Asana, the high-profile group collaboration start-up founded by former Facebook execs, is moving out of private beta after a year, and will launch to the general public.

Currently in use by thousands of users at hundreds of beta companies, Asana said it will now put its efforts at tweaking the product to a wider test.

In Sanskrit, “asana” means “sitting down,” and refers to strong but relaxed postures in yoga, presumably so frustrated workers can achieve a digital form of nirvana.

The product can be used for free by teams of fewer than 30 users.

“Our beta users have helped us in shaping our prioritization in the workspace,” said Asana co-founder Dustin Moskovitz.

Moskovitz said that the company — which raised $9 million in venture funding two years ago, and $1 million before that from Benchmark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and angel investors — is not in need of more funds and will not yet release a paid product.

Co-founder Justin Rosenstein added that one future direction will be the growth of the mobile application arena for Asana, which already has offerings.

Here are some screenshots of the Asana offering:

Clearspring, the social-sharing company — in an effort to increase its business as a marketing analytics player — has acquired XGraph, a data science company.

Clearspring declined to provide the price it paid for XGraph, but said the deal was in cash and stock. The start-up raised $3.75 million just over a year ago.

The combined company has 85 employees — 70 at Clearspring and 15 at XGraph.

Execs at the the McLean, Va.-based company said the purchase will increase value to advertisers and publishers via audience targeting and data science. Clearspring is best known by consumers for its AddThis social-sharing tool, which provides a lot of detailed user data.

Clearspring raised $20 million in funding in May. At the time, the company said it planned to spend its new cash on acquisitions that leveraged data and built audiences more efficiently.

The New York-based XGraph focuses on modeling and monetizing the Web’s social graph.

“We get a lot of data points every day and making sense of them is something we have already been doing, but XGraph fits the bill to go even further in the multi-graph use of data,” said Clearspring CEO Ramsey McGrory. “It puts us in a position to be the market leader for the application of data.”

Key Compton, CEO and co-founder of the three-year-old XGraph, noted that the industry has become data-driven in new ways.

“People are connected to each other via social connections in a multi-graph platform,” said Compton. “I think there are some really interesting opportunities to access the data.”

Here’s the official press release for the deal:

Clearspring Acquires XGraph to Create Largest Multi-Graph on the Open Web

Company accelerates growth by deepening data team and technology

McLean, VA and New York. NY. — November 1, 2011 – Clearspring, provider of the largest social sharing and analytics platform, AddThis, announced today it has acquired XGraph, Inc., a leading data science company focused on modeling and monetizing the web-wide social graph. Clearspring’s massive reach and proprietary real-time data processing capability, coupled with XGraph’s audience technology, create the largest multi-graph platform on the web — mapping 1.2 billion user’s connections by brand affiliation, intent and social behavior.

The investment in XGraph’s data science capabilities marks another step on Clearspring’s rapid growth trajectory. XGraph’s team has deep data science expertise with applied backgrounds in advertising, sociology, mathematics and computer science. Their unique technology dynamically organizes users by shared connections and interests. XGraph’s team and platform will drive Clearspring’s existing efforts with publishers, advertisers and agencies forward while also setting the stage for new innovation.

“Clearspring is at the epicenter of two major shifts online — the web becoming social and personal, and advertising becoming data-driven and accountable. The common thread in both changes is data. To compete in this new world, companies will not only need the ability to access and process big data, but also have the ability to activate that data to create value for consumers, publishers and advertisers,” said Ramsey McGrory, Clearspring’s new Chief Executive. “The combined company has the people, technology and data to enable our clients to stay at the forefront of these changes. 2012 will be a breakout year for Clearspring.”

For advertisers, agencies and trading desks, Clearspring will immediately be able to provide the largest multi-graph audience targeting capabilities available on the open web. By using this technology to identify a brand’s core audiences and finding millions of other connected and like-minded people online, the company can now drive more efficient spending and increased campaign performance. Clearspring also plans to leverage this new capability to deliver publishers unique audience insights, monetization capabilities and actionable data products in the coming year.

“Most companies only capture one dimension of how we’re all connected, whether it be our friends or people we share with — a single graph approach. XGraph not only models these social connections, but also multiple other types of connections such as brand affiliations, intent and more — a multi-graph approach,” said Key Compton, XGraph’s CEO. “We’re truly excited to leverage our technology to unlock the value of Clearspring’s massive data set and help publishers and advertisers truly harness the power of the web-wide interest graph.”

XGraph is headquartered in New York with an office in Silicon Valley. All XGraph employees based in New York will join Clearspring’s office there. Clearspring plans to keep the office in Silicon Valley. The combined company will have 85 employees nationwide.

Seattle-based Bobber Interactive believes it has come up with a solution: A Facebook application that allows prepaid users to track their spending, make savings goals and ultimately earn cash rewards.

While a number of Facebook applications exist to collect debts from friends, pool money for shared bills or track household expenses, this may be the first application that allows people to actually manage real money, like a bank.

The application, called Goal Card, is being unveiled this week at the Finovate event in New York, where the company is providing a demonstration and announcing that it has raised $1.4 million in a round of capital.

As you might expect, the Goal Card application is nothing like your mother’s bank. Instead of black-and-white spreadsheets, the GoalCard apps uses animated pictures, videogames to increase loyalty, and even viral mechanisms, like posting to a friend’s Facebook page.

The concept for the company, led by CEO Eric Eastman and COO Scott Dodson, started to gel last year, and won the “Best in Show” award at the Finovate event in the spring.

Today, the five-person team works out of luxurious headquarters in downtown Seattle. The space is hundreds of thousands of square feet too big, but it’s a bargain, and there’s always parking available in the garage. It’s also appropriate because it’s on Wall Street. Eastman jokes that while a lot of people have lost their trust for financial institutions on Wall Street, “hopefully they’ll trust this one.”

The company’s investors include Peak6 Investments and Dove Capital.

The application allows prepaid cardholders to do a number of regular banking activities such as check balances and track recent purchases. But it also allows users to set goals, like saving up for a new mountain bike or designer purse. Every day, users will see a progress bar detailing how close they are to making that purchase.

Users will also be able to play games, like a version of Bejeweled in which users line up credits and debits or answer questions such as “Who would you rather loan $50 to?” using their Facebook friends.

The games encourage engagement and enable users to earn cash rewards, Dodson explains. Users will also be able to receive up to five percent cash back once they meet their goal and purchase the item they’ve been saving up for.

Bobber makes money by sending referrals to e-commerce sites, which can pay up to 15 percent, depending on the item. But the majority of its revenues are expected to be made from interchange rates, which merchants pay the card’s processors each time a purchase is made. Those rates have remained high for prepaid cards — around 1.25 percent — despite recent legislation that lowered rates for other transactions.

So far, Bobber has only integrated with Amazon, but it expects to add more retailers soon.

Additionally, it expects to lower the cost of acquiring customers compared to other banks and card issuers, which spend big dollars on circulars and flashy ads. Instead, it believes current customers will spread the word about the site through Facebook’s viral channels.

With the adoption of smartphones and tablets, many retailers are scrambling to understand what e-commerce looks like on the mobile device. As it evolves, increasingly it’s looking like the bigger opportunity might be on tablets — not the phone.

Today, Google released Google Catalogs, a free iPad app that enables shoppers to browse — in an electronic form –the familiar glossy print publications that come in the mail. It launched the app with dozens of the most popular catalogs, including Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn, Crate and Barrel, L.L. Bean, Lands’ End and others. An Android version is expected soon.

Google Catalogs product manager Abigail Holtz said Google has built other shopping experiences for the Web that are all about search, but this time it was looking to build something users would browse, like window-shopping in a mall.

“We asked how do we create the inspirational browse-shopping experience, and we thought about whether it makes sense on the Web, but the platform that it is most poised for it is the tablet,” Holtz said.

A Forrester Research report titled “Why Tablet Commerce May Soon Trump Mobile Commerce” found in a survey among retailers that on average 21 percent of their mobile traffic comes from tablets, with several reporting figures north of 50 percent.

Separately, we’ve reported that various retailers had expected revenues from all mobile devices to hit about 10 percent of overall sales by the end of the first quarter, and that later this year, that figure could inch even higher, as more tablets and smartphones get into the hands of more consumers.

Google Catalogs is a single application that provides access to dozens of catalogs. From the homepage, it provides a number of categories: Women’s fashion, jewelry, beauty, home, men’s fashion, kids and gifts. Once you drill into each one, you have the option of seeing dozens of specific catalog titles displayed with their most recent edition.

Because the pages are digital, you can zoom in to see products up close, tap on images of price tags to learn more about the item, or even search for the product in nearby stores. Some retailers have also integrated videos and other digital content.

For instance, in the Williams-Sonoma catalog, one of the listings is for a Cuisinart product that cooks and blends soup in one device that costs $365. The blender ad also links to a four-minute video of a woman demonstrating how to use the blender to make smoky lentil soup.

“It adds a richness to the shopping experience that is really engaging for consumers,” Holtz said. “As I’m flipping through, it’s different from a catalog. You can go deeper.”

From a product page, users can either find the item in a store or buy it on the retailer’s Web site. The app does not handle any of the payment processing, and Google does not charge any of its partners referral fees.

The app is very similar to two other catalogs also available in the iPad App Store. Menlo Park, Calif.-based Padopolis launched Catalog Spree in April and TheFind launched Catalogue in May. Both of the companies have some of the same catalogs as Google and are charging retailers affiliate fees for purchases made on their sites.

Holtz said Google doesn’t have plans to start charging, although it is a possibility in the future. There’s also a chance it could monetize the app in other ways, she said, but declined to be more specific.

The Pago service is a variation on Google Wallet and is also similar to Square, the well-backed San Francisco start-up that has raised significant funding from Visa and others.

Fueled by significantly far less funding (about $2.1 million), Pago’s service is being rolled out today in 53 merchant locations through the help of Mountain View’s local chamber of commerce.

Like many other experiments in the market, Pago is designed to bring together loyalty programs and offers like Groupon with point-of-sale. Consumers on one end will use a mobile application to place orders and pay; on the other end, merchants will use an iPad to track incoming orders, accept payments and track and reward customer loyalty.

The San Francisco-based company was founded by Leo Rocco, who previously worked at IBM, managing sales relationships with major customers such as Intel, Oracle and eBay.

Rocco said the inspiration for the product was born at San Francisco’s AT&T Park, where he went to watch Barry Bonds break the home run record. But Rocco missed the moment because he was stuck in line at the concession stand.

“This is the hottest space, but I’ll tell you what: There’s a lot of players, and yet, no one has figured it out,” Rocco said. “There’s a battle of ideas from Visa, MasterCard, American Express, PayPal and Google on how do you make payments on the phone ubiquitous.”

He’s right.

No one supplier has nailed it, and if anyone is paying attention, consumers and merchants so far haven’t figured out how to use it yet, either, opting instead to use what’s convenient: cash or credit cards.

Like Square, Pago relies on the iPad as a register, and requires consumers to download an application through which orders can be placed. A user fills out a short form with some personal information and enters his or her credit card number.

