On Friday, Australia’s High Court dismissed Apple’s bid to have a ban on the sale of the 10.1 extended. And it denied the motion “with costs,” slapping Cupertino with the bill for all the legal wrangling.

It’s an important victory for Samsung, one that brings the Galaxy Tab 10.1 to retailers’ shelves just in time for the biggest shopping season of the year. And it’s another setback for Apple’s legal campaign against it, which now spans some 10 countries.

Today’s decision by Australia’s High Court follows a recent U.S. court ruling denying Apple’s request for a preliminary injunction prohibiting sales of some of Samsung’s Galaxy smartphones and tablets in the States.

Rovio was one of the first to try out the model on a large scale through the sale of plush Angry Birds, and now there are plenty of fast followers.

The Australian game studio Halfbrick is the latest copycat.

Today, it started selling stuffed toys based on the characters found in its hit mobile game Fruit Ninja. It closely follows others, such as ZeptoLab, which sells plush toys based on the main character in Cut the Rope, Om Nom, a critter that likes to eat candy.

While cross-branding has worked well for Rovio, it’s unclear whether consumers will lose interest as other game makers pile on.

However, if the entertainment industry is any guide, there are plenty of brands that have successfully made millions selling merchandise.

The Fruit Ninja options are fairly limited for now. Fruit Ninja fans will have their pick of only two toys: A grey-haired sensei dressed in a kimono and wearing flip flops, or a ninja watermelon cut in half.  (Unfortunately, there’s no toy warrior swords or throwing stars, and the fruit doesn’t really explode on contact as it does in the game.)

Halfbrick has partnered with ToyFoundry, a brand merchandise company, to launch its own Fruit Ninja store, where the toys went on sale today. The sensei costs $16 and the sliced watermelon will sell for $15. A training pack that includes both will save you $1.

In addition to the store, Halfbrick will be working on a new iteration of its Fruit Ninja game. The company has received $3 million in capital from Australia’s New South Whales Interactive Media Fund to support a new studio, according to Inside Social Games.

Apple, which argues that Samsung copied the design from the iPad, had already succeeded in persuading a court in Germany to bar the sale of some of its tablets there. The U.S company turned up the heat further this week by asking the same German court to ban sales of a modified Samsung device throughout the entire European Union.

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In an appeal hearing at the Federal Court in Sydney, Samsung lawyer Neil Young said Justice Annabelle Bennett’s granting of an injunction to Apple preventing the distribution of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Australia was based on “irrelevant considerations.”

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The Korean company said it filed on Monday for preliminary injunctions in the Tokyo District Court and in the New South Wales Registry, Australia, to stop the sale of iPhone 4S smartphones in both countries. Samsung also asked the Japanese court to stop the sale of Apple’s iPhone 4 and iPad 2 devices.

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Justice Annabelle Bennett ruled that the Galaxy Tab can’t be sold in Australia until Samsung’s patent dispute with Apple is resolved. “Despite the force of Samsung’s submissions, I have found that Apple has established a ‘prima facie case’ for the infringement of claims of both the Touch Screen Patent and the Heuristics Patent within the O’Neill test,” Bennett wrote. “That is, it has established a probability, not necessarily in the mathematical sense, that it will, on the present evidence, succeed at trial. … I am satisfied that it is appropriate to grant an interim injunction, however I propose again the opportunity of an early final hearing on the issues presented in this application.”

Lousy news for Samsung, which will now likely miss the approaching holiday shopping season, and may as a result opt not to launch the current iteration of the Galaxy Tab in Australia at all. Earlier this month, the company’s legal counsel said as much, telling Bennett that Samsung would likely abandon plans to launch the tablet Down Under altogether, because missing the Christmas season would essentially mean it was “commercially dead” by the time it reached market.

But for now, Samsung has vowed to fight on, saying it is confident it will prevail in its counterclaim alleging Apple infringes its wireless standard patents. “We are disappointed with this ruling and Samsung will be seeking legal advice on its options,” the company said in a written statement. “We will continue to legally assert our intellectual property rights against those who violate Samsung’s patents and free ride on our technology.”

Apple Inc. is seeking a temporary injunction against sales of the Galaxy Tab in Australia ahead of a final hearing that could go on for months on the U.S. company’s claim that aspects of Samsung’s touch-screen technology infringe Apple’s patents on its popular iPad tablet.

But after a day of testimony in Federal Court here, Justice Annabelle Bennett gave no firm date for when she would rule on the patent dispute that since early August has prevented Samsung from releasing its iPad challenger. “It’s going to take me a little time, but I will do it as quickly as possible given the urgency for both parties,” Justice Bennett said as she ended the hearing.

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The agreement, if accepted by Apple, could see the tablet’s launch next week, Samsung’s attorney David Catterns told Dow Jones Newswires after a hearing at the country’s Federal Court in Sydney.

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Delivering on a threat it made in late August, the South Korean company has countersued Apple in Australia, alleging that the company’s iPhone and iPad product lines violate seven of its wireless patents, covering everything from methods of data transmission and decoding to power management.

“Samsung has a proud history of innovation in the mobile industry,” the company said in a statement. “It has invested continuously in R&D, design and technology to produce our innovative and cutting-edge mobile devices. To defend our intellectual property, Samsung filed a cross claim for Apple’s violation of its wireless technology patents.”

The counterclaim, which argues that the patents Apple has asserted against Samsung should be invalidated and revoked by the court, comes ahead of a hearing later this month that will determine whether Samsung will be allowed to sell its Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet in Australia.

That’s the claim, anyway.

“Apple filed a complaint with the Federal Court of Australia involving a Samsung GALAXY Tab 10.1 variant that Samsung Electronics had no plans of selling in Australia,” Samsung said in a statement. “No injunction was issued by the court and the parties in the case reached a mutual agreement which stipulates that the variant in question will not be sold in Australia. A Samsung GALAXY Tab 10.1 for the Australian market will be released in the near future.”

So Samsung would like us all to believe that this was an empty victory for Apple. And perhaps it would have been, if the company had presented the noninfringing Australian Galaxy Tab 10.1 in court, explained why it doesn’t infringe Apple’s patents, and provided a firm launch date. But Samsung did none of those things.

“Samsung states that ‘[n]o injunction was issued by the court.’ That doesn’t mean that Apple’s complaint was denied with prejudice,” Florian Mueller explains over at FOSS Patents. “It just means that the court will look at this again as soon as Samsung presents the Australian version of its product, and Samsung does not explain why that one would be less likely to be found infringing than the U.S. version. Until Samsung provides that explanation, the most likely explanation is that this just delays the point in time at which the decision gets taken, but the basis for that decision won’t be much different.”

The deal stops short of the imminent launch of the Tab 10.1 in Australia and gives Apple a chance to review that version of the device, which differs from the one sold in the United States. Evidently Samsung believes it’s got a better chance of fending off Apple’s assault using the unreleased Australian version of the tablet, rather than the one it brought to market in the States earlier this summer. But what does that mean for the company’s patent suit in the U.S.?

“Apparently, Samsung didn’t want to take its chances trying to defend its U.S. product in the Australian court,” Florian Mueller observes over at FOSS Patents. “Instead, Samsung hopes to defend its Australian version. But this does appear pretty weak. If Samsung believed that the U.S. version of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 doesn’t infringe any of Apple’s rights, it would have defended itself as a matter of principle.”

Accel Partners, an early investor in Facebook Inc., Groupon Inc. and other white-hot companies, has led a $35 million Series A investment in graphic design marketplace 99designs Pty. Ltd., marking the firm’s third deal in an Australian tech company in the past nine months.

“We’re looking more closely at Australia,” said Accel Partner Andrew Braccia, confirming that conversations to fund more Australian companies are ongoing although no new deals have been signed. Accel previously invested undisclosed amounts in software company Atlassian Software Pty. Ltd. and foreign currency exchange service OzForex Pty. Ltd.

“Australia has a lot of opportunity and promise,” he said.

Now, with Accel’s cash and cachet, Melbourne-based 99designs is poised to capitalize on that opportunity right here in the good ol’ U.S. of A.

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I can tell you that Windows Azure is going to make the telematics systems in the next generation of Toyota cars smarter. And I also know that this unit of Microsoft has been in a state of management flux recently. Amitabh Srivastava, the Microsoft Distinguished Fellow, who in 2006 took over a project then known only as Red Dog that went on to become Azure, left the company in February.

It’s no secret that, like so many other companies, Microsoft has some big plans for cloud services. It recently disclosed that it plans to spend more than $8 billion in research and development funds on its cloud strategy.

On a recent visit to the Microsoft campus in Redmond, I got a chance to sit down with Doug Hauger, Microsoft’s general manager of Windows Azure. And my first question was really really basic.

NewEnterprise: Doug, there’s so much happening in the cloud computing space these days, and most of the time when people think of cloud services they think of Amazon Web Services. And if they mention Windows Azure, they think, well, that’s Microsoft’s answer to Amazon. But you describe Azure as more of a platform-as-a-service. Can you walk me through the differences?

Hauger: Windows Azure started about five years ago. At that point it started because the company, as with all service providers, was facing some challenges on providing large, scalable, manageable services, not just to consumers, but to businesses that could dynamically scale, and that we could innovate on quickly, and bring out new features. Originally it was meant to be a platform we would use internally for services that we would then deliver out to customers. We quickly realized that we should sell it to partners and customers, and allow them to build on it as a platform.

