No longer just about using your smartphone to make purchases, mobile payment options are now popping up in transit systems in metropolitan areas, as companies look to gauge consumers’ appetites for buying products while truly on the go.

EBay-owned PayPal has just launched a pilot in Singapore’s subway stations for commuters to buy goods while en route. The experiment, through which eight merchants will offer Valentine’s Day gifts at reduced prices, is being conducted across 15 subway stations across Singapore.

Commuters can make purchases by using their smartphone to scan a QR code on a billboard or poster, and can then pay through a PayPal account. (For those wondering how cell service might work while riding a subway, Singapore has long boasted complete underground coverage, in addition to being one of the most Wi-Fi-friendly cities in the world.)

Earlier this week, New Yorkers learned that they would be able to purchase beauty products while riding in some taxicabs, with just a swipe of their smartphones.

Launched by Glamour magazine as part of a Fashion Week experiment, 50 Manhattan cabs will be equipped with SnapTags from technology company SpyderLynk; according to a Wall Street Journal report, VeriFone, which handles payments for New York City cabs, will power the beauty product purchases, as well.

The experiment was inspired by the virtual stores launched in the Seoul subway system by the Tesco supermarket chain, the Journal says.

While mobile payments are becoming increasingly popular — even the Obama campaign has hopped on board — the companies pushing mobile payments forward are divided on their approach to the technology. Square, for example, uses a dongle that plugs into the iPhone to accept mobile credit card payments; it also offers an app that uses geo-fencing to allow a customer to pay when he or she is within a certain distance from a store. Google’s mobile payments app, Google Wallet, uses near field communication technology to transmit payments.

For PayPal, which recently doubled its mobile payments predictions for 2012 to $7 billion, the emphasis has been on options that don’t require near field communication; which, as my AllThingsD colleague Tricia Duryee points out, can be a limiting factor for adoption.

PayPal says that, aside from a smartphone and an app with bar-code scanning capability, no additional infrastructure — such as an NFC-equipped terminal — is required for merchants, retailers and consumers to participate in the Singapore pilot.

Late last year, PayPal began testing point-of-sale purchasing at Home Depot retail stores, in which a select group of PayPal employees can purchase items by using a PayPal-issued credit card or by entering an account number at the register.

Of course, you knew at least a little bit would slip through.

In response to an analyst who asked about the company’s ability to tailor deals to a person’s interests, Mason hinted at new products coming in the first or second quarter.

In addition to being able to get deals based on multiple locations, gender and past buying behaviors, he said, users will be able to vote down deals if they don’t want to receive similar ones again.

So, if you are male, you won’t have to see offers for bikini waxes, or if you are bald, you won’t have to see offers for barber shops.

Mason said, “It allows us to say, ‘Please stop sending me pole-dancing lessons.’ … That’s been a much requested feature.”

Otherwise, Mason quickly and confidently answered inquiries throughout the call.

But he didn’t talk much about future financial expectations, instead emphasizing the company’s merchant services, new investments (such as its mobile products) and new categories (like products and travel).

So far, few details have been shared on the impact of those offerings, including Groupon Now, which is available in 31 U.S. markets and allows customers to purchase deals that can be redeemed in a short time window. Groupon’s travel site has also gotten quite big through the help of its partner Expedia.

Groupon CFO Jason Child explained that all of the investments are really at an early stage, and it’s uncertain how they will be impacted by seasonality or other economic factors.

The strategy remains to invest in the future, Mason said. “The Groupon of five years from now will require investments in technology and innovations. Despite rapid growth, we estimate that we participate in less than 1 percent of all local transactions.”

Still, the forward-looking statements weren’t enough to satisfy investors who were looking for the company to show a small profit.

For the fourth quarter, Groupon reported a net loss of $42.7 million, or 8 cents a share, compared to a net loss of $378.6 million, or $1.08 a share for the same period in 2010.

Mason concluded his first earnings call by saying: “Thanks, guys, this was a lot of fun, and I look forward to many more of these.”

And then the stock was clobbered in after-hours trading, falling nearly 15 percent, or $3.68 a share, to $20.90.

In a three-story building in Palo Alto, Calif. — formerly occupied by Danger, the developer behind the T-Mobile Sidekick — Groupon has been trying to build out a Silicon Valley technology center, one acquisition at a time.

The pursuit was kicked off two years ago with the purchase of mobile app development shop Mob.ly. Mihir Shah, the company’s CEO, started recruiting for the social buying company, and then became the Groupon’s VP of mobile.

Since then, there has been a hodgepodge of acquisitions, including Campfire, which builds chat, calendar and media-sharing tools, as well as Zappedy, which makes a platform for merchants to redeem Internet-based offers more easily.

Last week, it continued with Adku, a low-profile San Francisco start-up that helps e-commerce retailers fine-tune their recommendation engines using external factors, such as whether it is hot or cold outside.

None of the teams have been extremely big or expensive, but Groupon insists that they already are having a major impact on the company.

That may be hard to believe in a company of more than 10,000 employees, most of which are salespeople who are not working on technology.

But Adku’s co-founder Carlos Whitt, who is joining the company along with five others from his team, said the entrepreneurial vibe in the building is “ridiculously exciting.”

“The opportunity, the innovation and entrepreneurs are all there,” he said. “It’s a good intersection.”

Still, Groupon has not been able to attract every entrepreneur it pursues. It had been actively trying to buy other social start-ups, such as Gowalla. That particular deal went to Facebook. Another would-be Groupon acquisition target, Clever Sense, was won by Google.

No matter, according to Mob.ly’s Shah, who said Groupon is actively evolving beyond a daily deals service into a company that builds a set of key marketing tools for local merchants that increases sales, cuts costs and boosts productivity.

Some of the early tools include online calendars to make it easy for spas or gyms to book appointments online, and rewards programs that allow merchants to identify loyal customers who return and spend a lot of money.

Groupon also recently revamped its merchant center, where its customers can manage their daily deals and other programs in an online dashboard.

Shah said the idea is to create a marketing suite that makes small businesses more efficient and productive.

“We never want to stand still and be a big company,” he said.

But the big question is whether those tools will be sticky enough to keep merchants coming back to offer new deals, which is where Groupon gets all of its revenue from. That’s because most of the new tools are expected to be given away for free and not generate any additional income — at least for now.

It will also have to be enough to keep away other close competitors, such as LivingSocial, Google and Amazon.

The ability to spur innovation and keep ahead of rivals will be on the minds of analysts when Groupon reports its first financial results as a publicly held company this afternoon.

Wall Street is expecting the company to report three cents per share profit on revenue of $475 million in its fourth quarter earnings, according to Thomson Reuters.

That’s up from $430 million in revenues in the third quarter and will be Groupon’s first profitable quarter in nearly two years

In particular, analysts will be listening for updates on some of the company’s core programs, such as Groupon Now, which is its mobile product that allows consumers to purchase deals minutes or hours before redeeming them based on their location. Other metrics may be shared regarding loyalty and retention programs.

This is also Groupon CEO Andrew Mason’s first big chance to speak to the investment community since the end of the company’s quiet period (which he wasn’t really good at keeping, anyway).

Groupon’s stock increased nearly three percent yesterday to close at $24.19, which is just above its IPO price of $20 a share.

The deal indicates new directions for Klout, which to date had not been particularly focused on mobile or local.

Blockboard made a neighborhood discussion board iPhone app that had only been available in its hometown of San Francisco. Its team of four had previously been at companies like Delicious and Craigslist. When I covered the company, I noted that it has more of a Twitter approach to a local social network, where competitor Nextdoor requires real identities, a la Facebook.

Klout said that Blockboard’s app would continue to be available, and that its team would work to improve Klout’s local and mobile efforts.

Klout received a rich valuation in its most recent funding round, which closed last November but was only announced in January. Blockboard, meanwhile, had raised $1 million in 2010 from Joshua Schachter, Mitch Kapor, Founder Collective and others.

While Google doesn’t require the kinds of approvals needed from Apple or Microsoft before an app goes live, the company has been taking some actions to try to keep malicious code out of its virtual storefront.

Bouncer not only looks for known malware and spyware, it also tries to detect behavior that might offer a red flag that a product is malicious. In addition, the company runs every submitted app on its own cloud infrastructure to simulate how the program would run on an Android device. Finally, when the company learns of a new type of exploit, it goes back and rescans all of the apps in the market.

“We have been working on this for a while,” Android Engineering VP Hiroshi Lockheimer said in an interview. “It’s always been a goal of ours to have a secure market.”

Lockheimer said that avoiding a manual approval process is very important to Google, but he said that shouldn’t have to mean giving up security. Bouncer, he said, is Google’s attempt to avoid that trade-off.

“It is the Google way to use technology and automation,” he said.

And, Lockheimer said, it is paying off. While lots of outsiders have said Android malware is on the rise, Google says it has seen a decline in malicious apps in the official Android market. The number of such programs was down 40 percent from the first half of 2011 to the second half of the year, Lockheimer said.

Last week, I talked to Punit Soni, who runs games and mobile for Google+, to get an update on Google’s plan for social games. Since the conversation took place before Facebook’s filing, Soni has no direct responses to the numbers.

But he addresses in general how Google expects to challenge Facebook’s dominance in social gaming, and the big opportunity in front of them to do something different.

“There’s no point in being in this game if we are a ‘me-too,’” he said. “We want to be different.”

Yesterday, in Facebook’s IPO filing we learned that substantially all of the company’s payments revenue is coming from virtual goods from inside social games, and that one game publisher alone — Zynga — is contributing 12 percent of the company’s revenue, payments and advertising included.

At those rates, it’s easy to see why Google is emphasizing games and wooing developers to its platform.

It started off with a bang in August, when it launched games. In talking to reporters, Soni announced the company was sharing 95 percent of the revenue from virtual goods with developers, and was keeping only 5 percent for itself.

That was, and remains, much more generous than the 30 percent cut that Facebook takes.

Still, with only 36 games on its network, and far fewer users (however you want to calculate it), Soni was pretty honest about how far they still have to go. He was also extremely enthusiastic, and at times looked as if he wanted to leap out of his chair to get going on some of the projects Google had planned.

First, and foremost, he said they are working hard to get virality right; and second, they want to nail cross-platform, so that games worked seamlessly across the Web and mobile.

Viral channels are the most common way for people to learn about a game, and also one of the most controversial.

More than a year ago, Facebook was forced to dial back those channels, because users complained about receiving too many unwanted messages.

“We err on the side of caution,” Soni said. “We are slowly giving more options to do things.”

Soni said they also see a big opportunity to differentiate by offering a multiplatform approach, and letting developers build games that work across Google+, Google’s Chrome Web Store and mobile. Of course, it has an advantage because of the millions of Android users, whereas Facebook’s mobile efforts are still nascent.

Already, there are some examples of cross-platform play.

Today, you can play Rovio’s Angry Birds and Bubble Witch Saga across both Google+ and the Chrome App Store, and can pick up where you left off between the two.

“These are not Google+ games, but games that are on Google,” Soni stressed. “A lot more is coming on mobile.”

Google has also focused on getting a number of games as exclusives that launch a few weeks on Google+ before they show up on Facebook. To date, it has scored at least three titles — including a major title, Kabam’s Godfather — and there are more coming.

Asked why the game developers are willing to go exclusively on Google+, Soni said there’s some marketing that Google is willing to put toward it, but otherwise, “they are betting on us.”

He says it’s mostly the potential of the platform, and the fact that he’s receptive to feedback, that helps him understand exactly what developers need. Developers also acknowledge that supporting more platforms is helpful in reaching more players and diversifying their risk.

“If they say it’s because the platform is the best ever — no, it’s not true. But the plans we have and the sensitivity that we have for our users and developers, we will be very good sometime soon. … That’s why you are seeing exclusives.”

Soni wasn’t wiling to spill specific plans about what was launching next, but said a lot more is coming.

“We are a start-up platform. We are humble and know our flaws. As we grow, you’ll see new things. My work has barely started,” he said.

Data from the popular photo-sharing service shows the number of mobile photo app users who use the apps at least once a day doubled to 42 percent, up from 20 percent midyear in 2011.

Meanwhile, only 64 percent reported using digital cameras to capture the majority of their images throughout the season, down from 82 percent a year ago.

Anecdotally, this means more bad news for camera makers, as they become increasingly threatened by smartphones with decent image-taking capabilities.

The Photobucket report also points out that pets were, shall we say, very present in this year’s holiday cards. Some 41 percent of respondents used an image for their holiday cards; among pet owners, 58 percent included Fido/Rudolph in the photo.

The surge in smartphone use didn’t apply to just pictures: Capturing videos on mobile devices also saw a jump during the holidays. A full 80 percent of survey respondents took video using a mobile device at least once throughout the season, up from 59 percent in Photobucket’s summer sampling, while 50 percent of respondents used a mobile device to record video daily or multiple times a day.

While already-avid users of mobile photo apps increased their usage this past holiday season, a substantial 43 percent of respondents indicated they have yet to try a mobile app for taking photos.

Photobucket says it gathered responses from more than 2,200 survey participants, and culled data from Photobucket’s more than nine billion image uploads for the report.

(Photo courtesy of HollyLovesArt/Flickr)

Seattle-based Treemo Labs has created an iOS app maker called Appafolio that requires no code in the app-building process, will show up to 10 screens of data or imagery, and caches the app content so the app will work even when an Internet connection isn’t available.

The company wants to become an app resource for business users and marketing professionals who want to create brochure-like apps that likely won’t pass muster in the App Store. Appafolio is free, though there will be a premium model that offers more bells and whistles.

There’s also a simple Appafolio pass phrase that app makers can use as a URL and share with anybody, directing iPhone and iPad users directly to their app instead of to an app store or marketplace. The link won’t, however, work on a Web browser.

Treemo co-founder and CEO Brent Brookler pointed to camera company Contour as an example. Contour used Appafolio to show off its new line of cameras a few weeks ago at the Consumer Electronics Show — where the cellular service and Wi-Fi connectivity is notoriously bad. The company used an iPad as a kind of marketing brochure at its booth, and since the content of the app could be downloaded and cached in advance, there were no issues swiping through the Contour app and viewing all of the data available.

Of course, the number of companies that help people make apps is as large as the day is long — and some them also offer no-code builds. There’s also AppMkr, AppIncubator, AppWhirl from App.co, AppVoyage and EachScape, which just nabbed $3 million in Series A funding, to name just a handful.

While the Appafolio product is geared toward business clients, the app maker doesn’t allow users to import things like PDF or PowerPoint files. So, for an offline deck, the non-iPad-owning business user might still turn to other software applications to create slides or brochures.

And while Brookler sees getting an Android app going as an important step to market Appafolio to the masses, for now the app is iOS-only.

Brookler says the app isn’t just for business users; a casual user might want to create an app for a wedding, for example. But that sort of app is also unlikely to pass App Store muster, so Appafolio makes it easier for those users to become developers for a day.

Seattle-based Treemo Labs launched in 2005 and has mainly created apps for media properties, including CBS News, “60 Minutes” and “Survivor,” as well as music video apps.

“We run the iPhone and iPad teams separately from the Web team, and the Web team had fallen behind,” said Paul English, co-founder and CTO.

The goal with the site’s design has always been to provide a simple layout, so that users can easily sift through thousands of flights, hotels and car rentals to find what they are looking for quickly.

But up until now, the focus wasn’t really on being beautiful, English said. The new look tries to incorporate a clean and attractive design.

After eight years in business, English said this is the most significant redesign of the site (check out the gallery below to see how the site has changed over the years). But only the most die-hard users are likely to notice many differences. Rather, the larger significance is that mobile is influencing the Web, and not the other way around.

Increasingly, this may be the case in the travel industry as so much of the traffic now comes from phones and tablets. Kayak said more than five million applications were downloaded in the nine months ended in September, a 97 percent increase over the same period a year earlier.

In early testing, English said conversion rates are higher and completion times are shorter as a result of incorporating mobile designs — which, by nature, are always built with speed and ease-of-use in mind. “They [customers] are more confident to compete the purchase because we haven’t worn them out.”

View the slideshow

Here’s some of the more notable changes:

The unibrow is gone: Internally, the company refers to “the unibrow” as the black bar that stretched across the the top of the page that said “Search One and Done.” Now at the top of the screen are several tabs, such as Flights, Hotels, Cars, etc.

Similar to iOS: The iPhone and iPad designers released a new iPad app about a month ago. In the new Web site design, they leaned on the design to bring a consistent typeface and coloring to the Web site.

Fewer ads on the site: When users are looking at photos of a hotel or viewing a map, they won’t see any ads. “Obviously, ads are an important part of the way we make money, but advertisers have gotten clever, and sometimes the ad is jarring and has animation,” English said. Kayak is issuing all-new guidelines that requires advertisements to blend with the site. “If you do a good job, it should be content. If we are showing you ads that are extremely related to what you are doing, it’s useful.”

Most of the changes will go live today, with some of the others — like the new ad guidelines — taking more time to implement.

English declined to provide an update on the company’s IPO. While it continues to file financial updates with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Kayak told AllThingsD in September that it was putting its plans on hold.

The Mobile Threat Tracker app consolidates the most recent two weeks’ worth of Lookout’s security data into a kind of mobile heat map. The user sees dots flying around the globe as a real-time visualization of where threats are happening.

When users scroll over the globe, a timeline appears, showing how much of the threat is malware and how much is spyware; the top three threats are listed along with plain-English descriptions, and why Lookout has identified them as malicious.

Kevin Mahaffey, Lookout’s co-founder and CTO, said the app isn’t necessarily about offering immediate solutions, but more about making people aware of when they might be particularly vulnerable on mobile. “People shouldn’t have to be security experts to stay safe. We want to remind them to download apps from reputable app stores, to not go to shady download sites; to look at the developer name behind an app, and make sure it’s legitimate.”

The Mobile Threat Tracker is only available on devices running an Android OS to start, and Mahaffey says it’s unclear whether there will be a version for iOS devices. “Right now, it makes less sense, because there isn’t any real malware on the iPhone,” Mahaffey said, “though at some point there might be a need for it.”

Lookout Mobile Security launched in 2007, and now claims more than 15 million users worldwide. The company says it takes an educational approach to informing people about products for malware and spyware, rather than using fear-mongering in its marketing; it offers most of its apps for free, with additional features available at a premium.

While threats on mobile devices still aren’t as high-scale as malware and spyware on PCs, Lookout’s internal research shows that the amount of malware on mobile has increased.

Lookout said the likelihood of an Android user encountering malware increased from 1 percent to 4 percent over the course of 2011. The company has identified more than a thousand instances of infected applications, double the number it saw in July 2011.

The Lookout report notes that Web-based threats like phishing can carry over easily from PCs, making the likelihood of clicking on a bad link higher than that of acquiring malware through mobile apps. The global yearly likelihood of an Android user clicking on an unsafe link is 36 percent — up 6 percent from just six months ago — while in the U.S., the likelihood is higher than the global average, at 40 percent.

(Photo courtesy of TheTechBlock/Flickr)

The idea behind Snapkeys isn’t new; the company says it has been working on it for more than 10 years.

A snapshot of Snapkeys' redesigned keyboard.

But the more recent emergence of touchscreen devices — and the complaints from even avid users about typing on them — means that Snapkeys’ research and development has been serendipitously well-timed.

“We think the end user is finally ready for an upgrade to the old Qwerty keyboard, after almost 150 years,” said Ryan Ghassabian, a Snapkeys business development manager. “Today, there are just too many new devices — phones, tablets — that are changing everything.”

“And Qwerty is just not meant to be on touchscreen devices,” he added.

Snapkeys is just one of a growing number of devices and applications that aim to change the way users interact with the traditional keyboard.

That doesn’t necessarily mean altering the layout of the Qwerty keyboard. The popular keyboard add-on Swype, recently acquired by Nuance, uses a standard layout, but lets users trace a word with their fingers.

While many companies work on technology for onscreen keyboards, still others are trying to create smart, ultra-portable or “invisible” keyboards.

Celluon's Magic Cube laser-projected keyboard.

Korea-based Celluon, which works on portable input applications, has introduced a “Magic Cube” device that connects wirelessly to an iPad or iPhone and projects a laser keyboard image onto an opaque surface for users to “type” on. The idea is that the user would only have to tote the palm-sized, battery-operated cube around, instead of a full keyboard.

Mozilla Labs’s Seabird project uses two Pico projectors to spit out keyboard imagery on either side of a smartphone to establish a full keyboard for typing.

Others believe the answer to typing on touchscreens lies in somehow adding a tactile set of keys — ones that people can actually feel, as they’re accustomed to — to those sleek glass displays.

Part of this stems from the simple fact that many consumers find typing on raised keys easier than typing on touchscreens. A study conducted last year at the University of Washington’s Information School in conjunction with Microsoft Research found that when users typed on a flat surface lacking tactile feedback, they were subject to inadvertent touches, and typing speed was 31 percent slower than it was with a physical keyboard.

Five years ago, manufacturers like Nokia and Samsung were trying everything from vibrating screens to sensor pads underneath keys to create the sensation of keys you could feel on touchscreens.

And consumers seem to want options beyond just attaching a full keyboard to a mobile phone or tablet. Last fall, two Seattle-based designers received $201,400 dollars in pledges on crowdfunding site Kickstarter, after having set an initial goal of just $10,000. Their product: A thin, light keyboard overlay called the TouchFire that goes over the iPad’s touchscreen and creates a sense of keys.

But tactile touchscreen tech still hasn’t made its way into the mainstream.

While physical buttons certainly have their advantages, software keyboards, in the meantime, are showing a tremendous amount of potential. For example, keyboards can simply be reconfigured based on context. When in a browser, dedicated keys can be presented for “www” and “.com”. If the entry is for a ZIP code, a screen with only numbers can be offered.

Also, soft keyboards can do interesting things using prediction. Based on what the next character is likely to be, the software can actually assume which letter is likely to be pressed next, making those keys bigger, either physically or just by favoring those keys.

Above all, software keyboards, unlike physical ones, disappear entirely when they are not needed. The trend away from physical keyboards, which began with the iPhone, has continued unabated, with full touchscreen smartphones making up a steadily increasing portion of the market.

Chris Harrison, a Ph.D. candidate in Carnegie Mellon’s Human Computer Interaction Institute, says that while tactile feedback is “kind of the holy grail of input,” we’re still years away from tech that offers true tactility on touchscreens. “Right now, there are ways you can take really inaccurate input and make it usable — look at something like BlindType — so that’s what you’ll see getting pushed out in the next two or three years. Maybe in five years or more, we’ll see the technological breakthrough of ‘shape-shifting’ the keys on touch surfaces, so people can feel them.”

OmniTouch: A new kind of "Palm" phone?