And like Google, Pago also provides a loyalty- or offers-like system, which allows restaurants to reward regulars with discounts or enables salons to offer specials when they have a few available hours in the afternoon. They can also present offers at the time of purchase.

For instance, Rocco said, if a customer buys a sandwich, the merchant might recommend a Coke over a Pepsi. He compares it to a company buying Google keywords, except this appears on the mobile device at the point of purchase when people are ready to buy.

The merchants participating in the launch are receiving a limited introductory offer and a subsidized iPad, but down the road, Pago anticipates charging five percent of all transactions, which is about double the normal transaction rate.

“That’s a flat fee that includes credit card processing fees,” he said. “They get all of this ability to collect data and be able to communicate directly with their customers, without having to pay 50 percent to Groupon.”

In one scenario, Rocco describes a dry cleaning company that can send out a reminder to customers that their dry cleaning is ready. Customers can add the reminder to their calendar from the application and click to pay without ever walking in the store. When they go to pick up their clothes, there’s no delay.

Participating retailers in Mountain View include One Love Pizza, Amber India, Baskin-Robbins, Clocktower Coffee, FullForce Fitness, Holiday Cleaners, KFC, Mtn View Grant Florist, New York Pizza, Shoreline Billiards and the Better Bagel. Pago is also available at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas.

Now, the publicly held company is starting to look a lot more like Groupon.

The company, which has a market cap just shy of $1 billion, has released an iPhone app that will allow its subscribers to find deals for restaurants, travel and entertainment on the go.

I have heard from multiple sources that track sales in the space that Travelzoo could be the third-largest group-buying site on the Web after Groupon and LivingSocial.

In terms of number of subscribers, it easily falls behind the two leaders in the space. Groupon has 83.1 million subscribers, LivingSocial has 40 million and Travelzoo claims to have 23 million. Of its subscribers, a third are outside the U.S., and as of March 30, it delivered its one millionth deal.

As of the end of the first quarter, Travelzoo said revenues from its local deals doubled in the past three months to total $16.2 million. It’s ramping up its local sales team quickly, and is forecasting $312 million in annual revenue if it can grow to two deals a week in 100 markets with 20 million subscribers. It is currently live in 75 markets, and posted local deals revenue of $26.2 million in the second quarter.

For now, the iPhone app will only be available in North America, and will launch later in other countries.

Like the Groupon and LivingSocial apps, the Travelzoo app will allow users to browse current offers, search for deals that can be redeemed nearby, or search for deals in other cities when traveling. The app can also be used to manage and redeem vouchers that have been purchased.

Travelzoo is slightly different from others in the daily deals space because its emphasis is on vacation packages, including air and hotel discounts. Also, the company’s offers are often featured on the site for more than a day.

The company’s stock fell 31 cents yesterday to close at $58.01, which is significantly lower than its 52-week high of $103.80.

Pixazza is dead. Long live Luminate.

Well, from a brand perspective, at least, as the image advertising start-up changes to an easier-to-say name and also launches a new platform for image applications.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based start-up — which is backed by Google Ventures, CMEA Ventures, August Capital, Foundation Capital and Shasta Ventures, as well as by angel investors Ron Conway, Gideon Yu and Maynard Webb — aims to do for Web photos what the search giant did for text.

The new name for the company that called itself “AdSense for images” pretty much speaks for itself.

In addition to Luminate’s previous sharing, commerce and advertising apps, the company will offer information, navigation and public service apps, which you can see below

Luminate says its interactive images are viewed three billion times per month.

Here’s the official press release for the name change, as well as the image app platform:

PIXAZZA, INC. REBRANDS ITSELF AS LUMINATE, INC.

New Name Better Reflects Vision For Making All Online Images Interactive

Company Enables Images at Rate of 30 Billion Image Views per Year

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA — July 27, 2011 — Pixazza Inc., the worldwide leader in making images interactive, today announced its new company name — Luminate, Inc. With its new services and the introduction of a groundbreaking new platform (see separate release: Luminate Launches World’s First Platform for Image Apps), the company opted to rebrand itself with a name that better reflects its bold vision of making every image interactive.

“We started the company to change the web by offering information relevant to online images, engaging consumers in a novel way while offering advertisers and publishers additional revenue streams,” said Bob Lisbonne, CEO of Luminate. “We’ve since developed the technology and scale to enable images to do even more. Moving forward as Luminate, we will continue to elevate the role of the image and dramatically improve the web experience.”

Rapidly scaling to accommodate the new demand for interactive images, Luminate now reaches more than 150 million unique visitors per month.

Its publisher network also has grown to more than 4,000 publishers, and the company enables images at a rate of 30 billion image views per year. This is significant because just as page views are commonly used to measure web site traffic, Luminate tracks image views, which count the number of times a web publisher serves up a Luminate-enabled image. It is a clear marker of audience interest.

The name change and announcement of the Luminate™ platform for image apps, comes on the heels of an innovative partnership with Hearst Digital Media. The company’s explosive momentum has also been a draw for top talent including CRO and head of publisher development, Chas Edwards, formerly of Digg; Terry Murphy, CFO, formerly of LiveOps. Luminate also added Elliot Schrage, the Vice President of Global Communications, Marketing and Public Policy at Facebook, as a strategic advisor to the Luminate Board.

Please visit www.luminate.com to learn more about how Luminate is changing the way consumers, publishers and advertisers use and interact with online images.

