The Mountain View, Calif.-based company tries to boost online companies’ revenue by placing targeted promotions and offering incentives at the point of checkout.

It’s a bit similar to how grocery stores try to boost sales by strategically placing tabloid magazines, gum and candy bars at the register to spur last-minute impulse buys.

Instead, TrialPay makes last-minute offers to give people incentive to make a purchase when they are on the fence.

As an example, TrialPay’s CEO Alex Rampell said that when people visit Fandango’s site, they may get an offer for a free movie ticket if they sign up for Netflix. Or, in a Zynga game, you might be offered a virtual bouquet for free, in return for purchasing real flowers on Valentine’s Day.

Visa’s participation in the investment, which is being announced later this morning, is rare. Over the years, the payments company has made a few acquisitions, including PlaySpan, CyberSource and Fundamo, but Visa’s only investment in recent memory was in payments darling Square, which allows anyone to accept payments using a cellphone.

Rampell said that with Visa’s help, TrialPay will be able to expand to offline merchants from working exclusively with online retailers, by giving it a way to track if a person visited a store and made a purchase.

“The question is, how do we send traffic to Starbucks or McDonald’s or any other offline merchant?” Rampell said. “We already have access to people online who are buying or thinking about buying something. It would be great if we could could give you 20 virtual coins if you shopped at McDonald’s. But how do we close that redemption loop?”

Today, TrialPay, which has 130 employees, reaches more than 70 million monthly active users worldwide. In 2011, Rampell said, revenues more than doubled; he declined to offer specifics.

Rampell also declined to provide details about potential partnerships with Visa. Visa also declined to comment.

Investors in the company’s fourth round included new investors Greylock Partners, Visa Inc., T. Rowe Price, DAG Ventures, DFJ Growth and QuestMark Partners. Existing investors also participated. To date, it has raised roughly $70 million.

For more of Rampell’s opinions on how the payments space will evolve, check out his Web 2.0 speech from October:

Take Reiss Innovations, for example.

Six years ago, owner Ken Reiss was selling five to 10 mouse pads a year through Amazon. Flash forward to 2011, Reiss increased the number of products he sells by 50 percent compared to last year and expanded into Canada.

In many ways, Amazon is a giant built on the backs of millions of individuals.

Or at least that’s the message the Amazon wants you to hear this morning.

Along with a laundry list of holiday announcements, it said its third-party sellers reported record growth this Christmas season. This year, nearly 40 percent of products purchased by Amazon customers were sold by more than two million independent sellers of all sizes.

But it’s hard to read the story of Reiss Innovations and others in the press release and not think “damage control.”

Earlier this month, Amazon faced a flurry of criticism after launching a promotion that would give consumers $5 off if they compared prices using Amazon’s mobile phone application in the store.

The one-day promotion served as a way for Amazon to increase usage of its Price Check application, while also collecting intelligence on prices in the stores. Consumers received the discount if they bought the item using their phone.

Small and large retailers, which worried that their stores would only become showrooms, called the move anti-competitive. Meanwhile, consumers pledged to buy locally and created Facebook pages in opposition and petitions asking Amazon to end the one-day promotion. In addition, eBay offered consumers $10 to walk back into the stores.

In this morning’s press release, Amazon also mentioned Scharf Industries, an office and electronics provider, that reported a sales increase of more than 500 percent this holiday season compared to last year.

Other third-party successes Amazon pointed to:

• Sellers sold enough cameras for every fan at the next 10 Super Bowls.
• Sellers sold enough toys to give one to every resident of Chicago.

It did not mention third-party sellers in last year’s press release, but it did mention how many times its Price Check application was used — a fact that was surreptitiously left out of this year.

To be sure, Amazon’s services give these retailers access to millions of consumers they may not ordinarily reach. But these retailers pay dearly for the opportunity.

Prices vary widely based on the services being provided and the product being sold, but as an example, a $10 book would glean a proceed of $6.42. Meanwhile, a $200 camera would garner $182.37. In these scenarios, Amazon is also offering fulfillment services, which means it will store, pack and ship orders from its warehouses as soon as an item is purchased online. That results in an additional fee, of course.

If Amazon’s promotion did motivate people to shop locally instead of buying online, it’s really not obvious.

ComScore reports that online shopping this holiday season was up 15 percent compared to a year ago and Wall Street analysts are expecting Amazon’s fourth-quarter revenues to be up at least 38 percent year over year.

The wireless company said on its Web site earlier today that the fee will go toward costs incurred by processing individual online or phone payments — in other words, actual customer service representatives handling telephone transactions.

Verizon did not immediately respond to a request for comment, or to an inquiry about how many of its customers currently pay their bills online or over the phone.

One fed-up user has already launched a fledgling petition drive aimed at getting Verizon to reverse course.

