On Yahoo’s recent fourth-quarter earnings call, CEO Marissa Mayer called the company’s mobile efforts a “nascent source of revenue,” a theme she reiterated in her appearance earlier this week at a Goldman Sachs investment conference in San Francisco.

There, she said that the company was going to cut down on its apps portfolio from more than 60 to “the dozen or so applications that people use all the time on their phone” to turbocharge efforts in the key arena.

Touting her mobile aspirations, as well as noting Yahoo’s clear weakness in the area, has been a carefully concerted Mayer effort to get in front of investors’ worries about the company’s mobile performance.

In fact, Mayer addressed the issue in an interview with Bloomberg recently, noting rhetorically: “Given that we do not have mobile hardware, a mobile OS, a browser or a social network, how are we going to compete?”

How, indeed.

Because, according to sources inside the company, direct mobile revenue hovers only around $125 million annually, mostly from search revenue on mobile devices. While users are consuming lots of Yahoo Web pages on their phones, which could technically boost the sales numbers higher, rendering most desktop-created ads on mobile is not the same thing as the significant mobile revenue Yahoo needs to generate.

There’s no question that Mayer has taken every public opportunity she can to talk about how important mobile is to Yahoo’s future and how she is going to double down in the area. Along with loudly proclaiming her commitment to the fast-growing sector, she has also bought a number of small mobile startups since she arrived at the Silicon Valley Internet giant last year.

Last week that meant Yahoo scooped up Alike, a mobile app that helps users discover nearby venues and places to visit based on your interests.

But, while these acquisitions are all interesting and important to spur innovation and consumer engagement, they are still very tiny steps to solving the big problem for Yahoo to make mobile a truly significant revenue stream without any of the most critical elements of the ecosystem that rivals have.

It’s not that Yahoo has not tried in the past, having mounted several aggressive and quite elaborate mobile efforts over the years. But, without going into painful detail, most have had little traction overall and no needle-moving revenue to speak of.

The constant shifting of mobile-focused execs has been another difficulty, with little continuing leadership since Marco Boerries left in 2009. To fix that, Mayer appointed Adam Cahan as Yahoo’s mobile product kingpin in November. The former IntoNow founder and CEO oversees all mobile efforts, as well as its Flickr photo sharing service.

But mobile monetization is another issue, without a significant mobile advertising czar in charge — a task which then presumably falls to new COO Henrique De Castro. But while the Google exec is an experienced enough online ad exec, he was definitely not known at the search giant for any serious mobile expertise.

Yahoo will need that and fast, because however you count mobile revenue at the company, insiders there admit it is extraordinarily low. That’s probably why Mayer declined to share specific mobile revenue figures in Yahoo’s recent fourth-quarter earnings call, instead touting 200 million daily active mobile users.

Impressive? Not exactly. By comparison, Facebook said it had 618 million daily active mobile users with 23 percent of its $1.33 billion in Q4 revenue from mobile, from an almost zero base a year ago.

That’s 10 times more than Yahoo — about $300 million a quarter versus $30 million.

Interestingly, at the Goldman conference, Mayer made the point that no one has cracked the mobile monetization puzzle. True enough, but both Facebook and, of course, Google are well down the road to doing so, while Yahoo remains stalled as yet.

To be fair, the acceleration of mobile monetization at Facebook is perhaps easier for the social networking giant, which has been achieving that by leveraging its singular product and audience and building its own mobile ad technology.

And Google has already been hard at work retrofitting its massive search business to aim at mobile, has strengthened its efforts with the purchase of AdMob and Motorola and, of course, has made the early and enormous investment in its Android platform.

From a stand start, it’s all a much harder task for Yahoo, which has a plethora of product offerings that all require different mobile monetization solutions. It’s a bigger problem since Yahoo’s own mobile ad targeting and contextual search is considered weak and unable to serve better targeted ads in a variety of mobile experiences. That means things as simple as when you search for a sports game, you get a beer ad.

In improving this, Yahoo has few choices — building it up in-house, acquiring a company with mobile ad expertise or partnering with someone in a significant manner, which most suggest is its best alternative in the short term.

The first is certainly important, which is why Mayer is pursuing the range of mobile startups she has, seeking both apps consumers will love and engineering expertise in the area. That is all well and good, but focus has to be on creating great products first and, as Mayer has said repeatedly, money should follow.

The second has also been considered, with Yahoo looking at a range of possible acquisitions to improve its mobile ad technology. In this, because of Yahoo’s huge scale, there are still few choices, boiling down to the larger players, JumpTap and Millennial.

Yahoo has mulled over acquiring both over the years and even recently, although the price tags are high and there are issues about whether this will solve the problem or not.

One possible short-term alternative is to do some kind of mobile advertising or contextual search deal with Google and perhaps one with Apple, which has its own iAd offering.

According to sources, Yahoo’s current search partnership does not preclude the company from working with Google in certain mobile monetization areas. In fact, the pair recently struck a deal, as Peter Kafka wrote, “to begin running some of its AdSense display ads on Yahoo sites, and will become one of several ad networks Yahoo uses to fill some of its pages.”

That’s money in the bank for Yahoo, which Mayer — an ex-Googler, too — knows might extend well to mobile monetization and innovation. She has famously handed out free smartphones to all employees, which is a nice touch and also an important message to send to them and others.

But it will take a lot more than an iPhone in every cubicle at Yahoo, because mobile is the issue she will be scrutinized for, given the stress she has put on it as one of the key ways to revive Yahoo.

“There is no question Marissa will be judged on bringing the product management expertise she demonstrated at Google to Yahoo to make things consumers want to use in mobile,” one top Yahoo insider told me. “The thing is, she has to also actually make some real money doing it.”

When the company posts its Q4 results next week, we’ll know exactly how much mobile contributed to eBay’s revenue in 2012, but based on the new moves, it’s clear the online shopping giant is preparing for another banner year for mobile.

As part of the reorganization, which took place at the end of last year, mobile is now reporting into the company’s main marketplace division, rather than being a standalone product group.

The restructuring is similar to moves that other companies are making now that smartphones and tablets are becoming a main part of the user experience, and not just a second or third screen.

Steve Yankovich, eBay’s former VP of mobile and main spokesperson on the subject, has been appointed VP of innovation and new ventures. In his new role, he will focus on the company’s Red Laser application, which allows users to find product information by scanning a bar code. He is also working on developing new mobile experiences.

Additionally, Kevin Hurst, who was previously VP of product management at eBay Mobile, is now VP of mobile products. Instead of reporting to Yankovich, as he previously did, Hurst is now reporting to Dane Glasgow, the VP who heads up the company’s marketplace division.

Hurst will be based out of Portland, Ore., where eBay operates an office with 100-plus employees focused on mobile.

In an interview with AllThingsD, Hurst said it’s clear “we’ve gone through our incubation phase. We are pretty much going mainstream [with mobile].”

I’ve written about eBay’s mobile momentum before, mostly because it’s impressive. As of the end of September 2012, its apps had been downloaded 100 million times, and users have listed 100 million items to its marketplace using the app. It also forecast mobile revenue to hit $10 billion in 2012. Based on that estimate, I’ve calculated that mobile will make up about 16 percent of its total revenue.

That’s roughly double the percentage I reported last week based on one analyst’s recent estimate for Amazon’s mobile revenue.

The new apps being released today on iPhone and iPad are designed to decrease friction for both buyers and sellers in the marketplace.

For example, shoppers will find that the search bar now features auto-complete to anticipate what they are typing. The apps also provide an improved check-out experience, by allowing guests to make purchases without registering for an eBay or PayPal account, which was required in the past.

“It was a huge hurdle,” Hurst admits. “We’ll be working in 2013 on reducing that friction more.”

Selling has also become easier for those who like using their camera phone to take pictures of the item they are selling.

Now when listing items from the iPhone or iPad app, eBay will complete many of the fields for the user, especially in electronics, which have common characteristics. For instance, when attempting to sell a Kindle Fire, the app automatically fills in all the tablet’s specifications and provides a standard photo. It even makes suggestions for a sale price based on eBay’s current inventory.

Posting an item could literally take just a couple of minutes.

Additionally, the listing process can be started on the mobile phone and completed later on the tablet or PC.

“It’s very common for people to use their iPhones to access eBay and then later on iPads and then the PC. This multi-device world allows people to switch from one device to the other,” Hurst said.

Currently, eBay does not allow users to list items on eBay through the mobile browser because of technical limitations, like lack of access to the phone’s camera from inside the browser. “For the foreseeable future, we won’t offer it on the mobile Web,” Hurst said. “When it’s ready, we’ll add that.”

Both the iPad and iPhone apps are free and are available in iTunes. The Android application has already been updated with some of the new features, but a fully functional version will be available soon.

Devin Wenig, eBay’s president of global marketplaces, said in an interview that next year the company will stop running mobile ads inside of its applications.

“We aren’t happy with the user experience and we don’t need the money,” he said.

This year, eBay displayed ads inside of its iPhone app as an experiment, but found that they were distracting and cluttered up the smaller screens. The ads also didn’t deliver meaningful revenue.

“It’s not worth it,” Wenig added.

Fortunately for eBay, it has options.

The primary way it makes money is through selling products online. Meanwhile, other media properties that are mostly supported by advertising are left dealing with the fact that ads on mobile don’t perform as well as they do online.

“Some don’t have an alternative business model. In this case, it’s better to be lucky,” said Wenig, who, as the former CEO of Thomson Reuters Markets, knows all too well what it’s like to be in the other camp.

Despite eBay’s lack of enthusiasm for mobile advertising, it is a huge promoter of mobile commerce in general, as it serves consumers wherever they want to shop.

The San Jose-based company announced back in September that its mobile apps had been downloaded 100 million times since launching four years ago. That’s not a trivial number, given that it’s equal to the number of active users on eBay last year. Additionally, this year, eBay expects to transact more than $10 billion in mobile volume from its apps. In fact, the company just hit its biggest mobile shopping day ever on Dec. 2.

For advertisers, this should be a reminder that there is still a lot of work left to be done to make advertising run smoothly across a range of mobile devices. EBay’s huge mobile audience should be attractive to marketers over the long term, but given that it was only conducting experiments for now, its decision to hold off on in-app advertising won’t be counted as a huge loss.

cdrin / Shutterstock.com

The drawn-out process is particularly troubling for some that are hoping to launch games or other applications in time for the holidays to take advantage of higher-than-usual phone and tablet sales. “It’s been a nightmare. It’s worse than it’s ever been,” said one developer, who spoke to AllThingsD on the condition of anonymity.

The same developer said Apple has been warning app makers over the phone that based on expected volumes, it could take up to three weeks to get an app approved. Additionally, if developers want to ensure that apps are approved before the New Year, it’s recommended that they submit them by Thanksgiving — only two weeks away.

Apple sent out a letter to developers today, reminding them that the company will not be processing any requests for one week this winter as part of its practice to shut down operations during the winter holidays. The shutdown this year will run from Dec. 21 to Dec. 28. An Apple spokesperson declined to comment.

While it is hard to gauge exactly what is normal since the approval process largely depends on the publisher’s circumstances, a rule of thumb is that Apple approves apps within 10 to 14 days. The new timelines being shared with some developers are likely presenting the worst-case scenario, with some occurring much faster. According to Apple’s developer portal, 84 percent of new apps and 95 percent of updates have been reviewed in the past eight business days (although those numbers have not been updated since Oct. 15).