LUMINATE UNVEILS WORLD’S FIRST PLATFORM FOR IMAGE APPLICATIONS

Company Brings Images to Life with Image Apps Designed to Create Rich Consumer Experience

Luminate Transforms Images Into a Canvas to Shop, Share, Comment, Examine, Curate, Search and Socialize

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA — July 27, 2011, Luminate, Inc., formerly known as Pixazza, Inc., today unveiled a groundbreaking new platform for image applications. For the first time ever, consumers can launch applications within the individual images on their favorite websites.

With this exciting new platform, Luminate opens a new world of image apps, breaking down a wall and bringing flat, static images to life. Online images become more than visual stimuli — they become a gateway for accessing rich and relevant content across the web. The apps available on the Luminate™ platform will allow consumers not only to conduct their favorite everyday online activities such as shopping, sharing, commenting and navigating directly from the images, but can also facilitate entirely new services made possible by the development of apps specifically for images.

“Image apps transform images from static pixels into interactive experiences,” said Luminate CEO Bob Lisbonne. “Just as phones evolved from merely voice calls to smartphones with apps, now consumers can enjoy relevant apps inside every online image. The explosive use of images fueled by mobile, social, and cloud computing trends sets the stage for Luminate’s pioneering new image apps platform.”

How It Works:

When a consumer sees the Luminate icon in the corner of an image, it indicates that the image is interactive. Consumers simply mouse into the image and choose from a variety of image apps. They can easily share an image or specific points within an image with their friends, discover statistics about their favorite athletes, see where to purchase similar products to those featured in a photo, uncover the latest information about a particular event, reveal geo tag or Wikipedia information, read more content about the people or places featured in an image, listen to music or see a movie trailer related to an image.

Image Applications:

Image applications will span a number of key categories including: Commerce, Information, Social, Organization, Advertising, Navigation, Public Service, and Presentation. Luminate’s platform currently offers such applications as: unique Twitter Share, Facebook Share, and Email Share apps that give consumers the power to select precisely what they want inside an image and share it with others; an information app called Annotation that allows publishers to quickly and easily tag any spot within an image and add information relevant to that image; a commerce app called Products, which enables consumers to mouse over the image and interact with tags on the picture; and an Advertising app that offers publishers a seamless way to place relevant advertisements within an image.

Luminate plans to roll out new applications frequently to address the varying needs of consumers, publishers and advertisers. Its platform is designed to ultimately enable the development of any conceivable app that is relevant to a particular image. It is this capability that will help define the future of web images.

This cutting edge platform for image apps comes from the company that pioneered the use of images as real estate for delivering ecommerce and advertising three years ago as Pixazza, Inc. With the introduction of the new platform, the company has been rebranded as Luminate, Inc. (see separate release: Pixazza, Inc. Rebrands itself as Luminate, Inc.) as it takes the next step in executing its vision to make every image on the web interactive.

The Luminate Approach:

What makes the Luminate platform so compelling is its breakthrough ability to link images with applications and content beyond the website where the image is viewed. To create the best possible consumer experience, Luminate focuses on all of the data relevant to a particular image or part of an image. Luminate has long employed a unique recognition system that combines visual algorithms with human crowdsourcing. With its new platform, the company has multiplied the sources and ways to uncover information about images. In addition to the data derived from its team of experts, the company can avail itself of information from end users and publishers with the goal of creating a richer, more immersive experience for the end user. Luminate has the most sophisticated system in the industry for tagging relevant content.

“The reason images remained stagnant for so long is because it is remarkably difficult to contextualize their composition and link them to other pieces of relevant content across the Internet,” said James Everingham, CTO of Luminate.

“We were the first to develop the technology to overcome these complexities, turning images into an even more valuable asset. With our platform and the introduction of image apps, we believe that the entire Internet can become connected in a more meaningful way.”

To learn more about how Luminate is changing the way consumers interact with images, please visit www.luminate.com.

Last week, that meant buying Zong, a carrier billing provider. Today, Laura Chambers, the senior director of PayPal Mobile, demonstrated another way at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat conference in San Francisco.

The new application, which will be available later this summer, will allow users to transfer money using near field communication on the Nexus S, the first Google Android device to have NFC chips integrated. For now, the solution will only work on NFC-enabled phones — a very limited market.

In the demo between Chambers and VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall, Marshall fictitiously sent $1 million to Chambers by entering the amount into a widget on the homescreen. To activate the transfer, he tapped his NFC-enabled phone against Chambers’ phone.

The video below shows the technology in action:

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.

Google unveiled a mobile wallet and deals program that will allow users to tap their Android phone at the register to pay using near field communication (NFC) technology.

At the press conference today, it also said it has built a deal network, much like Groupon, that offers consumers discounts and loyalty programs for local retailers and merchants.

(It was only a tiny bit deflating later in the day when PayPal sued Google and its top two payment execs).

Rewind to earlier this week when Square, the company founded by Twitter creator Jack Dorsey, also announced its mobile payment plans.

On Monday, Dorsey showed Square’s way of replacing wallets without using NFC.

Instead of NFC, users order and pay with an iPhone application, where their credit card information is stored. At checkout, they give their name to the cashier, who will need to use an iPad as a register in order to complete the transaction.

Square also envisions building a local deals network.

Both systems are headed into trials at various locations around the country. Google will be expanding nationwide by summer.

For an industry that seemed so far out in the future just a few days ago, that’s a lot of promises being made in just one week.

Both Google’s Eric Schmidt and Dorsey will be making appearances next week at our D: All Things Digital conference to make the case.

In the meantime, which player–Google or Square–is the likely winner?

Put bluntly, neither system is good enough right now.

Even though it seems certain that as a society we will increasingly move away from cash as a primary method of payment, it will take plenty of experiments–and future iterations–to get it right.

Both Google and Square are plagued with the same problem: Making bets on technology and partners that limit the addressable market.

