As the No. 3 in the market, the Seattle-based company may be the next candidate, if things remain as frothy as they have been.

“My phone is certainly ringing,” Tobias said in an email yesterday.

Tippr has taken a slightly different approach than either LivingSocial or Groupon. It doesn’t have thousands of employees, for example–only 45, of whom 24 are in sales.

In February, it had launched in Seattle with five subscribers. Today, it’s up to 13 markets and “hundreds of thousands of subscribers.” The growth is not only thanks to their own sites, but also by enabling others to join the group-buying frenzy, as well.

Tippr wants to be a platform, not a brand, so if you haven’t heard of it, it’s possible you never will. Even in Seattle, deals seem sporadic, and most offers are from places within walking distance of Tippr’s Queen Anne neighborhood office.

But, to cast a wider net, Tippr recently signed a partnership with Belo Corp., a television network that leverages Tippr’s platform to power its own local deals site, Yollar.com. It uses its own local sales force to make deals with merchants in markets such as Dallas, San Antonio, Houston, Seattle, St. Louis, Portland and Boise. All these individual sites, powered by their own sales force, creates a magnifying affect that Groupon can only match by adding more sales people.

“Groupon is not like Facebook or eBay, where the winner takes all,” he said. “This is more like search.”

EBay became successful by generating a critical mass of buyers and sellers, and Facebook has staying power because once you define your social network, Tobias posits, you don’t want to have to build it again.

“With Groupon there’s nothing locking you in,” he said. “You haven’t invested anything, and the merchants don’t care either.”

Tobias talks tough–despite the apparent lack of interest from Google or Amazon–because he believes he has the IP to back it up. In November 2009, he acquired the patent portfolio of defunct Mercata, a Paul Allen-backed group-buying venture from Web 1.0.

He traded stock in Tippr’s parent company Kashless for the patents, which include more than half a dozen granted patents covering areas like price optimization, demand curve modeling and buyer-seller interaction models. Today, Tippr is announcing a strategy around these patents. A spokesperson said its new “patent licensing program for group-buying” will charge anyone, from white label partners to competitors (theoretically, Groupon), a fee to license them.

Tobias is also bullish, because in his last venture he was attempting something much larger. As CEO of Imperium Renewables, he raised around $500 million in capital to produce biodiesel on a mass scale, which he admits is not enough “when taking on Exxon.”

But taking on Groupon, which may have annual revenues of up to $500 million? To him, that’s doable.

Without actually saying AT&T (T), that is.

Asked a question about miserable call quality in Houston, Jobs said phone calls aren’t Apple’s (AAPL) area of expertise. But he said he’s been told “by people I trust” that the carrier is working hard to fix its capacity problems. Still, he said half-jokingly, experts tell him that “things, when you start to fix them, get worse before they get better. That’s what I’m told. And if you believe that, things should start getting a lot better soon.”

Okay, but more practically, when can iPhone owners expect relief? “I’m told that a lot of places are going to get a lot better by the end of the summer.”

More Coverage on the Steve Jobs D8 Speaker Page »

Rarely known for their technological savvy, law firms are nonetheless turning to technology to try to address clients’ cost concerns. Some are rolling out budgeting tools to keep better tabs on expenses. Others are using software to automate tasks.

“Firms are starting to recognize that clients are not willing to pay for a custom-made suit when all they really need are jeans and a t-shirt,” says Jeffrey Carr, the general counsel of FMC Technologies Inc., a Houston-based oil services and technology firm.

One longtime gripe about law firms is that their costs are hard to predict. Typically, firms bill by the hour, and they often are hard-pressed, at the inception of a matter, to estimate how many hours they will take to complete assignments.

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The Palm (PALM) Pre officially went on sale this morning, and judging from initial reports–and my experience at a local Northern California Sprint store–neither demand or supply was particularly overwhelming. Certainly, lines for the device were far shorter than those that extended from Apple (AAPL) stores for the launches of the iPhone and the iPhone 3G.

Arriving outside my local Sprint (S) store about an hour after they first opened, I found not a queue of eager Pre-buyers, but two kids making forts out of a few Pre shipping boxes left outside the store. Inside the store, I found a group of nine people waiting in line to add their names to a waiting list for the device, which was already sold out at this location. A Sprint rep refused to tell me how many Pres had been sold this morning, but admitted that the shipment had been a small one.

The situation is apparently the same across the country. The Boston Globe reports that Sprint’s Back Bay store sold out of its 55 Pres by 11 AM. An informal survey by 24/7 Wall Street reveals sell outs or fast-dwindling supplies of the device at Sprint and Best Buy stores in Chicago, Houston, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Four of the five Best Buy stores I contacted reported selling out of the Pre very quickly; one representative told me his store had just four of the devices and he believed that to be the case at many other locations.

Sprint stores I spoke with in LA, Chicago and Boston told me they’d sold out by late morning.

Q: How many names on the list? A: “We’re not allowed to say.” A reader tells me that the line outside the W. Division Street in Chicago was at least 50 people long, and that the store started wait-listing people somewhere around #36. Another reader reports a line of about 20 people outside an Emeryville, CA Sprint store. That same reader claims a clerk told him the store had 60 Pres on hand. Still another reader reports that the line outside Sprint’s Market Street store in San Francisco started at 6 AM this morning. There were a dozen or so folks in line by about 7:30 AM. Finally, another reader reports that a Sprint store in San Francisco’s Castro district had a line of about 40 people when she showed up to get in line at 7 AM. That location, too, sold out quickly.

Four phones at the local Best Buy? Stores in Marin, LA and Chicago sold out within hours? Makes you wonder if Palm and Sprint are purposely constraining supply to foster an image of overwhelming demand.