A third-party service, called Shiny Development, attempts to track the wait times independently and is reporting an average wait time of nine days. It’s unclear how accurate that data is since it is based on developers self-reporting their times on Twitter. In the meantime, Shiny Development also reports that the Mac App Store wait times are an average of 19 days. Many believe that Apple has shifted resources from the Mac store to the iOS store to help with increased demand on the mobile front, resulting in longer delays for the Mac.

Apple’s week-long vacation always leads to longer approval processes around the holidays, but this year a number of developers are saying that timeframes increased earlier than normal — for obvious reasons. Developers have been busy creating new applications for the iPhone 5, which has a larger display. The iPad mini may also increase submissions as developers choose to tailor their iPad apps for a smaller display. Finally, developers must also update their apps to support new features in iOS 6, including Passbook, Apple’s new maps and Facebook integration.

Apple has been criticized for a slow approval process before, and many delight in the fact that Google’s Android has none at all. To be sure, it seems that the times once promised by Apple have slipped in recent years. In June 2010, Steve Jobs told developers that 95 percent of all apps submitted were being approved within seven days.

Now it’s not only consumers who are willing to stand in line to get their hands on the latest hardware; developers are eager to get their turn, too.

The new operating system sports a geometric layout, emphasizing third-party applications and touch navigation that works across PCs and mobile devices.

So far, companies like Netflix, Hulu Plus, Evernote and eBay have contributed apps, but many consumers will probably find the catalog thin. The selection is even more pressing, given that some versions of the operating system — called Windows RT — will not support older-style programs.

This week, Microsoft is hoping to fix that by hosting hundreds of developers at its Redmond, Wash., campus, under a big white tent, where it will be building its best case for why developers should be creating apps for its platform. Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer has already been busy giving the hard sell, projecting that a year from now we’ll see close to 400 million new devices running the new operating system, to make it “the single largest opportunity for software developers today.” That includes hardware spanning phones, tablets and PCs.

The company is also trying to pitch developers on its broader Windows ecosystem including Windows Phone 8, which was formally announced Monday in San Francisco.

Stay tuned for the keynote, starting at 9 am PT.

Earlier:

8:51 am: Hello folks, welcome to Redmond, Wash., where it’s raining super hard. But heck, we can’t complain since it’s not a hurricane.

As people get into their seats under the massive white tent, we’re getting a lesson from artist Jordan Rudess on how he uses a Surface to create music.

8:58 am: Rudess is rocking out. Hard to see him in the photo, but he’s bent over his keyboard, mixing the beats.

It’s like electro-funk, extraordinary techno-like music. But he’s legit. He went to Juilliard when he was 9.

Audience goes wild as Rudess leaves the stage after his finale. Now a little stage set-up while we watch a promotional video showing launch scenes from last Friday from around the globe.

9:08 am: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome Steve Ballmer to the stage. He mentions the rainy weather, and says that today’s festivities sold out in 58 minutes. He promises a bigger, better event next year. (Indoors, maybe?)

Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 are here, so how are they doing? Not a huge amount of data yet, but he says in three days, four million Windows 8 upgrades sold. Those are all individual users buying a copy — we’ve sold tens of millions of units to corporate customers, who can update when they choose.

9:12 am: Ballmer says lots of great things being said, namedrops quotes from CNET, Geek.com, AP and The Verge.

“The level of enthusiasm we’ve seen is exciting … I think we are really resonating across the board with the work we are bringing to market.”

Ballmer starts the pitch to developers: “Some points that are useful for those who are thinking about developing for Windows 8 today. With Windows 8, we absolutely have in our hands the best PCs — hardware and software — ever made. The best laptops, desktops, the new tablet meets PC form factor.”

9:17 am: With the launch of Windows Phone 8, it’s a first-class member of the Windows family, Ballmer says. You can read about the phones that were announced yesterday here. “If you want the best experience with your Windows computer, you’ll own a Windows phone. If you want an experience that’s most personal, you’ll want a Windows phone.”

9:20 am: Ballmer promises that he’ll be talking in a moment about the opportunity to make money and drive volume. But right now he’s touching on the fact that developers will be able to write once and have an application that runs across PCs that come with all kinds of form factors.

“You can not only build popular apps, but the apps you deliver on Windows will be better applications than you can build anywhere else, if you choose to marry the opportunities in the software.”

That’s a huge statement, but in order for them to be better than anywhere else, he’s saying developers have to embrace everything they have to offer, such as the opportunity to build live tiles, and integration with SkyDrive, etc. In other words, use everything that Microsoft has to offer!

9:25 am: Ballmer is going to do all his own demos, even though he isn’t a professional demoer. He’s got an 80-inch-plus slate! Huge touchscreen. He’s joking around and getting a lot of laughs from the audience. Someone is tweeting about him in another language — he says, “That’s got to be great!”

He’s sort of like a weatherman, giving us a tour of the Microsoft campus on Bing maps. Now, he’s bringing up OneNote. He makes a couple of notes on the screen, using a stylus.

9:30 am: Next demo. Ballmer is on a Dell desktop, and he’s talking about hanging out with Jessica Alba yesterday at the Windows Phone launch. He does a Jessica Alba search on the PC — there are no related apps, but some photos of the two of them, and then he searches the Web.

9:35 am: And now the smallest demo in the Windows 8 family: The phone. Phones on display are from Samsung, Nokia and HTC. He’s got Bill Gates pinned to the front of his screen. He’s also syncing his notes that he changed earlier on the 80-inch screen. Sure enough, the ink annotations show up on the screen.

9:38 am: Back to medium-sized devices, a one-pound Asus tablet. He’s tempted to throw it to someone in the first row, since it feels so light. But he won’t, because “he’s logged in to his email.”

Sorry, correction. That tablet was 1.15 pounds.

Next up, the Microsoft Surface, which gets applause from the crowd. Before this next demonstration, Ballmer admits: “I’m not a touch typist in any form!”

9:43 am: Ballmer is showing off Xbox Music on the Surface, by streaming “Beautiful Day.” Side note: If you haven’t tried it out yet, it rocks.

Next tablet demo is a Lenovo that weighs 1.32 pounds and runs all applications, not just ones made specifically for Windows 8. This tablet comes with a stylus to make it easy to make annotations.

9:47 am: Now Ballmer is showing off a touch laptop from Acer that weighs less than three pounds. Do people want touch in a laptop? Ballmer asks. Yes, he answers himself. This is a good enough machine to do testing, but also the development of apps, he says. He’s pinching to zoom in the new MSN app, and clicking through headlines.

Ballmer: “If it’s not clear, we’re all in with Windows 8. Every group at Microsoft has contributed something.”

9:53 am: Ballmer steps off the stage, and Steven Guggenheimer, corporate VP of developer and platform evangelism, is up next.

Looks like Ballmer’s job was to sell us on the hardware. Now the other Steve is here to show us a lot of apps. And, oh boy, he’s a fast talker.

That was cool, Guggenheimer just connected an Xbox controller to a Surface to play a game. You’ll also be able to Skype together with a friend while playing a game on a split screen.

Now something a little more serious: Using AutoCAD. It’s running the old Windows 7 app on a new Windows 8 desktop, although it has been upgraded to include a sketch application that can be used with a Windows 8 stylus.

10:02 am: Here’s some on the economics. This isn’t news, but, as Microsoft has already said, if developers choose to deliver the app through the Windows Store, including payments, then Microsoft shares 70 percent of the revenue with the developer, with the opportunity to increase that to 80 percent.

He’s saying that developers can use their own payments system, Microsoft’s, or PayPal.

10:04 am: Cameo appearance by Michael Bayle, the SVP and GM of ESPN Mobile. He’s going to give us a peek into his experiences developing for Windows 8.

A look at the new Windows 8 app from ESPN, built in the “Metro” style: Viewers will have an experience that is synced with their previous preferences. Listen to podcasts, view photos or follow real-time scores. “It’s our mission to serve sports fans, anytime, anywhere.” The app launches today on Windows 8.

10:08 am: Steve Ballmer comes back onstage. He’s scrolling through the catalog of apps: Disney’s Where’s my Water? game, Wikipedia, Hulu Plus, Fitbit, Expedia. Others coming as of today: SAP, Dropbox and Twitter just announced.

“One thing I didn’t have a chance to show you, but with the built-in People app, you can actually connect directly into the system, so when I put my son or my wife on my desktop, that connects to Facebook and Twitter. The work that Twitter announced this morning to bring an app to Windows 8 will highlight and showcase capabilities.”

Here we go. Here’s the reality of it. The software and hardware are nice, but there has to be volume for developers to get excited. “We have an installed 670 million people on Windows 7. Windows 8 takes less resources than Windows 7. Every one of those is a potential Windows upgrade. In the last few days, four million sales have moved in that direction. We don’t know what will happen with the PC market over the next year. I think with Windows 8, we’ll see growth and vitality, but even if it stays flat, there will be 400 million new Windows devices that you can target with your application.”

He says that 400 million is “for sure.”

As for Windows Phone 8, Ballmer says that most people think they are a small player, but they are offering the most differentiated experiences. “We’ll do more marketing, and better marketing.”

That commitment gets huge applause from the crowd. They want to see more Windows commercials!

“You will not be able to pick up a magazine, go to the Internet or watch TV without seeing one of our ads frequently.”

He adds: “You have an opportunity to make money — for you, for your company or for your shareholders.”

“I guarantee this will be the best opportunity developers will see. I really want us to build together. We need your support; we need your commitment. For those of you in the room — not on the Webcast — it is my pleasure that every Build attendee will get 100 gigabytes of SkyDrive storage for free.”

Another Oprah moment: Everyone is getting a Microsoft Surface RT with 32GB and a Touch Cover. For that, he asks two promises: Write lots of applications and, since you can’t pick up the Surfaces until 7 pm, stay seated and don’t run.

Enjoy Build!

10:22 am: That’s it, folks. Thanks for tuning in. The bulk of the keynote is over, but plenty more sessions are scheduled for the rest of the week to address how to create the best applications for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8. We’ll be back tomorrow at the same time for the Day 2 keynote.

Big management shifts at Apple are now taking place.

Scott Forstall, the man in charge of its iOS mobile software efforts and a major and longtime executive at the tech giant, is leaving next year and will remain an adviser to CEO Tim Cook until then.

In addition, new retail head John Browett is headed out the door.

As part of the move, Apple noted that four key execs — Jony Ive, Bob Mansfield, Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi — would “add responsibilities to their roles.”

Ive gets “Human Interface”; Cue will take over Maps and Siri voice recognition responsibilities; Mansfield will run a new unit called Technologies, “which combines all of Apple’s wireless teams across the company in one organization”; and Federighi gets the big job of iOS and OS X.

More to come on what happened, but Forstall’s departure is very big news and a drastic move for such an important player in the tech space.

He had big fans and also many detractors for his sharp-edged personality, as well as what some described as exhibiting “growing open challenges” to Cook himself. Forstall had previously been called “CEO-in-waiting” in one media account in Fortune.

In addition, numerous sources noted persistent tension between Forstall and several other key execs, especially the powerful design chief Ive.

Veiled internal politics at Apple aside, Forstall has been a key part of Apple’s success over the last decade, especially in the development iPad and the iPhone.

Recently, there has been some level of ire at Apple over the troubled rollout of its own mapping software and the replacement of Google’s popular service, which was Forstall’s responsibility. (No, this move does not mean everyone gets Google mapping back, as one person asked me.)

Browett’s leaving is a little less of a surprise. Since he got the job, he has alienated many within the highly successful retail organization at Apple, many sources said.