In doing so, neither is able to a cast a big enough net to have a truly disruptive service.

For instance, Google’s solution works only on NFC-enabled Android smartphones running on the Sprint network (Sprint has only one NFC-enabled phone).

Square is on the opposite end of the hardware spectrum.

Its system requires a consumer to have an iPhone and a merchant to have an iPad. It said Android applications are coming soon.

They’ve also both made alliances on the processing side of the business. Google has partnered with MasterCard, while Square has received an investment from MasterCard’s arch rival, Visa.

Of course, this is the very first inning, and the game is not being played by just two teams, so anything is possible. Many others are jumping in, or planning to, and that will make things even murkier.

Going forward, Google may have the scale and determination to make some of those changes that can bring it to the masses, but it’s unclear what its plans are for non-Android devices. It says it is building an open platform, but how open?

In the meantime, Square’s approach appears to be winning over the hearts of the small- and medium-size businesses that don’t have the capacity to adopt complex point of sales machinery. It also has the ability to be platform agnostic since it does not have a stake in who wins the mobile operating system battle.

Maybe for now, the big winner is the customer, who has plenty of choices to pick from.

Catalog Spree, which launched yesterday on the iPad, aggregates a number of catalogs in one place, similarly to a mall, where consumers can go to find multiple stores.

So far, the app includes catalogs from Dwell Studio, Serena & Lily, Tea Collection, Nordstrom, Filson and Artful Home. More will be added regularly.

On the surface, the application may sound like a bunch of pretty pictures, but Padopolis’ co-founder and CEO Joaquín Ruiz makes a big case for the idea, which investors were willing to bet on.

After 10 months of boot-strapping, the Menlo Park, Calif.-based company has raised $1.3 million in seed funding from El Dorado Ventures, Blackberry Partners Fund and Andrew Jenks, an angel investor. The company, which officially launched in November, didn’t know it was on to something until Christmas.

Ruiz said they started having discussions with retailers, who reported that anywhere from 2 percent to 10 percent of holiday purchases occurred on the device in the months leading up to Christmas. That’s up from zero the year before since the iPad didn’t exist.

Ruiz said the catalog industry makes a great target because unlike other print publications, such as newspapers and magazines, it’s on the rise.

Roughly 20 billion catalogs were mailed last year in the U.S., jumping from 18 billion two years ago. Those catalogs translate to more than $100 billion in annual revenues, he said, representing the single-largest revenue generator for retailers.

But despite their effectiveness, there’s two downsides: distribution costs–including paper and postage–and, of course, consumers who don’t want the clutter (Ruiz swears 65 percent of people who discontinue catalogs still want to shop from that store, they just don’t want the paper).

That’s where the iPad can make the difference on both sides of the equation.

“There are three ways to interact with the customer: brick and mortar, there’s the Internet and there’s the catalog,” he said. “An Internet-only shopper spends an average of $120 a year. If you buy in the store, you spend an average of $180. If you’re a catalog shopper, your average spend is $240. But if you shop on all three, it’s more than $1,000. There’s a fourth channel. Mobile is going to become a significant part of that fourth channel.”

When you first enter the app, you are greeted by “Sally Spree,” a cartoon-ish blond-haired woman in high heels with a big smile who is galloping across the screen, carrying four shopping bags. The image portrays how fun and easy the shopping experience can be (instead of fighting crowds at the mall in any kind of shoes–much less pumps).

Once inside the app, there are miniature pictures of several catalogs, much like iBooks, where Apple sells the latest bestsellers from a digital bookshelf.

A user touches a catalog to enter, where they will see a nearly identical layout of the real catalog with pictures and descriptions. The difference, however, is its interactivity. Users can tap on an item to receive more information or to buy it. They can search to discover new catalogs and subscribe to feeds or be alerted to promotions. A favorite item can be posted to your Facebook feed.

On the back end, the catalog is linked into the retailer’s e-commerce site, so it’s intelligent enough to know if an item is in stock. Likewise, if a friend clicks on an item from your Facebook page, it won’t take you to a broken link or an iPad app, but to the company’s regular Internet site.

The application is free to consumers to download and to browse. Padopolis plans to take a percentage of revenue from each sale it helps generates on behalf of the retailer.

For now, the company seems to be ahead of the curve.

A search in the iPad store reveals a competitor called Catalogs.com that has products from Home Depot, Petco, Speigel and others, but it has only received two stars. Its biggest competition likely is the retailers themselves that have the resources to create their own standalone applications. As of launch, a search reveals that none of its partners have taken that route.

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.

The two companies on Friday are set to announce a partnership that marries Intuit’s accounting software for small businesses with Salesforce.com’s sales-automation offerings–-all handled over the Web, or in the cloud, as many industry executives put it these days.

They plan to offer a Web-based application based on Salesforce.com technology that will be sold through Intuit’s App Center for users of QuickBooks, a program used to manage the finances of 4.5 million small businesses, Intuit said.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

A panoply of big media giants sent a cease-and-desist letter today to Zite, the Apple iPad news reader app.

The Washington Post, AP, Gannett, Getty Images, Time, Dow Jones and many other media organizations were part of the action, which you can read all about below.

Zite bills itself as a “personalized iPad magazine that gets smarter as you use it.”

Not smart enough, it seems, to avoid copyright complaints from the content creators the app sucks in.

“The Zite application is plainly unlawful,” said the letter to Zite CEO Ali Davar, noting all kinds of copyright violations.

In a phone interview with BoomTown this afternoon, Davar said Zite would comply with the letter by shifting the content from its “reading” mode to a Web one, which points to publisher sites.

“It’s a bummer that they did this, but we expected it,” he said.

In a comment he posted below, Davar also wrote:

“Zite’s goal is to work with publishers, not to be antagonistic. The few publishers that have contacted us regarding the reading mode view we have complied with their requests and simply switched over to web view. We’re talking to publishers right now to find a win-win for them monetarily and to at the same time preserve the great user experience.”

For now, it’s lose-lose, and the letter is a dramatic shot across the bow of all the many news readers now hitting the market in the wake of the popularity of the Apple iPad tablet.

The social media-focused Flipboard and the news-oriented Pulse are two others, both of which have claimed they are working with publishers.

But Pulse wrangled with the New York Times over misuse of its RSS feeds and copyright issues, which has since been settled.

Zite showed up earlier this month, a product of a machine-learning technology start-up called Worio, which is based in Vancouver, Canada.

The aggregator of personalized content, which has $4 million in angel funding, gets its cues from a user’s interests.

Zite’s technology originated at research at the University of British Columbia several years ago.

In an interview with NetworkEffect’s Liz Gannes a few weeks ago, Davar seemed sanguine about publishers.

Wrote Gannes:

The free Zite app imports a user’s Twitter tweets, follows and Google Reader subscriptions, offers lists of pre-made categories, and then solicits feedback and refines over time a list of topics and sources the user is interested in. It features articles based on their popularity, number of shares from a user’s network and topic relevance. (Davar said he thinks a person’s Facebook network data is too heterogeneous to reliably recommend articles, so it’s not included as an option.)

Flipboard itself is likely to add more personalization features; the company bought real-time social discovery technology from Ellerdale and has yet to implement much of it.

Vancouver-based Zite is well-funded, with $4 million from angels and Canadian grants, but it doesn’t have business relationships with publishers. The app lays out pictures and articles, stripping out everything else, including ads. Davar said he doubted this would be a problem. “It would be shortsighted for publishers to think of Zite as us versus them,” he said.

Short-sighted maybe, but legally lethal definitely, as you can see by this cease-and-desist letter, as well as a video from Zite on how its app works:

Letter to Zite _03 30 11_ –

Zite: Personalized Magazine for iPad from zite.com on Vimeo.

(Full disclosure: New Corp. owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)

In response, Square’s CEO Jack Dorsey said the claims weren’t “fair or accurate,” and that VeriFone was overlooking all of the protections already built into your credit card.

VeriFone’s awareness campaign may be considered a little unconventional.

The company went as far as to launch a web site, record a video, and develop a mock-iPhone app that demonstrates how easy it was to use Square’s dongle to skim information off of a credit card.

Reactions to VeriFone’s approach largely sided with Square.

In comments on our site and on other venues, including Twitter, respondents mostly waived off the concerns, saying that VeriFone was feeling threatened by Square’s progress in the market.

In an exclusive interview, VeriFone’s CEO Doug Bergeron explained why the company felt it was necessary to launch the campaign.

Actually, the interview was positioned as a way to “clear the air,” although as you’ll see, those were not his words, but rather the phrase his public relations people chose to use in pitching us.

Here is our conversation, which has been edited for length and some context, but is largely as it happened.

Duryee: I was told you want to “clear the air” about VeriFone’s actions last week.

No, I don’t think that’s the way I would put it.

I believe that’s a direct quote from your PR person.

Well, I can’t help what they say.

But this is a very interesting time in mobile commerce. There’s a lot of things happening, and a lot of innovation that is happening, and yet, and yet a lot of historical issues that haven’t gone away.

[Skipping ahead in the interview] How is your smartphone product different than Square’s?

We’ve been selling PAYware Mobile for about a year, and it is selling well. Square is the only one that I know of that doesn’t encrypt their data.

We don’t use a dongle. We use a sleeve, or basically it’s a small cradle that the phone sits in. What’s different is that we encrypt the data, which means it costs $25 to $35 more to provide that technology. We aren’t creating fraud. We want consumers to be able to accept credit cards. But if you cut corners it causes problems.

We’ve been mentioning it for awhile, but we thought we needed to be heard.

Did you approach Square directly?

We’ve been in several conversations–not just with Square–but with the industry, and not just about Square, but about hypothetical devices.

We don’t want an industry that’s been moving toward simplicity, which we think is good, to move toward technology that’s allowing fraud. We don’t want it to go in wrong direction.

Did you give Square a heads-up that you were going to do what you did?

I don’t know who our PR folks talked to or didn’t.

Your PR folks told me that you had a meeting with Square’s CEO Jack Dorsey the week before.

I did see him in New York. We were at a similar meeting. I brought up the security issue, and asked him how are you addressing security? The answer was still, the networks will take care of it.

That’s not the way the rest of the world is treating this.

Networks have programs that monitor transactions, and they’ll call you if you are traveling, and there’s systems that can identify things post-facto, but that’s after the fact. The rest of the world has used smart cards and other mechanisms to stop fraud where it happens.

So, the networks can take care of it?

It’s not good enough. We should be joined arm-and-arm to make sure customers trust these systems and make sure that fraud goes down. I don’t think retailers like paying the highest interchange rates in the world, that’s not fair.

Was your open letter fair to Square?

[He laughs.] Listen it’s a competitive world. We take our role as a leader in the industry seriously. We gave them a heads up and free advice that you shouldn’t be allowing systems out there, unencrypted. If that’s fair or not, it’s not the issue here. We collectively need to create new technology to reduce fraud, whether you are a venture-backed business or a big businesses. We are both responsible for our own decisions and should be able to fend for ourselves.

Were you worried they were gaining traction in the market?

