During the Norwalk, Conn.-based company’s third-quarter conference call today, it fielded questions about the impact of Google adding airfare and hotel information to its search results through its acquisition of ITA Software.

Priceline CEO Jeffery Boyd said that, so far, it looks like Google has created “platforms that can be operated as an efficient vehicle for advertisers to get qualified leads.” He added that his company’s approach is “as an advertiser, and to participate as effectively as we can.”

Some companies, including Kayak and Expedia, worried about Google’s market power if it was able to acquire ITA. But Priceline did not object, Boyd said.

“The transaction was approved and we think it’s incumbent upon our industry to find the best ways to integrate and advertise on it, and try to get the wealth of qualified customers that Google is trying to drive toward us,” he said.

The downside: If Google is able to send more qualified leads, it might be able to charge advertisers more.

Priceline beat analyst expectations in the third quarter. Revenue grew 45 percent, to $1.4 billion; net income doubled to $469.5 million, or $9.17 a share, compared to the year-ago period.

In an exclusive interview with AllThingsD, Robert Birge, Kayak’s chief marketing officer, said the current market is too volatile and is not meeting the company’s expectations.

“We are going to file when the market conditions are favorable to IPOs,” he said.

In the meantime, Birge said, Kayak is committed to keeping its filing up to date with the Securities and Exchange Commission, so if the conditions change, the company will be able to move quickly.

“It gives us the flexibility to respond to market conditions,” he said.

Kayak, which filed 11 months ago to raise at least $50 million, is one of roughly 200 companies that make up one of the biggest IPO backlogs in the past five years.

Two other high-profile examples are Groupon, the daily deals site that wants to raise $750 million, and Zynga, the social games maker that is seeking $1 billion in additional funding.

Kara Swisher reported last week that despite copious amounts of negative press, Groupon has no plans to back down from going public. Likewise, according to our sources, Zynga’s IPO remains on track.

Birge was not able to elaborate on the company’s plans or whether it was seeking alternate exits, like a sale or staying private and raising more cash. The Norwalk, Conn.-based company updated its filing recently to suggest it was looking at other alternatives as an IPO became less likely.

But unlike Groupon or Zynga, which filed this summer to go public, Kayak has had nearly a year to pull the trigger, which predates much of the market volatility, raising the question of why it has taken Kayak so long.

Birge said even if the market conditions are right, the SEC must sign off on the offering in order to go public.

Perhaps the market will be more favorable once there are more comparable companies with positive valuations. Already there are a number of other public competitors, including Priceline, Orbitz and Expedia.

One big public event coming up will be Expedia’s spin off of TripAdvisor, which will create two separately traded entities. In that scenario, Expedia’s results would no longer also include TripAdvisor’s advertising business, and Expedia alone could more closely resemble Kayak’s business.

As a result, Greystripe, a mobile ad network purchased by ValueClick in April, says that it has seen travel-related mobile ad campaigns increase by nearly 50 percent over the past year.

In a study, it found that the overwhelming majority of iPad owners, or 91 percent, used their device for a travel-related activity. The data was collected from Greystripe’s 971 users on a network of iPhone (including the iPod touch), Android and iPad devices during June.

Specifically, it found that 47 percent of iPad users booked hotel rooms, which seems to coincide with the boom of applications catering to this activity.

I’ve written in the past about how travel companies are flooding the mobile app stores, including Expedia, Kayak, Priceline and even start-ups, like HotelTonight, which will find you a room the night you need it. What’s more, InterContinental Hotels Group, the massive hotel chain that includes Holiday Inn, told me it recorded $10 million in mobile revenues in April, jumping from only $1 million in the same period a year earlier.

Following closely after hotels, Greystripe said 37 percent of iPad owners used the tablet to book a flight; 28 percent have used it to make a restaurant reservation; and 24 percent have used it to rent a car.

Although Greystripe found that applications were not required, in fact, 69 percent of iPad users were more likely to use the mobile Web compared to 49 percent of iPhone and Android users.

Airbnb, the fast-growing online accommodations service, is expanding an offering to allow users to more easily book longer rentals of a month or more.

The San Francisco-based company said in a press release that it had seen a “marked increase in users seeking and booking long-term stays.” So now, after already booking 3,000 monthly rentals, Airbnb said it is improving the functionality and expanding the long-term market on the site.

“Searches for reservations of a month or longer will now display the total monthly price directly in search results,” said Airbnb.

The move will add more competitors to Airbnb, including huge sites such as Craigslist, which specialize in longer-term rentals. Until now, the well-funded site — which has just recovered from a recent controversy over a booking gone bad — has focused on shorter, hotel-like offerings, but at people’s homes.

Everybody wants in: The oddball start-up, substantial media companies like the New York Times, even AT&T and Amazon.

And it won’t stop there. No really, trust me, it won’t.

The next crop of companies that you may start getting offers from could include your bank, or even that hotel chain or airline you use most frequently.

This is through a nifty invention called card-linked offers, which honestly isn’t all that new at all. It works very similarly to how your credit card company offers you discounts on rental cars or hotel rooms. But now it’s becoming an ad network of sorts that can accept offers from all kinds and can take place with any brand.

I’ve written about this before, and to be sure, there’s no lack of venture-backed companies all hoping this is the next Groupon-killer. Some of the participants in the space include BillShrink, FreeMonee, Clovr Media, Offermatic and Cardlytics.

In this case, I talked to Lexington, Mass.-based Cartera Commerce.

The company, which has 165 employees and has raised $30 million, is announcing a partnership today with InterContinental Hotels Group to allow hotel guests to earn rewards points while doing everyday shopping.

If users link a credit card to IHG’s loyalty program and make purchases at participating retailers with that card, they will earn points that can be redeemed at such InterContinental Hotel brands as Holiday Inn, Hotel Indigo and Crowne Plaza.

The Aite Group estimates that by 2015, 460 million consumers will have signed up for incentive programs such as these, totaling about $1.7 billion in annual revenue for card issuers.

Tom Beecher, Cartera’s president and CEO, walks me through a PowerPoint presentation, comparing how it is better than Groupon’s business, and how it compares with Google.

On one side of the equation, he explains, there are the publishers, and on the other side there are advertisers and brands. That’s sort of like Google’s AdWords and AdSense.

In the same way, Cartera works with advertisers and also the banks, airlines, hotel chains, or other similar services that have access to the consumer. Some of its customers include Chase, Wells Fargo, American Airlines, Best Buy and USAA.

Because consumers link a credit card to these offers, these are considered very well-targeted ads. Cartera is able to collect information at the aggregate level to find out about spending habits. Advertisers can selectively make offers to consumers who shop at their competitors, but not current customers who already visit regularly. That helps retailers acquire new customers and not just give discounts to already loyal patrons.

So far, Cartera says it has processed $1 billion in transactions on its platform, and is seeing conversion rates from 20 to 40 percent.

Even though these offers are not as well recognized as Groupon, they are typically easier to redeem.

The offers don’t need to be purchased in advance or printed out. Consumers automatically get the discount when they use the same credit card that received the offer. The offers can appear in a number of formats, from a Web site to an email or a line item within their bank statement.

Photo Credit: Images_of_Money.

Expedia announced today as part of its second-quarter earnings that customers bought 15,000 travel deals within three days of it launching an exclusive partnership with Groupon.

The partnership went live on July 11, offering a dozen or so travel discounts that let people book hotel rooms and airfare at half the cost for destinations around the world. The two companies announced the partnership in June at the D Conference, before Groupon CEO Andrew Mason appeared on stage.

On the company’s conference call, it added that when the partnership launched, it offered roughly 25 deals, almost all of which sold out.

So far, it said the deals that have performed the best are for big tourist destinations in the U.S., like Las Vegas. The ones that have had a harder time are foreign destinations that require booking an international flight.

Another interesting detail the Bellevue, Wash.-based travel site revealed today was that collectively its mobile applications are downloaded an average of 36 times every minute, which is an increase of about 20 percent compared to the first quarter.

In March, the company unveiled its new mobile strategy, which included launching standalone hotel-booking applications. Expedia now has a variety of apps on both iPhone and Android for multiple brands, including Expedia, Hotels.com, TripAdvisor and Hotwire’s Travel-Ticker.

In the second quarter, Expedia reported a profit of $140.4 million on revenues of $1 billion. In the same period a year ago, it recorded a profit of $114.3 million on revenues of $834 million.

The company said higher revenues were driven by a 21 percent increase in hotel room nights year over year, and 27 percent increase in advertising and media revenue from its TripAdvisor division.

As previously announced, Expedia intends on spinning off its TripAdvisor business into a separate publicly traded company. It has filed the preliminary proxy statement required to complete the transaction, but has not announced when shareholders will vote on the spin-off.

The company’s stock jumped $2.26 a share, or 7.8 percent in after-hours trading to close at $31.25, regaining ground after falling 77 cents a share during regular hours.

The hotel group, which includes such properties as the Holiday Inn, Hotel Indigo and Crowne Plaza brands, said it recorded $10 million in mobile revenues in April, jumping from only $1 million in the same period a year earlier.

Michael Menis, InterContinental Group’s VP of Global Interactive Marketing, said the growth is not a surprise, since they’ve been anticipating it for awhile.

“I think we are at an interesting time related to mobile. We are seeing the convergence of consumer adoption and platforms.” But, he said, “it’s still in its infancy.”

InterContinental, which does all of its own mobile development in-house, hopes to build off what it has learned over the past year by launching seven new iPhone applications — one for each of its properties.

In 2010, it released a Priority Club Rewards app, which catered to its most loyal users, for iPhone and Android. That application, which is only accessible through a free membership, has generated a bulk of the revenues.

Here are some of the lessons InterContinental has learned:

• A full 65 percent of bookings occur within one day of the actual visit (despite offering no last-minute incentives on the application).
• Roughly half of users book reservations from the app, whereas half use the mobile browser.
• Of the people who use the browser, about half use it to find a phone number and make a call, while the more frequent bookers use the apps.
• The rewards app, launched last year, has been downloaded more than 200,000 times on iPhone and 60,000 times on Android.
• In just over a year, the hotel group has seen a nearly 1,000 percent increase in room night bookings from mobile devices, and in the first five months of the year, it has already surpassed last year’s total nights booked from mobile.

With the introduction of several branded apps for each hotel property, the company hopes to generate even more revenues, and also create more ways for guests to connect with the various properties, which include InterContinental Hotels & Resorts, Hotel Indigo, Crowne Plaza Hotels & Resorts, Holiday Inn Hotels and Resorts, Holiday Inn Express, Staybridge Suites and Candlewood Suites.

The new applications will allow users to find and book hotel rooms, check rates and view or cancel reservations. They will also emphasize finding last-minute rooms by quickly identifying a person’s location to offer nearby locations and available rooms.

InterContinental is not the only one to discover that customers are frequently scrambling to book a last-minute reservation by phone. In fact, several companies have recently launched mobile initiatives with similar ambitions.

Other features will be rolled out over time to each app that fits with the individual hotel’s brand.

Bill Keen, InterContinental Group’s Director of Mobile Solutions, said, for example, that the Crowne Plaza typically serves business customers, so the application may offer tips on how to be more productive, whereas the Holiday Inn brand is more about family.

One specific feature could also use location-based services. Keen said it could use geofencing to identify when the guest is getting close to the hotel and push out a coupon for dinner, preempting the person from stopping to get something to eat on the way there.

For his full-time job, Miller is the vice president of new business initiatives at LivingSocial, where he’s all about trying to replicate those kinds of experiences for others.

Under his close watch, he’s helped to expand the daily-deals company into two new niches, broadening its scope from restaurants and spas into vacations and activities.

LivingSocial Escapes offers weekly discounts on vacations in the U.S. and around the world. And then there’s LivingSocial Adventures, which came about from the company’s acquisition of Urban Escapes.

Recent offers range from a bed and breakfast in New York to a Vancouver Island retreat–complete with a seven-course dinner–to a five-night tour in Panama that takes you to two different resorts. LivingSocial Adventures, which has launched in 30 markets, offers deals on such activities as a mixology class, where you learn how to whip up various cocktails, to an experience called Shootin’ and Drinkin’, which features a trip to the shooting range followed by drinks (and not in the reverse order).

To be sure, LivingSocial is not the only one trying to sell vacations at a discount. Other group-sales sites have rolled out ambitious plans.

Gilt Groupe has its high-end travel site called JetSetter, which offers very high-end offers for affluent young professionals. More recently, Exclusively.In, a site focused on selling India-inspired clothing, has branched into selling exotic trips to Asia. On the lower end, Overstock has launched a travel site, which offers discounted hotel rooms to a couple dozen locations.

Miller has an ideal background for the job. He most recently spent eight years as a VP at Expedia and had earlier stints at both Ticketmaster.com and Citysearch.

I sat down with Miller, who joined the company in August and commutes between his home in Seattle and the company’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., to discuss how LivingSocial is changing travel and what he might be investing in next. A big part of his job will be to explore new areas that fit in well, and help maintain the company’s crazy growth rates.

Miller also discussed the importance of social media and how he believes it is important for us all to unplug once in awhile (after, presumably, buying an $1,800 trip to Panama).

I caught up with him at LivingSocial’s Seattle offices, coincidentally on the same day that the Justice Department approved the merger between Google and ITA Software.

Here’s an edited version of our conversation:

On the subject of whether social networking is making us less social:

“What I love about LivingSocial is that it harnesses social media and encourages us to get out and travel and experience life in some new way, including dinner, spas, or go-karting. We sold 5,000 vouchers for sky-diving.”

What they are doing is true social commerce because they help people get out into the world and experience new things. It’s not about Facebook all of the time. ”I’m optimistic that Millennials will take control of the tool and won’t let themselves be controlled by the machine. We need to wrestle back control from devices and not the opposite.”

“I am therefore I update,” vs. “I update therefore I am.”

On being a tour operator:

There’s a natural intersection between daily deals and travel, or what he calls “near-cations,” which are trips within two to three hours away.

“There’s not a great platform on the Web today. LivingSocial Escapes is a weekly collection of offers across the country and world. In the first five months, we booked 200,000 room nights for 200 properties, or roughly 1,000 room nights per property. In some cases that equaled to 25 percent of a destination’s annual occupancy.”

On offering a point of view:

Miller says their approach is “approachable sophistication.” They don’t just offer a discounted room. They are packages and experiences he calls “weekend in a box.” That means a hotel room plus cooking classes, or a hotel room and tickets to a water park for the whole family.

On whether it competes with his previous employer, Expedia:

“That would be very egotistical for me to think I will disrupt a $20 billion business. We are in very different spaces. We are trying to inspire and speak to you about something you didn’t know you wanted. Expedia reacts to demand with dates and an origin and destination. I’m upstream. You see a deal to Mendocino, and all of the sudden I say, ‘I want to go to Mendocino, but I didn’t know I wanted to go’.”

On storytelling:

Miller said he’s in the storytelling business.

Expedia and Ticketmaster were revolutionary because they gave consumers access to information that had never before been transparent (it used to be you went to a ticket vendor or a travel agent). What he thinks LivingSocial is doing is turning a very logical and rational experience you find online into a very emotional experience, full of rich imagery and well-crafted explanations that sell a destination.

“Google is responding to a query, whereas I’m pitching something to you that you didn’t know you wanted. That’s different from the OTAs and Google’s of the world.”

On lessons learned in local commerce between his days at Citysearch and now:

He said CitySearch represented the first platform that aggregated local commerce information, which had been very fragmented. “But the market wasn’t ready and our model was wrong. I also think the rise of social media is important.”

First came Escapes, second came Adventures, what’s next?

Miller declined to say, but hinted that “there’s an opportunity in live entertainment,” which would leverage his time spent at TicketMaster. “You can only imagine what we can do when we are the producer, and we have a massive marketing channel of 26 million people.”

One would be a travel agency, focused on selling air, hotel and car rentals and the other would be TripAdvisor, the travel reviews site that operates in 27 countries and 19 languages.

The split-up was a surprise today, many brows furrowed as to the significance of the timing, since the travel industry is facing a number of major disruptions.

Today, reports said Google and the Justice Department could ink a deal over the next couple of days that would allow the search giant to purchase flight-data company ITA Software for $700 million. One of its biggest partners, Kayak.com, is also zeroing on its IPO. Kayak is also beginning to book hotel rooms directly with its customers, rather than always redirecting to other sites, such as Expedia.

But much of the thought process has to do with what Expedia thinks its business is worth, compared to Wall Street’s valuation.

While Expedia’s travel agency business garners the most attention, it is TripAdvisor that has the bigger growth story, but in many respects is hampered by being tucked under Expedia’s  much larger wings.

Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told the WSJ that TripAdvisor is now big enough to be on its own. “It is a matter of size, globalization and diversification of revenues…It is really ready to stand on its own.”

On its own, it could be worth as much as $4 billion, according to some estimates, which is way above the $237 million Expedia purchased it for in 2004.

TripAdvisor makes money from advertising as well as from affiliate fees when users book through other sites, such as Priceline or Orbitz. TripAdvisor is the high-growth and high-margin business of Expedia today.

In 2010, TripAdvisor’s revenues totaled $486 million, up 38 percent compared to the year-ago period. Operating income in 2010 totaled $260 million, increasing 33 percent year over year. Its margins are slightly above 50 percent. Contrast that to Expedia’s overall transaction business, which is much larger, but is seeing a more modest annual growth at 20 percent.

But a lot of that growth story is not as easy to see on the surface.

Meanwhile, one of Expedia’s largest competitors, Priceline, continues to be appreciated in the public markets. Its stock hit a recent 52-week high after one analyst boosted its price target to $610 from $575.

In after hours trading yesterday, Expedia shares jumped 14 percent to $25.51 after closing $22.40 in the regular session. Today, Citi Investment reiterated its Buy rating at a $29 price point and called it a value play.

Not all analysts believe the break-up is the right thing to do.

Fitch Ratings, which is watching closely to see how the plan will affect the company’s bond ratings, wrote that TripAdvisor as a stand-alone entity will likely represent a significant new competitor to Expedia. It believes that TripAdvisor will now have much more flexibility to pursue a model that’s similar to competitors such as Kayak, which can promote hotel direct bookings in favor of directing traffic to online travel agencies, such as Expedia.

That is a particular concern because a large majority of Expedia’s revenue comes from hotel bookings, which has higher margins than airplane tickets.

Exclusively.In, which launched in June and raised $2.8 million from investors such as Accel Partners, has launched Palaces to Paradise, a companion site to its retail site that will offer discounts on travel packages to Asia.

Travel has been an obvious niche vertical that other flash sales and daily deal sites have readily expanded into.

Gilt Groupe launched Jetsetter in September 2009, and already has two million people signed up to receive its deals by email. About two-thirds of the membership overlaps with the other Gilt sites. Other daily deals sites have expanded into travel, including LivingSocial’s Escapes and Overstock.com.

Just like its apparel site, Exclusively.In is focused on offering travel experiences from Asia. The four travel deals that are live on the site starting today are: A boutique hotel in Udaipur, Rajasthan; a jungle lodge located in Kanha National Park in India; a beachside resort in India; and a villa located in Koh Samui, Thailand.

As an example, the five-bedroom villa in Thailand, which sleeps 10 and includes a full-time Thai chef, normally costs $1,290 a night but has been marked down to $1,095. The deal will be available until May 31.

In the past few weeks, Expedia has rolled out a hotel reservation application that will be the cornerstone of a much broader push into mobile. Kayak also announced it will shift its business to take hotel reservations directly, in a move toward creating a better mobile experience. Priceline’s Booking.com property also has applications, and individual hotel chains like Best Western have released apps of their own.

And then there’s HotelTonight.

The San Francisco-based company has an iPhone application that allows you to book last-second hotel rooms the day you are looking–for reduced prices.

HotelTonight is announcing today that it will allow users to book up to five nights at a time. It is now also available in Seattle and Miami in addition to New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Washington, D.C. and Boston. Dallas, Philadelphia and Atlanta will launch soon.

The one-off single-purpose applications for now appear to be standard. To be sure, they allow for easy-to-use streamlined experiences, but it’s unclear whether consumers will demand a one-stop experience over time as companies get better at adding sophistication without complexity.

So far, HotelTonight has clocked 250,000 downloads in its first two months, and is encouraging more downloads by giving away a $25 credit good toward the first booking after registering.

The company was founded by Sam Shank, who is CEO. Shank, who is bankrolling the operation while they try to raise a round of capital, previously founded and was CEO of DealBase.com and CEO of TravelPost.com, which was acquired by Kayak.

HotelTonight allows people to book a room as late as 2 a.m., which is often hours later than the big aggregated sites. The company also sends its own photographers to take mobile-optimized photos, and has writers produce descriptions that include relevant information for last-minute bookers.

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.

In doing so, it moves from an independent third-party aggregator to a competitor of the hundreds of travel sites it compares on a regular basis, such as Hotels.com, Hotwire, Priceline and Expedia.

The feature was released today in a limited beta, and will be fully functional in a few weeks, both online and on its iPhone application.

Since Kayak was founded seven years ago, it has been aggregating airline and hotel listings from hundreds of sources to give visitors the best options and price. But it was not known for selling directly to the consumer.

The company, which has filed for an initial public offering, traditionally has earned revenue from sending referral traffic to companies like Expedia and Orbitz. In fact, Expedia accounted for 25 percent of its revenues in the first nine months of 2010, and Orbitz made up 19 percent of its revenues.

In that period, it generated $128 million in revenue and processed more than 469 million user queries for travel information.

Now, the Norwalk, Conn.-based company has decided to go head-to-head with some of its biggest customers.

To do so, the company is partnering with the Travelocity Partner Network, which will be processing the transactions and providing customer service to anyone who books directly on Kayak.

In an interview, Paul English, Kayak’s co-founder and CTO, told us he believes the two businesses can co-exist because they still provide an extremely low-cost lead generator for all of their partners.

While the feature is being rolled out online and on mobile, he said the decision to start booking directly had more to do with the consumer’s experience on the mobile phone.

In a statement, Steve Hafner, Kayak’s CEO and Cofounder, said: “Our users value that we give them choices on where to book, though some people would prefer to complete their purchases without leaving KAYAK…For people who use KAYAK’s mobile app in particular, this will make booking much easier.”

Currently, if a customer is searching for a hotel and wants to book something, they will be kicked out of the app and redirected to another company’s web site in the browser in order to pay for it.

The poor experience causes many people to drop off, and conversion rates are low.

If the transaction can be completed inside the application, a user’s payment options can be stored, and it can be completed in a couple of clicks.

English would not say how much traffic its mobile application is getting, however, as one of the more popular travel apps on the iPhone, it makes up a notable number of its three million daily searches, he said.

So far, its mobile applications have been downloaded more than five million times, and he said there are some users who only search Kayak from the phone.

For the bargain-basement price of $10,000, you will receive a one-night stay for four in the Penthouse at the Fairmont in San Francisco, a four-course dinner, a commemorative Tiffany china set for four, monogrammed robes, Bulgari amenities–and not just any rental car, but a Maserati Quattroporte for the day.

The package normally costs $20,000, but for the next six days on LivingSocial’s travel site, it will be sold for 50 percent off. Still a little out of your price range? Well, if you can scratch together $2,000, you can enjoy a one-night stay for two in the Presidential Suite (without the china set and other extras), another half-off deal.

Hardly the usual dinner out or day-spa offer, but seven packages (mix unknown) have already been purchased!

The penthouse deal may be one of the most expensive yet to pop up as the race heats up between the various players competing for a foothold in the relatively young space of offering heavily discounted items in return for selling high volumes.

Another big-ticket item that sold recently was on the flash-sales site Gilt Groupe, which was offering 2011 Volkswagen Jettas for $5,995 (or 63 percent off the regular price of $15,995). Quantities were limited to three.

Gilt Groupe also has its daily deals business, called Gilt City, which offers premium and often luxurious deals in several U.S. cities. It also has a companion travel site, called Jetsetter, that offers exotic trips around the world or even closer to home. A current offer on the site is for ritzy digs at a New York City hotel for $205 a night (including a shower with a view).

In an interview with Tim O’Shaughnessy, CEO and co-founder of LivingSocial.com, late last year, he said that the company is increasingly putting the focus on hand-crafted curated packages, which will help them differentiate from market-leading Groupon or the dozens of other clones hitting the market.

If you ask us, a $10,000 one-night stay in a San Francisco hotel would count as an eye-catcher.

It’s hard to know if this package is truly a bargain, since prices on hotel rooms can vary so drastically, and this deal isn’t really found anywhere else.

But if you take their word for it, the one-night stay for four in the penthouse normally fetches $10,000 a night. The exclusive china set costs $1,600. The monogrammed robes, Bulgari amenities and rental Maserati…well, we don’t know.

Here’s a description of the penthouse from the listing: “Your decadent digs in the recently renovated eighth-floor Penthouse feature three bedrooms, a formal dining room that seats 60, a two-story circular library with gold-leaf rotunda, a Persian-tiled billiard room, and an expansive terrace where Sean Connery famously received a haircut in ‘The Rock.’”

Is there a pull-out couch? Heck, I’m sure someone would be willing to sleep on the floor.

Just in case you are wondering, the fine print is tolerable.

The deal expires at the end of the year, the driver must have insurance, be at least 25 and have a valid driver’s license, and reservations are required.

The company said it is performing well, as deal seekers around the world–from North America to Western Europe to the Asia-Pacific region–look for deals on hotels and rental cars, specifically, and benefit from improvements in the economy.

The company’s stock is trading at $463.33, up $6.32 a share today. A new 52-week high was hit yesterday, trading at $459.57 a share.

Yesterday, Priceline announced it entered its fifth straight year of its well-known advertising campaign, featuring William Shatner–a.k.a. “the Priceline Negotiator.”

Shatner is portrayed as a James Bond-like character who will stop at nothing to obtain the best travel deals and maximum savings for Priceline customers–although he does silly things along the way, too, like watch a gorilla wrestle a scrawny man.

Shatner will be joined in the campaign–created by Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners–by new sidekicks Naomi Pryce and the NBA’s all-time leading scorer, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

The Norwalk, Conn.-based company will release its fourth-quarter and full-year results Feb. 23.

Expect the focus to be on growth.

Priceline is forecasting total gross travel bookings to jump year-over-year by 36 to 41 percent, with most of the growth coming internationally.

International bookings are expected to jump by 54 to 59 percent vs. minimal growth in domestic gross travel of 5 to 10 percent.

Annual revenues are forecasted to jump by 31 to 36 percent, and gross profits are expected to soar by 49 to 54 percent.

As a close competitor to Priceline, Expedia.com hit a 52-week high of $29.85 back in September, but has fallen considerably since, to trade around $21.69 a share.

Yesterday, Expedia relaunched a new price-savings campaign called ASAP: A Sudden Amazing Price. The  promotion will offer two discounts a day on hotels and other items of up to 50 percent, aimed at both sides of the country.

I have a 3GS iPhone. Is there a way to connect it to the Internet cable found in hotel and motel rooms?

A:

Not that I know of. But you can do this indirectly by creating your own Wi-Fi network from the wired connection in the room. There are two ways to do this.

One possibility is to carry a small portable router. These are small devices that plug into the wired connection and propagate a Wi-Fi signal in the hotel room that the iPhone (or other devices, like laptops and tablets) can use. A second option is to plug a laptop into the physical connection and use it as a Wi-Fi base station by setting up what’s called an “ad hoc” or computer-to-computer Wi-Fi connection. Steps for doing this, which can be a bit techie, differ depending on whether you use a PC or Mac.

Q:

I have been struggling with a hard drive space shortage for at least a year. I have deleted duplicate emails. I have deleted videos and word files and put them on a stand alone hard drive. Do you have any other suggestions?

A:

If you don’t want to, or can’t, replace your laptop, and don’t want to be tethered to your external hard disk, you might look into buying a new, larger, internal hard disk.

Many stores and consultants can sell and install larger hard disks, and even transfer the data from your old one.

Q:

I have thousands of photos on my computer and external hard drives. I’m in the process of trying to organize them on one hard drive and noticed that there are many duplicates between the different devices. Is there one program that you recommend that reliably detects and allows the removal of duplicate files?

A:

You might try using Google’s Picasa to sweep the drives, locate the photos, and display them.

The program has a feature that can avoid importing duplicates. Once imported, if there are still duplicates, Picasa offers methods to hide or actually delete them from your disk. Information on this is at http://bit.ly/8YKTzy.

You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox, and my other columns, online for free at the new All Things Digital website, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

Usablenet, a company that powers the mobile Web sites of various airlines, hotel chains and Amtrak, said that traffic to its travel-related sites was up 200 percent over the past two days.

Also of note, Usablenet said the most traffic came from iPhones and Android devices, marking the first time that more business travelers were using Android-powered phones than were on BlackBerry devices.

“As travelers away from home are searching for the most up-to-date information regarding their itineraries, many of them are depending on mobile websites,” Usablenet President Nick Taylor said in a statement. The company’s clients include American Airlines, British Airways, Delta, JetBlue, US Airways and Amtrak, as well as the Hilton, Omni, Starwood and Wyndham hotel chains.

Meanwhile, those who have managed to stay high and dry have been enjoying some schadenfreude with time-lapse blizzard videos, such as this one.

December 2010 Blizzard Timelapse from Michael Black on Vimeo.

“We grew in a tough time and added people in a really challenging environment,” said Mike Klayko, Chief Executive of Brocade, which increased revenue seven percent to $2.1 billion in its fiscal year ended in late October. He added that Brocade currently has another 325 open jobs in Silicon Valley. “We’re interviewing all the time,” he said.

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A few weeks ago, BoomTown sat down in a hipster coffee place in a hipster section of San Francisco to talk to the hipster trio of founders of AirBnB.

Which, if you think about it, is a very hipster name for what is essentially the ability to rent out your apartment, home or wack-a-doo space (such as a shoe-shaped hotel or Frank Sinatra’s Palm Springs estate).

AirBnB is an alternative to other fast-growing similar sites such as VRBO–Vacation Rentals By Owner, only with more style and niche cool.

But the former Y Combinator start-up is not without its more traditional aspects, such as a recent $7.2 million Series A funding from Greylock Partners.

Also on board, its initial Silicon Valley venture investor, Sequoia Capital, which forked over $600,000 in seed financing last year.

That came after AirBnB’s first foray for travelers to find inexpensive lodging–often no more than just a room for events, such as the U.S. Presidential conventions–turned into a wider and more pricey range of offerings, with 700,000 nights booked so far in 166 countries and 8,000 cities.

AirBnB also includes–of course–reputation and social networking elements–as well as a very slick mobile app with unusually lovely photos–and also easy booking logistics.

And, because it is also very hip to do so these days, there is a Groupon-like daily deal too. But of course there is!

It’s actually all very well done, an interesting way to find cool places to stay beyond the usual.

Here are its founders–Joe Gebbia, Nate Blecharczyk, and Brian Chesky–talking about it all in a video interview, as well as a slideshow of its Top 40 collection of its more unusual properties to rent, such as a plane stuck in a tree in Costa Rica: