Postmates Inc., a San Francisco Internet start-up that launched its same-day delivery service in December, is hoping to succeed by tying its business to the proliferation of smartphones.

“We want to do for intracity commerce what FedEx did for overnight shipping across the country,” says Postmates Chief Executive Bastian Lehmann. “We’re definitely not blind” to the history of failed delivery start-ups, he says, “but we’re not afraid.”

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It’s too early to know for sure; there are two days left for last-minute packages to be delivered, wrapped and placed under the tree in time.

So, while it’s hard to say whether there will be any widespread panic come Sunday, there are some early indicators that the system is reaching capacity.

In perhaps the biggest demonstration of holiday stress, a FedEx delivery driver was caught on camera tossing a box containing a new computer monitor over a customer’s fence. The owner claims he or she was at home at the time, with the front door wide open. After nearly five million people watched the security footage on YouTube, FedEx responded by posting an apology on YouTube. (Only 193,000 people have watched that.)

Then there are the canceled orders at Best Buy, which ran out of heavily discounted merchandise and was forced to void some orders that consumers had placed last month. A few more reports have surfaced from other retailers, such as Sears, which was failing to keep up with orders that were placed online for in-store pickup.

But perhaps this sort of thing is to be expected when you see 15 percent year-over-year online growth in online shopping.

ComScore reports that e-commerce spending for the first 48 days of the holiday season has reached $32 billion, jumping 15 percent over last year. Last week alone, ComScores said, four individual days surpassed the $1 billion mark, to help set a weekly record of $6.3 billion.

On a positive note, retailers’ Web sites have been able to keep up with the demand. Compuware, which has been monitoring the Web and mobile performance of the top 50 retailers, reports that there have been no prolonged site crashes.

At this point, most online purchases won’t get to people in time for Christmas, although Amazon is offering some expedited shipping options for consumers in some markets as late as Saturday.

Besides stress on the retailers, one other choke point in the system has been delivery.

This week will be the busiest week of the year for UPS, which estimates that it will deliver more than 120 million packages worldwide. In particular, it was anticipating that today would be its busiest day, with more than 26 million packages shipped — which breaks down to about almost 300 a second.

UPS’s close competitor, FedEx, previously predicted that Dec. 12 would be the busiest day in its nearly 40-year history. The company was forecasted to ship more than 17 million orders that Monday, which was double its daily average volume.

That’s Target’s motto this holiday season, as it promises on-time Christmas deliveries for online orders placed by Tuesday.

But some retailers are being a little more jolly.

In today’s fast-paced digital world, procrastinators are being rewarded, and will be able to shop online as late as Thursday and still get presents safely underneath the tree in time for Christmas.

For example, Wal-Mart will rush packages to your door for orders placed as late as Wednesday; Amazon is offering regular free two-day shipping as late as Wednesday; Zappos is offering free shipping for orders made by 1 pm PT on Thursday; and Toys “R” Us will go as late as noon on Thursday for express shipping.

There are exceptions, of course, and Amazon is a big one.

For orders placed on Thursday, one-day shipping will cost shoppers $3.99 an item; for items ordered on Friday, only Amazon Prime members will be able to pay $9.99 an item for on-time delivery; those in 11 U.S. cities can wait until Saturday, at which point it will cost $3.99 per item to ship by local express.

Amazon Prime is the e-commerce company’s membership service; it charges $79 a year for free two-day shipping and other perks, like free streaming videos.

One of the biggest limitations for the holiday is the logistics of getting a package from a distribution center to someone’s home. For example, FedEx won’t be running on Christmas, but will be running partial operations on Christmas Eve, a Saturday.

At this late point in the year, physical retailers shine.

For example, Apple’s shipping cutoff date is on Wednesday, but it will allow customers to order online and pick up in the store until 11 pm on Friday. On Christmas Eve, many of its stores will be open until 6 pm. Toys “R” Us and Best Buy are also offering free in-store pickup, adding late hours to accommodate the busiest of people. Best Buy will be open until 3 pm local time on Dec. 24, and Toys “R” Us will will stay open for 112 hours straight, starting at 6 am Tuesday, Dec. 20 and closing at 10 pm on Saturday night.

Online retailers can’t compete with store hours but, conversely, stores have had a hard time competing with the deals online, especially earlier in the season.

This holiday period, Amazon prompted consumers to consider the moral dilemma of shopping in stores versus online, when it kicked off a Dec. 10 promotion that offered $5 off to consumers as an inducement to walk out of stores empty-handed. EBay fired back with its own promotion, which gave online shoppers a $10 coupon to return to stores.

To be sure, online retailers will have something to celebrate on Sunday.

ComScore, which is tracking online spending habits this holiday season, said $30.9 billion had been spent online during a 46-day shopping window that ended Dec. 16, marking a 15 percent increase over last year.

Spending last Friday — dubbed Free Shipping Friday — hit $1.07 billion; it was the fourth day to surpass the billion-dollar mark this year. Still, Cyber Monday — the Monday following Thanksgiving — appears to rank as the heaviest online spending day of the year for the second consecutive season.

With only 13 days until Christmas, today has historically ranked as one of the heaviest online shopping days of the year, thereby earning the nickname “Green Monday.”

This year it’s almost a guarantee that history will repeat itself.

Already, six individual days have surpassed the billion-dollar threshold this holiday season, according to comScore. That’s up from last year, when only one day eclipsed $1 billion in spending.

The term Green Monday was coined by eBay in 2007 to describe the second Monday of December because it tended to attract shoppers who wanted to make sure their presents would arrive in time. And, well, because the color of money is green.

This year, a number of online retailers are banking on it by offering a number of holiday specials.

But one of the biggest benefactors of all is FedEx, which must ship all the orders.

The commercial postal service is predicting that today will be the busiest day in its nearly 40-year history. The company is forecasting that it will ship more than 17 million orders today, double its daily average volume, and will exceed last year’s busiest day of 15.6 million shipments.

FedEx might be one of the first indicators to reveal how well the online shopping is fairing.

It says the increase is largely driven by residential shipments sent from online and catalog retailers. ComScore’s data would agree with that hypothesis. Already, the research firm says that online shopping is up roughly 15 percent from Nov. 1 to Dec. 9, compared to the same period in 2010.

ComScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni said, “We know that Green Monday will rank among the top online spending days of the season.”

But he added that it will likely not be the last hurrah of the year.

Other important days to come include the promotional day coined “Free Shipping Day,” which occurs on Dec. 16, and other days this week as we near the end of the year.

One retailer, however, was not in the holiday spirit.

Amazon-owned Zappos put out a press release today calling itself the Anti-Green Monday. It said shoppers don’t have to get caught up in the hype because it is guaranteeing that all orders made on Dec. 22 will receive next-day delivery for Dec. 23.

Now that’s the true definition of a procrastinator.

Here is comScore’s list of the 10 biggest shopping days of 2011:

His role will be a little different from that of most other VC partners. As AH’s partner for “market development,” rather than evaluate new deals he’ll spend his time on developing the sales and go-to-market strategies of companies that the firm has already invested in.

AH co-founder Ben Horowitz said it’s all part of the firm’s preference for founders becoming CEOs. “The thing that’s most difficult, especially for a technical founder, the most difficult thing to learn is sales. It’s the most difficult thing to learn operationally,” Horowitz told me. “If you don’t have experience with sales, it can cause you to fail as a founding CEO.”

It turns out that Cranney knows a thing or two about sales, and his history with Horowitz and AH’s other co-founder Marc Andreessen runs deep. Cranney spent four years as vice president of worldwide field operations at Opsware, which Andreessen and Horowitz sold to HP in 2007 for $1.65 billion. During that time Cranney’s team grew from 10 to 350 and sales grew from $18 million to $150 million. Horowitz wrote last year about how he came to hire Cranney at Opsware and how he possesses what Horowitz calls “the right kind of ambition.”

Cranney said that sometimes new companies get so focused on selling their new product or service that they forget to consider the larger backdrop of what’s going on inside a potential customer’s operations. “You want to help them avoid looking like a hammer in search of a nail,” Cranney told me. “There’s a systematic way of helping companies identify what’s going on in particular industries and companies and how they can tie what they do to projects already underway.” He’s also building out a network of contacts at large companies–including the Walt Disney Company, FedEx and JPMorgan Chase–that could become potential customers of the companies in the AH portfolio.

He’ll be focused on helping companies in the AH portfolio build their sales talent, and help them grapple with tricky issues like moving from “freemium” to premium business models, working with partners, identifying customers and responding to competitors.

One company he’s already worked with is Apptio, which helps companies manage their IT costs. It’s also notable for being the first investment that AH made. “They’ve had explosive growth in the last year and have been staffing up their sales teams,” Cranney said. “They had been a little concerned that these teams weren’t ramping up fast enough,” he said. Cranney helped Apptio develop a sales training program.

Besides Opsware, Cranney’s prior jobs include time at Aster Data, where he was executive VP of worldwide field operations, and a position as vice president for the Americas at Hewlett-Packard’s software and solutions business. He was also a vice president at Parametric Technology.

It’s another sign of growth at Andreessen Horowitz, which debuted in 2009 with a $300 million fund, then raised a bigger one of $650 million in November. It has recently taken positions at Groupon and Facebook on the consumer side. Its enterprise investments besides Apptio have included stakes in Okta and Fusion-io.

Interest from the two software giants would seem a plausible explanation for the peculiar circumstances around Autonomy’s on-again, off-again talks about making an acquisition.

In April it said it would sell convertible bonds to raise money–nearly $800 million–to fund an acquisition, though it never named a target.

Then suddenly last month the company said the deal it had been working on was being put off because of another unspecified opportunity, which promptly sent its stock reeling. Autonomy shares, which trade on London’s FTSE, are down 27 percent from their 52-week high. It could be that whatever deal the company was working on was put on the back burner following unexpected overtures from Larry Ellison and Steve Ballmer.

Autonomy specializes in what it calls Meaning Based Computing. Its software is designed to recognize the relationships between structured data–what you find in an organized database–and unstructured data–which can be anything from words in a written document, a speech or conversation, or anything else that has information that isn’t organized into rows and columns. Its customers run the gamut from businesses such as FedEx, the NYSE, Louis Vuitton and Goodyear to tech firms like Adobe and Cisco Systems.

On its face this rumor is interesting because now that the battle to roll up the data storage firms is largely resolved following Dell’s acquisition of Compellent, one of the next dealmaking battle fronts for the large IT vendors is going to be software that makes managing data in all its various forms easier, more powerful and less costly.

Autonomy certainly fits that bill, and at market valuation in the $7 billion neighborhood, both Oracle and Microsoft could get it done.

However, the cynic in me wonders if this is just a deliberate rumor intended to goose Autonomy’s flagging stock price. If that’s the case, it appears to have worked.

These come from mobile ad start-up Medialets, which put together a highlight reel at my request. The video doesn’t quite do these things justice, because you really have to see them on Apple’s tablet to appreciate them. But take a look, anyway–it’s probably best if you view these in full-screen mode–and I’ll try to tease them out for you afterward:

Here’s what you just saw:

• FedEx ad, designed for Newsweek app.
• Visa ad, designed for NPR app with help from AKQA, Visa’s regular digital agency. Features e-commerce possibilities, without leaving the app, via Fandango.com and Broadway.com
• Toyota Prius ad, designed for Weather Channel Max app; allows users to “draw” images incorporated into video.

Again, the market for this stuff is so new that shops like Medialets are essentially starting from scratch each time they put together a tablet ad. And that means there’s no reason for these things not to be interesting–you’ve never seen them before.

But eventually some of this stuff will become more standardized, just as most Web ads are. And that will make it harder to stand out.

Dear Apple Store Customer,

You recently received a Shipment Notification email from Apple advising you that your iPhone has shipped.

This email is to confirm that your delivery will occur on June 23rd. Although Apple and FedEx tracking information may currently indicate a later date, you can check the FedEx website the morning of the June 23rd to track your package to your doorstep.

In the event that you will not be available to accept delivery on June 23rd, it may be more convenient to use our pre-sign delivery option by visiting our Order Status website at http://www.apple.com/orderstatus.

Sincerely,

The Apple Store Team

The reason for the change in delivery date isn’t clear, though it might be that Apple is hoping to protect its servers from meltdown by staggering initial iPhone activations over two days.

Read Walt Mossberg’s iPhone 4 Review »

Under cover of darkness last night, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on the social-networking site’s blog that it would “return to our previous terms of use while we resolve the issues that people have raised.”

Oh, this is just too good to resist. Therefore, BoomTown shall not tarry in our ongoing job of busting the chops of the young Facebook leader, whose minions have actually–and I am not joking here–given him the nickname: The Wizard.

Well, the Wizard obviously had to pull back the curtain last night and show some serious mea culpa to the people, before they got out the pitchforks.

That’s due to the controversy Facebook has been embroiled in this week about changes it recently made to its Terms of Service that gave the company unusually sweeping rights over customers’ content and privacy.

While Zuckerberg had said in his first post about the issue that Facebook was not in the content-stealing business, the strong language in the ToS sent the usual suspects into a major meltdown over the possibility that the young geek had gone into full-scale evil mogul mode.

As if!

In fact, Zuckerberg has been ensconced in his Silicon Valley lair for years now, counting down until he knows precisely everything about everyone’s drunken college days!

Until D-Day then, here is my translation of his latest backtracking post:

What the Wizard wrote: Update on Terms

Today at 10:17 pm

Translation: OK, I have reached my limit of being yelled at by Sheryl and Elliot, have had my usual breakfast of Red Bull and Frosted Flakes–they’re grrreat!–and am ready to eat some major digital crow this morning.

I mean, night, which is my morning, because I actually slept through all this noise today about this whole Terms of Service “controversy.”

What the Wizard wrote: A couple of weeks ago, we revised our terms of use hoping to clarify some parts for our users. Over the past couple of days, we received a lot of questions and comments about the changes and what they mean for people and their information. Based on this feedback, we have decided to return to our previous terms of use while we resolve the issues that people have raised.

Translation: Did you know crow is delicious if you eat it with a little Bosco on top?

More to the point, I would just like to assure you that we have taken our lawyers–who idiotically rewrote our ToS to give us ownership rights to the Bible, “American Idol” and everything Bill O’Reilly utters–and sent them over to our friends at MySpace, because their owner, News Corp. (NWS), already owns two of those three [and also this site!].

What the Wizard wrote: Many of us at Facebook spent most of today discussing how best to move forward. One approach would have been to quickly amend the new terms with new language to clarify our positions further. Another approach was simply to revert to our old terms while we begin working on our next version. As we thought through this, we reached out to respected organizations to get their input.

Translation: As in: More yelling by Sheryl and Elliott and more Fedexing of lawyers to MySpace HQ in Beverly Hills.

But after we calmed down, we all decided the best course of action was to shoot ourselves in the right foot to stop the bleeding from when we shot our left foot before.

We are, of course, completely out of feet now, so if these hijinks continue, sooner or later, someone is going to lose an eye. By someone, I mean, um, me.

What the Wizard wrote: Going forward, we’ve decided to take a new approach towards developing our terms. We concluded that returning to our previous terms was the right thing for now. As I said yesterday, we think that a lot of the language in our terms is overly formal and protective so we don’t plan to leave it there for long.

Translation: Facebook, of course, never had any intention of stealing content and copyright! Perish the thought! After all, that’s the job of Google (GOOG)!

By contrast, ours is to collect incredibly embarrassing photos of everyone in the United States until one of them runs for president, and then our nefarious scheme to control the world begins.

We were planning on blackmailing the world for one billllliiiion dollars then, but Microsoft kind of forked over 15 times that without any pressure.

Still, we would like to own Palo Alto, Calif., and get free parking 24/7, so there will be demands!

Until then, enjoy the sheep-throwing. Mwaahahahahahahaha! (Quick visual: I am petting my white cat right now with Ernst Stavro Blofeld-like evil glee, and am, of course, cackling.)

What the Wizard wrote: More than 175 million people use Facebook. If it were a country, it would be the sixth most populated country in the world. Our terms aren’t just a document that protect our rights; it’s the governing document for how the service is used by everyone across the world. Given its importance, we need to make sure the terms reflect the principles and values of the people using the service.

Translation: Not to be completely and utterly arrogant or anything, but we just passed Pakistan, and those Brazilians better get ready to samba.

By the way, once we get to No. 1–look out, China!–we plan on decreeing that everyone in the world speak Pig Latin and that forthwith it will be flip-flop Fridays.

Also: Esyay, Iway amway anway alienway omfray anotherway anetplay.

What the Wizard wrote: Our next version will be a substantial revision from where we are now. It will reflect the principles I described yesterday around how people share and control their information, and it will be written clearly in language everyone can understand. Since this will be the governing document that we’ll all live by, Facebook users will have a lot of input in crafting these terms.

Translation: Ybay ethay ayway, “Otay Ervesay Anmay”? It’sway away ookbookcay.

In other words, I am sure you will make delicious contributions, after which Facebook will “invite” you to our world-wide HQ to share in a lovely meal.

Especially those Winklevii. I look forward to the twins coming by soon!

What the Wizard wrote: You have my commitment that we’ll do all of these things, but in order to do them right it will take a little bit of time. We expect to complete this in the next few weeks. In the meantime, we’ve changed the terms back to what existed before the February 4th change, which was what most people asked us for and was the recommendation of the outside experts we consulted.

Translation: To my credit, I did give in much quicker than with the Beacon ad snafu. And you thought I learned nothing during that debacle!

And, by outside experts, I mean Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer, who yells much, much louder than Sheryl or Elliot combined.

What the Wizard wrote: If you’d like to get involved in crafting our new terms, you can start posting your questions, comments and requests in the group we’ve created–Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities. I’m looking forward to reading your input.

Translation: Here’s my first pass, based on the U.S. Bill of Rights, Amendment I:

Facebook shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition Faebook for a redress of grievances.*

*Exceptway, ithway ymay ompletecay iscretionday, enwhay Iway
ecideday otherwiseway.

Then again, this is Google (GOOG), so you know they love to talk, because they are super-duper smart, I am told.

I will be posting video later, but thus far: A roomful of press in Building 43 at Google’s HQ in Mountain View, Calif. Tasty snacks, as expected, but unusually caloric (many tiny pastries, heavy cream, very small amounts of fruit).

First up: Sundar Pichal, Chrome honcho!

Google’s VP Product Management, who rode herd on this project to create the search giant’s own piece of software to navigate the Internet, apologizes for the snafu that resulted in this announcement being made a day early.

Google Fedexed a comic book it is using to talk about the technical aspects of Chrome to a Germany-based blogger too early.

Ooops, the Big Brains of Google jinxed by some mailing room goof and express mail! How deliciously ironic is that?

Now, Pichal talks about a bunch of info that has been previously released about Chrome being built on WebKit, being available in 100 countries and being open source (a new open-source project launching today is called Chromium).

As to why Google makes a browser? ‘”We live on the Web,” said Pichal.

Um, doesn’t Google actually own the Internet, and we are all just serfs on its vast lands?

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.