly online over the last year and can meet here in real life. Talent is in many places, and many ‘hubs’ will spring up and connect with each other.”

Many of the more successful start-ups at ArabNet are regionalizing/arabizing ideas that have worked elsewhere in English. In fact, some of the leading competitors at the start-up demo competition would be familiar to the western world. Cinemoz announced significant business development partnerships with the best in Arabic TV and movie content, creating a Hulu for the region. ReserveOut is a fast-growing reservation-booking and backend for restaurants and spas similar to OpenTable. Arab Rooms allows business travelers in Saudi and beyond to find cheap, clean and convenient rooms somewhere between a Hotels.com and an AirBnB.

Habib Haddad is a Lebanese entrepreneur who created the first Arabic translation search engine, Yamli, and has created wamda.com in Beirut as the cornerstone of an entrepreneurial ecosystem of breaking information, education, research and angel investing in the region. He believes that such “copycats” are a great thing. “The Middle East and Arabic market is huge, has perfect demographics and has hunger for services for them on their terms and in their language. As success breeds success, more innovation will follow.”

Panelists and participants concur universally that the mere act of creating content and services in Arabic offers significant opportunity. Surveys have shown that over three quarters of Internet users in the region would prefer content in the Arab language, yet a tiny fraction of content online is currently in Arabic. Barry Newstead, Chief Global Development Officer for Wikimedia Foundation, noted in his talk here that on Wikipedia there are over 22 million individual articles in 280 languages. Only 100,000 are in Arabic. Denmark alone has over 200,000.

Rob Kniaz, General Partner of Hoxton Ventures out of London, who specializes in early investments in emerging markets, told me that Arabizing the web not only creates services to large markets who wish to have them in their own languages, but also opens up new, now-dormant business opportunities. “Local, Arabic advertisers have nowhere to go, so aggregate dollars are small and ad CPMs can be a few cents. Think of the pent-up demand over time as this is addressed by more Arabic content,” he notes.

Demo Competition winner May Habib founded Quordoba first as a B2B platform for businesses to outsource translation needs online, creating a network of over 400 vetted translators, many with industry expertise, to turn around documents in a matter of hours. But rapid demand is now also coming from English consumer media companies looking to reach Arabic audiences — and not only book publishers, but authors themselves, want them to both translate and distribute their books digitally and offline in the Middle East.

There is plenty of grumbling about infrastructure issues at this gathering — each country with its own challenges of logistics, delivery and regulation. But there is a special place of frustration among attendees over mobile broadband quality and cost. During a panel with executives from some of the region’s telecom giants, many participants drilled into the quality of services, the scaleability of capabilities as more smart phones come on board, and the access charges that are high by any global standards. The Twitter feed of #ArabNetME retweeted themes like, “Only Skype matters” while the executives also described their hopes for expansions into 4G and beyond.

But many entrepreneurs find opportunity in infrastructure weakness. Rasha Khouri, Lebanese Palestinian founder of diaboutique.com and dia-style.com — the largest growing fashion and e-commerce website that allows global access to some of the most innovative and hard to find fashion brands — noted: “I’m very impressed with the number of start-ups here trying to solve issues we face infrastructurally. More efficient online banking, mobile charging, billing, teaching advanced computer skills. Some of these aren’t necessarily ‘innovation’ as in ‘new technology’ — but critical for innovation to flourish.”

Jordanian entrepreneur and competition finalist Fouad Jeryes could not agree more. He co-founded Codely as the first fully online education platform for schools to teach specific programming and tech skills to high-school age kids, offering supplemental but often unique educational opportunities. “We surveyed kids and asked them what computing skills were all about and most said ‘Facebook,’ or ‘a way to play games’ or ‘secretarial skills.’ Our programs not only teach skills but create awareness of whole new worlds they really never have understood existed for them. We are lighting a fire in kids minds to make this understanding real. I believe we will help create the next generation of entrepreneurs in the Middle East, and eventually completely globally.”

Regional venture capital — from the Arab world and Turkey — is hovering closely over the ArabNet attendees. Egyptian VCs Sawari Ventures and Amman incubator Oasis 500, some of the most active regional investors with nearly 50 investments last year, split their time equally here with portfolio companies and looking for new investments. Middle East Ventures announced five new investments from the stage, including two follow-ons in music, job discovery, gaming and mobile payments. Noted Oasis 500′s Salwa Katkhuda, “I came with good expectations to be about the same as last year. But so much more is going on now in the region in terms of start-ups funded, a few success stories, more VC funds and so on.”