His departure comes less than one year after the former Dixons CEO was hired by Apple to succeed Ron Johnson, who left for J.C. Penney in November 2011. Recently he’s been criticized by some Apple Store employees for unfriendly policy changes aimed at increasing Apple’s retail profit margins.

More to come, obvi, but here is the official press release from Apple, which it put out with the most understated title of all time:

Apple Announces Changes to Increase Collaboration Across Hardware, Software & Services

Jony Ive, Bob Mansfield, Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi Add Responsibilities to Their Roles

CUPERTINO, California — October 29, 2012 — Apple® today announced executive management changes that will encourage even more collaboration between the Company’s world-class hardware, software and services teams. As part of these changes, Jony Ive, Bob Mansfield, Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi will add more responsibilities to their roles. Apple also announced that Scott Forstall will be leaving Apple next year and will serve as an advisor to CEO Tim Cook in the interim.

“We are in one of the most prolific periods of innovation and new products in Apple’s history,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “The amazing products that we’ve introduced in September and October, iPhone 5, iOS 6, iPad mini, iPad, iMac, MacBook Pro, iPod touch, iPod nano and many of our applications, could only have been created at Apple and are the direct result of our relentless focus on tightly integrating world-class hardware, software and services.”

Jony Ive will provide leadership and direction for Human Interface (HI) across the company in addition to his role as the leader of Industrial Design. His incredible design aesthetic has been the driving force behind the look and feel of Apple’s products for more than a decade.

Eddy Cue will take on the additional responsibility of Siri® and Maps, placing all of our online services in one group. This organization has overseen major successes such as the iTunes Store®, the App Store℠, the iBookstore℠ and iCloud®. This group has an excellent track record of building and strengthening Apple’s online services to meet and exceed the high expectations of our customers.

Craig Federighi will lead both iOS and OS X®. Apple has the most advanced mobile and desktop operating systems, and this move brings together the OS teams to make it even easier to deliver the best technology and user experience innovations to both platforms.

Bob Mansfield will lead a new group, Technologies, which combines all of Apple’s wireless teams across the company in one organization, fostering innovation in this area at an even higher level. This organization will also include the semiconductor teams, who have ambitious plans for the future.

Additionally, John Browett is leaving Apple. A search for a new head of Retail is underway and in the interim, the Retail team will report directly to Tim Cook. Apple’s Retail organization has an incredibly strong network of leaders at the store and regional level who will continue the excellent work that has been done over the past decade to revolutionize retailing with unique, innovative services for customers.

Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices with iPad.

Over the past two years, Google has been working on making carrier billing an option so that consumers don’t need a credit card in order to buy an application or pay for in-app purchases. Yesterday, Google tweeted that Verizon Wireless customers will soon be able to pay for Google Play apps, music and more on their phone bill. The integration is expected to be live “over the coming weeks.”

Verizon represents the final major U.S. carrier to adopt carrier billing in the marketplace. AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile have all been accepting charges for quite some time.

The addition of Verizon could represent a watershed moment for developers. Not only is it one of the largest U.S. carriers, but it has a huge lineup of Android devices. Likewise, Google Play is notorious for not monetizing as well as Apple’s App Store, or even Amazon’s Appstore, so any additional help will be welcomed by developers.

Many of the excuses to date stem from the fact that Google doesn’t require customers to input a credit card number at start-up, whereas both Apple and Amazon are closely connected to a consumer’s iTunes or online account, which enables essentially one-click or two-click purchases. Of course, carrier billing will appeal to the segment of the market that does not have access to credit.

With the addition of Verizon Wireless, Google Play will have enabled carrier billing with 19 wireless operators around the globe.

Photo Credit: Worldreader & Jon McCormack / The Kilgoris Project Worldleader provides Amazon Kindles to kids in classrooms in Africa

The free service is being called “Whispercast for Kindle,” which is in line with the branding that Amazon has already introduced for other services that sync data across multiple devices.

Whispercast will allow teachers to manage Kindles from a central online location to set up policies, including things like blocking Facebook or Web browsing, and to prevent purchasing anything in the store. Teachers will also be able to push content down from the store. For enterprises, they can push down settings that require employees to have a password, or add personal devices owned by employees to the network.

Jay Marine, VP of Kindle at Amazon, said in an interview that lots of schools have been testing Kindle devices in the classroom, and while teachers generally liked them, there were also a lot of challenges when it came to administering and managing the devices across multiple classrooms and grades. ”We worked with them on this, and got a lot of feedback. It’s been overwhelmingly positive,” he said.

Whispercast will work on everything from the company’s lowest-end e-reader to its most expensive color-screen tablet. It will also work across any device running the company’s free Kindle application, including iOS and Android devices. In the coming months, Amazon hopes to expand the service to support the distribution of Kindle Fire applications. Of course, if Amazon can create tools that make it easy for large organizations to buy Kindles, it may result in more sales of the devices and content — so all this good work will eventually pay off.

In a release, Amazon says that Clearwater High School started off using 2,000 Kindles two and a half years ago, and now is using them in 122 schools in the district. Separately, a nonprofit organization called Worldreader was one of the first to try out the technology, and is now using Whispercast to wirelessly deliver more than 200,000 e-books to children in sub-Saharan Africa, as part of the literacy program.

Marine said that hundreds of schools are beta-testing Whispercast, and that they are trying to reach out to other schools that are using Kindles without their knowledge. “They happened without us, to be honest,” he said, in regards to the rollouts in some schools. “And, after the fact, we tried to help them through it and learn from them.”

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Sam Shank, HotelTonight’s CEO, said what interested him about the company was the team and the technology. He added that HotelTonight does not have immediate plans to get into the restaurant business. At least, not initially. “The platform that we’ve built is category agnostic,” he said.