No, not at all. We don’t know what traction they’ve seen. We might be doing more than them. I have no idea. It is worth noting that we do less than a couple of million dollars a year with micro-merchants, such as garage sales or Girl Scout cookies. But that’s not the essence of VeriFone. This is not our massive attempt to protect two million in revenue. If that’s what you think, you are missing the point.

We are not worried about competition in one of our $2 million segments, but we are worried about the industry not being concerned about the third rail of skimming, which is smartphones not using encrypted data.

Still, a lot of the feedback in the comments on our site and on Twitter was that you felt threatened by Square.

I notice Verizon and AT&T advertise whose systems don’t work. Oracle advertises against HP, by saying their systems have more processing power. I’m not quite sure how this is different. We have a solution that encrypts data and reduces fraud. If that’s not worthy of identifying and knowing, what’s wrong with that?

Well, maybe you went too far by making the faux iPhone application available for download on the site?

If we didn’t, we would have been accused of blowing smoke. The fact that we could do it [build one] in an hour demonstrates how serious of a problem it is.

[NOTE: PR jumps into the conversation, adding that the application on its site was only for demonstration purposes. No one could actually download it and skim credit card information with it. It was only to show it was possible, but there was no actual risk.]

You really believe that the Square dongle will be used for harm?

They certainly could. It’s a skimmer that doesn’t look like a skimmer. You might be using a merchant that you trust, and they are skimming right in front of you and don’t even have to go in the back room.

Now that you’ve voiced your concerns, what happens?

I don’t know. We all continue to go along our paths and try to improve paying at the pumps, and paying at the table, and try to continue to promote that smartphones are great and that the data should be encrypted…

We have a competitive reason to do so, and we believe we have a differentiated product. This can be solved. This isn’t rocket science. They can add encryption and they’d be done.

There is no next step. We’ll continue to sell the most robust in the industry, and reduce fraud and feel good about it, and they’ll continue to do what they do.

[From earlier in the interview. Bergeron provided the company's historical context in the industry, which led them to the decision to write the open letter last week.]

Without the benefit of 30 years of watching historical issues, it’s easy to see how our campaign last week was considered unconventional. But the reality is we are speaking to a very seirous issue here.

The first has to do with the ongoing concern–even worry–that retailers large and small are having with conventional card brands.

It plays out like this: I see you give me a lot of value to accept debit and credit because customers like it, but this notion that I’m paying the highest interchange rates in the world in America–15 to 25 percentage points of my revenue. Whereas, the rest of the world on average pays 10 percent. As a retailer, I’d say I’m just not getting how the 25 percent that I’m giving up to the card ecosystem is valuable.

The response is: The reason you pay the highest interchange rates in the world is because there’s a lot of fraud in the system.

Some of it goes to profits and managing the network, but a big piece of it is a pooled risk to cover the fraud in the system. The reason European retailers pay significantly less is because there’s a lot less fraud in the system. Ditto Canada and Australia.

Every other country has taken technology to eliminate or reduce the incidence of fraud and skimming. Therefore there’s less fraud and interchange rates come down.

Every day of the week, I hear them [retailers] complaining about interchange. I defend it. We are what we are, and there’s fraud in the system–that is what it is. We have made it our mission to go after the sources of fraud.

There’s two big areas of fraud, and the unregulated smartphone dongle is creating the third.

What are the two big sources?

The two biggest sources, which Forrester, IDC and NPD would all agree, is gas pumps and restaurants.

And there’s a reason for that.

Gas pumps received a waiver from Visa and other card companies.

They were leaned on by the oil companies, which claimed that meeting PCI compliance at each gas pump would have been really painful for the gas stations. And therefore at the 800,000 pumps today, unlike most stores you go to which use compliant technology sold by VeriFone or others, there’s nothing protecting your data there.

These pumps are serviced in the middle of the night by independent operators. It turns out that there’s a few master keys running around, which open up hundreds of thousands gas pumps, and then skimmers are inserted in the pumps and the data is captured.

Fraud gets created, and interchange has to stay high.

I thought gas stations experienced high fraud because the credit card has already been stolen, and can easily be used at the pump?

No, the signature doesn’t act as a deterrent. There’s a lot of unattended systems, where there’s not a person there, and they are all compliant and are encrypted. Only in America do these pumps exist.

And, what about restaurants?

The second area where there is a lot of fraud happening is in restaurants. You give your card up to the waiter, and they copy it. We agree [with Square] that copying cards down is a form of skimming.

Restaurants are the last frontier. Restaurants are the only place, where you give your card to a stranger and they go in the back room. So much happens in restaurants. They can get the number on the back, or run it through a skimmer, which are commonly available.

We have tech solutions to solve the two big problems, which would go a long way to reducing fraud, and probably reducing interchange.

Which leads us to how you believe Square is creating a new unencrypted point of sale?

We fear it is the third place, where data is being transmitted through a non-payment device without encrypting it before it goes in.

We have an iPhone product called PAYware Mobile.

We are on a mission here to reduce interchange for retailers by increasing the use of technology at the point of sale. We’ve been telling the story to card associations, customers and major retailers for the past year…It’s not just about reducing interchange for retailers when customers get their identity stolen, it’s a major pain in the you-know-what.

We think we are on the cusp of mobile payments, and there’s going to be more and more done with the phone. We want to make sure it is done securely because if there’s a major pandemic of fraud using cellphones, it’s going to slow the adoption.

We not only support mobile payments fully, we were great proponents of the use of smartphone as credit cards and acceptance systems–our point is let’s be consistent with the rest of the industry.

Yahoo is losing another longtime senior exec, this time Cheryl Ainoa (pictured here), who has been SVP of the company’s Global Service Engineering unit.

Ainoa, who was one of Yahoo’s top women executives, announced her resignation to her team earlier this week. She is apparently departing for a job at another Silicon Valley tech company.

As described for a recent “Girl Geek Dinner” at Yahoo, where she spoke on the topic of “Innovation at Scale,” Ainoa’s job was to lead “the teams that manage all Yahoo! applications in production worldwide–ensuring scalable, highly available and high performing experiences for every Y! user.”

Ainoa is a longtime Yahoo veteran and also has worked at other companies such as Broderbund Software, Genealogy.com and Healtheon/WebMD.

Earlier this week, another longtime Yahoo–VP of North American Field Sales Mitch Spolan–left for the top advertising job at social buying site, LivingSocial.

Yahoo declined to comment.

Yesterday, BoomTown paid a long overdue visit on the Mountain View, Calif., HQ of Mozilla, the unusual public-private company that makes the Firefox browser, to chat with its (relatively) new CEO Gary Kovacs (pictured here).

There is a lot to talk about with the new exec, especially the near-to-official launch of Firefox 4, the increasing coopetition with Google and its Chrome efforts and where Mozilla goes next (mobile).

Kovacs, in fact, has a deep mobile background, having arrived in the late fall of 2010 to take over from John Lilly, who moved on to a stint as a venture capitalist.

Before Mozilla, Kovacs worked on a range of products at Sybase–until after its purchase by SAP–and also on mobile and devices at Adobe. Before that, he played a key role at Zi Corporation, a company specializing in embedded software and services for mobile and consumer devices.

He’ll need all that expertise if Firefox is to do as well on mobile devices as it has in gaining market share on the desktop, an effort that has been challenged by a continual and intense effort at upgrade and improvement by No. 3 Google especially.

According to a recent poll, for example, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer holds the dominant 56 percent share, with Mozilla’s Firefox at almost 23 percent and Google at just above 10 percent. Apple’s Safari and Opera follow.

Of course, Firefox has been playing nicer with Chrome cousin Android, which is beginning to dominate the smartphone market and is moving aggressively into the tablet arena. In fact, Mozilla just released a new beta in the marketplace for Google’s mobile operating system.

Still, some have fretted as Mozilla delayed its official release of Firefox 4 several times since last fall.

Nonetheless, by dislodging IE from its dominant market position, Firefox has proved not only that open-source projects can provide better software, but that it’s possible for a particularly well done one to become an everyday consumer application.

Despite its success, Mozilla still has to keep up its innovation and technical prowess. But given its unusual status as both a profit and nonprofit, it is hindered in that it is not likely to go public and shower its Silicon Valley employees with giant gobs of overhyped stock.

In the video below, Kovacs talks about Mozilla’s relationship with Google (not easy!), feature improvements in Firefox 4 (a new Chromish user interface!), how to hold onto talent in Silicon Valley (also not easy!) and what it’s like to deal with Apple (definitely not easy!).

Enjoy:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110224/video-mozilla-ceo-gary-kovacs-talks-firefox-4-competition-with-googles-chrome-and-more/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20110214/was-tweetdecks-a-sale-a-good-deal-that-depends-on-bill-gross/ http://allthingsd.com/20110214/was-tweetdecks-a-sale-a-good-deal-that-depends-on-bill-gross/#comments Mon, 14 Feb 2011 22:04:22 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=29789 On paper, Twitter is worth $4 billion. Its investors, at least, believe it will be worth $10 billion sooner than later.

So why is the leading Twitter application–the one that many of Twitter’s most ardent users rely on–selling itself for $30 million?

That’s the question lots of people are mulling over since Friday’s news about the UberMedia/TweetDeck deal.

The tech investors and observers I’ve chatted with in the last couple of days generally land in one of two camps. Either:

• TweetDeck is the biggest Twitter client not owned by Twitter, and they sold too early.
• TweetDeck is the biggest Twitter client not owned by Twitter and, given the circumstances, they did okay.

This is basically a more muted replay of last year’s Twittersphere freakout, when it became clear that Twitter wanted to own much more of the Twitter ecosystem itself, and would place more limits on everyone else.

One important variable here is the way you view Bill Gross and UberMedia. A big chunk of the TweetDeck payout–the majority, according to multiple sources–will be in UberMedia stock. So if you think that company–which just raised another $17.5 million itself–has an upside, then the deal looks that much better.

That’s hard to figure, though, because Gross seems to be doing two things: Buying Twitter apps that compete with Twitter’s own products, and building a Twitter advertising system that will compete with the one Twitter is trying to build itself.

And Twitter doesn’t seem any more receptive to any of that now than it did 10 months ago. But Gross and his backers argue that they’re going to pull it off in a way that makes Uber become the Zynga to Twitter’s Facebook–a smaller company built on another bigger company’s platform, that makes both of them more valuable. So if they’re right…

Meantime, this seems like a good time to revisit Twitter investor Fred Wilson’s “inflection point” essay from last April.

That’s the one that precipitated much quaking among third-party Twitter developers and investors, with good reason: In part, it explained that Twitter would be buying or building “hole-filling” services, which meant there wouldn’t be much reason for many of the Twittersphere’s existing apps to exist.

A year later, though, it’s the second part of Wilson’s essay, where he calls on developers to build new apps and services that “create something entirely new on top of Twitter,” that seems more striking.

Because if Twitter really does end up being worth $10 billion or more, it seems like someone ought to be trying to do that. I’m not sure I’ve seen any, though.

Am I missing something? Feel free to weigh in below.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110214/was-tweetdecks-a-sale-a-good-deal-that-depends-on-bill-gross/feed/ 1