Will western investors be far behind? Saad Khan notes with conviction: “The answer to what will happen in five years is in the hands of the people in this room, period. And wins tend to beget wins.” He likes what he saw at ArabNet.

Christopher M. Schroeder @cmschroed is a U.S. Internet entrepreneur and angel investor. His most recent company, the social and content online health platform healthcentral.com, was acquired in December 2011. He has been active in following entrepreneurship in emerging markets, especially in the Middle East, and has written for AllThingsD on these experiences.

To address that perceived problem, Google is kicking off an awareness campaign today to promote building sites that render better on smaller screens.

After all, maybe there’s not always an app for that — or there doesn’t always have to be.

The project, called HowtoGoMo.com, is a public service announcement of sorts that explains why you may need a standalone mobile site — and, if you agree, what to do about it.

The promotional site, which has been delayed for a week, was officially rolled out this morning and detailed in a blog post.

In an interview, Google’s director of mobile, Jason Spero, explained that the purpose of the site is to walk companies through the process of deciding to build a standalone mobile site. Spero joined Google through the acquisition of AdMob, the mobile ad network.

Amazingly, while Apple has successfully convinced everyone that there needs to be an application for everything found on the Internet, mobile needs have not translated as widely to the need for mobile Web sites.

A survey conducted by Equation Research found that two out of three mobile users have encountered problems when accessing Web sites on their phones over the past 12 months. Load time is the top complaint; more than half reported that they had trouble accessing a site from the phone, and 40 percent said they’d use a competing site if they had to.

Beyond being able to view a Web site on a smaller screen, a mobile version could make it easier to book reservations, buy tickets or look up information with fewer clicks.

The new Google site is a resource center that links to a growing list of 15 to 20 vendors and agencies that can help with all aspects of building a mobile site. The site also has an emulator that shows how your site looks on a phone, and offers case studies from other companies.

Spero said the site is not about making money for Google — well, at least not directly.

If more sites were mobile-ready, Google could conceivably help them with mobile ad campaigns. But right now, Spero said, so many conversations for Google’s mobile advertising division start from scratch because so many companies still don’t have mobile properties.

“Google’s interest here is people being able to do business on mobile phones, and once they can, we can offer a great marketing solution for them,” he said. “Having a proper mobile Web site or an app is a prerequisite to marketing to mobile users.”

But I don’t know the details. Employees new and old keep their secrets close. That said, certain aspects of iOS5 have been made public for developers and speculation seems high that this is the juncture where Siri, a company on whose board I sat, will re-emerge as a core part of the operating system. Here’s a heads up on what’s coming now — and perhaps later — so you can prepare.

PC Free
Apple’s recently announced iCloud offers a host of new features but the most underappreciated is device configuration in the Cloud. It will have everything you need to configure and keep your iPhone up to date without a PC. Every Apple device you have will be linked with an Apple ID and iCloud will know the configuration of each one. No more long sync required before a phone upgrade, no more painful restore, simply enter the Apple ID and password and voila, good as new. This will make life easier for people with multiple iOS devices, but the implications go far beyond.

When configuration lives in the Cloud, modification to the configuration happens in the Cloud as well. That means you could install an app onto your phone while clicking a Facebook ad, reading a blog, or responding to an email. Every banner advertisement you see on the web will be an opportunity for app developers to entice you, and with your browser already cookied, a single click could make the new app magically appear on your devices.

This marks a major change for mobile app developers to promote their wares. Being on the Top 25 list won’t matter quite as much; there will be lots of ways to get the word out and drive downloads. The same PPI (pay per install) ad economy that multiplied AdMob’s revenues and led to the Google acquisition will be available to the rest of the Internet ad landscape. With the sophistication of ad exchanges today, app developers could bid on impressions of only Apple users and efficiently target the right people. Developers will need to have instrumented analytics all across this marketing funnel to maximize their opportunity and not get killed by others who have figured it out. Advice: App devs need an Internet acquisition animal in-house.

Assistant
Sixteen months ago Apple acquired a technology company named Siri. Siri was small, with three amazing founders — Dag Kittlaus, Adam Cheyer, and Tom Gruber — as part of a total of only 20 employees. Their size did not match their monumental ambition. Founded out of SRI where the technology originated and a Series A round from Menlo Ventures and Morgenthaler, the company was the first to make a “Virtual Personal Assistant” actually work. As an app running on the iPhone, users speak in natural language to book tables, order taxis, check flight times, and many other functions. In fact, their original venture pitch called the service “Hal” after the computer personality in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The app requires the Cloud because although voice is captured on the phone, the computation required to parse the words into intent and then invoke the chain of web services to accomplish the user’s goal is too much to run on the phone. Siri’s server farm does the heavy lifting.