The company’s first acquisition, though small, comes at a time when other large travel agencies are getting into the last-minute booking space by launching competing standalone hotel apps. Hotels.com, Priceline, Expedia, Orbitz and other large players have launched their own mobile applications that present special offers and deals to those booking rooms on the same day of travel.

Shank said he’s not particularly concerned about all the competition crowding the space, because his company has a lot of technology running behind the scenes that makes it all work. He said its tools help hotels determine how to price their rooms in order to fill their vacancies at the last minute. He’s particularly interested in PrimaTable’s forecasting and pricing technology. Three of the company’s employees will be joining HotelTonight, including the founders.

“Our platform runs a lot more like Google AdWords than Groupon, so our sales team isn’t calling hotels everyday. They are signing up new hotels and getting feedback on how to make tools better, but they aren’t dealing with daily inventory — that’s entered by the hotel,” he said.

The hotels that offer the lowest-priced rooms are the ones that get a chance to fill up three of the six slots that HotelTonight offers every day in each market — it does not offer hundreds of selections, like many of the competing apps, which often just copy their online experiences.

Since launching in January 2011, HotelTonight has been downloaded more than three million times — and it has no online presence. It is available in more than 60 destinations in the U.S., U.K. and Canada. It has 75 employees.

PrimaTable co-founder and CEO Jamie Davidson will become HotelTonight’s VP of Product. Before launching PrimaTable in 2012, Davidson worked at Google as a quantitative expert focused on optimizing the company’s display algorithm. PrimaTable co-founder Colin Zima will join as HotelTonight’s data scientist. Previously, Zima worked on Google’s search-ranking algorithms.

In what is becoming a routine move, the company said today during its second-quarter earnings release that it is now expecting eBay and PayPal mobile to each transact $10 billion in volume this year.

“That’s more than double 2011,” said eBay’s CEO John Donahoe, who called it “a staggering surge” in mobile commerce that did not exist just a few years ago.

As recently as January, eBay was predicting that mobile shopping — either through its apps or the browser on either a phone or tablet — would hit $8 billion in mobile gross merchandise volume in 2012. Likewise, PayPal was expected to hit another $7 billion in mobile total payment volume.

Last year’s numbers were similarly revised multiple times before the end of the year, when eBay’s final mobile tally stood at $5 billion and PayPal’s totaled $4 billion.

“The line is blurring between online and offline, and that behavior is happening because of the investments we have made in mobile,” he said.

As part of the company’s second-quarter conference call, analysts peppered Donahoe with questions about whether these sales were incremental to the company’s traditional business. However, he dismissed those fears; if someone wants to buy a car part while under the hood or while walking down the street, they better let them.

“We believe it is helping our growth rate and helping us be the leader in mobile commerce and payments,” Donahoe added.

It’s hard to say which retailer is a leader in mobile. Others, such as Amazon, have been reluctant to disclose how much traffic is coming from mobile devices. Donahoe said there are obvious leaders, like Amazon and eBay, but beyond that he questions if other retailers are doing significant revenue on mobile.

“If you think of it as an app-based world, we aren’t going to carry around a Neiman Marcus app and a Walmart app and a Best Buy app. By being a marketplace, it’s a single app that gives you access to a lot of things. That’s why we are getting viral traction on it.”

Just yesterday, eBay announced it acquired Card.io for an undisclosed price. The year-old company allows users to skip the tedious process of entering their credit number into various fields at check-out by taking a picture of the card. With that technology under its belt, Donahoe said you can envision a world where you take a snapshot of a credit card and a driver’s license to create a PayPal account.

“Consumer acquisition leads to user engagement, which leads to merchant ubiquity,” he said.

Other figures released today:

• eBay apps have been downloaded 90 million times, up from 65 million in January.
• People are using the apps to list almost two million devices every week, and a handbag is purchased every 30 seconds.

The company sells a firewall that provides security while at the same time allowing the constantly growing number of new applications to run on corporate networks. For the year ended 2011, it reported a net loss of $12.5 million on sales of $118.6 million. But it’s been profitable this year so far: For the first nine months of 2012, Palo Alto reported a $5.3 million profit on $180 million in sales. That would work out to a per-share profit of 10 cents, or nine cents on a fully diluted basis.

Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup are the lead underwriters on the offering. Major shareholders include Greylock Partners and Sequoia Capital, both of which own equal stakes of 13.8 million shares, worth $510 million, assuming a $37 share price. Their shares in the company amount to a combined 41.4 percent of the equity in the company. Globespan Capital Partners has a stake of 4.9 million shares, worth $182 million. Founder and CTO Nir Zuk has 3.8 million shares, worth almost $142 million.

Palo Alto will trade under the ticker symbol PANW on the New York Stock Exchange.

Below, a rundown of those numbers:

• This was Apple’s 23rd WWDC, making it the longest-running developer conference around.
• It sold out in one hour and 43 minutes.
• It hosts attendees from more than 60 countries.
• There are 400 million App Store accounts.
• And there are about 650,000 apps in the App Store itself.
• 225,000 of those apps are designed specifically for iPad.
• 30 billion apps have been downloaded from the App Store so far.
• The App Store has generated five billion dollars in revenue for developers.
• Soon, Apple will bring the App Store to 32 more countries, making it available in a grand total of 155 countries.
• There are 66 million Mac users — triple the number Apple had just five years ago.
• 26 million copies of Lion have been shipped so far.
• 40 percent of OS X users are running Lion.
• Mountain Lion will be the eighth major release of OS X.
• It will feature more than 200 new features and 1,700 new APIs.
• iCloud’s user base has grown to 125 million.
• Through the end of March, Apple had sold 365 million iOS devices.
• More than 80 percent of iOS users are running iOS 5.
• There are currently 140 million iMessage users.
• They send around one billion iMessages per day.
• iOS has delivered 1.5 trillion push notifications so far.
• There are currently 130 million Game Center accounts.
• Five billion scores have been posted from them.
• More than 10 billion tweets have been sent from iOS 5.
• About 47 percent of all photos posted to Twitter are sent from devices running iOS 5.

