Users download the app to their iOS, Android or Windows Phone device; register, and then start snapping photos of the unwanted mail.

Once a photo is taken, the user taps the “Unsubscribe Me” button, and then PaperKarma does the legwork.

Sean Mortazavi, the CEO and founder of PaperKarma, who also works full-time at Microsoft, has spent countless hours and weekends tracking down 10,000 of the biggest junk-mail offenders so that you don’t have to.

The only full-time employee PaperKarma has is Brendan Ribera, an engineer formerly from Urbanspoon and iLike. He is also co-founder. Currently, Mortazavi, who works on open-source projects in Microsoft’s Visual Studio division, is self-funding the project.

Mortazavi said more than 100 billion pieces of junk mail are sent every year in the U.S. alone, making it both time-consuming and a waste of natural resources.

The company already has a long list of companies in its database, but if users submit requests for something that isn’t on file, PaperKarma will use Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to track down the culprit. The Turk typically can track down people for hire at a reasonable price.

PaperKarma’s mobile apps, which are free, launched 10 days ago.

Mortazavi imagines being able to make money in the future by partnering with various businesses.

For instance, you may not want the flyer from Costco, but you may be willing to opt in for electronic coupons. PaperKarma could then charge the business for finding that customer, because it also would be saving them printing costs and mailing fees.

A couple of services like this already exist, but Mortazavi said it’s the first one to create a mobile solution.

Doxo and Earth Class Mail, two other Seattle companies, are addressing the problem in different ways.

Doxo encourages users to sign up for electronic communications with companies, which in turn saves those companies money. Earth Class Mail will accept all of your mail at its warehouses; if the mail is not junk, Earth Class Mail will open it, scan it, and send you an electronic version.

As the father of eight kids — now all between the ages of 12 and 21 — he knows a thing or two about the importance of finding the perfect place. (Note: Kaufer delicately calls family trips “adventures,” while getaways with his wife are “vacations.”)

Since then, TripAdvisor has become the online go-to destination for reviews of hotels from Barbados to bed-and-breakfasts in New York City.

In 2004, Kaufer sold the company to IAC for $210 million, setting off a somewhat complicated operating journey. A year later, TripAdvisor spun out of IAC as part of Expedia. It remained a division within the online travel agency until last month, when it broke off into an independent publicly held company.

Today, the Newton, Mass.-based company has 1,100 employees, attracts more than 50 million unique visitors and has published more than 60 million reviews. It trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “TRIP,” while Expedia continues to trade under the symbol “EXPE.”

Kaufer talked to AllThingsD about being an independently traded company, and about the media company’s prospects for growth:

AllThingsD: What is it like to be out from under Expedia’s wing?

Stephen Kaufer: There was a joke when we were spun out as part of Expedia from IAC. People asked me, “What’s your vision for TripAdvisor?” I would always say, “I want to be bigger than Expedia,” and people’s response always was, “That’s what the little brother might say.”

A year or two ago, we passed Expedia in comScore metrics, and are still experiencing growth. It’s a free service that’s valuable. It’s worldwide. TripAdvisor is in 21 languages, and three-fourths of the traffic comes from outside of the U.S.

Now that you are out from under Expedia, do you have more flexibility on where you send leads that are generated from people reading reviews on TripAdvisor?

Under Expedia, we had no obligation to send traffic to them … That never happened, and we were allowed to run independently. But at the end of the day, they [competitors] knew their marketing spend was going into Expedia’s pocket. That’s the most exciting thing. We are now completely independent. Expedia now owns no stock, so when I talk to Orbitz or Priceline, these folks can now partner with TripAdvisor without any hint of helping to fuel the competitors.

Why the spinoff now?

It was announced back in April, but basically there was a view that there was a class of investors that liked a pure Internet category leader and a fast-growing media company like TripAdvisor, and there’s another class that appreciates Expedia, which is in the dominant online travel agency position.

We were blurring the two when they were together. It gives Wall Street the opportunity to invest in either, and each company will find its own set of investors.

Do you think Wall Street is correctly valuing TripAdvisor? (The stock failed to come roaring out of the gate.)

No. But I’m not complaining. I think Wall Street, over the next couple of quarters, will appreciate how both companies perform as independent companies. The numbers have been a little hidden because they were jumbled together. … They’ve never seen TripAdvisor operate independently. They ask, “What will you do differently? How will things be the same?” Watch us, and I think you’ll like what you see.

Will you grow mostly organically, or through M&A?

We have a good track record on acquisition and product innovation.

The last few acquisitions, you saw a focus on our strategic priorities: A mobile company, a social company, two vacation rental companies and a company in China. Our four key investment areas that we called out are vacation rentals, mobile, social and geographic expansion.

In many ways, TripAdvisor was one of the original social networks, where users shared information on their vacations. Now you see Facebook getting into the space with Facebook Connect and other initiatives, too.

Everyone feels like being able to get travel recommendations from their friends is a natural evolution for getting a better recommendation, period.

There’s a couple of different angles. Some social travel companies are focused on making planning a group trip easier. No site out there has scale and does that well, and we don’t do that now. Facebook is a great platform to do it on, and it may be interesting to us in the future.

Our focus is leveraging the friend graph on Facebook and our rich content to give someone the experience of seeing recommendations or ratings from friends.

We love the concept, and we are furiously building up our own product offering to make it more valuable. If it’s not too early to call someone a leader, we are clearly it, because we have the content and the friend graph. We aren’t a site that’s based on Facebook, which is an advantage, because you can do anyting you want to do on the Web or the tablet or mobile.

What about Google moving into travel?

They have a couple of different approaches. They have Google Places, which reviews everything; and they have Google Hotels, which is a hotel finder; and then Google Flights, to help you find the best fare.

With Google Places, they still can’t seem to generate enough high-quality reviews to be useful. They compete with Yelp and us, and I’ve yet to be concerned. I was concerned about Google Flights — a lot — before they launched, but you cannot book through an online travel agent like Expedia — only directly through the airlines for now.

It’s an incomplete product, so I still use TripAdvisor flights, or go to Expedia or Orbitz. They get better results, and maybe aren’t as fast, but more information is still better.

They say they want to include online travel agents, but the airlines won’t let them. … Don’t mistake my tone for being sympathetic to Google on this one.

What about vacation rentals? HomeAway went public last year.

After HomeAway, there’s not that much.

We agree it’s a great market, and it deserves to be online. It helps consumers and there’s a need to bring a trust element into the equation. Folks who have tried it have liked (renting homes), and a whole lot of people haven’t tried it, because a hotel is all they’ve ever tried.

If they are reading hotel reviews, but I see that you are trying to stay seven nights in Orlando, I might say, “Did you know that you might be able to save money and get a private swimming pool?” They never would have thought of that as an opportunity, but there’s lots of great opportunities in Orlando and tons of other cities.

HomeAway dominates the category, but there’s plenty of room for a second, third and fourth.

I’m surprised that already three-fourths of your traffic comes from outside the U.S.

Yes, and that portion is growing. We have offices all over the globe, and our biggest investment opportunity is in China. We purchased a metasearch site for air, hotel and train in China. We view international growth as a tailwind to the business.

So what’s your price target for the stock? It’s currently trading around $25 a share.

I’m looking at how I can grow the business over the long term, and that’s why we are making some of these investments. I might be ahead of it, or other folks ahead of me, but I’m a nuts-and-bolts operator. I like to build stuff, and getting TripAdvisor to the next level of functionality and awareness is my priority — not the stock price.

A new start-up, Openspace, is launching a physical store where consumers can visit and discover the latest mobile applications.

“If your iPhone has a problem, you take it to Apple. If your Android tablet has a problem, you take it to Verizon, AT&T or Best Buy,” said Openspace founder Robert Reich. “But if you have a question about which camera app would be great for taking pictures this weekend on the slopes, where can you turn?”

To help solve that problem, Openspace opened its first physical storefront last week in Boulder, Colo. Open six days a week, the store is staffed by “App Gurus” who make recommendations and try to eliminate “app-rehension.” (Their joke, not mine.)

Previously, Reich founded Boulder-based OneRiot, which uses social data to make mobile advertising more targeted. The company was acquired by Wal-Mart in September.

Openspace is just getting off the ground, so all the details haven’t been nailed down — like how the operation will make money. But in the next year it hopes to partner with developers to take a percentage of sales that result from applications promoted in the store.

Consumers can also do things the old-fashioned way and visit the company’s Web site to get recommendations. On the site, the company categorizes applications by interests — many of which won’t be found on iTunes — including such nontraditional subjects as Occupy Wall Street, zombies or “games a 10-year-old girl will enjoy.”

Developers often complain about how difficult it is for their applications to be discovered, and frequently pay for advertising or third-party promotion. So it’s possible that a physical app store could be one more way to get the word out.

Whether Openspace will be able to make enough money off referrals to offset the high costs of real estate and full-time staff will be the bigger question.

The investment marks MasterCard’s first in the mobile payments space, and follows similar moves by both Visa and American Express.

Neither company is releasing terms of the round, but mFoundry said MasterCard was the lead investor. Intel Capital, Fidelity Information Services and Motorola Mobility also participated. Previous investors include PayPal, Bank of America and Ignition Partners.

Consumers will most likely recognize mFoundry for developing the Starbucks mobile application, which displays a bar code that can be scanned at the register to make payments from a prepaid account.

MasterCard’s SVP of Mobile James Anderson said he was more interested in mFoundry’s relationships with 600 banks and credit unions.

For the past five years, the company has been focused on the mobile banking space, by developing applications for banks that enables users to check their balances and conduct other financial services from their phone. He said millions of customers at banks, such as Citi and Bank of America, use the applications three to four times a week on average.

Going forward, MasterCard wants to work with mFoundry to enable those applications to make payments at the register using MasterCard’s near field communication (NFC) technology called PayPass.

Near field technology allows a consumer to tap their phone at the register to pay for items. By integrating with these banking applications, the purchase could be deducted straight from a person’s bank account, and without the need to carry around a wallet.

MasterCard is also working with Google Wallet and ISIS, the wireless carrier-led initiative, but it views this partnership as a third approach. “Some consumers will see value in Google; others will want to use their telco provider, and then some will trust their bank,” Anderson said. “At some level those options will be competing, but we believe the choice is up to the customer.”

MFoundry’s CEO and founder Drew Sievers said the relationship is not exclusive, so his company will be free to work with Visa or others, but MasterCard will naturally have a head start since they will be the first ones integrated into the application. Deployments will occur as soon as the middle of next year.

MasterCard is not the only payments provider making investments in the mobile payments space.

Earlier this year, Visa made a large investment in Square, and American Express has opened up an office in San Francisco and created an intimidatingly large $100 million investment fund to make sure it doesn’t miss out on any opportunities.

Sievers said for companies in the mobile banking and payments space that are gaining traction, there’s not only venture capitalists eager to invest, but a ton of companies looking for strategic investments.

In fact, he said, “there’s fewer opportunities to invest in than there are companies willing to invest.”

In the month of September, Yelp said it registered 8.5 million visitors on its mobile Web site and iPhone, Android and Blackberry applications.

It said nearly 60 percent of that traffic was coming through its apps, but the remainder was from visits to its mobile Web site. To help those users, Yelp is updating its site today with a better design.

However, Yelp’s mobile visits are likely to spike in the coming months due to a new partnership with Apple.

Earlier this month, Apple announced it was integrating sites, like Yelp and Wikipedia, into its voice-activated service, called Siri.

In his recent review of the phone, Walt Mossberg had this to say about it:

Siri can find information in Wikipedia, Yelp and Wolfram Alpha. It successfully answered when I asked it, “Who’s the president of Iran?” (though it misunderstood me the first time) and “Who stars in ‘Boardwalk Empire?’” When I asked for a “French restaurant in Bethesda, Maryland,” it instantly returned a list from Yelp, ranked by user reviews.

Yelp will still have a long way to go, however, before a majority of its visits come from mobile.

Compared to the 8.5 million mobile visits in September, 54.5 million visits were made to its traditional PC site.

To do so, the company is partnering with Silicon Valley start-up Chomp, whose search engine is designed to simplify the process of finding apps, allowing people to describe what they are looking for as opposed to needing to know its name.

“Part of the objective with redesigning our storefront is to improve discoverability of applications on smartphones,” Verizon’s Todd Murphy said in a phone interview. The company is also dropping its V Cast brand for the store and labeling it simply Verizon Apps.

While the broader Android market is still a primary means for finding new apps, Murphy said that Verizon’s store offers a focus on premium apps, allowing a different experience for consumers and a unique opportunity for app developers to get their programs seen.

“Obviously, the Android Market is on every single Android device that goes out the door,” Murphy said. “We are just at the point of getting our store on every newer Android device.”

That said, Murphy said the company offers a big advantage to developers — those users who do visit its store are willing to pay. While only around one in 10 app downloads on the broader Android Market are paid, some three in five of Verizon app downloads are paid, Murphy said.

Carousel, which initially will work on Macs and iOS devices when the service launches later this month, is designed to allow people to access, share and edit their entire photo libraries from all of their devices, though support for Windows and Android isn’t planned until next year.

The $60-a-year service (or $5.99 a month) allows users to upload an unlimited number of photos and have them synchronized to all of their Macs, iPhones and iPads. Adobe will also offer new users a month of the service free to kick the tires.

With a subscription, Carousel users can create up to five different photo collections, each of which can be shared with up to five additional people. Those with whom photos are shared can add photos of their own or edit pictures without needing their own subscription. Individual photos can also be shared through Twitter, Facebook, Tumber or via email.

On the editing side, the tools are a mix of image effects, which Carousel calls “looks,” as well as slider tools for controlling settings such as contrast, white balance and exposure. And no matter what edits are made, the original photo is preserved.

The photos themselves are stored in the cloud as well as, typically, on a primary machine. The Mac version of Carousel creates its own photo library, meaning that users will need a lot of extra hard drive space if they plan to store their full collection of pictures in Carousel.

Carousel is the latest effort by Adobe to create products that work across computers and mobile devices. Earlier this year, the company showed off several tools that aim to allow the iPad to work in conjunction with Photoshop in various ways.

The chief selling point for Carousel over various products from Adobe and others is the fact that the product synchronizes edits and photos automatically. That, says Adobe’s Chris Quek, is what users expect out of mobile photo services.

“It has to work right out of the box,” Quek told AllThingsD. “If it is difficult to set up and doesn’t integrate with the rest of their lives they are not going to use it.”

There are some significant limitations. On the Mac side, Carousel requires Lion — the just-released version of MacOS X. Support on the iOS side is a bit broader, working with iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 as well as all iPads and the latest version of the iPod Touch.

Adobe will also find a number of competitors in this area, including Apple’s soon-to-launch iCloud as well as a variety of other photo sharing and editing services.

The company is expected to announce the move later on Wednesday. Forman, who was executive chairman at location-based service app Where until it was acquired by eBay earlier this year, has also worked at EarthLink, Yahoo, Time Warner (and AllThingsD owner Dow Jones).

Though not well known in its own right, Appia powers app stores for some big names, including Opera, Samsung, T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon Wireless. Appia, which was formerly known as PocketGear, raised $10 million in venture funding back in March.

Actually, there are lots of apps claiming to help sort through the morass of hundreds of thousands of other apps. As of tonight, there is one more.

Yahoo is introducing Yahoo AppSpot — a program the company discribes as a “fun, fast way to search and discover” mobile programs for the iPhone and for Android-based devices.

“Yahoo! AppSpot, a new mobile application, works like a flashlight in the darkness of more than 425,000-plus apps in the Apple App Store and 200,000 apps in Android Market,” Yahoo said in a statement. “Yahoo! AppSpot offers a new way to take the guesswork out of finding relevant and interesting apps for mobile users.”

The app includes personal picks updated daily, related apps and other features, followed by a direct link to the Apple App Store or Android Marketplace once users have found the app they want.

In addition to the mobile apps, Yahoo is also adding a PC-based app discovery feature. Once people find an app they want via the browser, they can either use their phone’s camera to scan a bar code on the screen or have a link sent to the phone via text message.

Yahoo is, of course, only the latest company to enter the increasingly crowded app discovery market, lured by the popularity of mobile programs and the fact their developers are willing to spend a lot on advertising to help stand out from the pack. The field includes start-ups like GetJar and Appia as well as big names such as Amazon.

That’s the circle of life, according to a recent study from MTV Networks. The only surprise is that the study wasn’t referring to our relationships with our spouses, but rather our apps.

MTV actually characterized the stages in an app’s life in a little less cuddly terms, highlighting the transition from discovery and adoption to trial and, ultimately, either abandonment or long-term usage.

The network group surveyed 1,300 people who use mobile apps daily to find out their usage patterns, with 83 percent of respondents saying they are addicted to their apps.

“One participant went so far as to say that ‘apps are like Xanax in a phone,’” MTV said in a summary of its survey.

The MTV study asked users to go without their apps for three days and then imagine what it would be like to go without their beloved programs for two whole weeks.

“I don’t think you’d find me alive after the second week,” said one young woman. Asked whether they they would rather give up their favorite app or another treasured thing for a year, more than half of respondents said they would forego coffee, a trusted news source or favorite TV show rather than their favorite apps.

Of course, there are lots of apps and only a few favorites, meaning there are a lot of programs not even worth the memory they are taking up on the phone.

Among the other findings:

The new iPhone app allows you to take a picture of what you are about to stuff your face with, compares it with its databases and then sends back an estimate of just how many calories you are about to consume (or have consumed if you manage to down it before the result comes back). The app, from InterActiveCorp’s DailyBurn unit, costs $2.99.

Like the calorie signs at restaurants, what you learn may not be that pleasant, but some research seems to show we make better choices when armed with the information. Then again, other studies suggest that may not be the case.

DailyBurn CEO Andy Smith said he lives in New York, a place where some menus have to list calorie information.

“I know that affects my decisions,” he told Mobilized.

Smith admits that the app won’t be spot-on in estimating calories, but notes that’s not necessarily the point.

“It’s not super important to be accurate,” Smith says. “Just the act of tracking something can change behavior.”

Because it stores a record of the photos, the app can also be used as a visual food diary. The truly ambitious (or even the boldly gluttonous) can opt to share the pictures with their friends and family, using the in-app ability to upload to Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare.

“Some people like that to keep them accountable,” Smith said.

I wasn’t that ambitious, but I did want to put MealSnap through its paces. I started easy, snapping a picture of a tangerine. I didn’t want to make things too easy, so I didn’t add the optional caption. Two minutes later it guessed it was an orange and told me it was somewhere between 43 and 65 calories. Next up I sent a bowl of peanuts in the shell, including the caption. Within a minute it came back and estimated that would add up to somewhere between 149 and 224 calories (not counting whatever I burned cracking those pesky hulls). I opted to take a pass on the peanuts.

I wanted something that I could compare with an actual calorie count. In the name of science, I decided to scoop myself some light ice cream (I know, I have a rough job). I measured out exactly one cup, which the product label said should be 240 calories. I then scooped it out, snapped the picture and added a caption. MealSnap estimated my midmorning indulgence in the range of 108-162 calories.

MealSnap is only for iPhone for now, though the company hopes to do an Android app eventually. DailyBurn is still in the final beta testing for the Android version of its main app, which tracks exercise and nutrition information. Smith said the 14-person company has more iOS expertise, but is working to quickly get up to speed on Android.

“We know we’ve got to do it,” Smith said. “It’s coming soon.”

Smith said that MealSnap reflects the direction the company hopes to go, with apps that are less scientific but more fun and easy to use.

At least that was the finding of a flash survey of 10,500 Android users recently done over a 19-hour period by Qriously, an Accel Partners-backed start-up. Qriously’s polling found that 79 percent of those who responded believe Apple builds a good product, with only 21 percent disagreeing with that notion.

The start-up also found that far more users plan to buy another Android phone rather than an iPhone, though more would be open to buying an iPhone if it could also run their Android apps. About five times as many were happy with the quality of Android apps than those who were unhappy. And only about a third of respondents thought the iPhone had better apps than are available for Android.

Qriously bills itself as a quick way for customers to gauge public sentiment. It serves up its questions within mobile applications, replacing advertisements with various survey questions.

“We want to make the opinions of millions of people available in real time and be able to tag those opinions to location,” founder Christopher Kahler told Mobilized. The company’s business model, he said, is a simple one: Those who seek information pay for each response they get.

If successful, Qriously would offer app developers an additional way to monetize their software. Although Android sales have taken off, many developers say it is still hard to make money selling their programs directly, with many turning to advertising and other alternatives.

Developers got a boost late last month when Google turned on in-app payments for Android.

As for Qriously, the company is still tiny, just five people, and based in London. The company raised $1.6 million in December from Accel, and its service, in private beta, launched last month.

The Android poll about the iPhone is the first survey for which Qriously has released results publicly.

That’s the conclusion from a new Gartner forecast that predicts mobile apps will produce $15 billion in revenue from sales and advertising this year–nearly triple last year’s still-not-shabby $5.2 billion.

“Many are wondering if the app frenzy we have been witnessing is just a fashion, and, like many others, it shall pass. We do not think so,” Gartner research director Stephanie Baghdassarian said in a statement. “We strongly believe there is a sizable opportunity for application stores in the future.”

The company sees that revenue reaching a whopping $58 billion by 2014. (The forecast covers apps that are directly sold and not other kinds of media content such as ringtones and wallpapers.)

However, Baghdassarian noted that the challenge from Web-based apps will intensify as mobile browsers improve and the Web adapts to the growing base of Web-savvy phones.

“Applications will have to grow up and deliver a superior experience to the one that a Web-based app will be able to deliver,” Baghdassarian said. “Native apps will survive the Web enhancements only when they will provide a more-personal and richer experience to the ‘vanilla’ experience that a Web-based app will deliver.”

Advertising is poised to become a bigger piece of the revenue, Gartner said, climbing to nearly a third of revenue from apps by 2014, roughly double last year’s 16 percent.

Apple announced this week that 10 billion iPhone apps had been downloaded from its store. Apple’s lead in the store arena is poised to continue, but narrow in the coming years, Gartner said.

“We estimate that Apple’s App Store drove close to nine application downloads out of 10 in 2010 and will remain the single best-selling store across our forecast period (through 2014), although to a lesser extent, as other stores manage to gain momentum,” said Gartner Vice President Carolina Milanesi.

Google says it has been testing the system with a small number of partners for the base few months, and is not ready to open up the beta to a larger number of developers.

“In order to continue growing the mobile application market, developers need to make money to fund their projects,” Google said in a statement.

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Fewer than five apps a piece. Not what you’d expect given Apple’s January announcement of the App Store’s 500 millionth download. Of course, this is the median number for all platforms. Clearly, that number skews quite a bit higher for the iPhone. By the end of 2008, Apple had sold 17.38 million iPhones worldwide. So if 500 million applications have been downloaded from its App Store, the average number of downloads for the iPhone platform alone is far, far greater than that. So much greater, in fact, that it likely elevated the median download average for all smartphones. After all, 500 million divided by 17.38 million is about 28. That figure doesn’t account for iPod Touch downloads (Apple doesn’t break out app sales for the iPod Touch), but it’s clear iPhone app downloads far exceed InStat’s 5 apps-per-smartphone average.

Impressive, no? And that average will surely grow in the months ahead. And if you’re skeptical of that claim, consider this second mobile app study from ABI Research. Conducted in November, it asked 235 U.S. smartphone users how much they had spent on apps in the last 12 months. The majority spent between nothing and $100. But almost 17 percent spent between $100 and $499.

[Thanks Chris]