The New York-based company, which sells travel deals and daily deals via email and from its Web site, said fourth-quarter revenues totaled $35.2 million, falling below analyst expectations of $38.7 million.

However, Travelzoo did manage to return a healthy profit of 40 cents a share, exceeding estimates of 35 cents a share, according to Thomson Reuters, which conducted a survey of analysts.

The company is Groupon’s closest publicly held competitor, other than Google or Amazon, which don’t break out results from daily deals. Groupon was also trading lower today, falling about 3 percent, or 59 cents, to $19.49 a share. Groupon will report fourth-quarter earnings in two weeks on Feb. 8.

In a statement, CEO Chris Loughlin said despite a slower period for travel advertising in the fourth quarter, revenues in that period grew faster year over year than in any quarter in four years.

A majority of its revenues are still coming from travel. For instance, in 2011, Travelzoo reported that 57.8 percent of deals sold were for travel and only 26.7 percent came from local discounts. Search revenues coming from comparison shopping sites such as SuperSearch and Fly.com made up for the remainder.

Still, it is local that is growing the fastest. In North America, local deals grew 196 percent year over year.

The company ended the period with 21.5 million subscribers in North America and Europe, up 14 percent from the end of 2010.

Reuters reports that the EC will likely make that decision by March. “I will receive comments from the case team towards the end of the first quarter,” said EC antitrust commissioner Joaquin Almunia. “I do not expect anything sooner. Let us see.”

Let us see, indeed. There are rumblings that the EC is compiling a Statement of Objections detailing Google’s various alleged abuses of its market dominance and could drop it in CEO Larry Page’s lap sometime this spring.

Of course, Google is facing regulatory scrutiny in the United States as well. Last week, the Federal Trade Commission said it would expand its antitrust probe of the company to include its controversial “search, plus your world” feature, which introduces social content from the company’s Google+ service into users’ search results.

Global sales of semiconductors were $25.1 billion in November, representing a decrease of 2.4 percent from October. On a year-to-date basis, global chip sales were up by 0.8 percent versus the same time in 2010.

Last month, Intel slashed its sales outlook by $1 billion on concerns that effects of floods in Thailand would impact demand for PCs, and thus for its microprocessors. The flooding has caused what’s being described as the most significant supply chain disruption to the PC and server industry in a generation.

SIA President Brian Toohey described the disruption as a near-term problem. “Supply chain disruptions resulting from the floods in Thailand have impacted semiconductor sales in the near term, however OEMs” — PC and other electronics manufacturers — “are expected to recover production losses over the course of the next few months,” he said in a statement.

“November sales were additionally affected by the continuing European financial crisis which is having a broad impact on other economies and global demand,” he said. The impact from Europe is especially clear in the 11.5 percent drop in sales to that region, which you can see in the chart below, a screen-grab from the SIA’s press release.

(Image credit: iStockphoto | V777999)

The disruption, which occurred at about 6 am ET, was still affecting users nearly three hours later, with no time given for a resolution.

“We are working to resolve an issue currently impacting some BlackBerry subscribers in Europe, Middle East and Africa,” Research In Motion said in a statement. “We’re investigating, and we apologise to our customers for any inconvenience caused while this is resolved.”

Another tough break for RIM, which endured a service disruption in Canada last month, and at least two fairly major outages in the U.K. and U.S. last year.

According to sources, AOL’s head of Europe Kate Burns has left the company and has been replaced by Goviral chairman and co-founder Jimmy Maymann.

Goviral is a unit of AOL’s Advertising.com and has been a bright spot in its ad business. Goviral’s CEO René Rechtman will now serve as the new head of the European Advertising.com Group.

Burns, who is SVP of sales and operations for AOL Europe, does not seem to have immediate plans and will stay at the company until the end of October.

Maymann reports to Ned Brody, who was recently named AOL’s sales head and Chief Revenue Officer.

According to an internal memo, he will head the Huffington Post owned-and-operated businesses for both Europe and Latin America. The Huffington Post unit has taken over all of AOL’s content businesses.

In related news, Peter Kafka reported earlier today that AOL’s music head had left the New York-based company for a start-up.

The change in Europe happened last week, the second international shift at a big U.S. Internet concern. Yesterday, I reported that Yahoo’s Latin America head left the company.

In fact, here is the memo from Brody, if you want go to town:

From: “Brody, Ned”
Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2011 09:40:03 -0400
To: AOL_Advertising, B2B, FriendsofAdvertising, B2B_Partners
Cc: AOLExecTeam
Subject: Organizational Update

Team,

As you know, one of our focus areas has been to re-emerge as a dynamic player outside of North America. As a part of this plan, we made the strategic decision two weeks ago to focus these sales and marketing efforts on our core global businesses: the Advertising.com Group and The Huffington Post. I’m excited about the plans we have to move these businesses forward.

To best support these changes, we’ve formalized an operational structure that we believe will set us on the path for even greater global growth. I’m excited to announce that René Rechtman will serve as the new head of the European Advertising.com Group business and Jimmy Maymann will lead the Huffington Post O&O business for Europe and Latin America. René and Jimmy will report directly to me.

René will lead our strategy of partnering with publishers and advertisers across Europe. We believe that his proven leadership and expanded focus on our publisher and advertising businesses will allow us to scale quickly. Advertising.com and goviral operate in over 10 countries in Europe and we have an opportunity to fulfill our mission of building the strength of quality publishers and the strength of Europe’s best brands.

To help meet the outpouring of demand in many countries for our brand and content, we will be moving our global content platforms back into Europe — having started with the UK — and opening opportunities in Latin America. Jimmy will lead our European and Latin America operations, pushing our content expansion opportunities. He is one of the most talented entrepreneurs in our organization and the right person to lead this forward.

Our strong leadership team will continue to support the execution of our strategy. Nimeshh Patel will continue his role as head of European operations and will report directly into Artie Minson. Sarah Gavin will continue to lead marketing and communications, reporting into Maureen Sullivan. Noel Penzer will now serve as VP, Europe and Latin America, reporting into Jimmy. Luke Aviet will take on a wider European remit in the Advertising.com group, focusing on internationalization and expansion, and will continue to report into René.

It’s important to note that our current progress could not have been achieved without tremendous leadership. At this point in our company’s development, Kate Burns has made a personal decision to leave AOL to spend more time with her family and personal pursuits. Two years ago, Kate came on board as the SVP of European Sales and CEO of the European operation to help turn the business around. In that short time, she has successfully refocused our efforts, established a strong leadership team and scaled the new business operational structure.

She and the team have done this well ahead of schedule and I’m particularly proud of this progress. Kate will remain on board until the end of October in an advisory capacity and to help with the transition. Please join me in wishing Kate well in her future endeavors.

We told the world AOL would return to the global stage and that’s exactly what we did and what we’re doing. We have a number of exciting launches in the works in the coming months as well as executing on our daily commitment to our consumers, advertisers and teams. I ask that you continue to stay focused on our goals and most important, celebrate the amazing accomplishments of our collective teams in advancing our global strategy.

Best,

Ned

In the first quarter of 2009, RIM shipped 54 percent of the smartphones sold in North America. Now, just a few years later, it’s shipping less than a quarter of that — an estimated 13 percent in the second calendar quarter of 2011.

That does not bode well for the BlackBerry maker, says Bernstein analyst Pierre Ferragu, who views the company’s “progressive effacement” from the North American handset market as a foreshadowing of things to come abroad.

“We see the beginning of a weakness in the U.K. market, and BlackBerry might soon be in decline in other European countries as well,” Ferragu writes in a research note today, adding that his discussions with European operators suggest the BlackBerry is no longer considered a preferred mid-range smartphone.

Ugly news for RIM, because the BlackBerry isn’t exactly killing it at the high end, either. As Ferragu notes, “RIM has been completely routed in high-end smartphones.” The 18 percent share of that market segment it held in the first calendar quarter of 2010 slipped to just 8 percent in the first quarter of 2011.

And at this point, RIM can ill afford to lose on one front, let alone two. Yet that appears to be what’s happening as rivals like Apple, Samsung and HTC extend the reach of their handset portfolios to lower price points.

“We believe that the sub-$300 smartphone market will soon display an evolution similar to that of the high-end market as Apple, Samsung and HTC, which have formed an oligopoly in the high end, expand into the mid- and low end,” Ferragu concludes. “RIM’s market share has already declined 3 points from the first quarter of 2010 to the first quarter of 2011. We expect RIM to lose a further 5 points of market share by 2012 as the oligopolistic players extend their domain.”

RIM reports results for its second quarter Thursday afternoon after the bell.

And now for our media bummer of the week: Even without a 2008-style meltdown, ad spending is already contracting.

Kantar Media says that U.S. ad spending grew 2.8 percent in Q2. That’s still growth, but it’s the smallest quarterly gain since the media business began crawling out of its post-Lehman hole.

In fact, it turns out that ad spending has been slowing since the second half of last year. Ad buys grew by 8.7 percent in Q3 2010, but have been shrinking since then.

Some sales guys I’ve talked with are still shrugging off the decline as the result of more difficult comps: It was a lot easier to post big year-over-year increases when the preceding year was the apocalypse.

And again, if you’re in digital ad sales and you don’t work for Yahoo or AOL, you’re probably not seeing any sign of a slowdown at all. And if you sell newspaper ads, you’re used to bad news because you haven’t really had good news in years.

But if things really do crater worldwide — and today doesn’t look like much fun at all — then all bets are off, no matter what you’re selling.

Google TV’s failure to take off in the States evidently hasn’t dissuaded the company from pushing it into new markets — or attempting to, anyway.

The search behemoth’s struggling Internet television service is headed for Europe.

In a keynote speech at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, Europe’s leading broadcasting industry conference, Google chairman Eric Schmidt said Google TV will launch in Europe early in 2012.

“Just as smartphones sparked a whole new era of innovation for the Internet, we hope Google TV can help do the same for television, creating more value for all,” Schmidt said. “We expect Google TV to launch in Europe early next year, and of course the U.K. will be among the top priorities.”

And it will likely be slow going when it does launch, if the service’s ramp-up in the U.S. is anything to go by. Disappointing sales and lackluster reviews have hamstrung Google TV’s adoption in the States. Still, the company is committed to changing that, with a new version of the service and additional hardware partners. Said Schmidt, “We’re absolutely committed to staying, to improving Google TV.”

The German court that issued a preliminary injunction banning Samsung from selling its Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet in most of the European Union partially lifted it Tuesday, allowing the South Korean company to continue selling the device in EU nations outside Germany.

Evidently Samsung questions whether the Dusseldorf District Court has the authority to prevent a foreign company from selling its products outside Germany. And until that issue is resolved, Samsung is free to peddle the 10.1 again, as long it’s not produced or distributed by its German unit, which is still governed by the original injunction.

The Dusseldorf District Court is scheduled to hear Samsung’s appeal on August 25, at which time it could reinstitute the injunction or lift it entirely.

Buried deep in the complaint that led to a preliminary injunction against Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Europe is mention of additional complaints against Motorola and a German company called JAY-tech. Details on the actions are slim, but as FOSS Patents notes, it appears Apple has already won an injunction against whatever tablet JAY-tech had been planning, and is perhaps asking the court for another against the Motorola Xoom, though that’s not at all clear.

Either way, this is a significant escalation of hostilities between the two companies, which until recently were thought to be battling it out in the U.S. over patents related to the iPhone and Motorola’s Droid handsets.

According to Forrester Research, the iPad has more than 80 percent market share in the United States. But it has only 70 percent market share in Europe. And that remaining 30 percent presents a window of opportunity for the device’s would-be rivals.

Forrester cites a number of reasons for this, but two stand out. First, the research outfit believes Europe will account for 30 percent of worldwide consumer tablet sales in 2011, making it the second-largest market globally. And that market is largely untapped. Forrester surveyed more than 3,000 adults in France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and the U.K. about their tablet ownership and interest, and found that those interested in buying a tablet in the future far outnumbered those who already own one.

Second, Apple’s retail presence in Europe is far smaller than it is in the States. The company has 238 stores in the U.S. But it has a quarter of that number in Europe. Says Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps, “Other than the U.K., which has 30 of Europe’s 52 Apple Stores, Apple Stores are sparse in Europe, compared with the U.S., which has 238 Apple Stores.”

The Apple Store has proven a critical point of sale for the iPad, which isn’t as naturally aligned with a carrier distribution network as the iPhone. So Apple’s more limited retail presence in Europe could be viewed as a real advantage to the company’s rivals — if they can develop a real challenger to the iPad. But, of course, that’s no easy task, as Epps notes.

“Manufacturers, retailers and operators we spoke with all commented on the failure of the first seven-inch tablets that attempted to compete with the iPad,” says Epps. “The newer generation of iPad challengers, such as the 10-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab and the Acer Iconia Tab, are getting better reception, but they’re still at a disadvantage to Apple in terms of channel strategy. … No tablet competitor has come close to Apple’s market share, and the non-iPad tablet market is extremely fragmented.”

In the ongoing talent drain at Yahoo, longtime Yahoo search veteran Chi-Chao Chang (pictured right) is the next to swirl away from the Internet giant.

Chang was VP and GM of the global search business at Yahoo and has been at the company since 1999.

More importantly, he has been a key exec in Yahoo’s troubled search alliance with Microsoft, so there’s another plus for Yahoo (and by plus, I mean minus). It is not clear where Chang is headed.

On his LinkedIn profile, Chang described his job thus:

“I am responsible for Yahoo’s global search operations and marketplace, and am the executive manager of the Microsoft Search Alliance for the US/CA marketplace. My team runs in-region operations and marketplace analysis for Americas, Asia and Europe.”

But that’s not all today!

Also departing Yahoo is a top PR exec, May Petry (pictured left). She has held a number of different communications jobs at Yahoo over the years, including for its Connected Life unit, corporate and, most recently, for its Americas unit. Petry, who has previously worked at BEA Systems and Sun Microsystems, will head to Hewlett-Packard to run PR for its webOs unit.

(Note to May: I am just as interested in that action-packed business, so get ready!)

I contacted Yahoo for a comment (but let’s just assume I am right, because I am).

To get things going, I used that old trick of word association, channeling a technique perfected –aptly, for the location — by Sigmund Freud.

The panelists — who included Google’s Nikesh Arora, LinkedIn Chairman and investor Reid Hoffman and Accel Partner’s Jim Breyer — had to give lightning observations on Facebook, Google, Apple’s Steve Jobs, Nokia, New Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch and smartphones.

The results were very interesting and very different, as you will see here below in a chart of it, posted recently by DLD on its Facebook page (click on the image to make it larger):

And here is a digital version of its whole DLD book that the chart was in:

Let it be said: For a digital information junkie such as myself, traveling abroad without any cellular or consistent Internet connection on my spanking new white Apple iPhone is agonizing.

To explain: I switched from AT&T to Verizon recently, in order to actually be able to make voice calls with regularity in San Francisco.

Unfortunately, Verizon does not go international. And, although I am carrying another local feature phone for calls, I am without the rich multimedia mobile experience that I usually get day to day at home.

Worse still, an “unlocked” iPhone only went on sale in the U.S. — which would allow me to use a SIM card bought in Europe –Tuesday, after I left.

Poor little me, I suppose, and there is certainly no need to cry any big, fat digital tears on my behalf.

Still, without the constant certainty of a Wi-Fi connection as I move around, it’s disconcerting for someone whose life has been jacked into the matrix 24-7-365 for far too long to be without consistent digital interconnections.

More to the point — as I watch endless legions of Europeans, who seem even more entranced by and stranded on their individual smartphone islands than in the U.S., obsessively checking out their devices every second — the concept of being completely out of touch with the pulse of the world while in the world is an odd one.

Or, at least the Twitter-fied world, in which I get short bursts of all kinds of information all the time. It takes the lack to understand what it means to be always checking in.

This is a big dose of the obvious, of course, but it was brought home to me in a can’t-miss piece in The Daily, published yesterday by the iPad news service and available here.

Titled “Speed Journalism,” it’s a succinct but important discussion on the push and pull between the ephemera of information we are increasingly getting from real-time Internet sources such as Twitter and the need for longer and more reflective pieces.

Wrote Trevor Butterworth: “The question is whether technology is diminishing our appetite or capacity for this kind of storytelling.”

This is not a new revelation, of course, but it bears repeating and considering again and again as we increasingly use these myriad social-local-mobile — so-lo-mo — devices.

And, as this so-lo-mo way of the encountering the world grows, it creates deep expectations of ever more detailed and immediate information about the world around you that is mostly immediately consumable and highly useful.

Whether this is a good thing or a bad one, I cannot tell yet, except to say that the last time I was here in Copenhagen, I was just 18 years old and I mostly wandered around in circles with an outdated guide book and without a clue.

As it turns out, without my super-duper-smart mobile phone being super-duper smart, very little seems to have changed.

The round was led by Keytone Ventures of China and DCM, and will be used for expanding in the U.S., Europe and Asia as it tries to build a hub where it connects both game-makers and players on the phone. The company, which is headquartered in Beijing and has offices in Menlo Park, Calif., has built a platform that can host mobile games on behalf of mobile developers who can tap into its social network.

So far, it has attracted 15 million users, and since launching the platform last year, has gained access to 350 applications. Games on the network include Paper Toss and a bunch of branded games, like Papaya Blackjack, Papaya Pet and Papaya Farm.

In a similar vein, Japanese-based Gree acquired San Francisco-based OpenFeint last week for $104 million, plus invested additional capital for growth of the OpenFeint platform. And, last year, Japanese-based DeNA purchased San Francisco-based Ngmoco, which is also working on a mobile social network on Android.

In a repeat of a trend seen last quarter, both firms report that the market shrank in the first quarter of the year. This would constitute the first market contraction in six quarters, and the first since the onset of the recession. They differ, however, on the size of that contraction: IDC pegs it at 3.2 percent since the first quarter of 2010; Gartner at 1.1 percent.

To be fair, let’s remember that the first quarter of the year is always seasonably slow for PC purchases because two things tend to happen in the fourth quarter: Consumers splurge on gifts for family and frankly for themselves too, and take advantage of crazy deals offered by retailers desperate to clear out their inventory. On the business side, some CIOs take the opportunity to use up unspent funds in their budgets, and get employees starting off the new year with a fresh new machine at their desks. However, this tendency is just as often offset by the start of a new budget year. Whichever way you slice it, the first quarter is always weak on consumer sales though a bit stronger on the enterprise side.

So what happened? The iPad 2, for one thing. “With the launch of the iPad 2 in February, more consumers either switched to buying an alternative device, or simply held back from buying PCs,” is how Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner, put it. “We’re investigating whether this trend is likely to have a long-term effect on the PC market.” Ya think?

Bob O’Donnell, IDC’s vice president for Clients and Displays, wasn’t quite as willing to blame the iPad: “Slower than expected commercial growth in the first quarter failed to offset the ongoing challenges in the consumer market,” he said in a statement. “While it’s tempting to blame the decline completely on the growth of media tablets, we believe other factors, including extended PC lifetimes and the lack of compelling new PC experiences, played equally significant roles.”

Jay Chou, another IDC analyst put it much more succinctly: “‘Good-enough computing’ has become a firm reality.”

The picture gets no better when you look at regional results. IDC says shipments declined in the U.S. by 10 percent. Gartner pegged it at 6 percent. It was, Gartner noted, the third consecutive quarter for year-on-year declines in U.S. notebook sales. Shipments in Europe contracted too, and Japan, which was already expected to be a weak market this quarter, has other things on its mind since the devastating earthquake and tsunami. Asia was the only bright spot, where shipments increased by 5.6 percent in IDC’s forecast and 4.1 percent in Gartner’s. China, IDC noted, failed to reach double-digit growth, and consumers in India, Gartner says, were distracted by the Cricket World Cup. Okay, then.

So how do the numbers look? Since IDC’s forecast is the most dire, I’ll start there:

The worldwide demand for PCs was 80.6 million units. Hewlett-Packard sold 15.2 million; Dell, which just made it back to second place, shipped 10.3 million; Acer 9 million; Lenovo 8.2 million; Toshiba 4.8 million; while “others” clocked 33 million. All vendors except for Lenovo saw declines. The worst decline was Acer’s, whose shipments fell nearly 16 percent. (Now we know why its CEO Gianfranco Lanci lost his job.) Lenovo, on the other hand, saw its shipments improve by more than 16 percent.

Demand in the U.S. was 16.1 million. HP led with 4.3 million, Dell 3.7 million, Toshiba 1.6 million, Apple 1.4 million and Acer 1.3 million. Unnamed others sold 3.7 million. Acer saw its shipments fall by an alarming 42 percent. Apple and Toshiba posted gains of 9.6 and 10.4 percent respectively. HP and Dell both saw declines.

Now let’s look at Gartner’s numbers (remember that each firm tracks the market a little differently):

Gartner pegged the worldwide market at 84.2 million units. It says HP sold 14.8 million, Acer 10.9 million, Dell 10 million, Lenovo 8.2 million, Toshiba 4.8 million. (Clearly there’s a difference in how they see Acer and Lenovo’s performances.)

In the U.S., Gartner estimated the market at 16.1 million units. By its reckoning, HP sold 4.2 million, Dell 3.6 million, Acer 1.8 million, Toshiba 1.7 million, Apple 1.5 million, others 3.3 million.

Of all the many job openings in tech, perhaps the most interesting to watch will be who Groupon selects as its next COO.

The search has been on for a while for the critical hire for the Chicago-based social buying company, well before the recent announcement that it was parting ways with President and COO Rob Solomon.

Among those approached, said sources close to Groupon: Former Doubleclick and Google exec David Rosenblatt.

He’s not taking the job for a variety of reasons, sources said, but
finding someone to step up for the job will be tough, since it is likely to be one that will require a wide range of talents.

That includes: epic cat-wrangling of thousands of employees in far-flung locations; deep marketing and advertising prowess; high-level technology, product, mobile and e-commerce chops; and international experience.

The last is perhaps the most critical of all, since global growth–especially in Europe and Asia–is increasingly becoming Groupon’s main revenue driver, and the COO will have to pull together a crack team across the world.

That will become even more important after Groupon’s top international managers–Germany’s entrepreneurial Samwer brothers–move out of active management by the end of this year.

While company sources said this has been long planned, the Samwers (pictured here) have been fully involved in Groupon’s fast trajectory in Europe and elsewhere, since it bought their Citydeal discounting clone last May.

Thus, sources said, Groupon is looking at a range of candidates with experience abroad, as well as talent in scaling businesses quickly and to huge size.

And that means looking to companies such as Google and Amazon for an exec, where there are quite a few choices.

While BoomTown could not confirm whether Groupon has spoken to any of them, possible COO types are obvious.

At Amazon, some qualified execs include: Sebastian J. Gunningham, SVP of Seller Services; Diego Piacentini, SVP of International Retail; H. Brian Valentine, SVP of Ecommerce Platform; and Jeffrey A. Wilke, SVP of North America Retail.

At Google, there are tons of good candidates that Facebook has not yet raided, including: Stephanie Tilenius, VP of eCommerce; Henrique de Castro, VP of Media and Global Platforms; Dennis Woodside, VP of Americas Operations; and Margo Georgiadis, VP of Global Sales Operations (plus a Chicagoan!).

Other names being raised include Hulu’s Jason Kilar (unlikely, but I’d like it), various Microsoft execs and a spate of others.

(I say, let’s bring in Zynga’s Owen Van Natta, who was once COO of Facebook, since he’s missing a big pile of Groupon stock to add to his enviable collection of hot Web 2.0 company shares.)

While there are probably qualified execs outside the tech industry at retail and media outfits, sources said it is likely Groupon will select within the digital ranks.

Lastly, and perhaps most important, the Groupon COO candidate is going to have to accept that the role will not be a CEO-in-waiting, either before or after its inevitable IPO in the next year.

While I have received several tips that Co-founder and CEO Andrew Mason (pictured here) might not stay its principal exec, extensive checking with sources inside and outside the company indicate that such a move is highly unlikely.

“Andrew is beloved to the board, by investors and, most of all, by employees,” said one source. “He’s not going anywhere.”

Indeed, Mason has a close working relationship with Co-founder Brad Keywell, as well as Groupon Co-founder and Chairman Eric Lefkofsky.

In fact, despite other business interests, Lefkofsky has been very involved in all key decisions with Mason.

That job, presumably, would fall to the new COO, which Groupon should be hiring sooner rather than later.

“Groupon needs a world-class COO, who can manage hyper-growth, but also who knows that a No. 2 stays in the background while doing it,” said another source. “That’s a tall order.”

As we await the decision of which uneasy head gets the COO crown at Groupon, here is the opening from the Swisher boys fave Animal Planet cable television show, “Must Love Cats,” to get you in the mood:

At a press conference, Scott Durchslag, president of Expedia.com, was expected to unveil Expedia Hotels, a free iPhone app that lets users filter and book hotel rooms from their device.

The app will be available once it gets rubber-stamped by Apple, and an Android version is expected to follow in April. Expedia Hotels is the first product built by Mobiata, a developer of mobile travel applications, that Expedia acquired in November 2010.

In an interview prior to the press conference today, Durchslag told us that the hotel app is the first in a series of initiatives that the company will roll out in mobile this year.

The hotel application will automatically use GPS to find hotels nearby. The results can be filtered by price, rating, popularity or distance, and ratings are provided by TripAdvisor. Durchslag said from their experience with users on the mobile web, 70 percent of people searching on the phone are looking for a room for a single person, for a single night for the same day.

The application will default to those settings.

To be sure, Expedia’s plans don’t stop there. More apps will come later this year, and it doesn’t intend to stop with smartphone owners.

Phase two and three includes working with handset makers and carriers to embed applications onto devices before they are shipped to consumers.

While those types of partnerships used to be standard in mobile in order for companies to get wide distribution, the focus more recently has shifted to building applications for smartphones because of the speed to market and fewer barriers.

Durchslag defends the strategy: “Expedia is the world’s largest travel site, and while smartphones are the trend, and they are big and growing in Europe and Asia, there’s still a big portion of the population that doesn’t have one. Preloading onto feature phones is phase two, and building an unbelievable experience on smartphones is job one.”

Durshlag also says the plans synch up with what Expedia’s broader goal is for the company, which he calls “Expedia Everywhere.”

“The essence of that vision is to delight the earth’s travelers, and to help them find the perfect trip whenever and wherever they want. Mobile becomes really important when you are traveling,” he said.

Other companies have also identified travel as the latest frontier on mobile. Kayak says its mobile applications have already been downloaded more than five million times, and it recently started allowing customers to book hotel accommodations directly from them instead of referring them out to third parties, such as Expedia.

The cellphone maker is hoping that its PlayStation phone, combined with several other new smartphones, will help lift the company to the top of the Android race as opposed to being just one of the pack.

In an interview at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Sony Ericsson CTO Jan Uddenfeldt told Mobilized that the company intends to capitalize on Sony technologies beyond gaming, particularly in the areas of screens and cameras.

“We think we have a really competitive edge,” said Uddenfeldt. The Xperia Arc, for example, uses the Bravia Engine that comes from Sony’s television heritage. “We will introduce 3-D technology and that will come from Sony, of course.

Uddenfeldt said that the company is now leading on Android as well, being the first company outside of Google itself to release a Gingerbread-based phone, with its Arc that was announced at CES. At Mobile World Congress, it announced the Xperia Play and two other phones.

“From being a little bit of a laggard when it comes to Android releases, we are now the leader,” he said. “We intend to really stay that way. Our intention is to be the number one player in this Android world.”

First and foremost, Uddenfeldt said the company has to be a leader when it comes to using both the latest version of Android and the newest chips and other hardware. “It is a technology race, so it is very important to be on the latest technology,” he said.

With Xperia Play, Uddenfeldt said, the company has something that takes advantage of the latest and greatest version of Android but also does something unique.

“We don’t see anyone else doing this in the near future,” he said. In addition to being PlayStation certified, it will also work with a lot of Android games, including many customized just for the Play.

“Most of the games that we will launch are actually non-Sony-based games, Android games,” he said, referring to deals with Gameloft and EA Sports to create Xperia Play-optimized titles. “There’s going to be like 50 games when we launch the product in March or April.”

Though most Americans wouldn’t know it, Sony Ericsson is a top-three global player in Android phones, with about 20 percent market share, he said. Until recently, Uddenfeldt said, the company would tend to introduce phones first in Europe and Asia, bringing them to the U.S. several months later–and that, he said, “was absolutely not the right strategy.”

“The U.S. is now the leading market,” he said. “The U.S. is the country where the most advanced products are being launched first. That was not the case two or three years ago.”

Sony Ericsson is realizing this and is changing, he said, noting that Verizon will be among the first carriers to offer the Play. “We will work very closely with AT&T in launching different products as well,” he added.

The company is also shifting more of its design and engineering to the U.S., Uddenfeldt said, noting that the Redwood Shores, Calif., office where he works, established just two years ago, now has about 300 workers doing everything from product design and engineering to business development.

“It’s the right place to be,” he said. “We have Android there. We have Facebook.”

Uddenfeldt has a unique perspective, having been with Sony Ericsson for only six months but at the same time being a 30-year Ericsson veteran and being based in Silicon Valley for the past several years. He’s also not afraid to admit that the company has made mistakes, including in the past year as it tried to move from proprietary Walkman and Cybershot phones to a fully Android-based lineup.

“I don’t think Sony Ericsson fully understood the importance of being on the latest Android release,” he said. “That kind of hindered a little bit the growth of the company during last year.”

However, he said, with the move to Android, the company has stemmed its losses and has now had four profitable quarters. This year, he said, it is time for growth.

Scripps says revenue at the site and its related spinoffs was up 38 percent, to $69 million, in the last three months of last year, while profits were up 20 percent to $21 million.

Those numbers are evidence that Shopzilla is both growing in Europe and doing much better in the U.S. following an intensive overhaul. The company says redirects from the site are up 39 percent; it’s worth noting that this is happening while Google tries to find ways to keep comparison shopping sites from clogging up search results.

Scripps’ primary business, however, is running cable networks like the Travel Channel, HGTV and the Food Network. And that business is doing fine without an overhaul: Revenue was up 32 percent, to $500 million, and profits were up 48 percent, to $248 million.

Or wanted it–at least not the kind that Schmidt’s been offering recently, which was on display once again today in yet another PR gaffe.

Asked by the Sunday Telegraph about the European Commission inquiry into the company’s dominance in search, Schmidt spun the requests for information that Google received as part of that investigation as the beginnings of possible settlement discussions.

“I think it is in our interests and I would hope in their interests to do a quick analysis of concerns that have been raised by competitors, hopefully they are minor or they are not correct, and we’ll find out and make sure we are operating well within the law and the spirit of the law,” he said. “We understand we play a major role in Europe and we’re not denying that. We have a lot of meetings with appropriate government officials.”

We have a lot of meetings with appropriate government officials.

If that’s true, the officials to which Schmidt refers have nothing to do with the European inquiry into Google’s business practices. Because the European Commission today flat-out denied it is in antitrust resolution talks with the company. “There are no discussions,” commission spokeswoman Amelia Torres said in a statement. “The investigation is not finished.”

We have a lot of meetings with appropriate government officials. One more to add to Schmidt’s dubious canon.