Sprint does not currently charge its customers to pay bills online, though it notes, as other wireless providers do, that if you pay through your bank, you could incur charges from that financial institution. AT&T also doesn’t charge customers for monthly online bill payments, nor does T-Mobile, though T-Mobile notes that certain types of accounts, such as T-Mobile Monthly4G (prepaid) and certain business and government accounts, aren’t eligible for paperless payment. T-Mobile customers are actually encouraged to make online payments, as they’re charged a $5 processing fee for payments made over the phone through a customer service representative.

(Image courtesy of EMay78/Flickr)

This time it’s GoGo Inc., maker of GoGo Inflight Internet service, which you’ve probably used at some point if you’ve ever accessed Wi-Fi during a flight.

The company is filing for an initial public offering that could raise as much as $100 million.

GoGo’s S-1 doesn’t say how many shares it plans to sell or at what price. But it does plan to trade under the stock symbol — you guessed it — GOGO.

There are currently 1,177 commercial airplanes offering Internet access through GoGo: That’s about 85 percent of North America’s Internet-enabled commercial aircraft.

According to the filing, GoGo’s consolidated revenue increased to $113.8 million from $60.1 million, a year-over-year increase of 89.3 percent in the nine-month period ending in September. Despite increasing revenue, the company still lost $25.8 million in the first nine months of 2011.

A large portion of GoGo’s revenue comes from its customers in the business aviation market, for which it provides both broadband connectivity and satellite-based communications systems. GoGo’s business aviation arm has sold approximately 6,000 ATG and satellite-based communications systems for private planes and has signed agreements with all of the largest fractional jet operators, according to the filing.

On the the commercial side, the company cites the emergence of the “connected lifestyle” for consumers, coupled with the projected growth of the worldwide travel market, as evidence of demand for its in-flight product. In 2010, there were approximately 2.7 billion scheduled passengers on commercial aircraft worldwide, with 630 million in the U.S. According to the International Air Transport Association (IATA), the number of passengers worldwide is expected to grow to nearly 3 billion by 2012.

GoGo plans to expand internationally and to penetrate even more of the business aviation market, with the number of business jets in the North American and global business markets expected to grow by 8.3 percent and 16.7 percent, respectively, by 2015.

One of Gogo’s biggest risks is its dependence on partnerships with North American airline fleets for about half of its consolidated revenue. Approximately 45 percent of its commercial airline revenue — generated within a nine-month period ending September 30, 2011 — was acquired through Delta Air Lines; approximately 18 percent came via GoGo’s partnership with American Airlines, whose parent company, AMR Corp., recently filed for bankruptcy.

The company also cites as risks the increasing demand for in-flight WiFi, and the possible incapacity to meet that demand, as well as the need to keep up with rapidly advancing technologies in network infrastructure.

Low on the risk list, though still worth noting, is that in June of 2006, Gogo purchased at auction a $31 million, exclusive 10-year license for three megahertz, air-to-ground spectrum, outbidding at the time JetBlue LiveTV LLC and a company called Space Data Spectrum Holdings. GoGo expects to renew that license, but the FCC could, in the future, decide to auction additional spectrum for ATG use that is not currently designated for that purpose.

Illinois-based GoGo Inc. was originally incorporated in Texas in June of 1991 as Aircell Inc., and later became Aircell Holdings Inc. On June 15 of this year, Aircell Holdings Inc. officially changed its name to Gogo Inc.

Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, UBS, Allen & Company, Evercore Partners and William Blair & Company are listed as the underwriters on the IPO filing.

While online donations account for only 7.6% of total charitable giving, according to Blackbaud’s 2010 Online Giving Report, it is the fastest-growing segment, increasing 40% in 2010 from the year before, according to a report from fund-raising software provider Convio.

That has helped juice the growth of online “giving platforms” with names like CauseVox, Razoo, Network for Good and GlobalGiving. These websites — some nonprofit and some for-profit — serve as gateways, making it easier for donors to give money and offering additional services such as website design and campaign promotion.

But those extras come with a price.

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One app maker is aiming to better that ordering process — by allowing customers to see in real time when a restaurant is running out of food or changing the menu.

Snapfinger, an Atlanta-based start-up that powers the online and mobile ordering of nationwide chains like Subway, Outback, California Pizza Kitchen and Boston Market, is updating its service so that it can be fully integrated into point-of-sale computer systems in restaurants.

Thanks to a new version of the app that is meant to serve — get it? serve? — both the restaurant employees and the customer who’s ordering the food from blocks away, the customer can now see menu changes and updates as the restaurant staff is entering them. So if there’s a special on the menu that night, the at-home diner can see it just as the people dining inside the restaurant can — and when the special runs out, the online or mobile menu will reflect that, too.

“We’ve realized that point-of-sale integration is crucial. As mobile ordering into restaurants gains momentum, the whole customer experience is really going to be dependent on systems like these,” Snapfinger’s CEO Jim Garrett said. He added that it is Snapfinger’s goal to be the “OpenTable of food ordering,” citing the popular reservation-making service that factors in available tables in real time as reservations are being made. Snapfinger currently powers online and mobile ordering for about 12,000 restaurants in the U.S.

Version 4.0 of the app, which is free, runs on iOS and Android devices. It also includes a map that gives directions to takeout restaurants, along with mobile prepayment features and the ability to have digital receipts sent to users’ iPhones and iPads.

While Snapfinger is spicing up its service — according to Garrett, it accounts for 70 percent of all U.S. restaurant-ordering applications — it still faces formidable competition from growing services like Seamless and GrubHub. Both sites have made acquisitions in recent months to expand their reach — Seamless bought MenuPages, which claims 35,000 menus in its database, while GrubHub acquired Dotmenu, which caters to college campus crowds and boosted GrubHub’s menu database significantly.

Garrett pointed out that both of those services are focused mainly on local markets in various cities, while Snapfinger has a foothold in big, nationwide restaurant chains and also serves as a white-label app.

Still, in recognizing the growing importance of the local market, Garrett said Snapfinger also plans to try to get more local restaurants to use Snapfinger in the coming year.

There is a very cathartic crisis that’s gone on, and it’s not clear where it’s going to go. But at least everyone knows things are rotten. We’re in a much better place than when things were rotten and everyone thought things were great.

Facebook investor and futurist Peter Thiel, profiled in the New Yorker (article only available online to subscribers)

Helping to achieve these records were nearly magical online and mobile presales that took place in the 45-days leading up to its debut.

Comcast-owned Fandango, which sells tickets online and through mobile applications to more than 16,000 screens, reports it sold more midnight and early morning show tickets for “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2”’ than it did for the late night openings of any other movie (including “The Dark Knight” and “Twilight”‘s “New Moon”).

It said many of the sales were for screenings starting at midnight, and that in total, more than 6,000 showtimes sold out on Fandango between midnight and the wee hours of the morning.

In all, the movie represented 93 percent of the day’s total ticket sales from its site.

Fandango charges a service fee of $1.25 for each ticket sold, but it’s difficult to say how much it would have grossed from the movie since a spokesperson declined to say how many individual tickets the 6,000 showtimes represented.

Fandango’s closest competitor MovieTickets.com also reported strong sales, reports MovieCityNews.com. As of Wednesday, it had sold more tickets for “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2″ than any other movie released in 2011 — and that sales exceeded all ticket sales for “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.”

Variety is reporting that as of 1 pm Pacific time on Friday, the movie had already collected $24 million in domestic day-time sales, putting it on pace to break the record currently being held by “The Dark Knight.” That’s in addition to the $43.5 million in midnight sales.

If the pace continues, it may garner $80 million, which would far exceed Dark Knight’s $$67.2 million in opening day receipts.

Beginning in August, players will no longer have to spend $10 a month in order to enter Lego Universe. Now they can play for as long as they like before deciding whether to subscribe. The game is also becoming a digital download, so players will no longer need to buy a DVD.

By lifting these barriers, Lego is hoping that more players will get introduced to the game and therefore more will end up paying over the long run, much like games found on Facebook or other virtual worlds, like World of Warcraft. Lego has been very successful at building videogames on other platforms, like Nintendo, but most have been for a substantial upfront fee.

Lego says that “thousands of players” have played Lego Universe since it launched in October 2010.

Lego says it has no current plans for microtransactions and will stick to its tiered subscription model, which starts at $10 a month. Nonpaying players will have access to two adventure zones and the ability to build Lego models on one property. Full members will have access to all areas in the game and be able to compete and participate in community events.

Photo Credit: Christopher Vigliotti

But a lot of the details were still unknown after Nintendo’s press conference yesterday, leaving a lot to the imagination on how a tablet-based game controller will change console gaming.

At a joint press conference between Nintendo and Ubisoft, a French-based games publisher, the two companies demonstrated how a touchscreen can be used to interact with a game on the TV and how it will be connected online to make the platform more social.

Nintendo’s President Satoru Iwata kicked off the event by saying, “I have come here today to introduce you to the most important partner for Nintendo.”

Ubisoft presented two of the five games it has under development, including one of Ubisoft’s long-standing brands, Ghost Recon, and an all new first-person alien shooter called Killer Freaks from Outer Space. It also said Assassin’s Creed was coming.

For now, it appears the most obvious role for a touchscreen controller is to serve as a second window into the game.

In Ghost Recon, the player with the Wii U controller can fly a drone overhead to spot enemies and allies on the battlefield. In Killer Freaks, Ubisoft calls the alternate view “immersion controlling,” where you can move the tablet to the left and right to see from where the enemies are attacking.

Of course, if your arms or neck gets tired, you can revert back to normal game play using the buttons.

In addition to providing different views, the tablet can also enable new types of game play. In a demo in Killer Freaks, for example, they called the new approach a shooter vs. strategy game.

The player with the Wii U remote gets to be the strategist or mastermind behind the game, by picking and choosing where the monsters will attack.

The other players, who have only a normal Wii remote, will have to kill the aliens wherever they land.

Besides the console’s new remote, other big questions remain about how Wii U will connect to the Internet and offer digital and social components like those provided by Xbox Live and PlayStation’s network. Apple also announced today how its Apple TV product will connect to the iPad to create a gaming platform.

Yves Guillemot, the CEO of Ubisoft, said in his opening remarks that he sees social gaming as the future.

As part of that, Ubisoft demonstrated how the tablet will allow users to be “always on” and create “persistent characters.”

For example, if the TV is off or you are watching a show, you can track friends and achievements in Ghost Recon and decide based on what the tablet is telling you when an appropriate time to join your friends online is.

“These are the two big game changers that we believe the tiny connected screen will bring to the gaming world,” said Hugues Ricour, Ubisoft’s senior producer.

More From E3

• At E3, Xbox Lets Kinect Lead the Charge on Gaming, Live TV Ambitions
• Justin.tv Broadcasts Gamers’ Every Move on TwitchTV
• Who Needs War? Sparks Will Fly in EA’s New Sims Game for Facebook.
• Sony Unveils Vita Gaming Device at E3; Will Launch This Year for $249
• E3: Nintendo Unveils the Wii U With Tablet-Style Controller
• Three Key Takeaways From Nintendo’s Wii U (Plus Photos!)
• No Hacks to Report at Xbox, But Microsoft Isn’t Letting Its Guard Down
• Forget About 99 Cents, What If You Could Rent Mobile Games for 25 Cents?
• Digital Game Revenues Hit $5.9 Billion in 2010

It argued that instead of creating hits that are sold on store shelves for videogame consoles, the Redwood City, Calif.-based company wants to take popular franchises, like Madden or Need for Speed, and digitally distribute them across a number of platforms, such as mobile, social and PC, to create recurring revenue streams.

Riccitiello was unwavering in his commitment:

“The consumer has changed. 200 million console players have become 1.5 billion consumers gaming on multiple devices,” he said. “Today, we are a very different company….From here, it is about building a better, more predictable, and more profitable business, a business that is less dependent on individual hits and more deeply anchored in the ongoing monetization of game franchises.”

But the big question is whether EA can turn the ship when there are 8,000 employees on it who are used to doing business the old way.

Habits are hard to break, especially when it requires replacing a controller with a mouse or a touchscreen. In the meantime, some of its more nimble competitors are getting most of the credit as the industry shifts to digital.

For example, earlier this year, we watched as the private market valuation of Zynga–EA’s much smaller and younger competitor–exceeded EA’s public market valuation. Zynga was reportedly worth between $7 and $9 billion, while EA was valued at roughly $6 billion.

Today, EA’s market cap stands at about $7.25 billion.

Zynga, which makes such Facebook games as FarmVille and CityVille and has dabbled in mobile games, reportedly had revenues of $850 million in 2010. In comparison, EA’s digital revenues totaled $833 million for its fiscal year 2011. (Meanwhile, its overall revenues totaled much more, or $3.6 billion.)

Still, smaller competitors, such as Zynga, which strictly make money from digital revenues, are viewed as not having a lot of baggage and can go hard after something new without sacrificing the old.

Just last week, there was a sign that EA wasn’t winning that battle–even internally.

Electronic Arts disclosed that its COO John Schappert resigned. Rumors indicated that he was joining Zynga, although Zynga has not confirmed the appointment.

Despite that potential set-back, and EA’s public perception, it has been trying.

It has been on an acquisition spree for the past couple of years, picking up everything from Playfish, a social-games developer, to Chillingo, a mobile-games publisher. Earlier this week, it bought a small mobile-games studio called Firemint. (Of course, those investments also become a curse because they have to start paying off.)

Beyond acquisitions, it has also re-prioritized the work it was doing.

On the call, Riccitiello said that involved paring back the number of titles it was making from roughly 70 to around 20. While that was something of a defensive move, he said they are now shifting to offense, by picking the game franchises they do decide to build and porting them across several platforms to increase their profitability. “Over the coming years, we will transform EA from a packaged goods company to a fully integrated digital entertainment company.”

He calls it the “games-as-a-service” model, which is comparable to the software industry switching from a licensed packaged goods model to SAAS, or software as a service, several years ago.

Under this philosophy, he said, they will rely on intellectual property and strong brands, such as EA sports and Hasbro, and build out a platform of registered users that can be marketed to (in Q4, it had 112 million users, roughly twice as many from a year ago). It’s also making managers experts across mobile, social and console, rather than making silos for each category.

“It’s a big change,” Riccitiello said. “As an investor, you can see this as a way to better manage our IP, and drive up the ARPU for our core properties.”

At least one analyst was reluctant to believe the transformation could take place. How does Riccitiello plan to get everyone on board?

“If only you could spend a couple of weeks with us,” Riccitiello joked.

His more serious answer was that they’ve spent the past three years conducting a managerial change: “We’ve identified intellectual property owners inside of our company, and we’re sort of organizing around that.” Those individuals are charged with plans that involve console, PC, mobile, social and a variety of business models, including microtransactions and subscriptions.

The change will be relatively slow. This year the company is projecting digital revenues to total $1 billion, increasing roughly 20 percent over 2011.

And despite all of its efforts, the company will face other challenges, including some that are out of its control. For instance, the company’s EA Sports business is facing two potential league lockouts and this year there won’t be a FIFA World Cup title. Those three things represent roughly a $250 million revenue gap.

It’s also launching its biggest launch campaign for a game in EA’s history for Battlefield 3, and it’s unclear when the highly anticipated launch of Star Wars, an online multi-player game, will occur. Depending on when it is ready, EA’s earnings per share could fluctuate by 15 cents.

Overall, at least some people were sold on the picture Riccitiello painted.

The company’s stock increased a modest $1.76 a share yesterday, or roughly 8.8 percent, to close at $21.68. And Piper Jaffray analysts raised their price target on EA’s shares from $19.50 to $25.00.

Madden, who shares no relation to EA’s top-selling NFL title, was most recently WildTangent’s EVP of sales and marketing. In his new role, he will head up advertising across all of EA’s properties, including console, online, mobile and social gaming.

“There’s a lot of free content being monetized through in-game transactions. That’s the perfect playground for advertisers to add value,” he said.

At EA, his focus will be on figuring out a way for advertisers to easily participate in a way that scales–across all the various platforms–and leverages their video and other Flash assets.

Madden, who continues to own stock in Redmond, Wash.-based WildTangent, said his decision to leave was the next logical move for his career. He will now be based in Los Angeles. The Global Marketing team has 50 employees.

In his absence, WildTangent, which operates a game platform on PCs, has promoted Bill Clifford to the position of SVP and general manager of WildTangent Media.

Earlier this week, the online game industry got a jolt of attention after Myspace co-founder and former CEO Chris DeWolfe doubled down his investments in the game space. After purchasing MindJolt in early 2010, DeWolfe acquired two more companies this week: SGN, a developer and publisher of social mobile games; and Hallpass Media, a popular free online game network.

Given all the scuttlebutt, here’s the official list of the top 10 online game properties ranked by unique visitors in March, according to comScore.

In first place is Spil Games, the Netherlands-based company that has localized its games around the world. It continues to dominate the charts, attracting nearly 50 million unique visitors last month to its various girl-, teen- and family-focused properties. In second place is GSN Games, a company owned by DIRECTV and Sony Pictures Entertainment, and in third and fourth places, respectively, are well-known players like Electronic Arts and WildTangent.

But Hi5, the former social network that is trying desperately hard to remake itself into a game destination by luring over popular games from Facebook is a surprise at sixth place.

In fact, this marks the company’s debut appearance.

Hi5 put out the list today to make the assertion that the transformation has been a success. Well, sort of. Truthfully, this marks the first time comScore categorized the company as a game network instead of a social network. Still, with 21.7 million unique visitors, it leap-frogged other well-known properties, such as Nickelodeon, Yahoo and MSN.

Here’s the chart:

Photo credit: Wallyg

The first round of funding was led by Seattle’s Madrona Venture Group, known for its early investment in Amazon.com.

The small Vancouver, B.C.-based company was started in 2007 when two college students, Kyle Vucko and Heikal Gani, went hunting for a good suit. After being struck by the difficulties of sorting through the options, ranging from Hugo Boss to Men’s Wearhouse, the two college students determined that there must be a better way.

That’s when the idea for Indochino was formed.

He and his partner bought one-way tickets to Shanghai and identified home tailors who could sew a suit in 48 hours and ship it to the U.S. in two to three weeks–all for $300 to $500.

Three years later, Vucko spends a lot of time in a suit.

“It’s an occupational hazard. I’m from the West Coast, which is not a huge suit-wearing culture. I grew up wearing Birkenstocks,” said Vucko, 25, who dropped out of University of Victoria during his final year to start the company.