“This is the bigger opportunity we see under real-time commerce, based on the adoption we’ve seen with our members and the feedback from the restaurants,” said Greg Mazanec, LivingSocial’s general manager for Takeout & Delivery.

The move is a big step away from the company’s roots of offering large discounts to draw patrons into a store or restaurant. But the step also raises the broader question of whether mobile commerce — as we’ve envisioned it for years — will ever take off.

For the past decade, mobile executives and others have promised that, someday, consumers will be alerted of nearby deals or specials on their phone as they walk by a coffee shop or a restaurant. For example, a free latte with a purchase of a scone, or free fries with a burger and milkshake.

More recently, LivingSocial and Groupon were considered clear front-runners for bringing that promise to scale, because both have a large user base and a dense enough footprint of local businesses for it to work. But now LivingSocial is downplaying the idea of location-based offers, a year after launching.

Groupon, which launched a competing product called Groupon Now soon after LivingSocial Instant, continues to offer these real-time deals.

Mazanec declined to say how Instant performed financially, but said it was the company’s first attempt at “real-time commerce,” and it turned out that the response for takeout and delivery had been extremely high. ”It was the repeat behavior that was important to us,” he said.

Now the value is centralized around convenience instead of discounts. That’s something merchants generally like more, too. Instead of offering discounts to people who may have already been looking for a latte or a burger, now they are drawing in more people at full price.

Mazanec describes the nearby Mexican restaurant that already had a long line during lunch. He said the only way for them to sell more food without expanding physically is to offer takeout and delivery.

“Consumers aren’t pulling their phones out to search for the nearest real-time discount on a car inspection or framing service. They are, however, looking for a faster and better way to order food from their favorite local restaurants,” he said.

Now, Takeout & Delivery will replace Instant on the LivingSocial apps.

The mobile app allows users to place and pay for orders for either pickup or delivery. On the back end, the restaurant receives the order by fax, and is able to say how long the order will take to fill. Consumers who show up for takeout are directed to a specific line and can pick up their order without having to pay. Restaurants that offer delivery are responsible for supplying the drivers.

Discounts can always be layered on top of the transaction if a merchant wishes, but it’s no longer the starting point. LivingSocial shares the revenue from the transaction.

“This helps broaden our offerings and puts us in a place where we can offer fast casual to five-star gourmet,” he said.

By adding the service, LivingSocial also starts competing with other delivery services that have declared this to be a big market opportunity.

Seamless, a New York company focused on online delivery and takeout, recently acquired MenuPages and booked more than $400 million in orders last year. And GrubHub, a Chicago-based company, recently raised $50 million and acquired Dotmenu and Allmenus. GrubHub projected that orders would hit $225 million in 2011.

The tiny, Atlanta-based company launched in October 2010. Run by CEO Juan Pablo Gnecco and CTO Alan Queen, Movl (pronounced (MOE-vul) develops what it calls “multiscreen, multidevice” apps that are meant to enhance the connected-TV experience.

In early 2011, Movl’s Pictionary-like WeDraw app won $200,000 as part of Samsung’s Smart TV apps competition. Last month, Movl announced that it had developed an app called SwipeIt, which works on Android phones and Samsung TVs (and is technically owned by Samsung), allowing users to “swipe” content from their phones and have it appear on their TV screens.

Now the company is working on something called Direct Connect, which adds to the existing Connect service and is designed to work with both the Wi-Fi and 3G capabilities of mobile devices. One example the company gave was tapping into a smartphone’s built-in accelerometer and using the phone as a game controller.

Movl is also experimenting with a multiscreen, interactive ad platform and something it has code-named Kontrol TV, which will offer shortcuts for users to find multiple TV apps from the same app — and not just channel apps, but also trends, tweets, and other social media references related to TV shows. The company is aiming for a May launch of Kontrol TV.

Essentially, Movl is to Samsung TVs what AirPlay is to TVs using the Apple TV box. While enabling users to “throw” content from their mobile devices to their TV screens, Movl also wants to package all the various TV-related apps on that mobile device into one “shell.”

The apps currently work on Samsung TVs, Google TV-equipped sets, iOS and Android devices. Movl said that it is becoming increasingly focused on developing everything in HTML5, which Gnecco and Queen say they see more smart TVs moving toward.

Cuban explained his interest in the company by saying he thinks smart TVs, as a platform, are getting ready to take off, as new TVs get more powerful by the day.

He also said he feels the introduction of an Apple TV — as in an Apple-manufactured television set, not Apple TV in its current form — wouldn’t necessarily disrupt small fish like Movl, because they might have an already-established user base if or when an Apple TV comes out. Apple won’t ever have 100 percent of the TV market, and both Samsung and Vizio have a solid foothold, Cuban believes.

There’s also the question of whether Movl’s new applications could potentially raise the ire of cable operators, who have been introducing their own apps for mobile devices, and who might not like Movl’s idea to aggregate all TV-related apps into Movl’s Kontrol “shell,” as the company describes it.

But Movl says it’s not looking to usurp other apps — it mainly just wants to make it easier for a user to toggle between various TV apps during a multiscreen viewing experience. The company has been speaking with some cable providers that are interested in using Movl as a possible white-label solution, it says.

At that size, it claims to have outpaced Rovio’s Angry Birds, which took 20 months to hit 300 million.

If you haven’t heard of Outfit7, it’s probably because it hasn’t raised any institutional venture capital, it wasn’t founded in the U.S., and much of its application usage is spread across 120 countries.

But the company’s franchise of apps called Talking Friends, which are sort of like a modern-day Neopets, is gathering a large base of users.

