SurveyMonkey, the quiet but profitable and fast-growing Web survey company, is buying online forms start-up Wufoo.

While the terms of the transaction for the Tampa, Fla.-based Infinity Box–makers of Wufoo–were not disclosed, sources said the price was $35 million in cash and stock.

Besides bringing together two delightfully kooky start-up names, the acquisition gives the Palo Alto, Calif.-based SurveyMonkey another tool to expand its offerings.

The Silicon Valley company’s most recent purchase was telephone-polling firm Precision Polling. And, in January, it acquired a minority stake in ClickTools, a U.K.-based survey provider on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange.

Here’s the official press release:

SURVEYMONKEY ACQUIRES WUFOO

Leader in online surveys adds leader in online forms to expand services for customers

Palo Alto, Calif. and Tampa, Fla., April 25, 2011– SurveyMonkey, the leader in Web-based survey solutions, today announced the acquisition of Infinity Box Inc., the makers of Wufoo, a web application to create online forms. As part of the transaction, the entire Wufoo team will relocate to Palo Alto to join the combined company and help fuel SurveyMonkey’s continuing growth. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Wufoo was created in 2006 to provide an easy and efficient process for creating online forms, one of the most essential and commonly used interfaces for collecting data on the web. The application’s HTML form builder automatically builds the database, backend and scripts needed to collect and understand data so users can create surveys, contact forms, registrations and other forms without writing code. In addition, customers frequently use Wufoo’s forms to process online transactions. With Wufoo, a process that previously required hours of work by web developers can now be done by anyone with web access in a matter of minutes.

“Wufoo is the market leader in online form creation and a perfect fit for SurveyMonkey,” said Dave Goldberg, SurveyMonkey CEO. “From the product and business model, to the team and culture, we are absolutely delighted to welcome the company into the SurveyMonkey family and look forward to increasing the reach and scale of an already outstanding product through our platform.”

“Everyone at Wufoo is very excited about joining the SurveyMonkey team, and the expansion opportunities for our business that will result from this combination,” said Wufoo co-founder Kevin Hale. “By leveraging SurveyMonkey’s international resources, knowledge scaling infrastructure and expertise with large data collection systems, we will be able to increase the scope, performance and reliability of Wufoo’s services.”

The acquisition will allow SurveyMonkey to offer online forms, in addition to surveys, to collect users’ insights and data. Over the past two years SurveyMonkey has continued to enhance services by actively evaluating opportunities to partner and invest in complementary businesses. In January, SurveyMonkey announced it had formed a strategic partnership with ClickTools, a leading survey provider on salesforce.com’s AppExchange. In 2010, SurveyMonkey successfully completed a $100 million debt financing and also acquired telephone-based survey company Precision Polling.

The first one came in at about half a gigabyte of memory, and it hasn’t shrunk that much since.

And Condé Nast’s newest iPad app, from the New Yorker, isn’t much better: It takes up 173 megabytes–but that’s for a weekly issue. If Condé can’t slim the app down, a month’s worth of New Yorkers will be much heavier than the first monthly Wired app.

And at that rate, a year’s worth of issues would consume more than seven gigabytes–that’s close to half of the smallest iPad’s 16-gig memory capacity.

No problem, says New Yorker Deputy Editor Pam McCarthy, who oversaw the production of the new app. She says it’s going on a diet, soon.

Both the New Yorker and Wired have the same weight problem for the same reason: They are built on the back of an Adobe (ADBE) program that essentially functions as an image reader.

That is, each page of the magazine is turned into the equivalent of several big photos. Which means an image-rich layout at Wired or a page of text at the New Yorker both consume a lot of memory.

The New Yorker could fix that overnight by presenting the text using HTML code, McCarthy says. That would use much less memory and allow the magazine to do things like resize the type. But for the moment, Adobe doesn’t have the ability to break up HTML text into individual pages. Instead, the text scrolls down the screen, a la the popular Instapaper app.

That sounds pretty good to me, but McCarthy says it’s not a good way to read the very long pieces her magazine is famous for. “It’s pretty clear that when you have a 10,000-word story, smooth scrolling is not a good option,” she says.

So for now, the New Yorker presents small items, like its “Talk of the Town” pieces, via HTML, and presents its long stories on individual pages. Once Adobe figures out how to break up HTML text into individual pages, McCarthy will make the switch, she says. Perhaps in a month.

“The goal is to be all HTML, and we will be,” she says.

Great!

But take note, grumblers: You probably still won’t be able to download the magazine wirelessly. Apple caps wireless app downloads at 20 megabytes, and the app is unlikely to shrink that much soon, which means you’re going to need a Wi-Fi connection to get your hands on the app.

And the fact that Condé Nast can’t yet sell subscriptions for its mag apps, which would let it knock the $4.99 issue price down considerably, has nothing to do with tech limits. That’s an issue between Apple (AAPL) and the publishing industry, and that may still take some time to sort out.

Thursday afternoon, Adobe (ADBE) quietly rolled out the latest update of its cross-platform runtime environment, one the company touts as the most significant since its original release two years ago. Using AIR 2, developers can build standalone applications for the desktop from Flash, Flex, HTML and AJAX for devices running a variety of operating systems: Windows, Mac, Linux and soon, Android.

Also given a final release today: Flash Player 10.1, which boasts some much needed H.264 hardware acceleration–just not for Macs.

Now, two years later, Zuckerberg will once again take the D stage. And once again, his appearance follows another privacy debacle, another apology and another rejiggering of the company’s privacy safeguards. Let’s see what he has to say about leadership this time around.

Update: See video highlights from Zuckerburg’s interview. We’ve compiled a reel on his answers to privacy questions, and a clip on the inside of the Zucker-hoodie.

Liveblog

4:54 pm: “There are a lot of things to talk about with Mark,” says Kara. “And I think he’s got a lot of guts coming up here.”

4:54 pm: Walt kicks things off by asking about Facebook’s business. It’s based on sharing, but there is this perception that you’re on a course to push people’s information into a position where it’s visible on the Internet. Is that correct?

Zuckerberg: Privacy is very important to us. I think there are some misperceptions. People use Facebook to share and to stay connected. You don’t start off on Facebook being connected to your friends, you’ve got to be able to find them. So having some information available broadly is good for that. Now, there have been misperceptions that we’re trying to make all information open, but that’s false. We encourage people to keep their most private information private. But some of the most basic information, we suggest that people leave public.

4:58 pm: Zuckerberg–We recommend settings for people, and we asked that everyone review their settings and make a choice about what they wanted them to be. We didn’t simply change them….The big feedback that we got was that the privacy settings had become too complex. Over the years we’d just accumulated many, many settings.

4:59 pm: Walt–The real issue here is whether people trust that you are still on board with the idea that they thought you were on board with when they joined: That you will keep the information they want to be private, private. But you’ve done some abrupt things and forced people to do something to maintain their privacy settings. Why are you making me have to take steps to protect my information?

Zuckerberg dodges. Talks about the serendipitous connections that Facebook enables. Offers an anecdote about meeting someone for dinner.

5:03 pm: More on serendipitous connections. Zuckerberg continues with this theme until Walt jumps in and asks him to answer the original question.

5:04 pm: Zuckerberg stresses that people can still control their Facebook information. More than 50 percent of Facebook users have changed their privacy settings at one point. That demonstrates that our users understand the tools, he says. “To me, that’s a signal that on the whole, we’re getting it right and giving people the control they want.”

5:05 pm: Kara–So do you feel this recent backlash against you is unfair? How do you explain the hubbub around this? She notes some old inflammatory college IM messages of his that have been making the rounds lately that suggest he may have a cavalier attitude towards privacy.

Zuckerberg: When I was in college I did a lot of stupid things and I don’t want to make an excuse for that. Some of the things that people accuse me of are true, some of them aren’t. There are pranks, IMs…. I started building this when I was around 19 years old, and along the way, a lot of stuff changed. We went from building a service in a dorm room to running a service that 500 million people use.

Kara: But people want to know about you. Do you feel that you’re adequately portrayed?

Zuckerberg seems confounded for a moment. Then recounts his oft-told story of moving to California and being approached with offers to buy the company. Another long rambling answer to a simple question. Finally: “I can’t go back and change the past, I can only do the best that I can do moving forward.”

Kara and Walt again circle back to the issue of privacy. Is Zuckerberg attempting to force his vision of privacy on all of Facebook?

5:08 pm: [My God, Zuckerberg is literally dissolving in a lake of his own sweat. He is visibly flushed, and you can see the beads of sweat rolling down his face. Could this be his Nixon moment?]

Kara sympathizes, suggests he take off the hoodie he’s wearing, “You all right?” she asks. “We’re not even yelling at you…yet.”

Zuckerberg refuses to take off the hoodie. “I never take it off,” he says. Then he wipes the sweat from his brow, looks at the resulting water stain on his arm, says “whoa,” relents and takes it off.

5:10 pm: Kara helps him and then examines the hoodie. Evidently Facebook’s mission statement is printed inside it along with a giant Illuminati-style insignia (“Making the world more open and connected”). “Oh my God. You’re a cult!” jokes Kara, commenting on the emblem inside. Zuckerberg’s obviously relieved that the privacy questions have paused, at least for a moment.

Walt moves on. “So what is instant personalization?”

5:10 pm: Zuckerberg–”We have this strategy where what we’re trying to do is make it possible for everyone to design social apps where their contacts are at the center….What we’re trying to do now is to make it so that people can extend that to the rest of the Web….We’ve made it so that people can build these people-centric Web sites.” These points are buried in a long rambling answer. He’s fumbling here.

5:13 pm: Walt–Why not, when I log on to Facebook, give people the option to use instant personalization instead of automatically personalizing things for them?

Zuckerberg dodges again, then suggests that doing so would create “a lot more friction.”

Walt again tries to get him to answer the question at hand: But shouldn’t people make this decision themselves? Shouldn’t they have to opt in? [C'mon, Mark. Just answer the question. It would be so much easier....Over on Twitter, longtime tech observer Dan Gillmor just wrote: "Walt Mossberg insists on an answer re FB’s unilateral privacy changes; nope, still no answer."]

Opt in versus opt out is part of a balance in sharing, says Zuckerberg. He rambles on for a while before noting some previous Facebook innovations that people rebelled against, that are today viewed as essential to the service. Newsfeed, for example. [At last a decent point.] “My prediction would be a few years from now is that we’ll all look back and wonder why these services weren’t personalized. The world is moving in this direction where everything is designed around people.”

5:17 pm: Kara–What’s your next big goal? What’s on the short-term horizon and the long-term horizon?

It’s tough to follow Zuckerberg’s answer, here. He seems to be replying to another question. He talks a bit about the development of applications. He says that the industry is moving into an age where more services will be built with people at their core.

5:20 pm: Walt, moving on again–What is the social graph? Is it something you control?

Zuckerberg: The idea of the social graph is that if you mapped out all the connections between people in the world it would form this graph, and that’s what we’re doing at Facebook. Once you’ve done that, you can start building services on them and enable this broader platform, build games, etc. A lot of people have characterized the social graph as something that we own or control, but we don’t.

5:22 pm: Kara–So what kind of power does Facebook have in this graph?

Zuckerberg: I think people look to us a the leader in this space. And I think there’s a widely held belief that we’re much closer to the beginning of the space than the end. It would be easy for us to just keep things as they are, but we don’t believe that if we did, we’d be doing the best thing for us or the industry. So we do what we think are the best things, even if they are controversial.

Walt: How does the social graph get monetized?

Relevant advertising, says Zuckerberg. And user engagement. He cites a recent campaign by Starbucks (SBUX), which was evidently quite successful. He says that people are sharing information about brands in the same way they are sharing information about themselves.

5:25 pm: Kara–Who are your competitors in this space?

Zuckerberg: We compete with different companies in different ways. One of the things I try to do as CEO of this company is not make mistakes that other companies make….I make different ones, he jokes. [Given his performance today, one wonders if he's really qualified to be the public face of his company.]

The world is changing so quickly now that I think the biggest competitor for us is someone we haven’t heard of, Zuckerberg continues. So we just need to stay focused on doing what we do and doing at well.

5:27 pm: Kara–You’re going to be CEO of this company when it goes public?

Zuckerberg: Yeah.

Kara: When will that be?

Zuckerberg: I don’t know.

5:28 pm: Some more patter. Then Zuckerberg again circles back to this theme of a Web centered around people. This is obviously his D8 PR bullet point, just as “Facebook is about helping people to share information and share themselves” was his bullet point for D6.

Kara: How do you think you’ve changed as a CEO in the past few years?

Zuckerberg: I’ve always just focused on a couple of things. One is having a clear direction. The other is having a good team. Right now, I think we have a clear direction. We’ve got a lot of cool apps and a great platform. On the people side: Just continuing to bring in great people and putting them in positions that they’ll excel at is important. We’re out in the valley recruiting the very best people for the roles we have available in the company. I think as a company, if you get those two things right, then you can do pretty well.

Q&A

Q (from RealNetworks founder Rob Glaser): Do you realize that you’ve built at the age of 26 one of the five most important Internet companies in the world? Because of that, people view you differently. How do you deal with that?

A: Maybe I’m in denial. I think our goals haven’t really changed much at all. We don’t think of the company as successful. We know that we have a service that many people use. But it goes back to this concept where I really think we’re just a lot closer to the beginning than the end. Personally, I have a core group of people that I really trust, and that’s what I care about: Those people that share my values and the values of the company.

Q: Who’s your role model? Who would be the best person to run Facebook–aside from you?

A: [Pause] I don’t think I can answer either of those questions. I feel like I learn the most from the people around me now. [Who's your role model? Easy question, Mark. How about "my Mom." ... No real answer.] … I think if something happened to me you could pick any of the people around me and they’d do a great job of running the company. And that’s important because we’re still a very small company.

Q: I’ve heard that you’re going to offer an email platform. Is that true?

A: We’re not building a Web-mail competitor. People already use Facebook for messaging. There are definitely these great services that people use that are full Web-mail clients, but I think the opportunity is more around short-form communications.

Q: How are important decisions made at Facebook?

A: We’re a company where there’s a lot of open dialogue. We have crazy dialogue and arguments. Every Friday, I have an open Q&A where people can come and ask me whatever questions they want. We try to do what we think is right, but we also listen to feedback and use it to improve. And we look at data about how people are using the site. In response to the most recent changes we made, we innovated, we did what we thought was right about the defaults, and then we listened to the feedback and then we holed up for two weeks to crank out a new privacy system.

Q: When it comes to Facebook, what’s your opinion of Flash?

A: We’re agnostic on that issue. I tend to believe more in the Web than apps. The thing that I actually care a lot more about is how you integrate people into all this stuff.

Q: I wonder if you can comment on what it means for Facebook to have mobile apps?

A: Our mobile experience is growing really quickly. It’s well more than 100 million people using Facebook on their phones right now. I think that one of the challenges of mobile is that there’s no standard platform yet. Is it going to be Android, iPhone, HTML apps?

Q: Will you have an iPad app?

A: I assume that we will.

And that’s a wrap!

A note about our coverage: This liveblog is not an official transcript of the conversation that occurred onstage. Rather, it is a compilation of quotes, paraphrased statements and ad-lib observations written and posted to the Web as quickly as possible. It is not intended as a transcript and should not be interpreted as one.

On Thursday, Adobe co-founders and co-chairmen Chuck Geschke and John Warnock followed suit with some thoughts of their own. Their eight-paragraph essay, “Our Thoughts On Open Markets,” mentions Apple only once, but when it does, it is to lambaste the company for its position on Flash, a position the two claim “could undermine this next chapter of the web–the chapter in which mobile devices outnumber computers, any individual can be a publisher, and content is accessed anywhere and at any time.”

I spoke to Geschke Thursday afternoon about the pair’s letter, Adobe’s (ADBE) new “We ? Apple” ad campaign and Apple’s (AAPL) stance on his company’s software. Below, a transcript of our conversation.

John Paczkowski: What is Adobe is hoping to get out of this new “We Love Apple/Freedom of Choice” campaign?

Chuck Geschke: We mostly are using it as a way to communicate with our customers and partners to assure them that we’re not going to change our strategy and to inform the rest of the community of what the pluses and minuses are of not supporting Flash on the iPhone and the iPad. Our customers, a large percentage of them, are the people who generate and distribute information and content, and for them they have one production stream that they use to do that and they’ve gotten used to the fact that we’ve worked very hard to open up the standards that we support so that we can offer them ubiquity of output on all kinds of platforms. So the fact that Apple is precluding that puts them in a tough position because it means that they’re going to have to create that content twice, and that’s not very productive. It’s certainly more expensive than what they do today. And as you know, the content industry is an industry under a lot of cost pressure these days.

JP: Both Apple and Microsoft have said publicly now that Flash has issues with reliability, security, and performance. Do you think those complaints are legitimate?

CG: I think they’re old news. Go to our Web site and read the actual facts about Flash. We enumerate the facts about Flash there as we see them. [Microsoft and Apple] may have a different set of facts that they believe are accurate. It’s up to you to decide. But I will tell you that the Flash version we’re coming out with now–where, for the first time with the Mac platform, we can actually get to the lower-level interfaces–is going to run like the wind. And the same is true on Windows.