There are fundamental differences between infrastructure as a service and what we did as platform as a service. It’s different in key ways from, say, what Amazon does with EC2 and S3 or VMWare being implemented in a data center. Our starting point for the design was to see the data center as a unit. That means the networking structure, the load-balancers, the power management, and so on–rather than in infrastructure as a service, you start from an individual server and move up.

If you allocate a service into Windows Azure and say you want it available 100 percent of the time, we will allocate it across multiple upgrade domains and physical power domains in such a way so that if any individual rack goes down or if we’re upgrading the operating system, there’s no interruption in service. That’s just a fundamentally different starting point, with an individual server and moving up. And the way that we do that is we have built out an abstraction layer of APIs that let you write to a set of services, storage services, computer services, networking services, et cetera. As a developer you can write to the service, and give us your application, and it just gets provisioned through what we call a fabric controller, that controls the data center, and also across multiple data centers. That was a design point. That’s how we allow people to write services that can scale and won’t fail and will be available all the time.

The conversation about infrastructure as a service typically starts at cost savings. You go see a customer and they say they want to cut their IT budget and outsource their IT, and so they start there. Platform as a service you start at the cost savings, but very quickly you see 10, 20 or 30 percent cost savings. But the conversation quickly turns to the innovation life cycle that they can get out of the platform. It’s much faster than you can at infrastructure as a service.

The big point that everyone gets about the cloud is that they can use it to save money, but then they quickly start asking what more can they do with the cloud. Are you seeing the same thing?

Yes, exactly. In the enterprise, they’re starting to turn the crank on innovation. I talk to customers who are turning things around in six weeks or a month whereas before they would six months or a year. I actually just talked to a customer the other day, and they said their developers were spending 40 to 50 percent of their time managing services and they couldn’t use that time writing software which was their job. When they moved to a platform as a service, they didn’t have to worry about that anymore. We’re seeing this happening in the enterprise where people are doing this for internal development and on services they’re building for their customers.

One example, Daimler just did their new version of the smart car. They wanted a service so you can check the status of your car when its charging from your smart phone, locate it, et cetera. They turned it around in a couple of weeks on Azure and launched it at the same time as the car launched.

We’re also seeing small players compete at the enterprise level. There’s a small company called Margin Pro and they do mortgage analysis and risk assessment on mortgages. Basically it’s a couple of economists and developers. They wrote the software on Windows Azure, and now they have 70 banks around the world, tens of millions of dollars in revenue, and they are competing with some of the biggest financial services companies in the world because of this back-end infrastructure data center they can use to deliver their results to their customers.

But do you have customers who run standard apps on it too?

Many standard applications have some level of customization, and so we’re seeing a lot of hybrid applications, where customers are extending them into Azure. We have a case with Coca-Cola Enterprises which has a back-end order-processing app that they’ve extended into Azure. And what they wanted to do was get more reach and more agility for the front-end. So they built a secure connection between their data center and Windows Azure and then extended the application out to their partners and customers, essentially people like Domino’s Pizza who order Coca Cola products. We’re seeing a lot of these cases of existing applications being extended like that.

We’re also seeing companies using the high performance computing workload. One example is a company called Greenbutton, which has done a high performance scheduling and billing system on Azure. Another is Pixar, which has an application called RenderMan, which does rendering. Most large animation houses have their own clusters they do this rendering on. Pixar wanted to open up a market for smaller animation houses, little Pixars if you will. They’re working with Greenbutton to embed their technology into RenderMan. They can farm their rendering out to Azure and be billed on a usage basis. That’s a case where you have a large company and a smaller one working together and leveraging the power of the cloud to open up a whole new marketplace where they can be competitive. We call it the democratization of IT.

At what point is the customers’ thinking right now? Are they still at that point where they want to see how much money they can save by moving things that are on-premise to the cloud or are they past that by now?

I would say there’s three buckets of customers. I’ve been in this role for three years and the conversations have evolved in some interesting ways. Three years ago I was telling people they should be adopters and get on board with this platform early. They all said to come back and talk to them in five years. Then about two years ago, the majority of customers were in the first bucket, interested in wanting to save money but they weren’t interested in doing any new innovation. And then there were a few willing to innovate a bit by extending their applications into the cloud. Today I would say many, but not the majority yet, but a lot of them say they get the cloud, they get the cost savings, and now they want to drive the innovation life cycle faster. And there is a growing percentage who are willing to do something completely different and compete in a new way and build a brand new business. It’s been exciting to see that.

What’s been really exciting has been seeing mid-sized companies realizing they can use the cloud to give them an advantage to innovate faster and compete against really big companies. So that is sort of the landscape. Interestingly, I’ve been seeing a lot more adoption among the financial services companies than I had anticipated.

Aren’t they the ones who are supposed to be the most conservative when it comes to IT? I mean, they’re aggressive on performance, but obsessed with security and so skeptical of using the cloud because they don’t want to let their data leave their hands.

Exactly. But think about financial services. They’ve been in cloud computing forever, but it’s just been running on their own proprietary clouds. And so they are very good about understanding their application portfolio, and what can run in a public cloud, what has to stay in a private cloud, and how they can span those clouds. You can basically say you want to do risk assessment on portfolios, you anonymize the data, and you run it on the public cloud, you do all the analytics, you bring it back on-premise and then you deliver it to your customer. Having that kind of mentality in that industry allows them to move very quickly.

Also, manufacturing is moving and adopting the cloud faster than I would have guessed. And interestingly enough, government–not so much federal, because there’s so many certification requirements–but state and local governments are embracing the cloud because of the economic situation, and these are not just governments within the U.S. In Australia and Western Europe, we’re seeing governments adopting and building out applications so they can get services out to their citizens.

So what’s keeping you up at night? What makes you worry?

There’s a few things I think about. While we drive customers to a very fast innovation life cycle, we need to stay ahead of that innovation life cycle ourselves. We’ve done a pretty good job with that. One example, when we first released in beta a few years ago, we had .NET but we didn’t have PHP or Java. We got feedback immediately, almost on the first day, that customers wanted those and right away. And so we turned it around and added those within three months. Our ability to turn the crank pretty quickly is there. And that is something that in the software industry and specifically Microsoft, we have to make sure we make this turn toward service delivery, where we have to innovate quickly so you can deliver services. I think we’re doing a good job, but it’s something top of mind for me.

What are they asking for now? Is there something new the customers want that they don’t have?

They’re asking for continued investment in Java. We have it now, but making it a truly first class citizen, which is what we’re focused on delivering. We also need to keep our ear to the ground around things like application frameworks, extending the modeling capabilities in Visual Studio and things like that. It’s just a matter of thinking about the developer. We need to understand what they want, that’s what we’re here for.

That’s why this new one from AVG is especially close to our heart. As part of the company’s Digital Diaries research on children and technology, the security firm polled a couple of thousand mothers with kids from 2 years old to 5 years old in the U.S., Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

Among the findings was that more of the young kids could play with a smartphone app (19 percent) than could tie their shoes (9 percent). See, Mom, I’m not alone! Of course, Mobilized is no longer a kid and is still bad at shoe-tying.

Tech skills are outpacing life skills in other areas as well. For example, more of the kids can open a Web browser than swim on their own, and more can play computer games than ride a bike.

My favorite part, though, is the quote from AVG CEO J.R. Smith.

“Technology has changed what it means to be a parent raising children today-–these children are growing up in an environment that would be unrecognizable to their parents,” Smith said. “As our research shows, parents need to start educating kids about navigating the online world safely at an earlier age than they might otherwise have thought.”

I would have gone with “Holy crap! We need to get our kids outside more and make sure they can do more than play Angry Birds.” But that’s me.

The Web-hosted document company, founded as a sort of YouTube for PDFs in 2006, now has raised a total of $26 million.

Based in San Francisco, Scribd says it has more than 60 million monthly visitors, and attributes recent traffic growth to its social sharing initiatives on sites like Facebook. In addition to pure hosting, it offers users nifty OCR technology that translates document images into searchable files for free.

Scribd is planning a major mobile expansion for 2011, and said it would use the funding toward that effort as well as for other product and revenue projects.

In an appeal to customers today, Groupon co-founder and CEO Andrew Mason explained in a blog post why it is suing an Australian competitor, Scoopon.

And the story is pretty juicy: Gabby and Hezi Leibovitch, two brothers who started Scoopon in Australia, have purchased the Groupon.com.au domain name, registered the company name of Groupon Pty Limited and tried registering the Groupon trademark in Australia.

“The way we see things, this is a classic case of domain squatting–an unfortunate reality of the Internet business,” Mason wrote. “As Groupon became internationally known, opportunistic domain squatters around the world started to buy local Groupon domain names, thinking that we’d eventually be forced to buy them at an insane price.”

But wait, there’s more: Groupon offered the brothers $286,000 for the Groupon.com.au domain and trademark, and Mason claims they accepted the offer.

Then they changed their minds (presumably around the time Groupon turned down $6 billion from Google, and then was rumored to be raising nearly $1 billion in fresh capital). No doubt, the Leibovitch brothers now have a much richer number in mind.

To that end, Mason says his company is choosing the path of last resort: “Left with no other options, we’ve filed a lawsuit against Scoopon, claiming that their Groupon trademark was filed in bad faith (amongst other things).”

In the meantime, the nearly $300,000 offer continues to stand, and Groupon has opened shop under an alias: www.stardeals.com.au/.

If a court doesn’t come down on his side, Mason is hoping customers will: “Apologies–we don’t like to bother our customers with these things, but felt you deserved to understand why it’s taking us so long in Australia,” he wrote.

A “Groupon in Australia” Facebook group has been created to raise awareness of the situation, and by this afternoon had already counted 568 members.

But it’s hard not to make news when you turn down a $6 billion buyout offer from Google.

Meanwhile, Tim O’Shaughnessy, CEO and co-founder of LivingSocial.com, has remained relatively quiet. As the head of the second-largest company in the local, group-buying space, it wasn’t because he didn’t have anything to talk about.

Just about 24 hours before Groupon’s rejection leaked out, LivingSocial announced it had secured $175 million from Amazon, and $183 million in total new investments. In that same release, the Washington, D.C.-based company confirmed that it was booking revenues of more than $1 million a day on average and is projected to book well over $500 million in revenue in 2011.

To be sure, Groupon and LivingSocial are pulling away from the pack when it comes to defining the nascent daily-deals market. O’Shaughnessy, who claims that the two have 90 percent market share combined, said: “I think the idea conceptually that you can buy things online and go interact with merchants in offline is starting to take hold and be widespread. But it’s really been less than two years…It’s definitely the first couple of innings right now.”

Here’s our interview with O’Shaughnessy:

eMoney: Give me an update on where your business is today.

O’Shaughnessy: As of yesterday [Dec. 16], we were in 136 markets. We launched five new markets yesterday. We tend to do them in batches, and five or eight will go out at once. Overall, we’ve been averaging a market a day.

What about up-to-date figures on uniques?

We are at more than 10 million, or I think the last number we said publicly was 12 million. That’s primarily Canada and the U.S. that are signed up for the daily deal. We are in five countries today. [LivingSocial is in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Ireland and Australia.]

What’s the competition like internationally?

Groupon has been acquisitive, and they’ve become established in lots of places. The U.S. is the most mature by a large margin, and there’s some countries with a few players that have established themselves, and finally, there’s some countries out there that’s a fairly green-field environment.

It’s fairly established that Groupon is No. 1, and LivingSocial is No. 2. But there’s a huge debate about who is No. 3?

There’s a pretty big gap. One of the things I’ve said is that it’s a pretty easy business to get into. All you have to do is know how to process a payment, and have a brother-in-law that has a restaurant that is willing to participate. But it’s a hard business to scale.

We have a competitive spreadsheet with 200 names on it, and if you do a couple of filters on how many deals someone has run, starting with 100, the vast majority drop off. And then if you up it to 500, you are up to the top two. It’s a pretty big drop-off.

Six months ago, we [Groupon and LivingSocial] collectively had 90 percent market share, and last month that was still true.

In that time, the market got bigger, and some others have grown for sure, but our market share has grown quite a bit. The signal-to-noise ratio is off, relative to who is doing what.

Is that what gives you confidence?

That’s one data point to look at, but what gives me confidence is what I see and I know we do every day. The degree of effort that goes into it and how many things can go wrong when you are managing merchant relationships, that’s what gives me the confidence.

What about the critics who say there’s no loyalty in this business–a consumer will always go with the provider who has the best deal for the business they want to visit.

There’s some loyalty that’s there, and I think people buy through us pretty regularly. They know that it’s going to be a merchant that’s vetted, and we work really hard at that. We are a good solid legit company that’s able to deliver. People place value on that. The brand matters, and enhancing user trust is an important thing.

What about the critics who say the margin will erode over time?

I think that the erosion of margins is just like any single other business if you stop innovating and do the same thing over and over. If we continue to innovate and provide additional value to merchants, the value per dollar increases. I don’t tend to be hugely concerned about the margin front.

The conduit has been 50 percent off a service, but there’s additional value we can provide to merchant communities and consumer communities. Overall, we aren’t not going to do the same thing over and over.

Can you give me an example?

We’ve started working with merchants in completely different ways, and sometimes we are going and operating events. We just did something called “tubbing and tasting,” where we worked with three merchants.

You could pick 10 to 12 Saturdays, and you’d meet in Midtown Manhattan, where a coach bus would take you to a snow hill, where you’d go snow tubbing. At the lodge, there was a bonfire and s’mores, and a beer tasting with a bunch of microbrews.

In that circumstance, we worked with three merchants–a coach company, a ski mountain and a brewery–in an entirely different way than how they associate with folks. I think it cost $60 and it sold out virtually every Saturday in January and February. I don’t see anyone else doing that, by finding unique hand-picked, curated ways to work with local businesses.

So, how will you be working with Amazon?

Right now, our first step is focusing on getting the relationship from a financial perspective locked down, and we’ll figure it out at a later point.

I assume the funding will go toward expansion?

We will be very aggressive on additional market launches as we build up our brand and user base. It’s very much a global game, and this is a global opportunity. We’ve gone from one country to five, and we’ll likely continue to expand globally.

A lot of this year was laying a foundation and the building blocks, and adding more value for the merchants, like LivingSocial Escapes. It’s on fire right now. It’s a weekend getaway, or a “staycation.” They are curated packages that are within a short driving distance from where you live. We also have LivingSocial Family Edition, which has things parents can do with their kids.