The characters include Talking Tom Cat, Talking Ben the Dog and Talking Harry the Hedgehog — in other words, many more brands than Angry Birds alone. Of the 14 in existence, Talking Tom Cat is the most popular, having been downloaded 100 million times.

The animals serve as a virtual pet, which responds to your touch and repeats everything that you say. You can pet him, poke him or grab his tail. A popular activity is to record videos of the pet and send them to friends.

The number of users who come back to the app is impressive, with more than 90 million monthly active users worldwide. The company also averages more than 25 million downloads per month.

Executive Chairman Narry Singh believes Rovio and Outfit7 have similar growth trajectories; and like Rovio, which was able to create a strong brand from Angry Birds, Outfit7 is angling to create brands, as well.

Today, Outfit7 has offices in Palo Alto, Calif., as well as Slovenia, Cyprus, London and Seoul, South Korea. Its apps are primarily free, but users can make in-app purchases to buy virtual goods.

The company is also announcing today that it is partnering with Iconicfuture and Digital Artists to bring branded virtual goods to Talking Tom Cat. In a testament to its international pull, the merchandise will represent six of the world’s most popular soccer clubs, from Spain, Italy, England, France and Portugal.

Of course, Outfit7 is not the first company to want to replicate Rovio’s successes.

In the end, it won’t be important which company got to 300 million downloads the fastest, but which one was able to build a more long-term and sustainable company.

When you look at it in those terms, the jury is still out on Rovio, as well.

“We run the iPhone and iPad teams separately from the Web team, and the Web team had fallen behind,” said Paul English, co-founder and CTO.

The goal with the site’s design has always been to provide a simple layout, so that users can easily sift through thousands of flights, hotels and car rentals to find what they are looking for quickly.

But up until now, the focus wasn’t really on being beautiful, English said. The new look tries to incorporate a clean and attractive design.

After eight years in business, English said this is the most significant redesign of the site (check out the gallery below to see how the site has changed over the years). But only the most die-hard users are likely to notice many differences. Rather, the larger significance is that mobile is influencing the Web, and not the other way around.

Increasingly, this may be the case in the travel industry as so much of the traffic now comes from phones and tablets. Kayak said more than five million applications were downloaded in the nine months ended in September, a 97 percent increase over the same period a year earlier.

In early testing, English said conversion rates are higher and completion times are shorter as a result of incorporating mobile designs — which, by nature, are always built with speed and ease-of-use in mind. “They [customers] are more confident to compete the purchase because we haven’t worn them out.”

View the slideshow

Here’s some of the more notable changes:

The unibrow is gone: Internally, the company refers to “the unibrow” as the black bar that stretched across the the top of the page that said “Search One and Done.” Now at the top of the screen are several tabs, such as Flights, Hotels, Cars, etc.

Similar to iOS: The iPhone and iPad designers released a new iPad app about a month ago. In the new Web site design, they leaned on the design to bring a consistent typeface and coloring to the Web site.

Fewer ads on the site: When users are looking at photos of a hotel or viewing a map, they won’t see any ads. “Obviously, ads are an important part of the way we make money, but advertisers have gotten clever, and sometimes the ad is jarring and has animation,” English said. Kayak is issuing all-new guidelines that requires advertisements to blend with the site. “If you do a good job, it should be content. If we are showing you ads that are extremely related to what you are doing, it’s useful.”

Most of the changes will go live today, with some of the others — like the new ad guidelines — taking more time to implement.

English declined to provide an update on the company’s IPO. While it continues to file financial updates with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Kayak told AllThingsD in September that it was putting its plans on hold.

In a new report, Flurry Analytics estimates that in the final seven days of 2011, 1.2 billion apps were downloaded worldwide across both Android and iOS, representing a 60 percent jump over a typical week.

More important, it is the first time the globe has punched through the billion-download mark, according to the technology company, which builds tools that thousands of developers use to track usage of their mobile applications.

Flurry had said last week that a record-breaking 6.8 million iOS and Android devices were activated on Christmas Day, along with an equally record-breaking 242 million application downloads. For the entire week, it now is estimating that 20 million iOS and Android devices were activated.

Additionally, Flurry discovered that Americans represented the biggest app addicts, downloading 509 million of the worldwide total.

The remainder of the top five countries are: China (99 million); the U.K. (81 million); Canada (41 million); Germany and France (40 million each).

In the new year, Flurry is forecasting that application downloads will frequently break the one-billion-a-week mark.

In 2011, it added, Apple’s App Store was on pace to exceed 10 billion downloads, which was twice the number it recorded over the three previous years combined. Likewise, the Android Market is also setting records. Over the past seven months, it achieved more than seven billion downloads, taking its life-to-date total past 10 billion.

(Image credit: iStockphoto | mbortolino)

For players, the goal is to clear as many gems as possible, but going forward, PopCap’s goal is to get as many people as possible to play the game.

To do so, the company’s strategy is to make it free.

AllThingsD visited PopCap’s Seattle office this week, and caught up with Giordano Bruno Contestabile, franchise business director for Bejeweled, to see how the game is evolving after more than a decade.

Earlier this year, PopCap was acquired by Electronic Arts for up to $1 billion, thanks to Bejeweled and other hit games, including Plants vs. Zombies.

Up until now, players had to pay for Bejeweled in order to play it, but PopCap has recently launched free versions on Facebook and the iPhone.

In the free version, players can challenge others to score as many points as possible in one minute. They have the option to pay for “power boosts” to increase their odds.

A paid version on the iPhone allows players to knock out gems without a time limit.

With the switch to the free-to-play model, Contestabile said, PopCap has a way of reaching a half a billion users, up from 40 million paid users. That’s comparable to Rovio, which claims to have achieved 600 million downloads in two years — both free and paid.

In this video interview, Contestabile talks about the benefits of the approach, while also disclosing that Microsoft and Electronic Arts had the chance to buy the game a decade ago for cheap, but passed: