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With the end of 2012 approaching, I started to assess what’s happened in the space this year and identified a few areas with the potential to reshape the social landscape. As we move into 2013, a year in which funding appears to be harder to secure, these factors will be instrumental for both start-ups and larger companies alike.

First, the move to mobile has definitely affected interest-based networks. A notable shift was Pinterest’s launch on phones and tablets, but many other start-ups also made a mobile push. Fitocracy, an interest based social network oriented around fitness that was originally Web-only, launched its iPhone app earlier this year, and has seen usage on mobile surge to a huge percentage of its overall engagement and traffic. Thumb, an iPhone and Android-based social network that allows people to ask questions and get instant responses, sees extremely high user engagement through its mobile apps, to the tune of over five hours per month per monthly active user and over 1 billion total yearly responses.

Users are spending lots of time engaging on social media from their mobile devices, but they are discerning and demanding. Consumers want responsive, well-designed mobile apps, and as engagement on mobile continues to grow, social services that nail their mobile experiences will reap the benefits of this momentum.

Brands are looking for a piece of the action on social and mobile

Second, a consistent concern over the year has been the effectiveness of advertising as a revenue driver on new social and mobile platforms. On the eve of the Facebook IPO, GM pulled back from its $10M advertising spend, and they are not the only ones who have doubted Facebook’s plan to drive revenue on mobile. More recently, after a disastrous snafu that released earnings early, Wall Street analysts dropped Google’s share price by nearly 9 percent due to concerns that its mobile ad business would not monetize as well as it did on the Web. These examples underscore a basic concern, namely, mobile and social-oriented networks are not set up to monetize as well as the Web on desktops.

My own view is more optimistic. Certainly social networks will have to refine their offerings for brands. This will likely take experimenting that will result in both good and bad outcomes that focus on solutions that benefit both companies and users. Mark Cuban recently critiqued Facebook’s approach on its Promoted Posts because it failed to reach a balanced solution for both parties. Over time, I expect that the mobile and social spaces will offer new opportunities to advertisers and brands to adapt and connect more effectively with their target markets. This isn’t a broken market; it’s just still in early stages of maturity.

As with any maturing process there are both good and bad examples of how brands can work with social networks. Even on Facebook, which is the most heavily embraced by brands, many are weak in how they connect with fans and followers. For example, I’m a fan of Canon cameras, as are nearly 1.1 million other Facebook users. Visit Canon’s Facebook Fan Page, though, and it’s a ghost town. The last activity on the page I see was from April of this year. It’s ridiculous. Canon is the global market share leader in digital SLR cameras, with over a million fans willing to interact with them on Facebook. Yet the brand shows no evidence of photo contests, no showcasing of products, and lacks recent video demos of its cameras or lenses. Clearly, there are still global brands that haven’t really leveraged Facebook yet.

On the other hand, companies that are finding ways beyond advertising to connect with people encourage me. Walmart, for example, is starting to use Facebook to connect with users and drive business to its stores this holiday season. Here’s one recent example from my own Facebook stream:

This is fun. As a video game nerd, I get pulled in thinking about whether a Halo or WoW toy should be the rollback of the day. Walmart connects with me in an interesting way, and if I engage, the company gets potentially useful data. Walmart is starting to evolve.

The potential for mobile social companies is even larger. Brands see the rising engagement and importance of mobile, and are working to figure out how to leverage it effectively. I look to companies like BlueRun Ventures portfolio company Verve Mobile, that focus on mobile ads targeting users leveraging location data, and see this opening all sorts of new opportunities and campaigns options for brands and advertisers. There is often a misperception that location-based marketing is about catching a consumer as they are in front of the shelf or just walking into the store. On the contrary, there are more creative ways to leverage location that are as insightful as search was to intent. For example, understanding that your target consumer is shopping at competitors’ stores or has visited a number of locations in your category is a strong signal of purchase intent. These are opportunities that weren’t available before smartphones. Couple location with data from social or interest-based graphs, and it becomes a powerful platform.

The fact that the relationship between social and mobile networks and brands is still maturing bodes well for start-ups, as they are nimble enough to test the countless avenues toward revenue. This is especially true for the interest-based social apps and services, which are known to quickly gain users and engagement. Brands are going to be looking for scale and how much time their users spend on the service interacting. By focusing on building a great community, there will be an opportunity to ride the wave of advertising dollars that will inevitably shift into social and mobile as brands adapt. Start-ups also need to think about what an ad unit really means on their service and how they can monetize their brands without compromising their product experience. The aperture for advertising is more important than ever in mobile and it is something that both brands and start-ups need to work together on to get right.

Facebook hasn’t snuffed the competition; the social space continues to evolve

New interest-based networks continue to crop up, some breaking through quite strongly. Pinterest is the obvious leader of the bunch, proven by its ongoing expansion and growth this year. But multiple other interest-based social networks suggest a future that is more diverse and not dominated by one player like Facebook. For example, humor site 9gag exploded in the last 18 months to become a top 500 site globally, according to Web analytics firm Alexa. Fitocracy gives the athlete in us a place to share fitness achievements without sounding like a bore or braggart, and sees its users spending an average of 3.5 hours on the app each month, a number that is second only to Facebook and Thumb in terms of user engagement. Go ask a question on the mobile opinion network, Thumb, and you’ll get more than 50 responses in just a few minutes, as Facebook recently gave up on its foray into question and answer. User appetite for these new services continues to expand.

There are two broad categories of interest-based networks, and both are seeing companies succeed in 2012. One category is verticalized, subject-themed networks such as Foodspotting (food), Rapgenius (rap lyrics), 9Gag (humor), Wedding Party (weddings) and Fitocracy (fitness). The promise of these services is that they deliver value to users in a specific slice of their lives. They create strong, loyal communities that can be valuable targets for brands. The challenge they face in the evolving ecosystem is how to sustain growth and user acquisition given their vertical focus.

The other approach is horizontal: Pinterest, Quora, Path, Thumb and PandaWhale. These services span a broad range of topics, but offer a different interaction model — whether through pinboards in the case of Pinterest, or questions and answers in the cases of Quora and Thumb. These networks have broader audiences that can be spliced into specific targets, but will require large scale to deliver meaningful targets in specific areas (e.g. number of users on Quora that are interested in a particular topic). In this segment, the mechanics for driving engagement and analytics will be very important to delivering advertising targeting and conversion.

Both approaches will likely yield winners. And there are many questions I ask myself when evaluating these companies and looking ahead to 2013. For vertically focused networks, the question will be when and whether those services need to scale into other areas. Will Foodspotting expand to offer Winespotting? Will Wedding Party extend into Baby Shower Party? And will the users follow?

For horizontal services, the question is how to extend the entire platform more broadly, to make it more mainstream. Pinterest has seemingly crossed this chasm. Some have questioned whether Quora will do so, though I’m extremely confident it will.

Looking back on what has shaped the ecosystem to this point, it is impossible to ignore the effect continued growth on mobile and increased interest from brands will have on the current batch of social contenders in 2013, new and old. The goal is to deliver a service that adds value to users, builds a community, and helps power users and key contributors gain recognition and notoriety. But the path to success will be varied. I will say that from my vantage point as an investor that, heading into 2013, if mobile doesn’t factor very heavily into the approach of an interest-based social network, then I’m not interested. Skate to where the puck is going is the lesson here.

Jay Jamison is a Partner at BlueRun Ventures, who focuses on early stage mobile, consumer and enterprise investments. He also serves on the boards of AppCentral (acquired by Good Technology), AppRedeem, Foodspotting, and Thumb. You can follow Jay on Twitter @jay_jamison or read his blog at www.jayjamison.com.

The app, called Kapture, promises instant rewards in exchange for users taking photos of themselves along with a particular item in a store or a food dish in a restaurant.

After snapping the picture, the “kapturer” then has to share that picture with either Facebook or Twitter.

The rewards can range from a free juice to 15 percent off an item in a store to 10 percent off your total restaurant bill.

Kapture has been in beta mode for about a year now, but officially launches today on iPhone. It’s currently offering rewards in a few hundred locations in New York City.

There are some rules about the contents of the photos. Kapture founder and president Michael Szewczyk says the user has to take the photo in the designated restaurant or retail location. And a user can only capture one picture per brand, called a “moment,” every 24 hours, so you can’t pop into a store more than once.

In the age of smartphone-happy consumers and incessant photo-sharing, it’s an interesting idea — one that has been attempted before.

Last year, Zappos founder Nick Swinmurn launched a site called RNKD, with a very similar goal in mind: Get users to share photos of their favorite brands in exchange for rewards from those companies. Instead of requiring users to take photos in stores, they could share pictures of stuff in their closets.

But earlier this year, after minimal success, Swinmurn quietly shut down the site and turned his attention toward his newest project, a video “stitching” app called Threadlife.

In an interview, Swinmurn said there were challenges in getting the business to grow. Brands didn’t want to jump onboard until there was proof of a user base, and it was hard to incentivize users without the rewards. He also says he should have taken more of a mobile-first approach.

And the pictures themselves proved challenging. “The primary purpose of RNKD initially was to connect brands with loyal customers, and the pictures were really just a kind of verification,” Swinmurn said. “But it turns out the pictures weren’t nearly as pretty as an e-commerce site, or people just wouldn’t want to upload their stuff.”

Kapture has a leg up on the business side — Szewczyk says the merchant base is 300 and growing, and includes places like the Strand Bookstore, Vince Camuto, and Anthony Bourdain’s restaurant Les Halles.

But picture quality could prove something of a challenge, as it did with RNKD. And most brands don’t want profanity or other negative elements associated with their products.

Szewczyk says it’s not “anything goes” with Kapture photos: Pics will go through a vetting process, and repeat offenders will be flagged.

Young Hollywood, the high-profile next-gen digital media start-up, has hired a top Yahoo content exec, Liz Coughlin.

The Beverly Hills-based Young Hollywood named Coughlin SVP of business operations, overseeing new business initiatives and all digital operations.

At Yahoo for a decade, Coughlin was most recently in charge of omg!, one of the largest celebrity sites on the Internet, as well as Yahoo TV. She also worked on corporate strategy, partnerships and large events for the Silicon Valley Internet giant.

Previous to Yahoo, she worked at the Digitas advertising agency.

“Right now, Young Hollywood is small, but it’s special, and where content production and media business is headed,” said Coughlin in an interview yesterday. “Trying to build new forms of content with the use of new devices and metrics and new forms of programming is an exciting place to be.”

Coughlin officially left Yahoo last week.

Currently, Young Hollywood creates “Entertainment Tonight”-style celebrity and lifestyle programming for other online outlets such as YouTube, Hulu and also Yahoo, as well as working on various marketing initiatives for large brands.

And Tumblr is happy about it. Union Metrics for Tumblr is the social blogging company’s first “preferred analytics provider.” It’s not an exclusive relationship, but it’s the first of its kind.

The new product aims to help marketers get a sense of what’s being discussed on Tumblr and how it spreads through shares (a.k.a. reblogged). It’s built on Gnip’s authorized Tumblr fire hose, which was released in April.

What’s interesting about this idea is how late it’s coming about relative to Tumblr’s popularity — especially considering Twitter’s developer ecosystem has become so fraught. Tumblr itself is just getting around to being friendly with advertisers.

And actually, Union Metrics for Tumblr is not ready yet; Union Metrics is just asking for signups today and hasn’t published pricing yet.

I asked Union Metrics CEO Hayes Davis about the difference between Tumblr and Twitter.

“We have a good relationship with Twitter, but it’s more like an arms-length kind of relationship,” he said.

Davis posited that the lag time between activity around the Twitter and Tumblr APIs are because the core early Twitter audience was tech geeks, while the early Tumblr crowd was content creators.

“I think Tumblr has its own center of gravity,” he said. “There’s an ecosystem here building over time.”

It’s a rich trove of data that can prove extremely valuable to marketers and research firms, though only a handful of companies pay for access to the “firehose,” Twitter’s stream of real-time tweet data. And not all of those companies have full access, meaning the data may be less meaningful than, say, if you had access to every tweet ever tweeted since Twitter’s inception six years ago.

That’s Gnip’s pitch, at least. Gnip, a social data API aggregation company that sells vast amounts of social data to third-party analysts and marketers through its single API, announced on Wednesday that it will now offer the entirety of all archived tweets available for outside analysis. Provided, of course, that you pay to use Gnip’s new “historical powertrack” product.

Gnip has offered a similar service in the past. The company’s original offering touted filtered search results for firms, including a 30-day “backtrack,” which allowed for viewing complete Twitter data information over the past month. That’s useful for, say, a company who has just launched a media campaign and wants to see the effect of its impact on the Web — or at the very least, how that buzz has translated into chatter among the Twitter-literate.

Gnip was the first to do this; competitor DataSift followed suit shortly thereafter, offering more history than Gnip — up to two years of previous tweets.

The appeal of Gnip’s new service, then, is to contextualize a given search term throughout the entirety of Twitter’s history, perhaps seeing the impact (or lack thereof) that different marketing campaigns have had on generating social media buzz.

All of that said, whether lots of Twitter buzz translates to actual sales or market movement is still a point of contention between marketers and analysts — especially in the still-nascent days of brands and Big Media figuring out how to most effectively use platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare to reach consumers.

At the very least, Gnip’s new offering means you won’t have to resort to thumbing the Dewey Decimal cards of the Library of Congress the next time you’re trying to gain access to one of your long-since-tweeted messages. Just be prepared to cough up some green.

The company’s inspiration comes from “fukubukuro,” a Japanese New Year’s Day tradition where merchants sell grab bags filled with unknown objects at substantial discounts. But in this version, shoppers get to buy a mystery bag filled with women’s fashion products — mostly jewelry and purses — and then trade the items they don’t want with others online.

The outcome is a company that offers mix of commerce, game play, and even some marketing, too.

The company’s round was led by GRP Partners, with participation from DCM. In total, Little Black Bag has raised $10.75 million.

Co-founder and CEO Dan Murillo, who was previously a VC at Greycroft, said the company is generating more than 10 million impressions every month across Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and YouTube, and that, so far, customers have conducted more than one million trades.

In addition to offering a shopping experience for consumers, brands are also using it to market upcoming products. For example, last month, L’Oreal’s Redken brand gave each user one of 11 different product samples, which they were encouraged to trade and post comments about using social meda. The company says the campaign resulted in one million social media impressions.

The newly raised capital will go toward hiring marketing and merchandising execs, and adding new brands to the experience, the company said.

At the time, many companies were using the site to promote brands on their own Facebook pages — but most were paying little to nothing to do so. While Facebook was starting to push more paid notices, it was unclear whether such ads actually led to purchases.

So last October, Ms. Everson created a “Client Council,” calling together senior advertising executives from 13 big brands and ad agencies.

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So, what’s taken so long?

Bart Decrem, the SVP and GM of Disney Mobile Games, said development took a back seat, as the company worked on its overall mobile games strategy.

Over the past year, Decrem said, the focus was on using games to promote Disney’s brands or create all-new Disney characters. And, sometimes they were able to do a little bit of both.

For example, the company’s hit game, Where’s My Water?, which features the lovable, original, character Swampy the Alligator, was repurposed as Where’s My Perry? to leverage Disney’s existing characters from the “Phineas & Ferb” TV show. Both games consistently rank in the Top 5 paid apps in the App Store.

Now, Decrem says, Disney is trying to figure out how Tap Tap Revenge fits in with the broader strategy.

Disney acquired the Tap Tap game franchise two years ago through the purchase of Tapulous, which was one of the breakout stars of the early iPhone app economy.

Decrem, who was CEO of Tapulous, says it was always his belief that it was important to build a community of users to drive discoverability and to increase cross-promotional benefits. As a free game that draws in thousands of users, he said, Tap Tap Revenge is the logical place to turn to in developing that network of users.

“We are trying to create new characters, like Swampy, and high-quality games around existing characters, like Perry, but one of the things we are also learning — from the business perspective — is that discoverability is important,” Decrem said. “We are trying to build a network that connects all of our apps together. Tap Tap is one of the biggest games in the App Store, so the question is, how do we tie it up to the others we are building?”

Tap Tap Revenge: Tour, which is available for free on iOS, is a rhythm game that challenges players to tap the screen to the beat of a song.

In this particular version, the game includes a “tour” mode that puts the player in the role of a concert promoter, a tour manager, and a rock star. The app gives free tracks away daily, including songs from top artists LMFAO, Avicii and Selena Gomez, and featured artists Gotye, Carly Rae Jepsen and Kaskade (feat. The Neon Trees). It also will be selling 17 bundles of premium content available for in-app purchase.

The bundles include tracks from hit artists such as Katy Perry, Maroon 5, Lil Wayne, Drake, Nickelback, Far East Movement (feat. Justin Bieber), Lady Gaga and Disney Channel favorites from “Shake It Up” and “Austin & Ally.”

“When we started Tapulous, we knew it was important to build a network and community of users. At that point, it was our goal to dominate the free chart and get as many downloads as possible,” Decrem said.

Once you get those users, they can be monetized over time across several games. But still, Decrem says the network only goes so far.

“At the end of the day, the greatest thing is word of mouth. It still dominates. You can propel an app to the top of the charts, but it won’t stay there if users aren’t talking to their friends about it. When you have something like Tap Tap that becomes an institution, you have to invest in it and maintain it.”

The New York company, which competes with other so-called flash sales sites like Gilt Groupe and Rue La La, says it has signed up more than 5.5 million members and has worked with roughly 3,000 brands since getting its start in 2007.

The new funding will be used to further the company’s growth and infrastructure. Investors in the fourth round include Credit Suisse and existing investors. To date, Ideeli has raised about $94.8 million.

About a year ago, the company raised $40 million from Next World Capital with Cue Ball Capital, StarVest Partners, Constellation Growth Capital and Kodiak Venture Partners.

In 2010, the company said its revenues totaled $77.7 million, according to Inc. magazine.

“We have high aspirations and high hopes for this one,” said Jami Laes, VP of Global Studios for Playfish, EA’s social games studios.

As part of the company’s E3 press conference this afternoon, it is unveiling SimCity Social for Facebook, where players pretend to be the mayor of their very own city.

All Things D began live coverage about an hour ago, but you may be able to catch the tail end of the live stream on Spike TV.

Leave it to a game company to not give up after getting beat the first time it challenged Zynga on the Facebook platform.

As you may recall, last year EA used the annual videogame conference to announce The Sims Social, which it hoped would push the company to the top of the Facebook charts.

For a short period, the game indeed did spectacularly, attracting 30 million players a month soon after launching. At that level, it beat FarmVille, one of Zynga’s most popular games, and helped to make EA the second-largest developer on Facebook.

But a year later, the Sims Social doesn’t even register in the top 25 and EA has fallen to fourth place.

In general, EA believes it can leverage big brands, like the Sims, Monopoly and Scrabble, to catch up to Zynga on the Facebook platform. But so far, Zynga has been able to dominate the charts through established games like FarmVille, CityVille and Poker.

In an interview, EA’s John Riccitiello told All Things D that he wished the Sims Social had sustained longer, but promised that at today’s press conference EA would be making introductions that will make your “eyeballs peel.”

In addition to SimCity, it also will show off several other game announcements for the game consoles and PCs.

To be sure, EA’s SimCity brand is the undisputed leader in city-building simulators, making this launch pivotal to the company’s success.

As with other versions of the game, the Facebook edition challenges players to act as a virtual mayor, constructing roads, buildings and streets from the ground up to make a city. But unlike other versions of the game, players will get to collaborate with friends, deciding to either build a friendly relationship with another city or a rivalry.

For instance, Laes said, a player may go to dinner with a friend and will have the choice to make it a nice evening or to sabotage it by throwing up on the table; likewise, you can send a seagull attack to your friend’s city, unleashing poop bombs on the city’s rooftops.

“It’s suitable for the platform. It’s rewarding and fun and surprising,” said Laes, who was surprisingly stoic discussing such subjects as “poop” and “throw up.”

The social game will launch soon on an unspecified date. It also precedes the launch of the new SimCity for the PC, which is expected to hit stores in February 2013.

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But some advertisers with big spending accounts are wondering whether they’re getting their money’s worth.

The doubt lingers as bankers and prospective investors decide how to value Facebook for an initial public offering planned for May 18, said people familiar with the matter. Facebook executives will be pitching the company to big investors in an IPO roadshow starting Monday, these people said.

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What gives?

With all due respect to Lewis, who is one of the greatest innovators in media, I left realizing that there are different ideas of what “social” can mean on the Web, and that not everyone knows where the gold lies. Putting the whole picture together, there are four different models for social that, despite sharing the same name, are completely different concepts.

• Social = Viral Hit
  For those on the marketing and advertising side especially, the word “social” often means that you or your client are jealous of someone else’s success. Viral hits are largely based on breakthrough creative, though great distribution is an often-forgotten second factor. Who wouldn’t want to be responsible for the next Old Spice guy? Of course, these kinds of hits are easy to ask for and hard to achieve. And if you do achieve it, you’ll need another viral hit to bring your audience back again.
  Verdict: Good luck!
• Social = 1,000,000 Fans
  
  Here, the theory goes that social means getting lots of fans, and then something magical is supposed to happen. Like the boys’ adventure with the “South Park” underpants gnomes, it usually ends up with a lot of time and money spent, a big collection achieved, and a big question mark over “what now?” It doesn’t matter how low your cost per fan was, if the value per fan is near-zero. It’s not the size of the fan base that matters — it’s what you do with it.
  Verdict: Bad strategy.
• Social = Comments
  Another concept of “social” is that it’s a medium for conversation. With programs like @ComcastCares, brands have used this approach to shape their brand images and reputations — and it has worked. On the publishing side, the Huffington Post and other publishers have succeeded in using social engagement to drive deep participation and connection among an inner circle of its audience. Hosting a conversation certainly builds a relationship. A “Like,” comment, or share from a user can all get you more exposure on the margin, but, as Lewis noted on our panel, the friends who come that way don’t stay very long and don’t come back much. They came for their friends, not for your Web site. That’s why, even though engagement strategies are great for your core audience, they won’t single-handedly drive the large, loyal audience we all crave.
  Verdict: Smart, but it’s not enough.
• Social = Lasting Relationship
  A lasting relationship with an audience is the holy grail of every brand online. In fact, it has made Amazon the most valuable e-commerce company on earth, and it’s made Disney and the NFL valuable over decades. But what some haven’t realized yet is that the most valuable mode of social is in keeping these relationships connected.

  Do you have any idea how valuable a “Like” is? Any seventh-grader goes all atwitter when his crush says, “I like you.” It’s permission to see someone more, get to know them better, and talk to them all the time — not just once, but every day. If you are doing it right, a “Like” or a “Follow” begins a two-way relationship: One where your audience is asking for programming from you every day, week and month; and giving you their interest data about what works and what doesn’t. With that relationship, you can choose what content you create, and when and how you share it. That relationship isn’t once-and-done — it’s ongoing.

  And data from our experience shows that it translates into a million visits a week from our fan base — almost one visit for every fan, not to mention dozens more impressions right in their home page, the Facebook news feed. Done right, social can already drive more traffic than search, making a new top venue to recruit, and more importantly, retain an audience.

  More and more, I talk to marketers and publishers who have hundreds of thousands or millions of fans and followers, and yet have no idea what to do with them. They haven’t realized that they have subscribers at the ready, waiting for great content and experiences — the currency of their relationship.

  Nor do they understand the tremendous value of those subscribers: If you give your friends what they are after, they’ll keep coming back for more, and they’ll bring their friends. This is exactly how companies like Groupon and Zynga have reinvented their categories and created businesses worth billions of dollars in the process.
  Verdict: There is nothing more powerful than a lasting relationship.

Ben Elowitz (@elowitz) is co-founder and CEO of next-generation Web publisher Wetpaint, and author of the Digital Quarters blog about the future of digital media. Prior to Wetpaint, Elowitz co-founded Blue Nile (NILE).

“I have about 50 pairs of Nikes in my closet, and it seemed to me like I should be treated differently by Nike than a customer who has zero pairs,” he said.

The thought inspired Swinmurn to start RNKD, which is launching in beta today. Customers can create profiles and upload pictures of items of clothing they already own by snapping a picture and designating brands and where they bought each piece.

“The idea was to bridge the gap between consumers and brands by using what people already have in their closets,” Swinmurn said.

Users will be rewarded with badges and points for uploading photos, and will have the opportunity to win gift cards based on their participation. Swinmurn believes brands could use RNKD as a way to offer clothing at a discount to their most dedicated fans.

The emphasis is on the brand, rather than the store at which the apparel was purchased, which is how many other loyalty programs are designed.

Swinmurn, who left Zappos before it was sold to Amazon, also gained inspiration for RNKD after starting a small clothing line called Dethrone, which creates gear and clothing for practitioners of mixed martial arts. He said he sells 99 percent of the apparel to small shops. “We have no idea who walks into the shops and buys the product,” he said.

Swinmurn is hoping to tip the market on its head. Brands are already giving discounts on clothing at stores like Ross and T.J. Maxx, and on online flash sales sites like Gilt Groupe, ideeli and Rue La La. But those discounts aren’t being given to the biggest fans of the brands.

Instead, Swinmurn argues, discounts should go to consumers who deserve them.

RNKD is based in San Francisco, and is self-funded by Swinmurn, who has an engineering team of one.

In an interview in Silicon Valley, Brad Serwin, the COO of Playdom’s social games unit, said the company has finally started to come out of hiding after being acquired for $563.2 million, plus a $200 million earn-out, more than a year ago.

One reason it took so long, according to Serwin: The general pains of integrating a small company into a larger organization.

Since the acquisition, Playdom has moved to new offices in Palo Alto, Calif., which it shares with Disney Mobile (which was formed through the acquisition of another Silicon Valley start-up, Tapulous).

Both have been learning to work with a parent company that is headquartered 350 miles away.

“A year after the acquisition, we are successfully transitioning into an operating division within Disney,” Serwin said. “We are 100 percent back to work.”

It took long enough, especially given the radical change the industry has undergone since Facebook launched its third-party application platform in May 2007. [More on how the industry has changed  in an interview today with Rick Thompson, a founder of Playdom.]

Since then, games have become the most popular applications on the platform, and have evolved from simple and inexpensive time killers to graphically rich applications.

Facebook has changed the rules, too.

This has impacted everyone in the space, not just three-year-old Playdom. Two of the biggest challenges emerged when the social network shut down its viral channels: When it became difficult to acquire new users by posting messages on users’ pages, and when Facebook implemented Credits, a virtual currency that requires developers to cut Facebook 30 percent of all revenues.

Playdom execs believe the company has finally reorganized, and are planning on making a big splash in what many worried was a dead pool.

Of the dozen titles slated for the next year, two games will come as soon as this month, and up to three games — coming in January, March and August — will leverage Disney brands.

Playdom’s next game is called Secret Agent X. For now, it is only available in beta in some international markets, but it is coming to the U.S. in the fall. In the game, a player leads a dual life as an average citizen who at night becomes a secret agent, exploring new locations and completing missions with the help of high-tech gadgets.

In the trailer for the game, seen below, a suburban housewife manages to save the world, all the while keeping her cover by making sure dinner is on the table on time.

As the seventh-largest app maker, according to AppData, Playdom falls below Zynga, Electronic Arts and even such new entrants as Germany’s Wooga.

That said, Playdom’s recent launch of Gardens of Time was considered a breakthrough hit that used game mechanics rarely seen on Facebook. The social game falls into the category of “hidden objects,” where players try to find a list of items in a room, similar to “Where’s Waldo?”

The concept behind hidden objects is not new to gaming, but it is new to Facebook, and was recently identified as a niche worth pursuing. Today, Playdom’s game is garnering nearly three million daily active users, which registers slightly below Zynga’s new Adventure World.

Playdom hopes it will prosper by bringing new concepts to social gaming and also by leveraging Disney’s big brands to catch players’ attention.

As a recent test, Playdom renamed its game GnomeTown as Disney’s GnomeTown. Serwin said the game performed much better with the new name.

Playdom’s close competitor Playfish is also relying on the intellectual property of its parent company, Electronic Arts. It has seen its Sims Social title climb the charts to become the second-most-popular game.

On the other hand, Zynga, which is the largest social games maker, has made up all of its own properties, ranging from FarmVille to its newest property, Adventure World. More recently, it has used name-brand promotions within its games to garner attention, such as Lady Gaga in FarmVille, and more recently, Enrique Iglesias in CityVille.

“Competitors have chunks of IP, but we have a lot to choose from,” said Serwin, adding that it’s not as if Playdom alone needs intellectual property: “Everyone needs IP.”

Serwin said the Playdom division’s plan is to work closely with Disney; it has hired a liaison who works in Burbank every day to make sure Playdom’s plans are on course with what Disney has in mind.

Still, Serwin can’t deny that the lull in game making has dragged down the results of Disney’s Interactive Group. Disney reported $21 million in accounting adjustment in the third quarter and $34 million in the second quarter tied to Playdom alone, and the losses are expected to continue.

In the second-quarter earnings call, President and CEO Bob Iger tried to explain its multimillion dollar charges to analysts:

“We thought it would be wise to improve the quality of the games that we’re going to release. So, we took a five-month hiatus, which had not been planned, from releasing games, to build a higher-quality game, and then also to re-stack our technical capabilities to deal with volume or to deal with scale, which we are hoping to achieve.”

Iger declined to say when the group would hit break-even, but that it was expected to get into the black by 2013.

Iger gave Gardens of Time as an example of a game that is monetizing well. “We feel good about the direction of Playdom, particularly with this new hit game in the marketplace,” he said, adding that new games in the pipeline will be based on Disney, ESPN and Marvel brands.

It has taken more than a year, but Serwin believes Playdom is ready.

“We’ve made a connection with people at Disney to get it done,” he said. “Whether it should have happened faster or slower, I don’t know, but it’s happening and it’s great.”

That legacy — and his influence on the lives of people around the world — is inestimable, and we will be talking about him and his amazing, interesting life a great deal in the coming days and weeks.

But as the sun comes up here in New York this morning, still mourning the departed, we are forced to confront more immediate and material concerns. Insensitive though it may seem to consider at this moment, Apple is not simply a great company — it has also proven over the last decade to be a great investment, and as such is one of the most widely held stocks in the world. Its largest shareholders are the big mutual fund companies like Fidelity, the Vanguard Group, State Street Corp. and T. Rowe Price, who among them own more than 15 percent of Apple’s shares.

And as Apple’s value, as measured by market capitalization, has ballooned from less than $10 billion a decade ago to north of $350 billion as of yesterday, the anxiety about the mortality of its founder has regularly caused its value to swoon. Over the seven-year course of Jobs’s illness, Apple shareholders have had to come to terms with the so-called “Jobs premium,” the extra value attached to the company’s shares that existed as long as he was directly involved in mapping company strategy and applying his unique touch to its products.

The conventional wisdom among Apple analysts now is that Apple investors, once known for their hair-trigger reflex to sell on any whiff of rumor, have gained a more complex and reasonable understanding of the situation. Apple, without Jobs, will still be Apple, and for the immediate and medium-term future, there is no reason to believe that its strategy and execution will falter in his absence.

But as I wrote in August, when Jobs resigned his position as CEO, it’s important to understand that Apple’s long-term vision has been deposited deeply within the DNA of the company. There is a script for the next several years. Products are mapped out, schedules are set, components have been purchased, manufacturing deals have been inked. In short, everyone at Apple knows what their job is and will continue to do it without missing a beat. The path ahead is no less clear today than it was yesterday.

No doubt the shares will be volatile as the markets open today. But that volatility will be much less than might have been expected years ago. It wasn’t so long ago that analysts predicted that, upon the death or departure of Steve Jobs, the company would lose as much as a third of its value. That’s no longer likely.

Today, investors seem to understand intuitively that the fundamental reasons to invest in Apple remain unchanged. The growth trajectory and profitability in the sales of its products remain the envy of the industry. There are predictions that Apple will sell more than 100 million iPhones next year, and nearly 30 million iPads in the second half of this year. Mac sales continue to set records quarter after quarter.

For all its strength in North America and Europe, Apple still has significant room to grow overseas. There are already signs of progress. In its most recent quarter, Apple reported revenue in the Asia-Pacific region of $6.3 billion, amounting to 22 percent of sales, and more than triple the sales seen in that region a year ago. One key market — China — remains a strategic priority for CEO Tim Cook and his team. Apple is still something new to the people of China, and introducing them to the brand on an ever-widening scale will be an interesting journey.

If history is any judge, it will be a fruitful introduction. Wherever it goes, Apple’s brand seems to succeed. Ask anyone familiar with it — it is easily one of the best-loved and most recognized brands. And yet when branding experts measure its brand equity, it ranks high but surprisingly also shows room to improve.

Just this week, Interbrand, a consultancy that focuses on corporate brands, released its annual survey of the world’s Top 100 brands. Apple is ranked No. 8, one notch above the Walt Disney Company (of which, ironically, Jobs was the largest shareholder), and two notches above Hewlett-Packard; the company had seen the largest year-over-year improvement in the value of its brand. It’s informative to consider some other names that appeared in the Top 10: Stalwart consumer brands like Coca-Cola (No. 1), General Electric (No. 5) and McDonald’s (No. 6).

Yet it’s also interesting to note that among the technology names that appeared in the Top 10 of the Interbrand survey, Apple wasn’t at the top: That distinction goes to IBM (No. 2), Microsoft (No. 3), Google (No. 4) and Intel (No. 7). Rather than a weakness, I think this fact speaks to Apple’s potential.

The story of Apple has never been one of narrow horizons. It has always been about looking ahead. Not just to the next quarter or to the next year, but of seeing how the march of technological progress can be harnessed to make life better in ways we can hardly grasp now. And yet when things like the iPhone materialize, they become part of us and quickly embed themselves into the very fabric of day-to-day existence. They’re not tools so much as extensions of our minds and identities. And that vision, so carefully articulated by Steve Jobs yet revealed only one product at a time, is still incomplete.

And so I find myself writing something that at once seems absurd and yet completely obvious: It may very well be, on this deeply sad day following the death of its founder, that Apple’s best days are still ahead.

Image via Jonathan Mak’s Tumblr.

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As part of the acquisition, it will spin off a few of the company’s properties to create a well-funded new entity that will be led by GSI’s founder and CEO Michael Rubin.

EBay said it will acquire GSI to help retailers and big brands move into both online and mobile commerce. GSI helps more than 180 leading retailers and brands, including Timberland, RadioShack, Calvin Klein, Levi’s and Ralph Lauren.

But eBay and GSI have identified a few parts of the business that will remain independent.

EBay said it will divest GSI’s licensed sports merchandise business and 70 percent of ShopRunner and Rue La La. EBay will loan the holding company $467 million and retain a 30 percent stake in Rue La La and ShopRunner. In addition, Rubin will invest $31 million in cash.

Rue La La operates in the emerging flash-sales business, competing against companies like Gilt Groupe. GSI purchased Rue La La in 2009 for $350 million in cash and stock. Meanwhile, ShopRunner is similar to Amazon’s Prime membership. It charges members $79 a year for unlimited free two-day shipping with no minimum order from a variety of retailers across the Web.

The spin-off will also include Fanatics, a Jacksonville, Florida-based company that operates more than 250 e-commerce Web sites, including 60 e-commerce stores for collegiate and professional sports. GSI’s acquisition of the company closed only two weeks ago.

While all these companies sound complementary to eBay, the company said they are not core to its long-term growth strategy.

In a conference call this morning, eBay President and CEO John Donahoe, explained that it was important to spin off Fanatics and GSI’s sports licensing business because “we don’t want to be in competition with sellers, and that business would be in competition with them.”

As for Rue La La and Shoprunner, the reasons were a little different. “I would characterize it as a near-term operating loss and a huge opportunity that if we tried to realize, we’d probably screw it up. In Michael, we see a guy who can take those concepts to a level we couldn’t imagine, and our 30 percent investment is our indication of what we think Michael could do over time,” he said.

The day the mall went live, Payvment said its customers’ sales quadrupled, compared to sales when they were limited to a shopping tab on their individual fan pages.

Now, Payvment’s competitor, Adgregate Markets, which also helps brands build storefronts on Facebook, is releasing data that helps define the size of the opportunity for e-commerce on Facebook.

In a study commissioned by Adgregate and conducted with the help of Webtrends, Adgregate looked at the impact of Facebook fan pages on traditional e-commerce sites.

To be sure, the idea of social commerce is so new, it’s difficult to give too much weight to early studies like these, but because everything on the topic is unknown, it’s worth taking the data into consideration.

Generally, what Adgregate found was that Facebook was generating a ton of visits to brands’ Facebook pages, providing an opportunity to convert the traffic into sales, especially as brands see visits to their traditional web sites shrink.

The study highlighted one example. Delta Airlines recently enabled customers to book tickets directly on its Facebook page. While traffic to Delta’s site lost more than a million unique visitors over a three month period, its Facebook page gained more than a 1,000 new fans.

The study analyzed the unique visits to the websites of the Fortune 100 as well as their Facebook fan pages.

From Adgregate’s customer base, the study makes a number of conclusions:

• Following the launch of a Facebook store, wall posts generate on average 1,673 percent spikes in store traffic.

• Facebook stores on average generate a 17 percent social engagement rate (merchandise “likes” and “shares” per visitor).

• Facebook stores generated on average 5.9 pages views per visit.

• Facebook commerce conversion rates range from 2 to 4 percent, which is on par with e-Commerce websites.

• Average order value of $104 with 24 percent growth month-over-month (although this largely is dependent upon retail vertical).

The sky-high billboard is part of a contest that the four-year-old Mountain View, Calif.-based start-up conducted along side American Eagle, the teenage clothing retailer.

The contest challenged participants to come up with the best American Eagle spring break outfit. The grand prize winner received $1,000, and first and second place received gift cards.

Polyvore, which touts its ability to track brand engagement, said users created 13,732 entries, which generated 47,653 “likes,” and 3,552 comments.

Overall, the contest generated 735,808 impressions, and helped American Eagle skyrocket to become the fourth-most popular brand on the site during the campaign.

The first-place prize went to Lauren.y.b, who paired a racerback navy tank, a pair of white-washed skinny jeans, a stripped string bikini with accessories such as ballet flats and a studded wood bangle.

Live Your Life: American Eagle Spring Break! by Lauren.y.b? featuring wood jewelry

The four winning sets will be featured on the billboard from March 11th to March 18th, and will run twice an hour each day.