UrbanCode’s play is to speed up the development and delivery of software. Big Blue says it will be integrated into its SmartCloud and MobileFirst offerings. UrbanCode’s technology, IBM said, helps businesses cut down the time between updates to applications.

The deal is IBM’s second of 2013. In a note to clients, ISI analyst Brian Marshall estimated that the company has spent about $12 billion on small tuck-in acquisitions during the last three years. Word of the deal comes a week after IBM reported a disappointing quarterly earnings miss that was interpreted as a bad sign for the rest of the IT industry.

To do so, the Japanese-based company acquired San Francisco-based OpenFeint and established a U.S. headquarters in the same city. It then purchased Funzio, a mobile game developer, to help make hit games for the platform. In all, it spent $300 million.

But now the company is pulling back on its plans — just a bit.

While Gree is a massive entity in Japan, with $2 billion in annual revenue, its efforts in North America so far have produced much less. The company does not always break out revenue, but in August, it reported that sales in the U.S. totaled $16.9 million in the second quarter.

In the conclusion of a two-year spending spree, Gree announced in December that it was rethinking its platform ambitions and laid off about 25 members of its platform team to focus on mobile game development. I caught up with Anil Dharni, Funzio founder and Gree’s SVP of its studio operations, in San Francisco last week, to better understand where the the company is headed.

Here are some highlights from the conversation:

Why did Gree shut down OpenFeint in the U.S.? Does it no longer believe in the ability to build a network where players can discover games and other people to play with (a.k.a, a mobile platform like Facebook)?

Anil Dharni: We acquired OpenFeint two years ago, when Gree wanted to get into the U.S. It was working with a slew of indie developers, and over the past two years, we learned about the publishing business and the platform business. We’ve solidified our position with developers, so we didn’t need the platform team [in the U.S.] and moved production back to Japan.

So, what’s the status of the platform in the U.S.?

Dharni: It’s just being developed in Japan. It’s in beta [in the U.S.] today. Our learnings from the process is that we don’t want to have a me-too publishing strategy. We have to offer more, like game analytics, consulting, push notifications, game mechanics, etc. We are not ready to release those capabilities today, but we think we can bring it altogether.

The transfer of the platform development to Japan led to the elimination of 25 jobs in the U.S. How many employees do you have today?

There are 400 employees in the San Francisco offices, Dharni said, which are directly across the street from AT&T Park. The company has also opened a Canadian studio in Vancouver, where it has 10 employees. Both offices are hiring.

Crime City is one of the company’s oldest titles (launched in August 2010), and it continues to be in the Top 50 highest-grossing apps today. How does it continue to attract players?

“A lot of people talk about shorter lifespan of games on mobile than on Facebook,” Dharni said. But by working with his Japanese counterparts, they’ve been able to learn how to retain users for longer periods of time and increase the user base. It has required them to release more content and new mechanics inside of the games to keep people coming back.

How is hard-core being defined on mobile?

The more strategy-based the game is, the more hard-core it is, he said. “It means a smaller audience that monetizes better.” Genres may include first-person shooters, role-playing and card games (a popular category in Japan that challenges players to collect a deck of cards by completing a number of mini games). Dharni said that more developers have become focused on hard-core as the cost to acquire a player on mobile has gone up, since they can deliver a return on investment over a longer period of time.

As games become more hard-core, is the cost of developing a game going up?

No, it hasn’t, Dharni said, but the amount of time it takes to launch a game has gotten longer. “We used to launch games without events and other mechanics and then layer them in later. Now, they are included from the time of beta, which means testing the games out for a long time in either Canada or Australia.”

Is Android catching up to the iPhone in terms of revenue?

It is, if you aren’t successful on the iPad, Dharni said. But if you are, then Android is not competitive yet.

The study conducted by Flurry, a mobile-analytics provider, found that social games are among the most intensely used apps, but only for a finite period of time.

In a blog post, Flurry compared the characteristics of social games to mobile dating applications: “For most people, we can assume that finding a long-term ‘significant other’ is the ultimate goal of dating. As a result, the app maker should expect customer churn. While usage may be high during the time when a consumer looks for a suitable partner, once that person is found, usage stops.”

The same goes for social games, which consumers play frequently at first, but then tire of over a period of three months.

Based on a sample of apps used 1.7 billion times each week, Flurry determined that social games are played about 7.9 times a week on average, which is much more frequently than people check the weather (3.7 times per week). But while interest in the weather is abiding, loyalty falls off pretty quickly for games. After 30 days, 47 percent of players are still engaged; after 60 days, 34 percent are still engaged; and after 90 days, 29 percent are still engaged. In contrast, after 90 days, 55 percent of people are still checking the weather.

While this pattern may not be a surprise to some, the most public example of this trend recently was the game Draw Something. After Zynga purchased the company responsible for the mobile-gaming hit, usage immediately started tanking. In the month following the acquisition, Draw Something lost nearly five million daily active users, dropping from 15 million to 10 million. Today, it has closer to two million users. Zynga now expects to write down about half of the $200 million investment this year.

While some chalked up Draw Something’s instant popularity to a fad, it’s now pretty clear that the game was just following the same bell curve that other mobile games follow. In other words, churn and burn, baby!

Starting today, Cabana will be joining Twitter’s platform team, where it will be building tools “to help third-party developers create new experiences on Twitter,” according to a blog post.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but given that Cabana will be shutting down its mobile app development tools on Dec. 1, it sounds like Twitter was more interested in the team than the actual product. It’s worth noting that while HTML5 was once hyped as the way to solve fragmentation in mobile, the trend has shifted back toward native applications since they provide a better user experience — at least for now.

Cabana’s technology was used, in part, to turn Facebook fan pages into mobile apps. The San Francisco-based company’s list of investors includes First Round Capital and other high-profile angels, including Kevin Rose, Chris Sacca and Dave Morin. The Cabana co-founders are Reeve Thompson and Jeremy Gordon.

Twitter confirmed the acquisition and provided the following statement: “Reeve Thompson, Jeremy Gordon and their team have created a product that makes it easier for people to build rich mobile apps. At Twitter, they will join our platform team and build tools to help third-party developers create new experiences on Twitter.”

The online reservations company is hoping to solve that problem by giving restaurants the tools they need to optimize their sites for the smaller screen. “It may be a cost issue, or they don’t know who to call or how to maintain it, but for whatever reason, there’s a lot of things that have created a barrier that has prevented restaurants for doing it before,” said Matthew Roberts, OpenTable’s CEO.

Starting today, OpenTable will be reaching out to thousands of restaurants regarding the free service, which will be powered by its partner, DudaMobile. But if restaurants don’t act fast, OpenTable will start charging around $100 for the service after Jan. 31. The three-month window reveals a sense of urgency by OpenTable to get restaurants’ sites optimized for the phone.

In the second quarter, 28 percent of the 28 million reservations made through OpenTable in North America were created on mobile devices, including phones and tablets, which is up from 25 percent in the first quarter. But it could be higher if it weren’t for the fact that only about 10 percent of the company’s restaurants have a mobile-friendly version of their site.

Roberts said other Internet businesses must come up with new revenue streams for mobile, but not OpenTable. When a diner goes to the restaurant’s Web site, OpenTable charges 25 cents per seat for a reservation, and when a diner comes to OpenTable, it charges a $1 per seat — regardless of whether the transaction happened on a desktop computer or a mobile phone. “We don’t have to rethink how to make revenue on a mobile phone,” he said.

With millions of Americans carrying mobile phones, and looking for reservations up until the last minute, he said it makes sense to provide the ability to book from a phone. OpenTable has already optimized its site for mobile and has applications across the major operating systems.

OpenTable, as well as other companies like Groupon and Square, are constantly developing tools to make it easier for small- to medium-sized businesses to operate. Over the past year, Groupon has rolled out a number of services, including online calendar tools, rewards and mobile payments. Next up, Roberts said, they will be personalizing OpenTable’s Web site, so that when diners visit, they’ll see recommendations based on their past reservations, but he declined to say whether OpenTable was interested in offering other services, like mobile payments. “All things are in bounds. … I wouldn’t rule out any element, but nothing specific to share with you at this moment,” he said.

The lopsided economics of the business are driving at least one mobile game developer to do something about it. TinyCo, which is known for popular game titles like Tiny Monsters and Tiny Village, has created an affiliate program that will pay 50 percent of the revenue that a customer spends in its apps for each referral that another game developer generates.

The program, called Tiny Partners, is a spin on the affiliate models that are used by online retailers like Amazon, which share revenue from any sale that originated on another site.

Andrew Green, the head of business development for TinyCo, said that user acquisition costs are “going through the roof right now,” and that a lot of partners are buying at a loss due to a lack of ad inventory. “Just like Amazon.com, we are trying to bring that model to mobile.”

As part of the program, application developers are encouraged to tightly integrate TinyCo’s games’ assets into their game, rather than just relying on banner ads. For example, one game maker included the eggs from TinyCo’s Tiny Monsters in its game. When an egg cracked open, it created an advertisement that told the player to go download Tiny Monsters from the app store. From then on out, that developer received 50 percent or more of all the revenue that customer spent within Tiny Monsters.

Companies will have a chance to earn even more than 50 percent, depending on the level of integration and volume of downloads. Green reasons that the company can create such generous terms because it can afford to give away half of its revenue if it’s paying zero to acquire the customer.

Based on current economics, Green estimated that game developers are paying $2 to $4 for each new customer, and in some cases as much as $5 or $6. “There aren’t that many customer lifetime values that are on par with a $6 acquisition cost,” he said. “That’s mythic. In fact, it’s going to be very tight for most developers at $2.”

Green is optimistic that developers will find the program enticing, especially since TinyCo’s games are known for generating a lot of in-app purchases and consistently ranking among the top-grossing titles on Google Play, Apple’s App Store and Amazon’s Appstore. Other companies, like Chartboost, have experimented with similar advertising programs, which allow developers to swap ad inventory to help generate downloads at lower costs.

Here’s the press release outlining the program’s details:

TinyCo gives app developers 50% or more of their revenue with the Tiny Partners’ program

The Industry can drive better marketing and revenue results through promotional brand integrations

TinyCo, the San Francisco based developer of popular mobile games such as Tiny Monsters and Tiny Village, today announced Tiny Partners’, a program established to encourage collaboration between TinyCo and mobile developers through revenue sharing and brand integration. Mobile app developers can integrate Tiny Partners into their apps to create branded promotional spots for TinyCo games. When a user clicks on a Tiny Partners promotional spot and subsequently installs a TinyCo game, the developer earns at least 50% of the lifetime net revenue that user generates for TinyCo.

“User acquisition costs continue to rise and just as in the past with web advertising, most ad banner formats on mobile devices are being tuned out by users. Web advertising evolved over time with better targeting, rich media and branded content, and we want mobile to evolve faster. TinyCo can provide our partners with the ability to create better performing promotions for our games and then share in the success, “ said Andrew N. Green, Director of Business Development of TinyCo

“With TinyCo, we were treated like a partner, not just a vendor. TinyCo was willing to share their revenue with us. Other companies were just interested in the cost per download.” said Dave Yonamine, CEO, Mobility Ware an early partner in the program.

App Developers can create promotions that compliment their app’s user experience rather than detracting from it or cannibalizing their current banner ad inventory. In the sample integration below, the developer has included free TinyCo-branded items in the game’s virtual goods store, as well as a link to download the game Tiny Monsters.

TinyCo has a proven track record of monetization on iOS, Android and Amazon; their games are consistently among the top grossing titles on all 3 platforms. Tiny Partners’ is an excellent opportunity for mobile developers to tap into TinyCo’s substantial revenue stream without cannibalizing their existing advertising revenue.

TinyCo is encouraging developers to pursue deeper brand integrations, and will look to increase developers’ revenue share percentage based on the depth of their brand integration. The integration is easy and flexible and available on multiple platforms (works on iOS, Android OS, Google play, Amazon). Becoming a partner is free and easy.

For more information on the Tiny Partners initiative, please go here: www.tinyco.com/tinypartners

The San Jose-based company says its mobile app has been downloaded 100 million times since its launch four years ago. That’s equal to the number of the service’s active users — those who bought, listed or sold something on eBay last year. The company is not saying how many of those downloaded apps are used regularly, but by at least one measure, activity is fairly high — users have now listed 100 million items to its marketplace using the eBay app, by taking a picture of the item with their phone and uploading all the data within minutes.

While many other companies are fretting about how they will make money from mobile, roughly 16 percent of eBay’s revenue this year will be coming from mobile devices. While that’s still a fairly small percentage, that number has doubled in just the past year.

Steve Yankovich, eBay’s VP of mobile, said the average transaction on eBay’s mobile apps runs between $30 and $45, in contrast to companies that sell 99-cent mobile games or virtual goods. On the high end, he notes that more than 9,000 cars are sold every week through the app, some of which are priced above $100,000.

Yankovich says they see the most sales coming from the iPhone out of all the smartphone apps, and a lot of transactions are also coming from the iPad and the mobile Web.

Yankovich calls mobile commerce “situational shopping.” Maybe you’re admiring a friend’s fancy new espresso machine, and you buy it on the spot from your phone, he said. Or you’re on the sidelines at your kid’s soccer game, or stuck on the train, or in a meeting, with some spare time for a bit of shopping. “I could be a consumer just for that moment,” he says.

So far this year, the most expensive item that was listed and sold on eBay via mobile was a $22,500 framed Peter Lik photograph. But if that sounds ridiculous, Yankovich has a plausible explanation: “There’s all kinds of things that are bought on mobile that are six figures. People who have lots of money are also busy,” he said.

EBay previously forecasted that it would hit $10 billion in revenue on mobile this year. Based on last year’s gross merchandise volume of roughly $60 billion, that works out to 16 percent of the company’s revenue. The main app, which gets a five-star rating on the iPhone, is available in eight languages and in more than 180 countries. The company has a separate app for cars and parts, called eBay Motors. It also operates Red Laser, which provides bar-code scanning technology, and an eBay Fashion app, which focuses on clothing. There are versions for a myriad of smartphone operating systems and tablets.

Among private companies that discuss mobile revenue, some are seeing even higher percentages, albeit off a much smaller base. Fab.com, which sells trendy home decor and apparel online, said recently that 30 percent of the company’s revenue and 30 percent of its daily visits are now from mobile. One Kings Lane, which is projecting $200 million in revenue this year, reports that mobile makes up 22 percent of the company’s sales.

A more direct comparison would be to Amazon or Walmart, but neither breaks out mobile revenue, although Amazon does allude to positive metrics, such as selling more e-books than hardbacks and paperbacks combined.

Here’s the eBay infographic with all the fun facts:

“In terms of the IPO, no,” Hafner said in an interview with AllThingsD, after ringing the Nasdaq opening bell. “It went exactly like I wanted it to.”

Kayak originally filed to go public nearly 21 months ago, and while it kept its registration up to date, the company put the offering off due to a poor economy and direct influences in the travel industry.

“Google purchased ITA Software and that caused some consternation, but now that they’ve been in the market for 18 months, you can see for yourself our financial results,” Hafner said. “There were never any starts and stops with the IPO. When we thought the time was right and the story would be well-received, we were ready, and that day was today.”

While waiting for the right window, Kayak was indeed able to disclose strong operating results, including four consecutive quarters of profitable growth.

In the first quarter of 2012, it reported a profit of $8.1 million, reversing a loss of $12 million in the same period a year earlier. (The loss was mostly attributable to a $15 million impairment charge related to the discontinuation of the SideStep brand name.) Revenue in the first quarter totaled $73.3 million, compared to $52.7 million a year earlier.

In the offering, the online travel company raised $100 million after selling 3.5 million shares for $26 apiece. The shares priced slightly above the $22 to $25 range that Kayak disclosed last week. In early trading this morning, the stock climbed higher by $6.68, or roughly 26 percent, to $32.68. UPDATE: At the end of the regular session, Kayak’s stock was up nearly 28 percent, or $7.18 a share, to close at $33.18.

Both Hafner and the company’s co-founder and CTO Paul English (pictured right and left, respectively), said now that the offering has been completed, they are eager to get back to work.

On deck, English said, is a continued focus on the mobile sector. To date, Kayak’s applications have been downloaded 17 million times, but English sees it as a big opportunity, unlike Facebook, which is having a hard time monetizing as its user base shifts to phones and tablets.

“Our view on mobile is very different than Facebook,” he said. “Kayak is an e-commerce site, and whether they have a vacation coming up or a business trip, they need to make a purchase and they are increasingly making purchases on the phone, or sometimes in combination on the phone and the Web. We don’t really care what platform they use, but they are using [mobile] a lot.”

The San Francisco company, which allows people to book last-minute hotel deals for the same day at steep discounts, said that it will also be adding additional cities in the U.K and other Western European markets in the near future.

The company said its iOS and Android apps have been downloaded more than two million times, up from 300,000 just a year ago.

By offering deals in more than 40 U.S. cities, plus Toronto and Vancouver, B.C., you can expect downloads to continue to rise, but it also makes HotelTonight more competitive with some other last-minute apps, like Priceline’s Booking.com Tonight application. Although we’ve found that while Priceline’s app has a big selection in a lot of cities, it doesn’t necessarily offer huge discounts.

HotelTonight’s pitch is to provide ways to sell unfilled rooms without impacting a hotel’s brand. And for procrastinators, it offers the ability to find rooms at a discount of up to 70 percent off, starting at noon for the same evening.

HotelTonight recently raised $23 million in a third round of capital, led by US Venture Partners with participation from Accel Partners, Battery Ventures and First Round Capital.

As part of the expansion, HotelTonight also said it was opening a London office and hired Heather Leisman as Managing Director of Europe. Most recently, Leisman ran the supply, operations, customer service and merchandising functions at Jetsetter, a Gilt Groupe company.

The launch is not a surprise, since the Chicago daily deals company has been testing the technology in Philadelphia for the past few months.

Customers who opt in to Groupon Rewards will earn points when they spend money at a participating merchant using the same credit card or debit card they have on file at Groupon.com.

Once a customer spends a predetermined amount, a reward is unlocked to use during a future visit. All of the recording and accounting takes place behind the scenes, and doesn’t require customers to show receipts or check in on a mobile device.

Groupon says the program will also seamlessly tie in to a merchant’s point-of-sale system, and is available to any U.S. merchant, regardless of whether the business has previously run a Groupon deal.

Other companies are also working on similar loyalty solutions.

Earlier this week, I wrote about Belly raising $10 million to create a mobile-app-based loyalty program. And, Kirkland, Wash.-based Pirq also announced this week that it is giving Apple’s Bay Area employees access to daily deals.

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.