Your plans include tripling your employee count next year to 1,800 and more than doubling the number of cities you are in to 300?

We will continue to be pretty aggressive. Earlier this year, we were in six markets and we added 130 markets this year. We are a little more mature and one would hope that means we could move faster next year. We were around 30 employees, and over 600 now. It’s been a pretty crazy ramp-up.

The timing of your investment was so closely timed to Groupon-Google’s negotiations.

I’m a firm believer that we can’t control what other people do. Obviously, the deal we did with Amazon takes time to put together. We had decided awhile ago, if we want to become the biggest player in local commerce, we should be aligned with the biggest e-commerce company. That’s a lot of [what was] driving it. The timing was very coincidental.

So, no regrets?

No, not at all. We are thrilled and excited and expect to gain more market share over the coming year.

Amazon will invest $175 million in LivingSocial, the No. 2 player in the fast-growing social buying space.

(The press release is below.)

BoomTown reported yesterday that the massive investment was in the works.

The online retail giant’s big bet on the Washington, D.C.-based start-up comes in the wake of ongoing acquisition talks between Google and Groupon, the category leader in the local deals business.

While it appears to be a reaction to those discussions, sources said Amazon and LivingSocial have been talking for some time about a variety of deals between them.

Sources said the Amazon investment put a very hefty valuation of over one billion dollars on LivingSocial.

Interest in LivingSocial has heightened of late, given the $6 billion in cash, stock and earnouts that BoomTown has reported Google is considering ponying up to purchase Chicago-based Groupon, and grab ahold of its 12 million users across the globe and $500 million in annual revenue.

But LivingSocial–which has been thriving even in Groupon’s flashier shadow–has 10 million subscribers worldwide in more than 120 markets and five countries, including the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Ireland and Australia.

And, as LivingSocial noted when it announced its acquisition of Australia’s Jump On It recently, it is currently booking an average of more than $1 million a day and is projected to book well more than $500 million in revenue in 2011.

And that is what has attracted Amazon, which has almost no profile in this lucrative local space, despite some attempts at its own solution. It bought a small and quirky daily deals site, Woot, for $110 million in June.

But sources said that, rather than sell, LivingSocial management wanted to keep the company independent, and thinks a sale of Groupon will give it a huge opportunity for growth.

Why? Well, even though Groupoogle or Goopon are fun to say, the inevitable regulatory review could drag on, resulting in a slowing down of innovation in the bigger Google culture and the distinct possibility of newly rich Groupon execs flying the coop (in private planes).

More investment money should help LivingSocial move ahead faster. Sources also said there is likely to be deep integration between its and Amazon’s services.

LivingSocial announced in April that it had raised $14 million in a Series C round, after grabbing $25 million in a Series B venture funding only a month before. And it has raised $10 million on top of that since 2008.

Sources estimated at the time that the valuation for LivingSocial was several hundred million dollars.

The newest round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners; earlier investors include U.S. Venture Partners, Grotech Ventures and former AOL head Steve Case.

Lightspeed also invested $8 million more on top of Amazon’s funding.

Here is the official press release:

LivingSocial Announces $175 Million Investment by Amazon.com

WASHINGTON, Dec. 2, 2010 /PRNewswire/–LivingSocial (www.livingsocial.com) has secured a $175 million investment from Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN). LivingSocial has also secured an additional $8 million investment from Lightspeed Venture Partners. LivingSocial will use this investment to maintain a steady drumbeat of worldwide launches and overall business growth while continuing to serve more than 10 million subscribers across the U.S., Canada, UK, Ireland and Australia in more than 120 locations. Because of LivingSocial’s rapid expansion, the company is currently booking revenues of more than $1 million a day on average and is projected to book well over $500 million in revenue in 2011.

“To be the biggest player in the local commerce space there is no one better to work with than Amazon,” said Tim O’Shaughnessy, CEO of LivingSocial. “As the social shopping space continues to heat up, LivingSocial is committed to staying focused on providing the high level of quality that consumers and merchants have come to expect when working with us.”

As the online source to find amazing experiences at an unbeatable value, LivingSocial lets anyone experience the hottest restaurants, shops, activities and services in their area. The company has dedicated area experts on the ground in every location working directly with business owners, and constantly researching the best in local adventures to bring a savings of 50% to 70% for consumers.

Recently, LivingSocial expanded its business by acquiring adventure company Urban Escapes, and launching three new verticals including LivingSocial Family Edition, Campus Deals and LivingSocial Escapes, a travel site that offers unbeatable savings on curated adventures. In addition, the company continues a regular flow of launches–on average one per day–and has expanded its reach in Australia with a controlling stake in Jump On It, making it live in five countries.

With the red-hot acquisition dance between Google and Groupon sucking up all the attention, it’s easy once again to ignore the No. 2 player in the fast-growing social buying space–LivingSocial.

