Last week, the U.S. Department of Defense approved RIM’s BlackBerry 7 devices for agencywide use. And now the device has won similar approvals in the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.

CESG, the National Technical Authority for Information Assurance in the U.K., on Thursday certified BlackBerry 7 as fit for government and law enforcement use. And the Defense Signals Directorate of the Australian Government did the same for Australia and New Zealand. The reason: Those industry-leading security features RIM is so fond of talking up. Consumers may not pay them much mind, but in government they clearly matter a great deal.

Which is great for RIM’s business, but not quite central to its long-term success. While government sales will certainly help keep RIM afloat, it’s the enterprise and consumer markets where the company really needs some wins. RIM insists that BlackBerry 10 will deliver them, but it won’t launch until later this year.

Facebook filed an updated version of its S-1 public offering document today, which included somewhat disappointing first-quarter financials.

In the new filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, its fourth update for its upcoming public offering, the social networking giant’s revenue was $1.058 billion, up 46 percent for the year, but down six percent from the previous quarter.

In the first quarter of 2012, Facebook’s net income was $205 million, which was down from $233 million a year ago. The company attributed the decline to rising costs, including in marketing and in research.

Facebook also said its current share price was $30.89 each, which values the entire company at about $77 billion.

Some investors might worry about the latest results, which show a slowing in Facebook’s torrid growth. But Facebook said the quarterly decline was due to seasonality — it was flat in the same period a year ago.

As it noted in the document:

“We believe that our rates of user and revenue growth will decline over time. For example, our revenue grew 154% from 2009 to 2010, 88% from 2010 to 2011, and 45% from the first quarter of 2011 to the same period in 2012. Historically, our user growth has been a primary driver of growth in our revenue. We expect that our user growth and revenue growth rates will decline as the size of our active user base increases and as we achieve higher market penetration rates.”

Its audience, though, was still growing strongly: Facebook also said it had 532 million daily active users, up from 372 million a year ago and 483 million in December. Its monthly active users were up from 680 million last year to just over 900 million and up from 845 million from December.

Facebook also added an explicit figure for average revenue per user, which was $1.21, up six percent year over year. It also said the number of full-time employees grew 46 percent from last year to 3,539 at the end of March.

The last update to Facebook’s regulatory filing for its mid-May IPO was in late March. That one gave investors more information about a patent infringement lawsuit waged by Yahoo — Facebook noted its counter claim in the newest filing — and also its motion to dismiss Paul Ceglia’s legal attempt to garner half of the company. It then included more information about growing engagement by users of the social networking site.

Along with some other minor changes in the new document, Facebook noted, in news that was already known, that it would trade its stock on the Nasdaq market under the ticker symbol “FB.” It also said it had bought photo-sharing start-up Instagram, another piece of old news, and noted its just-struck patent deal with Microsoft.

One new detail about Instagram: Facebook forked over “approximately 23 million shares of our common stock and $300 million in cash” to buy it.

Also, said Facebook, in an interesting new section on its global business:

“In the first quarter of 2012, 50% of our revenue was generated by users in the United States and Canada, a decrease from 54% of our revenue for the first quarter of 2011, and in 2011, 52% of our revenue was generated by users in the United States and Canada, as compared to 58% in 2010, as we experienced more rapid revenue growth in markets such as Germany, Brazil, Australia, and India.”

Here is the whole updated file, if you want to peruse yourself:

4thfbs1update

It’s not the iPad that’s been mislabeled. It’s Australia’s 3G networks.

In a brief filed with the Federal Court in Melbourne, Australia, this week, Apple — which last month agreed to notify consumers that its new iPad is not compatible with Australia’s 4G LTE network, and to offer refunds to early purchasers who feel they were misled by its branding — refused to stop marketing the device as “iPad Wi-Fi + 4G.”

Its argument for doing so? Many of Australia’s 3G networks can reasonably be described as 4G under international definitions.

“The iPad with WiFi + 4G is a device which performs in accordance with the descriptor ‘4G’ in terms of data transfer speed,” Apple argued in its brief, according to the Australian, which first reported on the document. “The descriptor ‘4G’ … conveys to consumers in Australia that the iPad with WiFi + 4G will deliver a superior level of service in terms of data transfer speed (consistent with accepted industry and regulatory use of that term), and not that the iPad with WiFi + 4G is compatible with any particular network technology promoted by a particular mobile service provider in Australia.”

In other words: No, the iPad with WiFi + 4G doesn’t support Australia’s true 4G LTE network, but it does support networks that are fast enough to be defined as 4G. So, no harm, no foul.

And as silly as that might sound, it’s technically true. When the International Telecommunications Union, which sets the marketing standards for wireless networks, expanded its definition of 4G service in December of 2010, it said this of the term 4G:

“As the most advanced technologies currently defined for global wireless mobile broadband communications, IMT-Advanced is considered as ’4G,’ although it is recognized that this term, while undefined, may also be applied to the forerunners of these technologies, LTE and WiMax, and to other evolved 3G technologies providing a substantial level of improvement in performance and capabilities with respect to the initial third generation systems now deployed.”

And if that’s the definition, Apple argues, then there’s no reason to change the branding on the “iPad Wi-Fi + 4G” in Australia.

It’s all semantics.

But will a court buy that argument? We’ll find out in May, when the case is expected to be given a full hearing.

(Image courtesy of Someecards)

In the interim, the Cupertino, Calif., company agreed with the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) to clarify claims that the new iPad is compatible with 4G telecommunications networks, and to offer refunds to early purchasers who feel they were misled.

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So says the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, which today accused Apple of misleading consumers about the iPad’s true capabilities, in violation of Australian law.

“The ACCC alleges that Apple’s recent promotion of the new ‘iPad with WiFi + 4G’ is misleading,” the agency said in a statement today. “It represents to Australian consumers that the product ‘iPad with WiFi + 4G’ can, with a SIM card, connect to a 4G mobile data network in Australia, when this is not the case.”

And it’s not.

You see, the new iPad only supports 4G LTE networks in the 700MHz or 2100MHz spectrum band. And since Australia’s 4G LTE network uses the 1800MHz band, the 4G iPad is effectively 3G-only Down Under. Which is obviously quite frustrating for Australians who purchased the device assuming it would connect to their local 4G network.

And so the ACCC is taking Apple to the mat, seeking all manner of penalities for what it alleges is misleading and deceptive conduct: Injunctions, financial penalties, corrective advertising and refunds to consumers affected.

Apple did not respond to a request for comment.

“There’s an excellent growth opportunity for U.S. retailers outside the U.S.,” said Michael DeSimone, CEO of FiftyOne, a logistics company. “E-commerce is much more nascent [outside the U.S.], but our merchants are seeing extraordinary growth by building their brand with a new customer base.”

As it turns out, however, shipping and selling goods internationally is extremely complex.

First, there’s currency translation, then there’s the complexity of dealing with customs. And there are other considerations: For instance, a down pillow or a snakeskin purse may have to be cleared by the U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife or require a permit if the animal is on an endangered list.

“The opportunity for a bad customer experience is very high, unless you have a repeatable process in place,” DeSimone said.

In other words, done well and executed efficiently, it can be a moneymaker, but if done poorly, you can hurt the brand.

FiftyOne helps U.S. retailers ship products to 106 countries worldwide, by assisting retailers with currency conversion and global shipping logistics, including customs and returns. It manages a central distribution in Columbus, Ohio, where all the packages exit and enter the U.S.

The New York company works with dozens of online retailers, including Macy’s, J.Crew, Overstock.com, Saks Fifth Avenue, Nordstrom, Pottery Barn, Gilt Groupe and Wet Seal. Since FiftyOne started focusing on international logistics, back in 2008, it has seen e-commerce start to take off internationally, DeSimone said.

Last year, the company’s gross merchandise volume, accounting for the total amount of all international purchases made, was $136 million, almost up twice from the year before, when it recorded $78 million. In 2009, its business totaled $26 million.

The biggest international markets for U.S. retailers today, FiftyOne said, are English-speaking countries such as Canada, Australia and the U.K. But South Korea, Brazil and Mexico are also all growing close to 50 percent year over year.

In addition, DeSimone said, the average order size increased to $265 in 2011, up from $237 the year earlier.

Here’s a graphic detailing some of the challenges in shipping internationally:

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.