Harrison has spent the past two and a half years working with Microsoft on skin-sensory computing technology, called Skinput. The technology includes specialized sensors that gauge vibrations happening inside of the human body and enable graphical multitouch. The idea, basically, is that by tapping a projected image on your forearm, you can tell your computer — or another electronic device, like your TV — what to do.

More recently, Harrison and Microsoft have retailored the tech, which is now called OmniTouch, to use it on variety of surfaces — not just the epidermis, but also walls, tables, and notepads.

And while Harrison is laser-focused on changing the way we input information, he expressed a different sentiment than Snapkeys does it when it comes to the keyboard.

“The physical keyboard is an amazing thing, and the fact that it hasn’t changed much in almost 150 years is a good thing,” he said. “If you brought back an old keyboard, people will still be able to type just as well, and there aren’t many technologies as durable as that.”

Readers, which do you prefer for typing: Touchscreens or tactile keys?

(Magic Cube photo courtesy of Flickr/AsiaClassified)

AllThingsD’s Ina Fried contributed to this report.

Earlier this month, investors pushed Google shares up past $670 — the highest they’ve ever been. They’ve since pulled back a bit, but not for performance reasons: The Street still expects Google to post net revenue of around $8.4 billion — that’s up about 30 percent over the previous year — and earnings of around $10.46 a share — up about 20 percent.

If there are questions out there about Google, the Street seems to think they’re about what could happen — government regulation, a misstep with the $12.5 billion Motorola Mobility deal, etc. — than what just happened over the last three months.

Analysts who have been listening to search marketers say they don’t see any real signs of slowdown over the last quarter, even as other ad businesses have been roughed up. (We’ll ignore, for now, an outlier report from Kantar Media which reports a huge and puzzling decrease in paid search.)

As always, there is lots of interesting stuff going on at Google. And, as usual, you can expect Larry Page and company to say very little about it, other than making vague comments about the strength of their core search business, and some acknowledgement that their video, mobile and display ads are starting to become very significant businesses of their own.

In a fantasy world, we’d like to hear Page, et al, talk about what they really think about Facebook, and whether that move to shove Google+ pages into Google search results is as telling as it seems to be. We’d also like to hear more detail about their plans for Motorola, assuming the deal goes through early this year. Don’t hold your breath.

For more grounded speculation, we can consult this cheat sheet from Citi’s Mark Mahaney, which lets you see how different results might move GOOG shares. We continue to find these summaries as useful as ever (click image to enlarge):

Which is why I can’t believe I am missing lovable, furry Grover. The blue Muppet is making an in-the-fur appearance at CES on Tuesday, in a speech by Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs, and I am already booked.

The chipmaker has worked with Sesame Workshop on an augmented reality application.

Jacobs is also set to show off other tech stuff, including a demo of Windows 8 running on its hardware and working over AT&T’s LTE network and Lenovo’s Android-based television, which is powered by a Qualcomm chip.

But what has me sore is missing the Muppets. If you are still in Vegas, Grover, call me!

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• Ultrabooks, the Ultra-Fancy New Name for Laptops
• At CES, Expect More Gadgets Telling You to Get Off the Couch
• Intel to Detail Its Phone Plans at CES Next Month
• Microsoft Pulling Out of CES After Upcoming Show
• Intel to Detail Its Phone Plans at CES Next Month
• Dell Will Drop the Flashy Vegas Act for CES This Year
• Ultrabook Conga Line Preps for CES 2012

… think of these small mobile devices as creating the next wave of users who will want larger-screen devices.

– Dell CEO Michael Dell

At the Samsung press conference, the electronics giant showed off the S pen stylus that works with the Galaxy Note. Look, kids! It works just like pen and paper, Samsung says.

AT&T also announced earlier today the Samsung Exhilarate, a $50 eco-friendly LTE phone.

But let’s get to tablets: Samsung is now bringing the Galaxy 7.7-inch tab to Verizon Wireless. Samsung’s 7.7-inch tablet had already been announced for T-Mobile, but now it’s gone all LTE on Verizon’s network.

It’s got a 1280×800 AMOLED display, 1.4GHz dual-core processor, 16 gigabytes of onboard memory and both rear- and front-facing cameras, as well as HD video-capturing capabilities. It runs Android’s 3.2 Honeycomb operating system and has an HTML5 Web browser.

The company did not offer any more information on when the 7.7-inch tab would be available through Verizon (or how much it would cost), except to say that it would be “in the coming weeks.”

It’s worth noting that Samsung’s first tablet was a 7-inch device, followed by the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 inch tablet.

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• Complete coverage
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• Walt Shows Off CES Gadgets for Fox Business News (Video)
• What Kind of Web Video Plans Does Sony Have? (Video)
• Fujitsu Seeking Way Into Crowded U.S. Smartphone Market
• Why Rhapsody Is (Probably) Bigger Than Spotify — In the U.S.
• Microsoft Beefing Up CeBit Presence Even as It Pulls Back on CES
• Inside the CES Lost & Found
• FCC Chairman Has New Tablet, but Same Script: More Spectrum!
• Verizon Wireless: We Want to Connect Five Devices for Every Subscriber
• Ultrabooks From HP and Lenovo That Are (Kinda, Sorta) Different
• Walt and Katie Take a Tour of CES (Video)
• Schmidt-Storm Alert: The Google Chairman Didn’t Like Your Question
• T-Mobile Expands Bobsled Messaging Service
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• Motorola CEO: We’re Going to Release Fewer Phones This Year
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• More From T-Mobile CEO: On Pricing, LTE and That Ever-Elusive iPhone
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• And You Thought Jawbone UP Was Going to Miss the CES Party!
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• BlueStacks Bringing Android Apps to Windows 8
• Why the Future of TV Won’t Be Here Soon
• Nvidia’s Tegra 3 Tries to Save Battery in All Sorts of Different Ways
• Dynamic Dual Coverage: Ballmer’s Last Act in Vegas and the BCS Championship in 3-D
• Microsoft Phoning In Its Last CES Keynote
• Myspace — Yes, Myspace — Says It’s Going to Sell You Web TV
• Samsung Unveils “Super” 55-Inch OLED TV
• Nokia Unveils That LTE Windows Phone It’s Been Dying to Share
• Steve Ballmer Gives Ralph De La Vega a Very … Vigorous Greeting (Video)
• Interview: AT&T’s De La Vega on LTE, Tablets and Life After T-Mobile
• AT&T’s De La Vega: Shared Data Plans Still in the Works
• LG: 55-Inch Glasses-Free 3-D Screen Is on the Way
• LG Pushes 4G Smartphone Through Verizon: The LG Spectrum
• Live: AT&T’s Vegas Act Stars LTE and, Making Her Return to the Stage, Nokia
• CES Notebook: The Constant Search for Power and Vegas’ Worst-kept Secret
• Belkin Bringing Mobile TV to Lots of Cellphones, Will Anyone Tune In?
• Acer Introduces “World’s Thinnest” Ultrabook and a “Me-Too” Cloud Service
• There Better Be Some Cool Stuff at CES, Because CE Holiday Sales Data Bytes!
• CES 2012: Snooki and Bieber Are In, Gaga Is Out!
• Coming to a Smartphone Near You: Gorilla Glass 2
• RIM Hopes Next PlayBook OS Will Impress at CES
• Ultrabooks, the Ultra-Fancy New Name for Laptops
• At CES, Expect More Gadgets Telling You to Get Off the Couch
• Intel to Detail Its Phone Plans at CES Next Month
• Microsoft Pulling Out of CES After Upcoming Show
• Intel to Detail Its Phone Plans at CES Next Month
• Dell Will Drop the Flashy Vegas Act for CES This Year
• Ultrabook Conga Line Preps for CES 2012

Nvidia has already disclosed that its quad-core chip also packs a low-power fifth core that can be used in place of the other four to save power. On Monday, Nvidia shared a few more secrets about its latest smartphone and tablet processor.

Among its other power-conserving superpowers is the ability to reduce the amount of backlighting needed. It does this by looking frame by frame at what is being displayed and, when possible, opening up pixels and turning down the backlight where possible.

“That adds a significant amount of battery life to these mobile devices,” Nvidia mobile unit head Mike Rayfield said in an interview, noting that backlights are one of the bigger drains on battery life. In addition to the backlight trick and the low-power core, Rayfield said the Tegra 3 also eliminates the need for a separate controller to process input on a touchscreen.

The Tegra 3 is already shipping in Asus’s Transformer Prime (a device first shown at AsiaD). At this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nvidia is showing the Tegra 3 in action on a bunch of other devices.

Nvidia isn’t the only chipmaker trying to make a case for its processors this week. Both Intel CEO Paul Otellini and Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs are slated to deliver keynote speeches on Tuesday.

All three companies are trying to make the case for why their processors should be the brains of device makers’ next mobile gadgets. And they aren’t the only ones: Texas Instruments, MediaTek and Broadcom are also angling for different segments of the market.

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 year later, it isn’t clear whether the software giant’s shift will do much to improve its lagging position in mobile devices — or whether it is quite as ominous for Intel as it originally appeared.

On Monday night, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer is set to return to the stage of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where he laid out the company’s plans for the new software, known as Windows 8. He isn’t expected to demonstrate any new features or give details about its progress.

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Aside from the fact that this magic glass is being labeled Gorilla Glass 2, we don’t have many other details at this point. But in this MSNBC.com video from last year, Corning says the next big thing in glass will be a Gorilla Glass that can be formed into 3-D shapes so it can be used in products like keyboards and kitchen countertops. (The company also said at the start of 2011 that Gorilla Glass would be a $1 billion business; it later had to scale back that estimate.)

Corning says its Gorilla Glass is currently used in more than 575 product models across 30 major brands, totaling more than 500 million units worldwide.

Devices with Gorilla Glass displays include Motorola’s Xoom tablet, Nokia’s newer smartphones and Android smartphones (with the exception of the Galaxy Nexus).

While it’s unclear whether Apple’s latest iPhone and iPad displays are made using Corning’s Gorilla Glass, Walter Isaacson’s recently published biography of Steve Jobs includes an anecdote about how Jobs used his “reality distortion field” to get Corning to bring its specialty glass to market in time for the first iPhone launch.

Meanwhile, an IHS iSuppli teardown of the iPad 2 last year suggested that the device’s screen is made of Dragontrail Glass, manufactured by Japan’s Asahi Glass.

Dean, who was a victim of a Tony Bates housecleaning last summer, says several months on the beach eased the sting of his ouster. After considering CEO positions at some early-stage companies, and looking around in the mobile, social and messaging areas, Dean said he decided that the role at Urban Airship — which specializes in managing push notifications for mobile services — fits well with his background in messaging and communications.

Urban Airship is coming off a $15 million funding round that included investments from Salesforce.com, Intel and Verizon. Urban Airship also recently scooped up Jay Adelson’s SimpleGeo.

“They have a massive opportunity to drive messaging in the mobile world generally, and specifically around push,” Dean said in an interview on Thursday.

Moreover, Dean said he is excited about his new role, which includes responsibility for sales, in addition to his usual arena of business development.

As for Skype, he says he wishes the service well and hopes it will stay true to its cross-platform roots, even as it lands in the hands of Microsoft.

At $8.5 billion, Dean says Microsoft “paid a full price,” but that Redmond can still have gotten a good deal if it is able to integrate the service into its various properties, ranging from Windows Phone and Windows Live to Lync and even Xbox.

“I’ve always said I think the acquisition is a very strong and good one for Microsoft,” Dean said. “I can absolutely see why they did that.”

That milestone was reached in the last week of 2011. And what’s really interesting is how people are finding their apps. According to new monthly data from Chomp, a search engine for mobile apps, most users aren’t looking for specific app titles, but rather features and functions — and the top feature is “free.”

In December, 82 percent of iOS users, and 86 percent of Android users, looked for apps using such common search terms as “free,” “games,” “free games,” “fun games,” “ringtones” and “shopping,” rather than searching by name.

The word “Christmas” appeared on Chomp’s list of top search terms for December, across multiple countries. The company says query volume for the word, already elevated that month, spiked an additional 300 percent immediately before the holiday, then decreased again on Dec. 25.

Chomp’s data was culled from a sample of one million search queries, across mobile platforms iOS 4.0 and higher, and Android 2.1 and higher. Chomp, which powers app searches on Verizon Android phones, just started measuring tablet-app downloads, so those apps currently account for a very small percentage of its data.

What is somewhat surprising about this report is that other data, put out last year by Latitude and MTV Networks, shows that personal recommendation is one of the biggest driving factors when it comes to app downloads, with an estimated 53 percent of mobile app users saying their friends’ suggestions are most important when it comes to finding and trying apps. If that’s the case — say, if someone asks, “What’s that iPhone app that makes photos look old and cool?” (as I was recently asked) — users wouldn’t necessarily tell their friends to search for “free photo app” but rather, look up “Instagram.”

Chomp’s technology, however, is meant to enable app search based on functionality; it also factors user recommendations and social recommendations into its algorithm. Ben Keighran, the company’s founder and CEO, says he believes Chomp’s app-recommendation engine offers more to users than just lists of top-selling apps. (For app creators, though, nabbing a top-ranking spot in app stores has been shown to boost downloads significantly, as evidenced by RunKeeper’s 637 percent increase in average daily downloads after it became a featured app in the Android store.)

Chomp’s own list of top apps for iOS devices in December included WhatsApp Messenger, JunoWallet GiftCards, Pandora, and Adobe Photoshop Express; the top Android downloads for December were Angry Birds Rio, eBay, Google+ and Google Sky Map. GT Racing: Motor Academy Free+ was at the top of Chomp’s international download charts.

Another interesting nugget from the monthly report: While paid-app downloads on Android showed no change, paid-app downloads for iOS jumped to 30 percent of all app downloads, for the first time ever. The jump was concentrated at the 99-cent price point, which increased from 15.9 percent to 17.8 percent of all apps.