But not everyone is–according to sources close to the situation, the Washington, D.C.-based company that also focuses on local deals is in advanced talks for a major strategic investment–as high as $150 million–by online retail giant Amazon, at a very hefty valuation of over one billion dollars.

Sources said there will also be a deep operating partnership between the pair, as part of the deal.

Sources said the investment negotiations with Amazon is not complete yet, of course, and could fall apart.

But interest in LivingSocial has heightened of late, given the $6 billion in cash, stock and earnouts that BoomTown has reported that Google is considering ponying up to purchase the category leader, Chicago-based Groupon, and grab ahold of its 12 million users across the globe and $500 million in annual revenue.

But LivingSocial–which has been thriving even in Groupon’s flashier shadow–has 10 million subscribers worldwide in more than 120 markets and five countries, including the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Ireland and Australia.

And, as the start-up noted when LivingSocial announced its acquisition of Jump On It recently, it is currently booking an average of more than $1 million a day and is projected to book well more than $500 million in revenue in 2011.

That is what is apparently attracting Amazon, which has almost no profile in this lucrative local space, despite some attempts at its own solution. It bought a small and quirky daily deals site Woot, for $110 million in June.

But, rather than sell, sources said LivingSocial management wants to keep the company independent, and thinks a sale of Groupon will give it a huge opportunity for growth.

Why? Well, even though Groupoogle or Goopon are fun to say, the inevitable regulatory review could drag on, resulting in a slowing down of innovation in the bigger Google culture and the distinct possibility of newly rich Groupon execs flying the coop (in private planes).

More investment money should help.

LivingSocial announced in April that it had raised $14 million in a Series C round, after grabbing $25 million in a Series B venture financing only a month before. And it raised $10 million on top of that since 2008.

Sources estimated at the time that the valuation for LivingSocial was several hundred million dollars.

The newest round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners; Earlier investors U.S. Venture Partners, Grotech Ventures and former AOL head Steve Case.

A report of the Amazon interest in LivingSocial was first posted several weeks ago in a in VentureBeat, a day before BoomTown first broke the news of the Groupon and Google discussions.

Both Amazon and LivingSocial declined to comment.

But here is an October video interview I did with LivingSocial CEO Tim O’Shaughnessy on a recent visit to Silicon Valley.

The entrepreneur has worked at AOL, as well as at Case’s Revolution Health in Washington, before moving on to the local deals start-up.

Enjoy:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101201/amazon-poised-to-make-a-major-strategic-investment-in-livingsocial-to-counter-groupoogle-threat/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20101201/the-mobile-os-world-symbian-ios-are-superpowers-android-a-developing-nation/ http://allthingsd.com/20101201/the-mobile-os-world-symbian-ios-are-superpowers-android-a-developing-nation/#comments Wed, 01 Dec 2010 19:43:05 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=53458 Some sobering data points for the Droid army and a reminder that the Android onslaught is still largely a domestic phenomenon (for Koreans). Mobile Web usage statistics for the month of October compiled by StatCounter and Royal Pingdom reveal Apple’s iOS and Nokia’s Symbian as the dominant platforms, with Android besting them in a single country.

Unsurprisingly, Symbian is the leading mobile OS worldwide. It’s dominant in some 100 countries and accounts for more that half of all mobile Web usage in 75 of them. It essentially owns the Mideast and most of the developing world, thanks to those regions’ affinity for Nokia’s cheap mobile phones.

Apple’s iOS is the second most used mobile OS worldwide, with its iPhone and iPod touch claiming the most mobile Web traffic in 30 countries. In 21 of them, those devices accounted for more than half of all mobile Web traffic. IOS appears most popular in Canada, Cuba (!), Switzerland and Australia, where it claims over 70 percent of all mobile Web traffic. Interestingly, it’s quite a bit less popular in the United States, where it garnered a little over 35 percent.

Research in Motion’s BlackBerry OS leads four countries, with one–the Dominican Republic–where OS usage is over 50 percent. Shockingly, in its home country of Canada, it accounts for a paltry 3.6 percent of mobile Web traffic.

And Android?

It leads just one country, South Korea, with a 78.3 percent share of all mobile Web traffic. Presumably, that’s thanks to Samsung, which is based in the country and sells a number of Android phones. So while Android is surging ahead, thanks to Google’s strategy of flooding the market with multiple handsets on multiple carriers at a wide range of price points, there’s still a hell of a lot of market share that it hasn’t even come close to touching.

Top countries for iOS	Top countries for Android	Top countries for Blackberry	Top countries for Symbian
1. Canada, 83.7%	1. South Korea, 78.3%	1. Dominican Republic, 57.1%	1. Chad, 94.0%
2. Cuba, 77.2%	2. Austria, 27.3%	2. Guatemala, 45.4%	2. Libya, 93.9%
3. Switzerland, 76.7%	3. Taiwan, 26.5%	3. United Kingdom, 40.4%	3. Sudan, 92.9%
4. Australia, 72.5%	4. Denmark, 25.3%	4. Colombia, 38.9%	4. Iraq, 90.1%
5. Ireland, 69.7%	5. Slovenia, 24.0%	5. El Salvador, 37.54%	5. Oman, 88.3%
6. New Zealand, 69.0%	6. United States, 23.3%	6. United States, 32.0%	6. Jordan, 87.1%
7. France, 67.4%	7. Netherlands, 21.7%	7. Indonesia, 31.7%	7. Egypt, 86.6%
8. Singapore, 64.6%	8. Sweden, 21.3%	8. Saudi Arabia, 30.6%	8. Somalia, 85.2%
9. Denmark, 64.3%	9. Estonia, 16.8%	9. Panama, 29.2%	9. Mozambique, 84.4%
10. Sweden, 61.6%	10. Norway, 16.0%	10. Jamaica, 18.8%	10. Paraguay, 83.9%

[Image credit: Chart and data courtesy Royal Pingdom]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101201/the-mobile-os-world-symbian-ios-are-superpowers-android-a-developing-nation/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101122/australia-broadband-debate-heats-up/ http://allthingsd.com/20101122/australia-broadband-debate-heats-up/#comments Mon, 22 Nov 2010 16:07:34 +0000 Rachel Pannett http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=32921 Tension rose over the privatization of the nation’s planned 43 billion Australian dollar (US$42 billion) national high-speed Internet network, as a Senate debate on competition legislation began.
Australia’s center-left Labor government said it remains “firmly committed” to privatizing the fiber broadband network once it is completed.

The statement followed news from the Greens party Monday that it reached a deal with the government to support laws designed to curb the ability of dominant provider Telstra Corp. to compete with the national network. The Greens support came in exchange for a promise that NBN Co., the newly formed state-owned network operator, won’t be privatized without parliamentary approval.
That raised questions about how the government would recoup some A$26 billion in taxpayer funds expected to be used to build the network, which is designed to deliver high-speed communications to 93 percent of Australian homes.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101122/australia-broadband-debate-heats-up/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101117/livingsocial-goes-down-under-for-its-deal-of-the-day/ http://allthingsd.com/20101117/livingsocial-goes-down-under-for-its-deal-of-the-day/#comments Wed, 17 Nov 2010 17:33:40 +0000 Voices http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=32698 Discount-deal-a-day outfit LivingSocial is extending its presence into Australia with a $5 million investment that gives it a controlling stake in Jump On It, the country’s leading social shopping site. LivingSocial currently has more than 10 million subscribers across more than 100 markets in North America, the U.K. and Ireland. With its growth, the company says it expects to book more than $500 million in revenue in 2011.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101117/livingsocial-goes-down-under-for-its-deal-of-the-day/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101110/drinking-site-groggle-drops-name-after-fight-with-google/ http://allthingsd.com/20101110/drinking-site-groggle-drops-name-after-fight-with-google/#comments Wed, 10 Nov 2010 20:00:19 +0000 Jennifer Valentino-DeVries http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=32333 It sounds like a great name for a site that helps people find the best prices on alcohol in their area–Groggle. But you know who didn’t think it was such a great name? Google.

The search giant objected over the similarity of the Groggle name to Google’s own when the founders of the Australian drinking site applied for a trademark application as they prepared to launch their service in April, the Sydney Morning Herald reported. After a six-month legal battle, Groggle’s co-founders said that they had settled with Google last month, and they changed the name of their site to Drinkle.

The Groggle–or Drinkle–team announced on Facebook and Twitter that they were “forging ahead” after the trademark fight delayed their launch. They added that they were going to “celebrate by drinking Australia’s most [expensive] bottle of beer”–Crown Ambassador 2010 Reserve, which is made by Australia’s Foster’s and has a list price of $90. (The lager got a good review on Twitter from one of the site’s co-founders, who said it had “deep golden colour and rich complex flavours.”)

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101110/drinking-site-groggle-drops-name-after-fight-with-google/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100922/australian-teenager-unwittingly-unleashed-twitter-chaos/ http://allthingsd.com/20100922/australian-teenager-unwittingly-unleashed-twitter-chaos/#comments Wed, 22 Sep 2010 17:05:59 +0000 Beth Callaghan http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=30185 Pearce Delphin, a 17-year-old high-school senior who lives with his parents in Melbourne, admitted Wednesday morning to tweeting the piece of “mouseover” code that wreaked havoc on Twitter’s system on Tuesday. He told AFP via email that he did it “merely to see if it could be done…that Javascript really could be executed within a tweet,” but it was soon seized upon by hackers with mischief in mind. “Hopefully I won’t get in trouble!” he added.

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