The native integration of Siri into iOS could change the game in three ways. First, voice input will be a breakthrough for touch screen devices. Although users tolerate soft keyboards in exchange for larger screen size, typing anything of length is still painful and even short bursts are more convenient with voice. Siri found the overwhelming majority of queries were spoken rather than typed. High-quality voice recognition along with Siri’s semantic processing could allow a new level of instant gratification when capturing a reminder, queuing a playlist, or sending a text message, especially while driving.

The second game-changer could be voice access to apps. While Siri had to do all of its integration with other services (e.g., OpenTable) in the Cloud via web APIs, as part of iOS it would be possible to interact with any app on the phone seamlessly, with login credentials already there. Imagine being able to say “Checking account balance” and the banking app comes up to that page, or “Directions to Jim’s house” and the phone starts TeleNav to navigate you there.

The third implication is that Apple would be joining the search game and squaring off with Google. For the category of searches that people do on the go, the desired result is often a completed action rather than a page of blue links. Siri is a superior technology for getting the job done quickly. Both companies have a mobile operating system, a mobile device, an app store, and now an engine for navigating the web. It will be a fun one to watch. Advice: 2011 will mark the year a voice user-interface delivers real value and will rapidly become a must-have feature, prepare to respond.

Media on Demand
In addition to the PC Free features deriving from configuration in the Cloud, iCloud also stores media and data in the Cloud where it belongs. For personal media like pictures and videos, that means no more priceless baby shots at risk of deletion on the phone. All of the pics will get synced between devices and likely be shareable from the web.

Purchased media like music and videos will also live in the Cloud. For $25 a year, iTunes Match allows users to unlock pristine copies of all those songs they, um, ripped from CDs. Time will tell if it’s enough to stop the flow of people from iTunes to Cloud music services like MOG and Spotify. Movies will be in the Cloud too, allowing start times to be counted in seconds rather than the minutes required for download and sync. Apple already dropped the hard drive in their 2nd gen AppleTV to turn it into an Internet streamer like Roku, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a larger screened device resembling a TV appeared soon. To monetize all of this newfound cost, Apple has a model that seems inspired by Dropbox: Offer the first 5GB free and when users hit their limit they have little choice but to plunk down some extra bucks for an annual storage fee. Advice: Don’t waste your money on an Internet-enabled TV, it will be obsolete by the time you plug it in.

iNavigator
In 2007 after the iPhone launched, I emailed Steve Jobs to encourage him to take a meeting with TeleNav, a portfolio company who pioneered navigation on the mobile phone. Before TeleNav, the gigabytes of data required to render U.S. street maps was too large to put on phones so TNAV pushed the data, routing engine and traffic into the Cloud and streamed just the information required for GPS-enabled handsets to give turn-by-turn directions. They now power the majority of carrier navigation services in the United States. The fit with the iPhone was a natural. I fired off my carefully crafted note and got back a brief reply:

Shawn, Which provider does TeleNav get their map data from? Why would it be hard for Apple to also license this data and extend its own map application to do what TeleNav’s does?
Thanks, Steve

I replied with reasons of course, but never heard back. Apparently he decided Apple should do it themselves. Since that time, Apple has hired a number of engineers with navigation expertise. Though it has taken them several years, the service has been spotted recently in the wild and will likely show its face soon. Advice: Get an iPhone mounting kit for your car.

The move to the Cloud represents a tectonic shift in the IT landscape for both enterprises and consumers and the disruption is just beginning. It’s wonderful to see Apple embrace it wholeheartedly to drive value for their customers. For companies that are prepared, there will be great opportunities as a part of the ecosystem. The analysis could continue for pages, but I still haven’t found the iPhone5 pre-order page so you’ll have to excuse me for now.

Shawn Carolan is a Managing Director at Menlo Ventures, where he has been for nine years; he focuses on consumer Internet and mobile investing. He sits on the Boards of IMVU, PlayPhone, Roku, Talari, TeleNav (NASDAQ: TNAV) and YuMe.

Think about the federal government’s blocking of the $39 billion AT&T and T-Mobile merger and you might want to reread Google’s blog today, penned in reaction to the news that the Justice Department is making a second request for information about its $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility.

“This is pretty routine,” wrote Google’s Motorola integration exec Dennis Woodside. “We’ve gotten these kind of requests before.”