But now, there’s no turning back.

The company has 35 employees, has developed a significant supply chain (rather than the mom and pop tailors) and has offices in B.C. and Shanghai. It has 17,000-plus clients in 60 countries, and revenues have cracked seven figures with 200 to 300 percent annual growth.

The idea is fairly simple. Teach men how to take their own measurements via step-by-step videos. Let them order online from a number of selections. Ship the suit within three weeks. As incentive, it is sending out free tape measures for a limited time to people who follow them on Twitter and send a Tweet about Indochino.

If it doesn’t fit, there are three options: take it to a local tailor and they’ll refund you the cost to fix it, they’ll remake it, or you can return the suit and get your money back.

“We generally keep every customer that we get. The second suit is click, buy and repeat. From a business perspective, that’s where you make all of your money and margin. From a guy’s perspective, it saves them time and money. You don’t have to go back to the store. Buying online is faster than what it takes to go to a mall,” Vucko said.

Bonobos, which raised $18.5 million recently, is in a somewhat similar niche, although it doesn’t offer tailored clothing, just better fitting clothes. It’s also in the same vein as Milk & Honey, which ships custom high heels to women, or Gemvara, which claims to make user-generated jewelry and recently raised $15 million.

The company could announce the effort as early as Tuesday, the people said.

Amazon is still working out key legal issues related to the service, these people added. Most notably, Amazon has yet to secure content licenses from at least some major record labels and movie studios.

The online retailer appears to be racing Apple Inc. and Google Inc., both of which are also working on similar offerings, known as “locker” or “cloud” services. Such services create an online music or video collection identical to the one on a user’s computer hard drive, then let the user access the collection from elsewhere.

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Founded in 1999, the Salt Lake City company offers a wide variety of merchandise, ranging from bedding and home decor to appliances and sporting goods–at discounted prices.

But with a little bit of marketing polish, the practice has become a new, chic burgeoning industry.

A discount center conjures up imagines of large warehouses with cement floors full of unsold items. A flash sales deal, however, leads you believe you’ve found a pair of designer jeans for half off after sifting through dozens of boutiques on Rodeo Drive.

With that in mind, a micro industry of flash sales sites has been born.

The Gilt Groupe, HauteLook, One Kings Lane, Rue La La and Jackthreads all have their own niche, focusing on curating clothing for women or men, or furniture and home decor.

One big question is, is there enough inventory to sustain it all?

“It’s the dirty little secret in manufacturing,” said Overstock’s CEO Patrick Byrne. “The answer is that there is far more than you can possibly think. A company will say they don’t have overstock, but if you talk to the CFO, they will ask, ‘what can you truck away?’ The world is filled with excess inventory and is looking for channels to get rid of it.”

But just because the inventory is there, Byrne doesn’t believe they can all survive.

“We think the world only needs one pipeline, and we’ve built the one pipeline to do that,” he said. “The suppliers are better off with one big pipeline. If one pipeline emerges, where all the liquidation gets done, there will be price integrity in the rest of their marketplace. It’s our aspiration to be that one thick pipeline.”

On average, he said Overstock’s inventory is about 60 percent off the manufacturer’s recommended price. He said, general retail stores sell items for an average of 15 percent off and Walmart is even more heavily discounted at 30 to 40 percent off. Sites like Amazon.com, are normally somewhere in between, and flash sales generally claim discounts of 50 to 70 percent.

About a year ago, Overstock jumped on the bandwagon to launch Eziba.com, which focuses on selling a small number of items, ranging from furniture to jewelry, at heavily discounted prices via a daily email.

Eziba has the boutique look, with large photos of the products and colors bleeding off the page. That’s in sharp contrast to Overstock’s more straight-forward layout that stresses searching and browsing for items that are displayed in small thumbnail pictures.

Byrne said one of the big differences between items sold on Eziba and those sold on Overstock is the amount of inventory in stock.

Items on Eziba may have up to 5,000 on the virtual shelves, whereas products sold on Overstock have only a couple of hundred left.  Another difference is that there’s only a dozen or so items for sale on Eziba at any given time, while Overstock’s inventory spans 300,000 items (not including books and movies).

One of the big differences between Eziba and the competition is that it’s able to leverage Overstock’s infrastructure.

For instance, Eziba customers get the same customer service as Overstock and have the same flat-rate shipping of $2.99 an order.

So far, Byrne says the introduction of other sites has not affected the company’s business.

“It’s like swimming around in Lake Michigan and asking did you bump into each other. The world is so much bigger than anyone gets. It’s so enormous,” he said.

Overstock has been steadily growing over the years.

In 1999, the company recorded revenues of $1.8 million, and last year, revenues totaled $1.1 billion. Still, it’s a microcosm of the super-large e-commerce world. The company’s stock is trading at $14.31 a share for a market cap of $333.4 million. In contrast, Amazon’s is valued at around $75 billion, and eBay is worth $40 billion.

Generally, Byrne categorizes the company as a nice profitable company that has built a very solid foundation over the past few years.

He said the recent stability, compared to the start-up years, gives him the chance to experiment with new lines of business. ”We are very agile. We can develop new things really quickly and snap them into the platform we’ve built.”

In addition to Eziba, the company also runs Worldstock, a site that helps artisans from around the world sell their crafts online. Byrne made the recent decision to give all of its profits to a charity that’s focused on helping build classrooms in developing countries around the world.

It’s also recently launched Main Street Revolution, which helps small business around the U.S. sell their goods online, ranging from children’s clothing to specialty home-made cookies.

The company’s latest endeavor includes experimenting with a significant rebranding of the Web site.

In January, it introduced the domain name O.CO, which is a shortcut to its regular Web site. During an initial introductory period, customers who shop at O.CO will receive free shipping.

Byrne said the reason behind the name is to have a more recognizable brand across the 90 countries it operates in. While the domain name will change permanently internationally, the company is only experimenting with the name domestically.

HomeAway says it operates the world’s largest online marketplace for vacation rentals, with 31 sites in 11 languages, according to documents filed with the SEC today.

The company represents the third Internet company to file recently for an IPO, following Pandora and LinkedIn. HomeAway will trade under the ticker AWAY.

Over the past three years, the company reports, it has not once made a profit.

In 2010, it lost $18.3 million on revenues of $167.9 million. A year earlier, it lost $25.8 million on revenues of $120 million. Both years, the company paid out more than $30 million in preferred stock dividends.

If those payments are excluded, along with other expenses, it said, earnings before income, taxes, depreciation and amortization would have totaled $43 million in 2010.

Over the past five years, the company has expanded aggressively through almost a dozen acquisitions in various countries, spending about $377 million in cash and stock. Within a five-year period, HomeAway itself was able to raise $404.3 million in equity, plus an additional $110.5 million in debt.

Its big coming out party was an ad during the Super Bowl, although that fell a little bit flat when the company was forced to pull its commercial after drawing criticism for featuring a smushed baby. In the ad, a doll was thrown against a wall to demonstrate how cramped hotel rooms can be compared to more spacious rental houses.

The company intends to use the proceeds from the offering to pay $63.3 million in redeemable preferred stock and $29 million in unpaid dividends, with the remainder to go to working capital, including the acquisition of other businesses.

Morgan Stanley & Co., Deutsche Bank Securities, Goldman, Sachs & Co. and J.P. Morgan Securities will serve as the underwriters proposed offering. Stifel, Nicolaus & Company and Needham & Company will act as co-managers.

One indicator is the sales of prepaid gaming cards that are purchased at Walmart, Target, 7-11 and many other retailers.

While the game cards are typically purchased in person, they can be used for a range of things, from buying virtual goods within FarmVille  to buying a game that’s digitally delivered over the internet via Xbox Live.

Today, NPD released industry sales figures for February today, reporting that prepaid game cards now account for 22 percent of all accessories sold and that sales have increased 52 percent compared to a year-ago.

Meanwhile, in the same time period console software sales only increased by 2 percent.

NPD’s Analyst Anita Frazier said the jump in game card sales points to the increased importance of digitally distributed content sales within the games industry, and that last month marked the best February on record for accessory sales.

The top-selling item was the Xbox 360 1,600 points card.

Overall, NPD reported that physical retail channel in the U.S. generated video game hardware sales in February of $467 million, increasing 10 percent. Video game software, including console and portable totaled $601.4 million, dropping 5 percent, and video game accessories totaled $257 million, increasing 22 percent.

To that end, Adobe is unveiling new features today that will enable marketers to monitor, measure and monetize platforms, where consumers are having conversations about their products and brands.

As an example, Aseem Chandra, VP of Marketing for Adobe’s Omniture Business Unit, said the product will be able to alert a company to a spike in traffic on Twitter, and track down the original source.

What they might find out is that Justin Bieber, who has nearly eight million followers, tweeted about his favorite jeans, which was read and spread by thousands of others on Twitter or Facebook.

With that information, the tools could then enable a brand to make decisions on future celebrity partnerships, or more likely, on what keywords to buy on Google.

Chandra said one reason it has gotten so difficult to see where the traffic is originating from is that a ton of activity is also coming from mobile devices, including the proliferation of tablets. “How do you measure that, and where does it originate from? You want to be able to correlate those two and encourage the behavior,” he said.

The new SocialAnalytics features, which are apart of Adobe’s Online Marketing Suite, is expected to be unveiled this morning at Adobe’s Omniture Summit in Salt Lake City. The tools track more than 40 different social networks and gather positive, neutral or negative sentiments. A beta was introduced last year, and since then 75 customers have been using the platform. The product will be available more widely in the third quarter.

Chandra said the past year has shown them how important social media is to media, entertainment and e-commerce companies.

“Everything we do as consumers and professionals is informed by social. That’s going to stay regardless. The conversation we are having with CMOs is that they see that, and are asking us how do I make the important decisions around their business, marketing programs and campaigns? …There’s a lot of activity and it’s well deserved.”

On April 2, the free online game will be unveiled, marking the culmination of two and a half years of development. It represents a significant undertaking for the network.

Kyra Reppen, SVP and general manager of Nickelodeon’s Virtual Worlds Group, who was showing off the game at GDC last week, declined to quantify the investment, but said it will be heavily promoted, much like a new TV show.

Monkey Quest is comparable to other so-called massively multiplayer games, such as the insanely popular World of Warcraft, which has roughly 12 million subscribers.

Except for that it is cute and cuddly, and something even parents can approve of.

“What we did was take the big adult games and adapt them for kids, which is something you don’t see very often,” Reppen said.

That doesn’t mean they cut any corners.

While it runs in a PC’s browser, it has the quality look and feel of a console game, thanks to a development platform company called Unity, which has been the basis for a lot of other high-quality games.

Monkey Quest takes place in the World of Ook. It spans a vast territory that encompasses five different tribes, which are connected by a network of highways. Initially, there will be 50 levels for players to achieve, but new content will be added daily.

Even after the game launches, the Nickelodeon team will be busy adding missions, characters and other tribes–indefinitely.

In the game, each player creates an avatar monkey that can be customized. Even without a lot of work, the monkeys are very animated and have kid-friendly attributes, like the ability to burp, or take a nap if they aren’t being very active.

Challenges include fighting monsters, or venturing into volcanoes, where they may meet Maurice the Gorilla, a friendly giant that enjoys roasting marshmallows. Players never fight one another, and even when shooting monsters, they use silly guns like the Kernal Blaster, which is an ear of corn. The monkeys are also rewarded with bananas for completing tasks.

The game is targeting 8 to 12 year olds, and keeps things safe by limiting what can be said. Players are never allowed to know each other’s real names, and some phrases are filtered out of text-based conversations automatically. Nickelodeon monitors conversations around the clock, and parents can even choose to limit chats to a handful of canned phrases, like “do you want to trade x for y.”

Still, they find that doesn’t keep kids from interacting with one another.

While the game is in beta, they are noticing that a lot of the players are learning how to interact with one another through gestures. For instance if a monkey squats down and puts his hands above his heads, it implies that it is offering to give another monkey a boost up to a higher ledge. If you give someone a boost, it’s only proper etiquette to reciprocate.

Like many social games today, the game is free, and users never have to pay if they don’t want to.

But there’s two premium offers to entice kids. Subscriptions will cost $9.95 a month, or users can choose to pay as they go, by buying Nick Cash. Parents can enter their credit card online, or they can buy game cards in 40,000 retail locations through a partnership with InComm. Players who pay have access to additional content, including premium missions and items for your avatar.

The idea for Monkey Quest is an evolution from Nickelodeon’s roots in the gaming space, starting with Neopets, which Viacom purchased almost six years ago.

Neopets, which launched 11 years ago, allowed kids to take care of virtual pets, by buying them food, toys and clothes. Similarly, users had to purchase virtual currency to play.

The estimates were released today by BIA/Kelsey, but seem conservative given some of the official figures known about the largest players in the space.

For instance, Groupon turned down a $6 billion offer from Google late last year, and then raised nearly $1 billion in venture capital.

Groupon also recently disclosed in an internal memo that it saw its revenue surge to $760 million last year from $33 million the previous year (although more than a third of its 2010 sales came from outside the U.S.).

But that’s only Groupon.

The No. 2 player in the space, LivingSocial, which raised $175 million from Amazon.com, said it was booking revenues of more than $1 million a day and is projected to record well over $500 million in revenue in 2011.

Both companies are well-positioned with nearly 200 other players trying to get into the space, and as of March 1, deals were being offered in 178 cities, reaching 102 million people, according to the research firm, which is hosting an event on the topic later this month in Boston.

The daily deal providers operate by building large local sales forces that negotiate deals on services and products at roughly 50 percent off. Customers then purchase the vouchers in advance, and the companies keep about half of the revenues from the sale.

BIA/Kelsey said its revenue expectations factor in that the novelty of these group-buying discounts will fade and e-mail open rates will fall as time passes. In its most optimistic scenario, U.S. revenues could hit as much as $6.1 billion in 2015.