JP: Shouldn’t Apple have the right to define the means by which apps for its own platform can be written?

CG: They absolutely have the right. No one says they don’t.

JP: Cross-platform mobile apps tend not to take advantage of native features unique to each device. What do you have to say about complaints that write-once-run-anywhere software results in subpar apps?

CG: Well, people don’t say that about Photoshop. They certainly don’t say it about Acrobat….I’m a little confused about what the real examples of that are. If there’s a problem with the performance of Flash as demonstrated on the iPhone, it’s because we haven’t been able to access the inner layers of hardware and software we need to to provide the kind of performance we can provide on other platforms. But that’s Apple’s choice, not ours. And now, of course, you can’t use it at all.

JP: So you don’t think write-once-run-anywhere is limiting at all?

CG: Not really. I mean there may be certain features in certain environments that you’ll want to do customization for, but the more you go down that road, the more you get the experience of HTML on the Web, where the kind of browser, hardware and OS you use determines what your experience. That’s because HTML is not well codified and standardized and people sort of roll their own.

JP: How much of Adobe’s revenue comes from Flash?

CG: I would share that number if we disclose it, but I’m not sure that we do. It isn’t a huge amount of revenue, but it is an extremely popular platform that all of our apps have the opportunity to exploit when it’s distributed everywhere. Flash tools aren’t the largest piece of our business, but it’s a significant one and obviously we feel it’s extremely important to our customers and partners who want to build third-party apps in an environment where they can, in fact, put them on a variety of devices without having to re-implement them.

JP: So could Apple’s exclusion of Flash hurt Adobe sales?

CG: I don’t think it will have a significant effect. As well as Apple is doing, if you look at the number of platforms out in the market and the number of release of new ones that will occur over the next six to 12 months, it’s going to be huge. That’s a much bigger population, and we’re just focusing on making our technology operate as effectively and efficiently as possible for it.

JP: In his “Thoughts on Flash” essay, Jobs accused Adobe of abandoning Apple. “Apple went through its near death experience, and Adobe was drawn to the corporate market with their Acrobat products,” he wrote. Is Job’s implication here a fair one?

CG: We never abandoned Apple. Apple now seems to be abandoning at least one aspect of our product line right now. No, we never abandoned them. We’ve always ported our apps simultaneously to both platforms. There have been times when Apple has changed its strategy on hardware or on operating systems that didn’t meet our product cycle, so there have been periods of maybe six months where we didn’t keep up with their latest release. But that’s our own business model; we can only afford to re-implement our products at a certain rate.

We have never, ever abandoned Apple and we don’t want to abandon them today. Everything you read in our new ad is true. I myself own probably between 8 and 10 Macintoshes — both laptops and work stations. I don’t buy PCs, I buy Macs.

JP: Why isn’t Flash an open standard?

CG: It is. What are you talking about?

JP: Flash is proprietary to Adobe. It’s not Open Source. Let me rephrase: Why isn’t Flash an open standard overseen by an open-standards body?

CG: As soon as Adobe acquired Macromedia, we openly published the SWF format and removed the requirement that you have a license to use it….No, we haven’t put Flash out to a standards body yet as we have with PDF and Postscript. But I wouldn’t be shocked if we do someday when it makes sense.

With the standards that we have built and made open to the entire world, we’ve tried our best to get them to the point where they’re mature enough so that we’re not doing design by committee. If you look at the amount of time it will take HTML5 to become a reasonably solid platform, it’s going to take a long time because there are an awful lot of vested interests trying to influence its development.

JP: Any thoughts on Steve Jobs’s claim that “Flash was created during the PC era–for PCs and mice”?

CG: What do you think an iPhone is? It’s a personal computer.

JP: One last question. What do you think of the iPad?

CG: I think it’s a neat thing. I personally have no particular interest in it; I’d much rather have a general-purpose computer. I think there’s definitely a market for that kind of product. We certainly know a lot of people that want to produce content for it and a large percentage of them are disappointed that they’re going to have to do that separately from the way they produce content for all the other devices they support.

PREVIOUSLY:

• Adobe to Apple: You Wanna Hug It Out? Let’s Hug It Out!
• Good Luck With That Alleged Antitrust Complaint Against Apple, Adobe…
• Adobe CTO: Flash on iPhone Doesn’t Suck and Apple Knows It
• A Possible Apple Antitrust Inquiry? Nothing to See Here…
• Microsoft on Flash: What Steve Said
• Adobe: We’re Done With You Too, Apple
• Apple to Adobe: I Know You Are, but What Am I?
• So Much for Flash on the iPhone
• Adobe: Flash for Mac Is Getting Better–Really!

“The cost of smart phones is considerably higher than feature phones for which the early termination fees were created years ago at $175,” said Verizon spokesman Jim Gerace. He added that the new $350 ETF declines by $10 per month through the life of the contract and customers can avoid it by buying their devices off contract and paying full retail price.

An interesting move for Verizon (VZ), which just last year agreed to pay $21 million to settle a class-action lawsuit filed by California consumers over the very early-termination fees it is now increasing. The plaintiffs in the suit alleged that Verizon’s ETFs were illegal under California law and that they were designed to unfairly lock consumers into long-term contracts and prevent them from switching carriers. When Verizon settled the suit, it denied any wrongdoing, insisting that early-termination fees are simply a means of recovering legitimate costs. And to some extent Verizon does have a point.

Full retail price for the Motorola’s (MOT) new Droid is $559.99. With a two-year contract, Verizon sells the handset for $199.99. Theoretically, that’s a $359.99 subsidy (I have no idea at what price Verizon purchases Droid from Motorola). So if Verizon allowed subscribers to break their contract after a month without paying an early-termination fee, the company would stand to lose money. And subscribers who did so could subsequently sell the device online and potentially make a profit, though a small one.

So it’s certainly understandable that Verizon and other carriers want to protect the subsidies they dole out for these new smart phones. And as noted earlier, Verizon’s new ETF drops by $10 each month a subscriber remains under contract. But at this rate, subscribers are still bound to pay a $110 termination fee in the 23rd month of a two-year contract. The contract is nearly over, the subscriber obligation to Verizon almost fulfilled, yet the company can still slap its customers with nearly a third of the full ETF if they break it at that time.

By month 23 of a two-year contract, does Verizon really stand to lose $110 if subscribers decide to switch carriers? Doesn’t seem likely if subscribers can walk away just a month later without consequence, taking their handsets with them.

Since Verizon is pro-rating the ETF, why isn’t it doing so in such a way that it zeroes out by the end of the contract?

And isn’t the fast pace of innovation in the smart-phone sector such that prices–for both component and device–are dropping so quickly that high ETFs aren’t really justified? Remember, you can get Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone for $99 today. When the iPhone debuted in 2007, it commanded a price of $499/$599, depending on model.

I’ve put those same questions to Verizon and will update here when I hear back. In the meantime, here’s what Consumers Union policy analyst Joel Kelsey has to say on the matter: “When people want to switch wireless services, the biggest cost they face is early termination fees. These fees are designed to lock people into long-term contracts and stop them from getting better deals. Early-termination fees make the marketplace less competitive. Verizon’s move is painful proof that it’s time for lawmakers to crack down on these fees.”

UPDATE: Verizon Wireless spokesperson Nancy Stark offers the following answers to the questions I posed above:

Your first question regarding the balance at month 23 or 24 assumes that, at that point, we have recovered all of our subsidy and up-front costs for every device. That simply is not so.

On your second question, while the pace of innovation plays a role in prices coming down somewhat, it also plays a role in driving up costs as more and more complexity that customers want is added to phones–from premium HTML browsers to high-resolution MP cameras with optical zoom; videoplayers; music players; dual processor chipsets; WiFi; very high display resolution, operating systems such as BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Palm, Android–ALL with the added value (vs a desktop) of mobility, and ALL in one tiny device that ALSO allows you to talk to anyone from anywhere. phew! (by comparison, I recently paid $200 for a camera and all it can do is take pictures, and it has only middle of the road capabilities.)

But getting back to ETFs specifically. The most important point is that Verizon Wireless customers do not have to have an ETF at all if they do not want to. ETFs allow customers to have it either way: They can have no ETF and pay full retail for their device. OR, they can get a greatly discounted device by having an ETF.

As attendees texted their votes, moderator John Battelle, founder of Federated Media Publishing, jokingly asked: “Want to have a dance-off?”

None were necessary. The techies in attendance were starry-eyed for all things mobile, picking Nitobi’s PhoneGap, an open-source tool for building mobile apps, as the People’s Choice winner. Life-tracking site zeaLOG was a close second.

Read the rest of this post

The latest: An announcement that advertisers who buy AdWords–Google’s main revenue engine–can now automatically buy mobile advertising, too. The company says AdWords buyers can choose to have their AdWords automatically show up on phones that support “real” Internet browsers like T-Mobile’s G1 phone and Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone. Here’s an example:

These ads will reach a relatively small slice of mobile phone users. But that population will increase rapidly, particularly if Apple really does start selling cut-price phones at Wal-Mart (WMT). Which means that Google (GOOG) really may be the first company to make inroads toward the supposedly-huge-but-so-far-mythical mobile ad market.

Release from Google’s Daniel Rubin:

Today, we’re announcing a new campaign-level option that allows you to extend the reach of your text and image ads to show your AdWords ads on the T-Mobile G1, the iPhone, and other mobile devices that have full (HTML) Internet browsers. This new option will now allow you to display your ads specifically on these devices, create exclusive campaigns for them, and get separate performance reporting. We hope this option will help you more effectively reach your audience with the right message at the right time.

G1 and iPhone ads have many of the same benefits as our standard mobile-format ads, such as allowing you to deliver mobile-specific calls-to-action and reaching your audience when they’re on the go. Showing ads on the G1 and iPhone also have additional advantages for your advertising. Users are performing a lot of searches on these devices, and searches are likely to go up during the holiday season. Last Christmas, the iPhone drove more traffic to Google.com worldwide than any other mobile platform.

Unlike standard mobile ads, you don’t need to format your ads for mobile phones to show your ads on the G1 and iPhone. Because the G1 and iPhone has full Internet browsers, you’ll be able to display your standard AdWords ads and landing pages on these devices without having to modify them.

With this new option, you’re opted-in to show ads on the G1 and iPhone, and you’re also eligible to show on additional devices that use full Internet browsers as these devices enter the market. If you want to change your settings to only show ads on G1s and iPhones or to not show ads on these devices, follow these steps.

If you’re running standard mobile ad formats, they won’t be affected, and they’ll continue to run on mobile phones with mobile (WAP) browsers.”

You recently wrote that people should make sure new laptops have the new, faster “n” version of Wi-Fi built in. But how do you do that? All I see are impenetrable feature descriptions such as: “Built-in high-speed wireless LAN (802.11b/g).” I cannot understand this language.

Computer retailers too often insist on using techno-babble or engineering lingo, even when referring to frequently used terms like “Wi-Fi.” In my view, this practice is either lazy, or arrogant, or deliberately designed to confuse.

In this case, the product description you quote in your question is indeed referring to Wi-Fi when it uses the phrases “wireless LAN” and “802.11b/g.” The phrase “LAN” means “local area network,” a means for connecting computers to each other, and to the Internet. Engineers refer to Wi-Fi as “802.11″ followed by a letter like “b” or “g” or “a” or “n.” These letters refer to various flavors of Wi-Fi that have different speeds and ranges. The laptop whose description you quote doesn’t offer the “n” type of Wi-Fi, only the older “b” and “g” types.

In your column about the new Gogo service for using Wi-Fi on airplanes, you mentioned that iPhones will work with the system. But how can one do this legally, when passengers must turn off the cellular radio on phones aboard planes, and the method for doing that on iPhones also turns off the Wi-Fi function?

The solution is to use the new iPhone (AAPL) operating system version due out July 11. This version allows you to turn off the cellphone radio, while leaving the Wi-Fi radio on. It will come on all of the new 3G iPhones, and will be a free upgrade for the original iPhone models. Of course, on flights without officially approved Wi-Fi, both types of radios must be turned off on all devices.

Your June 26 Mossberg’s Mailbox explained how to export Internet Explorer (MSFT) Favorites. Please explain how to export Firefox 3.0 Bookmarks.

You go to the Bookmarks menu and select “Organize Bookmarks.” In the window that opens, select the star icon at the top and choose either “Backup” or “Export HTML.” The first choice saves your bookmarks in a new format introduced in Firefox 3.0 that preserves tags you may have added to your bookmarks. The second choice has been in prior versions of Firefox and will save your bookmarks in the same sort of format Firefox has previously used.

The file created by the “Backup” method can be imported into another copy of Firefox 3.0 by following the same steps, but choosing “Restore” and then “Choose File.” The file created by the “Export HTML” method can be imported into any version of Firefox using the Import or “Import HTML” function.

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

A big problem with blogs is privacy. While some people — especially MySpace fans — don’t mind posting personal news, photos and videos for anyone to read, many of us hesitate to leave details about our personal lives online.

This week, we tested a new, free blogging service called Vox, www.vox.com, from Six Apart Ltd., a blogging software company. One of Vox’s best attributes is its ability to label each individual post, or entry, with a different privacy filter, so that instead of setting your blog to be entirely private or entirely public, you can pick and choose what you want to share.

Vox also excels at making it easy to add photos, audio, videos and book links to your blog without any prior expertise. It lets you incorporate content from Web sites like YouTube, Amazon and photo-sharing site Flickr in only a couple of steps. Viewing of each multimedia element can also be restricted to people you choose. Vox is supported by ads that aren’t intrusive or distracting.

We each made a blog in Vox, and updated them several times. We found the process to be quick and simple, and the results to be attractive. We liked the privacy features. But while its intentions are good, Vox has a few downsides. Its idea of making each blog post visible to different groups is useful. But everyone who views your privacy-protected entries must also be registered with Vox, a quick process, but one that will discourage many potential users.

One example of a Vox blog.

Also puzzling are Vox’s categories for labeling those who view your blog. Everyone must be labeled as friends, family or neighbors, but the filters that determine who can view your posts don’t include neighbors at all.

Vox also doesn’t do a great job of implementing many features that are standard in blog services. These features include interactive elements on a page such as drag-and-drop organizing.

We got started by signing up for Vox — a process that involved entering our email address, creating a password and URL, and entering personal information. A Design section walked us through choosing a layout and theme from numerous choices. Katie chose the Cityscape Washington, D.C., theme, which includes the Capitol and Washington Monument. Walt chose Firefly Night, which includes the moon and stars and a silhouette of a tree.

To prompt you to blog, the Vox homepage always offers a Question of the Day, or QOTD. With one click, you can optionally answer the QOTD in your own blog. When you post your answer, or enter any post, a drop-down menu lets you choose who can view it: The World (Public), Your Friends and Family, Your Friends, Your Family or Just You. If, for example, you choose to allow only your friends to see a post, other groups won’t know that they’re not seeing the friends-only post.

If you see another person’s Vox blog and would like to bookmark it so that his or her latest entries are constantly updated on a special page just for you, you can add that blogger to your neighborhood. Friends and family are automatically part of your neighborhood, but when choosing who can see your content, neighborhood isn’t an option. Vox plans to make the neighborhood concept more understandable in an updated version due out by December.

Each individual post can be made viewable by certain people to provide privacy.

We first posted some simple text entries. Then in the Compose section, we chose from five colorful icons labeled Photos, Audio, Videos, Books and Collections. Selecting each icon let us load content from our computer or from a Web site with that type of content.

In Videos Katie selected a YouTube tab, entered a search word and found a favorite scene from the TV show “Grey’s Anatomy.” She selected a thumbnail image of the scene, hit OK, and the scene loaded onto her blog moments later. No formatting or HTML code is necessary, a requirement that used to plague many blogging services.

As we became comfortable using Vox and its privacy options, we started posting lots of things: vacation photos, a country music audio file to play along with a post about two-stepping and even Amazon links to our favorite books. And unless your post or profile is public, nothing can be retrieved using the Vox search feature.

We found a few hiccups, but mostly forgot about the geeky side of blogging and enjoyed sharing our digital media. And the idea that no one else would randomly browse across our content was a comfort. But that poses another problem: Not everyone will want to register with Vox just to see your protected content. Vox hopes to offer a way to register others so that your grandmother will be able to see your family photos online just by entering a username and password.

Back on the home page of Vox, a section called VoxWatch let us quickly see any recent activity from our neighbors or ourselves. Recently posted digital photos, recent comments and recent posts from everyone in our neighborhood were grouped here.

A helpful Organize section divvies all of your content up into its proper section: Photos, Books, Audio, Videos, Posts and Comments. This section let us quickly find a comment that we wanted to reread but didn’t feel like finding on our blog, and it helped us get a better idea of everything that existed on our blog — a boon as you add more and more content. This section also displays the names of those in your Neighborhood, as well as Friends and Family.

Vox does a nice job of jazzing up the world of blogging. Its designs are attractive, but it really shines when loading media onto your posts, making your blog richer in content and more sophisticated in looks. Updates will continue to be released, improving Vox’s weaknesses, the most important of which is clarifying its group labels. Vox also plans to offer to import your content from other blogging sites, encouraging experienced users to bring their last blog along with them instead of leaving it with the old service.

Email: MossbergSolution@wsj.com