Maybe Google has (and it has with other purchases) — but in actuality, only four percent of transactions got such a follow-up request from regulators.

To be fair, it is much more common in high-profile, big-money deals like this one, but it means a longer closing period and more uncertainty around the Android mobile ecosystem until it’s done.

Still, Google has good reason to be patient. Despite tough criticism and brutal lobbying, it won approval from Justice for its $700 million deal to buy flight data service ITA Software in April, after nine months of scrutiny and a number of conditions imposed.

And the search giant waited out an intense six-month Federal Trade Commission approval process last year for its $750 million acquisition of mobile advertising start-up AdMob. It had an even harder time with the FTC’s nod of its 2007 DoubleClick purchase for $3.1 billion.

One that it lost — an obvious bridge too far that I dubbed Yahoogle — was Google’s 2008 effort to meld a troubling partnership with Yahoo in search advertising.

So, we’ll see soon enough which way D.C. — which just had Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt up to the Senate for an antitrust hearing chit-chat — will go.

Until then, here’s Woodside’s whole blog:

An update on our Motorola acquisition

Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 5:30 PM ET

Posted by Dennis Woodside, SVP Google

Since we announced our plans to acquire Motorola Mobility, we’ve been excited about the positive reaction to the proposed deal — particularly from our partners who have told us that they’re enthusiastic about our defense of the Android ecosystem.

And as David Drummond said when we announced our plans in August, we’re confident that this deal will be approved. We believe very strongly this is a pro-competitive transaction that is good for Motorola Mobility, good for consumers, and good for our partners.

That said, we know that close scrutiny is part of the process and we’ve been talking to the U.S. Department of Justice over the past few weeks. Today we received what is called a “second request,” which means that the DOJ is asking for more information so that they can continue to review the deal. (This is pretty routine; we’ve gotten these kind of requests before.)

While this means we won’t be closing right away, we’re confident that the DOJ will conclude that the rapidly growing mobile ecosystem will remain highly competitive after this deal closes. We’ll be working closely and cooperatively with them as they continue their review.

Prior to today, I kept hearing chatter, none of it stronger than word-of-mouth gossip, that Google really did want to make a run at the video site. That struck me as a stretch, given that Google was already facing a wide-ranging federal antitrust probe, and that adding the video site that dominated the market for “professional” content would be a giant red flag for regulators.

Now it seems like a really, really long stretch.

Google could easily afford to shell out a couple billion for the site, owned by a consortium that includes Disney, Comcast and News Corp. (News Corp. also owns this Web site).

At the end of June, Google had $39 billion lying around, and it makes a couple billion more in profits each quarter. And Google biz dev boss David Drummond made a point of telling investors this morning that the $12.5 billion Google wants to spend on Motorola won’t slow it from making other deals.

But Motorola makes Hulu that much more unlikely for two big reasons:

• Google could certainly argue that it wouldn’t break antitrust rules with a Hulu deal for a lot of reasons. They could note, for instance, that Hulu doesn’t have truly exclusive rights to its programming, but shares the licenses with content owners who show the stuff on their own sites (i.e. Fox.com, NBC.com, etc.). But TV is different from mobile advertising or flight search software — people have an emotional attachment to it, and regulators respond accordingly. Note that Comcast had to abdicate any control of NBC Universal’s Hulu stake as a condition to getting its merger done. It’s that much harder to imagine Washington giving Google the go-ahead to control the online output of three of the four broadcast networks at the same time it is asking for control of a giant handset-maker.
• Even if Google thought it could get the deal done, it would have to convince Hulu’s owners, too. Google says it thinks it can get Motorola approved by Washington by the end of the year, but that seems crazily optimistic — as Citigroup’s Mark Mahaney notes, both ITA and DoubleClick took 9 to 11 months for sign-off. If you’re Disney/News Corp./et al and you decide you do want to sell, you want to find a buyer who can actually make it happen.

Then again, perhaps Google could offer a 63 percent premium and a gazillion-dollar break-up fee as insurance, just like it did with Motorola today, and Hulu’s owners would be willing to take the non-risk. Goohulu may have a very, very low chance of survival, but I can’t call it DOA just yet.

The network will compete with Apple’s iAd and Google’s AdMob networks, and is available to iPhone and Android developers and publishers looking to monetize their games or applications through advertising.

It could be particularly powerful because it taps into AT&T’s thousands of local salespeople, who work directly with local pizza places, dry cleaners, movie theaters and restaurants across the country.

The mobile ad network joins AT&T Interactive’s existing properties, including search on the Web or mobile at YP.com. A separate subsidiary prints the yellow directory that is delivered to your doorstep. The company’s interactive revenues have an annual run rate of $1 billion.

As an example of how big this business is getting, last year Google disclosed that mobile ad sales were now at a $1 billion annualized run rate. Google’s business is international and consists of both search and in-app mobile advertising.

While AT&T would still have a lot of catching up to do, David Krantz, AT&T Interactive’s president and CEO, said in an interview that he’s hoping its ads result in higher click-through rates because they can target a person’s location with more relevant ads.

Based on a three-month trial, Krantz said prices and fill rates were falling somewhere in between Apple’s iAd at the high end and Google’s AdMob or Millennial Media at the lower end. In the trial, which included 750 million impressions, costs per click ranged between 25 and 30 cents.

“We have really high fill rates because of our coverage, and we are able to provide CPMs in between [Apple and Google], so we’ve had a lot of interest in the pilot … We are finding a ton of demand for what we do,” he said.

Most of the major ad networks also try to serve more relevant ads based on location, but oftentimes it is difficult if they don’t have the sales force. Greystripe was focused on regional advertising before it was purchased by ValueClick, and Where had also latched on to the idea, before it was acquired by eBay’s PayPal.

AT&T’s ads will appear in any application as long as a person has opted to share their location. If a consumer clicks on a banner, it will direct them to a landing page from inside that application that will include click-to-call information, directions, reviews and coupons.  (Note: AT&T Mobility customers will not be treated any differently from subscribers on other wireless networks.)

AT&T is also launching a daily deals service sometime soon, but it is not part of the launch at this time.

Advertisers who are already part of the YP local ad network will not pay more to participate. AT&T pays the publisher on a pay-per-click basis.

Two of the applications that participated in the beta were Pinger and Skout. In a release, Pinger said it achieved CPMs three times higher than with other ad networks serving ads that were not local.

Krantz said AT&T’s ad network was built in-house with the help of Plusmo, which it acquired in September 2009.

In fact, it’s as easy as taking a picture.

Card.io, which was founded by Mike Mettler and Josh Bleecher, has raised $1 million in seed funding.

Angel investors include Michael Dearing of Harrison Metal; Jeff Clavier and Charles Hudson of SoftTech; Manu Kumar of K9 Ventures; Alok Bhanot, a former PayPal exec; and Omar Hamoui, AdMob’s founder.

Card.io is focused on solving a specific part of the mobile payments business — buying things with a credit card on the phone, whether it’s digital goods, like a song, or physical goods from a site like Amazon.

Rather than having to type in the credit card number, users just hold a credit card up to the phone’s camera, which automatically reads the card information and enters the appropriate data.

Co-founder and CEO Mike Mettler, who was one of the original product managers at AdMob, left the company around the time that Google purchased the mobile ad network for $750 million. He said a four-person team has been working on the concept since August.

“It’s super-frictionless. It requires no behavior change and no hardware dependencies,” Mettler said.

The company is targeting developers who want to sell items within a mobile application. The company is launching a private beta today that will allow mobile developers to integrate the service into its iPhone applications. It does not work for browser-based sites or the mobile Web, because they typically cannot communicate with the phone’s camera.

So far, it’s signed up three developers: MogoTix for event tickets, TaskRabbit for local services, and Samasource for donations.

Previous investors AllianceBernstein, General Catalyst, Redpoint Ventures, Summerhill Ventures, Valhalla Partners and WPP participated in the newest funding round; the company says new investors came aboard as well, but won’t name them.

Much of the funding had previously been disclosed via a regulatory filing in April.

Jumptap is one of several well-funded mobile ad companies yet to be snatched up by a bigger player. But many have: Google bought AdMob, Apple bought Quattro Wireless, and last month ValueClick bought Greystripe for $70 million. Competitor Millennial Media, which raised its own big round in January, talks often about its ambitions to go public.

CEO George Bell joined the company less than a year ago; he had previously been a managing director at Jumptap backer General Catalyst.

This morning, agents from Seoul’s Metropolitan Police Agency (SMPA) descended on Google’s Yeoksam-dong offices as part of an investigation into whether the company has been illegally collecting consumer location data through its mobile ad platform.

“The raid was carried out to confirm the allegations that Google’s AdMob platform was used to collect data on individuals’ locations,” an SMPA official told The Korea Times.

This is the second time Google’s Seoul offices have been raided on suspicion of privacy violations in the past year. Last August the SMPA seized dozens of hard drives and documents related to the company’s Street View service, which was later determined to have violated South Korea’s law protecting telecommunications privacy.

[Image credit: Flickr/toughkidcst]

Specifically, Inside Mobile Apps is reporting two big adjustments: in the last few days, Apple has rejected “dozens of apps” that use offer walls, and it has also apparently changed the ranking algorithm for its all-important top apps list to favor user engagement over number of downloads.

Apple declined to comment on the reports.

Offer walls are a method of cross-selling apps, where developers use companies like Tapjoy and Flurry to give users options to install other apps in order to earn virtual currency within a game.

The practice is now less influential on Facebook but incredibly pervasive for free mobile gaming apps, as I reported at length in March. Developers pay per install of their app so they can get on Apple’s top app leaderboards, which previously were determined by number of installs.

Similar practices on Facebook (in fact by some of the same companies; Tapjoy was formerly known as Offerpal) achieved notoriety in late 2009 when they were exposed for their scammy tactics in a series of articles about “Scamville” by TechCrunch.

To get on Apple’s free app leaderboard (which is one of the main ways users discover new apps), developers have been paying Tapjoy something like $30,000 to $500,000 for pay-per-install campaigns. That may seem exorbitant, but it’s seen as significantly cheaper than acquiring users with CPM advertising through Apple’s iAd and Google’s AdMob.

In its rejections of apps with offer walls, Apple has reportedly cited a clause in its developer agreement that prohibits app makers from manipulating or cheating its chart rankings. This is similar to Apple’s approach to mandating use of its own in-app purchasing by starting to enforce an existing clause about it with the rejection of Sony’s Reader app earlier this year.

As for the alteration of its app ranking algorithm, Apple now appears to be weighting factors other than recent number of downloads. That change has resulted in apps that clearly have large numbers of active users, like Facebook and Pandora, jumping up 10 or more spots in the most recent version of the list.

The leaderboard has been shaken up again in the day since Inside Mobile Apps reported the changes (a game called Stylish Sprint is now in the top spot), so other signals–perhaps something to highlight up-and-coming apps–may be in play as well.

And while Apple declined to comment, when we covered this topic in depth in March the company gave us a statement that defended its app discovery offerings, thus downplaying the role of companies like Tapjoy.

Tapjoy, for its part, said in a prepared statement:

Tapjoy has been and continues to be very supportive of the Apple app ecosystem, and we were not surprised about the Top Free & Paid rankings algorithm changes–we’re all for incremental changes that add to the user experience and keep the environment dynamic. But banning the largest and most effective channel for application distribution, engagement and monetization has a significant and long-term negative impact on the user experience, developer innovation and advertiser utility.

The moves bring Apple’s App Store practices closer to that of the Android Market, which uses more than just number of downloads in its app ranking algorithm. Pay-per-install campaigns are less prevalent on Android, though that’s also because much of the developer ecosystem is still focused on Apple.

Text messaging applications, which offer the ability to send messages to a group of people via a single phone number, were in the spotlight at SXSW. Companies such as Gogii, KIK, Beluga, GroupMe and Fast Society were the talk of the town since they provided easy ways for large groups of people to socialize and get in touch quickly.

Following the event, GroupMe provided its first hint at what its business model would be when it opened up its mobile group chat to brands, which would be highlighted in a “Featured Groups” section.

Now, Gogii is beefing up its monetizing efforts.

Hill, who will have the title of VP of monetization and publishing, was most recently VP of mobile monetization at Myspace.

She will oversee all company revenue, which includes in-app purchases, advertising and a new publishing unit, said Gogii CEO Scott Lahman. “I can’t think of anyone better who can hit the ground running. She’s been doing this for years at Fox and at Myspace. This is almost the exact same role.”

Gogii’s textPlus application has 7.7 million monthly active users and recently set a record for sending 35 million messages in one day.

While Hill is just joining the Los Angeles-based startup, the company has been monetizing with advertising from the beginning.  ”We hit seven-figure revenue-quarters last year, and that’s continued to grow. We are well past the testing stage. Advertising campaigns were up 300 percent in the first quarter compared to the same period last year.”

Mostly, the app relies on splash ads–which are like a homepage takeover–which the user sees immediately after opening the application. Lahman said users on average open the application 10 to 15 times a day, and that the ads have a click-through rate in the high single digits. There are also banner ads from within the applications, which are seen by its nearly eight million monthly active users.

Lahman said they made the decision to monetize with advertising because it allowed them to grow the business much faster than if they charged for it. A paid version of the application, which has no advertising, allows the user to pick the area code for the phone number they use. He said six to 10 percent of its users choose to upgrade. The app costs $4.99 and is available on iPhone and Android.

“The advertisers love it. We are the text client for a lot of our customers–that’s why they use it so much to send so many messages.”

Gogii uses a mix of its own direct sales force in addition to farming out some inventory to mobile ad networks, like Google’s AdMob, Jumptap and Greystripe. Returning advertisers include Disney, Fox, Target, Ford, Paramount, CBS, Unilever, JCPenney, MTV, Coca-Cola and Zynga.

The new publishing business, which Hill will oversee, will experiment with a sort of white-label service, which will allow a brand to completely take over the application for a specific brand or event.

Lahman said in March, 25 percent of the company’s revenues were coming from paid features inside the application. It’s his goal to hit 50 percent by the end of the year. “That will come against a growing advertising business–that’s not cannibalizing it,” he said.

After all, the folks behind Angry Birds have shown they have plenty of ways to make money, from selling downloads, to in-app purchases, to advertising and toys.

“They didn’t really need the capital,” says Rich Wong, whose Accel Partners was among the investors in the $42 million Series A round announced on Thursday. “It took them a while to convince them of the ways we might be able to help.”

Wong said the talks started last summer and took about nine months to complete.

Rovio’s Mikael Hed said that the dealings with the venture capital firms were somewhat ironic. For years, the company would have given anything for Sand Hill Road to take an interest in one of the company’s projects. Then Angry Birds took off, and suddenly people were beating down their door.

“Suddenly everyone wanted to talk to us and we realized we didn’t really need their money,” Hed said.

Eventually, though, Rovio decided to take some venture funding. In addition to Accel, Rovio’s new investors include Felicis Ventures and Atomico Ventures, the firm created by Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström. Zennström is also joining Rovio’s board.

“All of these people have been there to build billion dollar companies,” Hed said.

Rovio is not in that category yet, but certainly has a good start.
Details of the valuation were not announced, though sources said the total value is still in the hundreds of millions, rather than the billions.

“While being valued at a billion or several billion dollars isn’t an end goal in itself, it’s an interesting metric,” Hed said.

As for how the deal came together, Wong said he had known Rovio’s Peter Vesterbacka for years, from his days establishing the non-profit Mobile Monday effort. The volunteer-run collaboration project started in Helsinki in 2000 and has expanded all over the world, including an active chapter in Silicon Valley.

Wong notes that AdMob and GetJar–two of his firm’s big mobile investments–can trace their roots to Mobile Monday. AdMob, for example, connected with its first engineer thanks to MoMo, as members call the gatherings.

In any case, Wong said he is thrilled to be part of what is clearly one of the hottest things going.

“I’ve literally been waiting 10 years working in the mobile industry (for something) that is truly this mass market and broad scale,” he said. “It’s almost as simple as that.”

Wong, who grew up in Charles Schultz’s hometown of Santa Rosa, said Angry Birds has the chance to be for this generation what Peanuts and Pac-Man were for him. Among those who convinced him of that were his children and nieces and nephews, all of whom love the birds.

“They really love Angry Birds more than anything else,” he said, adding that perhaps his two-year-old would still pick Curious George, but that all the other ones are sold on Angry Birds.

“Maybe this is their Peanuts and Pac-Man and Super Mario Brothers,” he said.

Hed said he likes the Super Mario analogy, saying the company sees that kind of opportunity, but is careful not to move things too quickly.

“Every step we have taken we are mindful of not overextending the brand,” he said. Clearly one of the challenges for Rovio is going to be expanding with out becoming oversaturated and growing beyond its single hit.

That said, the company already has 40 or so projects in the works–almost as many as it has employees. (There are approaching 60 people at Rovio, all based in Helsinki, Finland.)

Hed said that the company has taken to use Google Docs to keep track of all of the things it has going on at any given moment.

“We do need a spreadsheet for that,” Hed said.

Wong said that the company has solid plans for this year and beyond, noting its efforts to evolve Angry Birds with both the frequently updated “Seasons” version and with the Angry Birds Rio game, which is a movie tie-in with a Twentieth Century Fox film due out in April. Rovio has also talked about a Facebook version coming in May and console games are also on the way.

“There’s a diverse range of products coming out including gaming products,” Hed said. “The pigs will be more prominently in play in the future I can tell you that.”

Beyond app sales and advertising, the company has sold 2 million plush toys and says that 40 percent of new iOS players are purchasing in-game help in the form of a “mighty eagle.”
But with so many eyeballs on Angry Birds–40 million people play each month–Wong said there is an opportunity for the company to influence the entire ecosystem based on which brands are featured within its properties. This week’s deal with Microsoft’s Bing is just an early example, he said.

Hed noted that the company also sees an opportunity to acquire other brands or help lesser-known companies get published.

Wong said he was also impressed with the Rovio team’s dedication. As has been widely noted, Angry Birds was the company’s 52nd game.

“I love the quote that this was an overnight success that took eight years,” Wong said.

The company said Scott will start today, reporting to David Henke, SVP of operations and engineering, and will be assigned to engineering new products and services.

Scott’s extremely thorough LinkedIn profile says he has expertise in “machine learning, distributed algorithms, large-scale distributed systems, information retrieval, compilers, programming languages, internet advertising and engineering management.”

Late last month, LinkedIn filed to go public in an offering worth $175 million. The company said it had 990 full-time employees as of the end of last year.

Verve said the acquisition will help monetize mobile media at the local level by leveraging Deconstruct’s self-serve ad network, which allows advertisers to buy ad campaigns with a credit card.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, and not much else is known about the company, other than its platform was built by product and engineering executives from Advertising.com, which is now apart of AOL Advertising.

Otherwise, information on the company’s Web site is fairly sparse, with a lot of its pages saying they are still in the works. Brent Halliburton, founder and CEO of Deconstruct, will join Verve as VP of product management. Prior to founding Deconstruct, Halliburton was senior director of new product development at Advertising.com. He and the rest of the team will be based out of Verve’s Washington, D.C., office.

Verve serves hundreds of media companies, and had the goal of serving 2.2 billion pages in 2010. It works with McClatchy and Belo Interactive, and has raised almost $10 million in capital from investors, including the Associated Press.

The price tag was likely small, but in the past year, mobile advertising and marketing companies have been a hot commodity (luckily, there’s still plenty to go around).

Last week, we broke the news that Facebook acquired Rel8tion, a mobile advertising company out of stealth mode for an undisclosed sum, and earlier this week Motricity said it had purchased Adenyo for up to $150 million.

Of course, these more recent deals pale in comparison with Google’s purchase of AdMob last year, and Apple’s purchase of Quattro Wireless to create iAd.

Facebook confirmed the acquisition in a statement: “We’re excited to confirm that we recently completed a talent acquisition of Rel8tion, a stealth-mode startup in Seattle. The engineering team will join our growing Seattle office, and we’re looking forward to having them on board.”

Rel8tion was started in part by Peter Wilson, who has dabbled in just about every major company that has set up shop in Seattle.

In addition to his responsibilities at Rel8tion, he was spending one day a week assisting Facebook with setting up its Seattle office. He will now be an engineering director.

Prior to that, Wilson was an engineering director at Google for four years, helping to ramp up Google’s Kirkland, Wash.-based engineering center. He also spent nine years at Microsoft, working on Microsoft Windows, XP, MSN and Visual Studio in a variety of roles.

There’s not much information about the company, but according to the little information available on its site, it was trying to create a system for synching up a person’s location and demographics with the most relevant ad inventory.

A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment on the role the Rel8tion employees would play at the company, or on the terms of the deal.

Another founder, Scott Hannan, was previously a consultant for Microsoft, and worked as VP of Business Development at Pelago–which operates the mobile social network Whrrl–and Nat Brown, who is listed as the company’s CTO. Brown was previously VP of Technology at Myspace in Seattle and CTO of iLike.

Despite Facebook having a gigantic mobile audience, it has yet to monetize that traffic through advertising. With its introduction of Facebook Places, which allows users to check-in at local establishments and find local deals, you can only expect more is coming.

While both Apple and Google have made big bets in mobile advertising with large acquisitions of Quattro Wireless and AdMob, respectively, this can’t really be put in the same category given its relative size.

The first extension of the event, it produced some very newsy sessions. We’ll be posting them all.

Today, it’s Google advertising bigwig Susan Wojcicki (pictured here), who talked with MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka about the search giant’s mobile ad strategy.

Google has plunged deeply into the nascent market, with its $750 million acquisition of AdMob last year, facing tough competition from Apple.

Will Google dominate mobile advertising in the same way that it’s ruled the online search ad business?

Wojcicki, who was key to that first huge success, is in charge of making sure lightning strikes twice for the Silicon Valley search giant.

Here’s the video of the interview: