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Today’s consumers have a world’s worth of information at their fingertips, anytime, anywhere. As of February 2012, half of mobile phone users have smartphones, and they’re accustomed to answering any question they have with a quick Google search or a barcode scan.

The information age has created some new challenges for retailers. To begin with, it’s now incredibly simple for a customer with a mobile phone to walk into an electronics store and scan the TV or camera she’s thinking about purchasing to do an instant price comparison against other brick-and-mortar or online retailers. This kind of behavior change is disruptive to retailers, and is forcing them to rethink their policies and business practices.

Millennial shoppers used to information on demand, and more globally aware than their parents and grandparents, expect greater variety and better quality, and they care about where their goods came from and how they affect the world. They want to know — or at least feel entitled to know — who stitched together their sneakers, whether the farmer who grew their coffee was fairly paid and the size of their potato chips’ carbon footprint.

For retailers in the grocery sector, demands for transparency are triggering bigger conversations. Take Proposition 37 in California — a bill that would have forced food suppliers to label genetically modified foods. Food suppliers stood on both sides of the issue. Agricultural powerhouse Monsanto was one of the largest funders against it, arguing that the bill would force unnecessary labeling of perfectly safe, common foods — a kind of Scarlet Letter. Meanwhile, yogurt manufacturer Stonyfield Organic donated in support of the bill, calling for transparency and less ambiguity in labeling. The bill was ultimately defeated by a fairly small margin (53.1 to 46.9 percent), and the issue has not been put to bed. The trend (or perhaps it’s a pendulum swing?) toward transparency is inexorable.

Another challenge posed by today’s torrent of information is the increase in “noise” compared to the “signal.” Facts that are easy to digest and easy to find don’t always tell the whole story. “Food miles” are a vexing example. When thinking about the carbon footprint of food, our natural instinct is to assume that the fewer miles the food travels, the better. Sometimes this is true — but when you’re comparing, say, tomatoes grown in Mexico to tomatoes grown in a greenhouse in New Jersey, food miles alone don’t tell the whole story. The reality is the energy spent heating a greenhouse may outweigh the fuel spent transporting the field-grown tomatoes from Mexico. In fact, transportation typically makes up less than 15 percent of the carbon footprint of produce.

For all the challenges retailers face as they adjust to the new reality of a digital age, there are also some enormous opportunities for those willing to adapt. Today’s consumers may be more skeptical, but they’re also accessible in new ways and are looking for personalization. Retailers now have the opportunity to move beyond mailing weekly circulars full of coupons — they can share local, real-time promotions on Facebook. A grocery store that’s just received a shipment of unusually sweet, juicy pineapple now has the means to tell that store’s shoppers about it instantly. Feedback is “ripe” to be transformed too. Who today would bother walking back to a store with a tasteless watermelon or soggy bag of salad to complain? But scan it with a mobile phone to give feedback to the store and grower (and get an instant coupon) — that is not only simpler, but actually generates more useful information for the store and supplier.

Some retailers in the grocery industry are already moving in this direction. The Kroger family of stores, which includes Kroger, Fred Meyer and Ralphs, has taken a progressive approach to consumer engagement and transparency. It was the first retailer to let shoppers trace produce back to the farm via the Internet and mobile apps — telling shoppers where their fruits and vegetables came from. In addition to building customer loyalty, this increased connectivity allows Kroger, in the rare event of a food recall in a category, to let shoppers know more precisely which products were affected. Retailers are also experimenting with scanning tunnels that can read more complex barcodes — including capturing information about freshness of perishable items.

As we move forward, retailers will figure out how to embrace consumer engagement. Instead of maintaining one corporate social media page, we can expect to see a much more nuanced approach, with local stores creating individual profiles where they can interact with local shoppers (they just have to figure out how to staff them). Instead of running a print ad for strawberries a few weeks in advance of Valentine’s Day, they’ll be able to push a timely nudge to their shoppers when the berries are abundant and at peak sweetness. The knowledgeable and friendly family greengrocer of the 1950s will be re-imagined with a smart algorithm that can make sensible recommendations based on what’s good today — and what the shopper’s personal dietary preferences are. It’s a more responsive approach, and could profoundly change the supply and demand dynamics in place today that favor availability above all.

Longer term, over the next decade or so, stores that sell faster-moving goods will face the same turning point that electronics, book and clothing sellers reached in the last decade — with fast, richly personalized online shopping now available, what’s the role of a physical store? Could the experience be replicated or improved online? I remember when the idea of shoe shopping online sounded like the opening line of a joke, but Zappos changed all that with brilliant logistics and piercing consumer insight. The same can and will happen for the grocery sector. In 10 years, I think we can expect to see grocery stores that focus less on staples like cereal and paper towels, and more on seasonal, sensory, impulse purchases. Today, produce makes up about nine percent of retail grocery purchases and shelf space. In the future, as more people turn to the Internet for the bulk of their groceries, produce could make up more like a third.

Whatever the next decades bring, it’s not much of a prediction to say that technology will reshape retail. Stores that can experiment with transparency, increase personalization, eliminate waste and build trust will win the hearts and shopping baskets of the millennial generation.

Elliott Grant is the founder and Chief Technology Officer 
for YottaMark. He founded YottaMark with the vision that giving products a unique identity is the foundation for real-time supply chain insights and recall management, as well as a powerful platform for brand owners to create new consumer connections. Previously, Elliott was VP of Operations for a $250M food-packaging manufacturer and was an engagement manager at McKinsey & Company. He holds a PhD in Engineering from Cambridge University.

In what has become an annual holiday tradition, those who keep track of these things have started in on touting just how digital the holiday shopper has become, whipping out all manner of buzzwords to do so.

Last year, it was Cyber Monday — this year, it’s turned out to be Mobile Thursday. What’s next? Social Network Saturday? Self-Driving Car Sunday? (We still have Black Friday, by the way, which is today.)

And, indeed, the Mobile Thursday phrase got some big laps around the track, with numerous online shopping surveys — coming out faster than you can buy that new tablet — using it in their flash reports yesterday and today.

This year’s anecdotal meme: Apple iPads go well with pumpkin pie.

What isn’t said so much is that it is still a very small number — though fast-growing — over the last few years, with overall sales reaching $500 million for Thursday, compared to about $1.2 billion on Monday, according to comScore.

Still, for now, no one seems to break out actual mobile sales figures, which are clearly still a fraction of the totals. But they are more than happy to tell you that people are certainly browsing on their mobile devices, which should come as a surprise to exactly no one who is tired of talking to the relatives about three hours into the day.

According to IBM’s Benchmark report, for example, online sales were up 17.4 percent over 2011 on Thanksgiving Day, noting that “big winners were retailers who connected customers with personalized deals across multiple screens including PCs, smartphones and tablets.”

Some stats from IBM about Thursday:

Mobile Traffic: The number of consumers using a mobile device to visit a retailer’s site reached 25.3 percent, up from 66.2 percent over 2011.

Mobile Shopping: The number of consumers using their mobile device to make a purchase increased to 18.3 percent, up 65.3 percent from 2011.

Mobile Email: Smartphone and tablet shoppers responded to email deals from retailers, with emails opened on mobile devices jumping 23 percent on Thanksgiving Day over 2011.

Couch Commerce: In the evening hours, consumers shifted from shopping through their smartphones at the dinner table to buying through their iPad on the couch. At the end of the day the iPad drove more retail traffic than any other device with traffic reaching 10.7 percent versus the iPhone at 9.1 percent and Android at 5.8 percent.

Social Shopping: Shoppers referred from Social Networks such as Facebook and Twitter increased in evening hours generating .63 percent of all online sales on Thanksgiving.

And today, Black Friday, IBM slightly upped those figures, noting that the iPhone was the preferred device to bring into a store to shop with — presumably irritating sales clerks everywhere.

Over at Fab, CEO Jason Goldberg was touting in a Betashop blog post that his mobile app sales were 40 percent of the retail site’s total for the day. It’s usually 33 percent, so it’s a small jump, which Goldberg attributed to a tweet by Apple promoting it. But how much did he sell? He’s not saying.

And eBay said it launched 20 mobile-only e-commerce promotions over its app, as did many other retailers.

Also, no surprise, the New York Times weighed in with the classic trend piece: “The Shrewd Shopper Carries a Smartphone.” Um, everyone carries a smartphone now, but it apparently gets more magical when you take it to Macy’s.

We’ll see if Mobile Thursday becomes Mobile Holiday Season, which would be a big deal — but it’s winning so far in the pundit stakes.

Until we get actual numbers, here’s a chart about the whole thing from eBay:

The app, called Kapture, promises instant rewards in exchange for users taking photos of themselves along with a particular item in a store or a food dish in a restaurant.

After snapping the picture, the “kapturer” then has to share that picture with either Facebook or Twitter.

The rewards can range from a free juice to 15 percent off an item in a store to 10 percent off your total restaurant bill.

Kapture has been in beta mode for about a year now, but officially launches today on iPhone. It’s currently offering rewards in a few hundred locations in New York City.

There are some rules about the contents of the photos. Kapture founder and president Michael Szewczyk says the user has to take the photo in the designated restaurant or retail location. And a user can only capture one picture per brand, called a “moment,” every 24 hours, so you can’t pop into a store more than once.

In the age of smartphone-happy consumers and incessant photo-sharing, it’s an interesting idea — one that has been attempted before.

Last year, Zappos founder Nick Swinmurn launched a site called RNKD, with a very similar goal in mind: Get users to share photos of their favorite brands in exchange for rewards from those companies. Instead of requiring users to take photos in stores, they could share pictures of stuff in their closets.

But earlier this year, after minimal success, Swinmurn quietly shut down the site and turned his attention toward his newest project, a video “stitching” app called Threadlife.

In an interview, Swinmurn said there were challenges in getting the business to grow. Brands didn’t want to jump onboard until there was proof of a user base, and it was hard to incentivize users without the rewards. He also says he should have taken more of a mobile-first approach.

And the pictures themselves proved challenging. “The primary purpose of RNKD initially was to connect brands with loyal customers, and the pictures were really just a kind of verification,” Swinmurn said. “But it turns out the pictures weren’t nearly as pretty as an e-commerce site, or people just wouldn’t want to upload their stuff.”

Kapture has a leg up on the business side — Szewczyk says the merchant base is 300 and growing, and includes places like the Strand Bookstore, Vince Camuto, and Anthony Bourdain’s restaurant Les Halles.

But picture quality could prove something of a challenge, as it did with RNKD. And most brands don’t want profanity or other negative elements associated with their products.

Szewczyk says it’s not “anything goes” with Kapture photos: Pics will go through a vetting process, and repeat offenders will be flagged.

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 partnership is an obvious comeback to last weekend’s promotion by Amazon, which motivated consumers to browse in a retail store — but to walk out empty-handed.

EBay is now doubling the incentive to go back in and buy.

It will give consumers who spend $100 online a $10 voucher to spend at the same retailer’s store. The promotion goes live Friday morning and will run through Dec. 19, with three retailers participating — Toys “R” Us, Dick’s Sporting Goods and Aeropostale.

Many retailers objected to Amazon’s promotion, which gave shoppers up to $5 off if they scanned a bar code with its mobile application, and then purchased that item online.

Small and large retailers, which compete against Amazon and others, said the offer went too far. After all, Amazon already has the lower price because it does not charge sales tax in most states. Some smaller retailers turned it into a moral argument, asking consumers “to buy it where you try it.”

While it is Amazon’s goal to increase the amount of spending that occurs online, eBay has been working over the past couple of years to support a multichannel world, where consumers spend seamlessly between online, mobile and the physical world.

EBay is leaning heavily on several of its divisions to roll out the promotion.

To get the voucher, consumers will be required to spend $100 online, using a PayPal account. All three retailers involved are customers of GSI Commerce, the retail platform eBay purchased seven months ago for $2.4 billion. The promotion will also apply on eBay.com for Toys “R” Us, which lists its inventory there.

Like Amazon, eBay operates a mobile application, called Red Laser, which allows customers to scan bar codes in order to compare prices and buy online. But there’s one key difference — it also allows consumers to see where the product is available nearby. As an example, Toys “R” Us allows consumers to buy items within Red Laser and then pick them up in the store.

Watch for promotions from eBay and the retailers as soon as tomorrow morning.

(Image credit: ©iStockphoto.com/mbortolino)

Amazon’s promotion will give shoppers up to $5 off on most purchases made using its price-check application. The event serves as a way for Amazon to increase usage of its bar-code-scanning application, while also collecting intelligence on pricing in the stores.

Large and small retailers alike often consider Amazon one of their toughest competitors, but this time around they say the company’s initiative is a direct attack.

“It’s wrong to try something in the store and then buy it online,” said Lesley Tweedie, who owns a bike shop with her husband in Chicago and is hoping that the mantra “buy it where you try it” takes off.

Tweedie is also the founder of Little Independent, a six-month-old marketplace where local stores can feature products online.

“I don’t know what their [Amazon's] motivations are. I would like to believe it’s about business and it’s not about deliberately trying to hurt a retailer,” she said. “But this affects our little bike shop in Chicago, Target, Wal-Mart or Nordstrom. It affects them all.”

The promotion brings into question a shopper’s moral compass just in time for the holidays.

Does price or convenience win? Or, is it more important to shop locally to support jobs and nearby businesses?

From the consumer’s perspective, it’s hard to walk away from Amazon’s offer. The application compares prices, gives product reviews and, on Saturday, will also offer a discount to those who use it to make a purchase online.

Still, it seems consumers are becoming increasingly aware of the online-versus-local debate.

EBay recently conducted an online survey on the subject, and based on more than 1,000 responses, found that nearly 50 percent of shoppers plan to allocate up to half of their holiday budget to buying local this season. EBay says it tries to be an advocate for local stores. Its bar-code scanning app, Red Laser, not only shows people the cheapest price online, but also provides a list of stores where the item can be purchased locally.

Yesterday, the Retail Industry Leaders Association made a much less emotional argument.

Jason Brewer, the association’s VP of communications and advocacy, said Amazon is anticompetitive because it does not collect sales tax in most states, so it will nearly always have a price advantage over a physical store.

“Our retailers aren’t afraid to compete on price — that’s a part of retailing,” he said. “If the price check app replaces the Sunday newspaper circular, that’s fine. But what retailers can’t do is not collect sales tax.”

Tweedie says the one silver lining of Amazon’s promotion is that it is bringing the conversation out into the open.

She frequently catches people pulling out their phone in her store and often even hears them wonder out loud if they find it for less on Amazon. “It’s hard as a retailer without alienating the shopper. But they’ve never thought about it, and they aren’t trying to be rude. … What I think is so exciting is how many people are talking about this.”

Amazon will offer the discount on up to three qualifying products in eligible categories, including electronics, toys, music, sporting goods and DVDs, and is anticipating that Saturday will be one of the biggest days of the year for the application.

Amazon thanked users for their patience on its website and on Twitter, saying consumers who ordered “Born This Way” on Monday would get the full album for the promotional price. Lady Gaga, a Grammy-winning multiplatinum pop star, is known for her unusual sense of style as well as hits including “Just Dance” and “Poker Face.”

Amazon is buying “Born This Way” at the full wholesale price, around $9, from Lady Gaga’s recorded-music distributor, Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group, according to people familiar with the matter.

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The first promotion–kicking off at midnight–will give customers who buy an Android device from Verizon Wireless $25 to spend on applications from the Amazon Appstore.

The offer ties together Amazon’s wireless store, which sells a variety of phones for all the major wireless carriers, and its brand new Appstore, which is an independent catalog of apps for Google’s Android operating system.

It also leans on tight relationships Amazon has formed with carriers, said David Camp of Amazon Wireless.

The promotion will continue for a week, and is only valid on Android phones purchased by Verizon, including the new HTC Thunderbolt, which runs on its speedy 4G network.

The promotion is designed to give Amazon’s Appstore, which just launched last month, a boost. But it also hints at the company’s interest in Android and a broader strategy it could be pursuing.

So far, it’s unclear how well the storefront, which is accessible on the computer and the handset, has been received–and Amazon is not sharing download figures. But it has almost doubled the number of apps available for sale from to 7,500 from 3,800 over the past few weeks.

That’s despite the fact that the International Game Developers Association cautioned game-makers about Amazon’s strict pricing conditions. Downloads could also be soft due to the fact that AT&T has blocked users from being able to download third-party apps, including from Amazon’s Appstore, to Android devices. The U.S. storefront is available to users from T-Mobile, Verizon and Sprint.

So far, Amazon’s interest in the wireless industry has seemed a little scattered. However, this promotion starts to bring it into focus, and hints at how Amazon could weave together its strategies to drive sales to its own properties.

It also shows how important the retailer could be to Google.

Today, Camp says that Android devices are the best sellers on its storefront (the big caveat is that it doesn’t sell the iPhone).

Beyond its cellphone store at AmazonWireless.com and the digital Appstore, Amazon has also released a bevy of applications, including shopping portals, barcode scanners, Kindle apps for virtually every device and an MP3 store. More recently, it rolled out a Cloud Player, which allows people to store their music and other digital content in the cloud, making it accessible from both Android devices and an Internet-connected computer.

Monday’s promotion is just the start. “We will continue to do things like this in the future,” Camp added.

The concerts can be seen by checking out the “Live Rising” tab on T-Mobile’s Facebook fan page or via mobile phone. Cold War Kids will play April 1 and Rye Rye on April 9.

My Twitterstream was dominated by snarky play-by-play, and the rest of the Web was doing the same thing. Even the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal put Grammy liveblogs on their homepages.

So now it might be nice to head online and actually see–and hear–what I missed. No dice.

The official Grammy site, run by the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences, has plenty of clips, but none from the CBS broadcast itself–it’s all backstage, or red carpet or other footage I don’t care about. CBS.com doesn’t have anything, and neither does TV.com, CBS’s mini-Hulu.

Meanwhile, Google’s YouTube, the place where I really expect to see clips, is doing a very good/frustrating job of keeping the site scrubbed free of amateur uploads. You can find some stuff, but it takes work, and the quality is poor, and I’m pretty sure it’s getting removed quickly after it goes up.

So while I really want to see Arcade Fire’s performance–my Twitter pals were ecstatic about it–right now the only thing I can find is grainy footage of  Lady Gaga doing yet another Madonna…homage. This may or may not be available by the time you read this:

[UPDATE: Ask, and you shall receive! For now. Thanks to @colinparksfried, @tdotjdot and @nolaschott]

A CBS rep notes that Grammy performances “aren’t typically available online due to rights clearance issues,” and I’m sure that’s true. Any given song can have lots of different owners, and getting all of them to agree to put it on the Web can be a huge hassle. On the other hand, it’s not an insurmountable challenge–that’s why we have Vevo.com, a Web site dedicated to nothing but music videos.

Left unsaid here is that big live events like the Grammys are now TV’s most valuable commodity, and the people who produce big live events continue to struggle with the Web. But more and more of them are getting it–even the very uptight NFL is putting highlight videos up on its site while the games are in progress.

The Grammys are already being augmented very nicely by the Web, which provided it with endless free promotion last night. But now that the live event isn’t anymore, you’d think the music industry, which can use all the promotion it could get, would be pushing very, very hard to let people see what they missed last night.

Who knows. It might even prompt someone to, you know, buy some music.

It’s a note to the European company’s select group of freeloading American users, letting them know they’re going to have to start paying sooner or later. And it says Spotify is “looking forward” to a U.S. launch in ‘the coming months.”

From: Spotify
Date: February 8, 2011
To: xxx
Subject: Spotify Payment Problem- ACTION REQUIRED!

Hello from Spotify!

You are one of only a few people who has access to a Spotify promotional test account in the USA, and we hope you’re enjoying listening to Spotify through our Premium or Unlimited service.

We are really looking forward to launching the service in full in the USA over the coming months, and hope that you will continue to use the service and be one of our key advocates.

We need to make some small system changes to our payment system for our USA launch, and so in order to make the transition for you as smooth as possible, we have credited your Spotify account with 1 month worth of FREE Spotify Premium/ Unlimited!

In return for this, we ask that you please do the following:

• Visit our website https://www.spotify.com/account/subscription/change-payment/
• Login with your username and password.
• Select a payment method (Card or Paypal) and click ‘Change’
• Click ‘I Accept/ Continue’ to accept the new product in US Dollars
• Provide us with your payment details once more, so that after your FREE
month has expired you will be able to keep listening to music through Spotify.

Your next bill is due to us on ’14/02/12′, so please provide us with your payment details before then, otherwise you will revert back to Spotify Free and if you have Premium you will lose access to Spotify on your mobile. On this date, you will then be billed in Dollars!

Thanks for your help, and please feel free to reply to us directly if you have any
questions!

Obviously this note isn’t anything like a confirmed launch date. In order to do that, Spotify needs U.S. deals with the big music labels, and so far only has Sony signed on.

Industry sources keep telling me a deal with EMI is this close, but they’ve been saying that for weeks now. Which doesn’t mean that it won’t happen. Just that it hasn’t yet.

And no matter what happens with EMI, Spotify can’t go anywhere unless it has Universal Music Group, the world’s largest label, on board. Again, lots of people tell me they’re confident a deal will get done soon, but…

In any case, the note does point out one of the reasons so many plugged-in Americans you know are raving about Spotify, even though the service doesn’t formally exist here–Spotify has quite cleverly been handing out free test accounts to lots and lots of people who might rave about it.

That includes VIPs and their families, all sorts of music industry people and media people, including yours truly.

And if you’re getting Spotify in the U.S., you are indeed getting a really, really good service: Free, unlimited music, anywhere you want it, whenever you want it, without ads.

Which is not what Spotify’s “real” users actually get. The ones who use the free service have a cap on the number of hours they can listen for free, can only listen on their PCs and will encounter a smattering of advertising. To get the real deal–mobile, no ads, no limits–they’ll need to cough up the equivalent of about $13.50 a month.

So far, about a million people are doing just that, people familiar with the company tell me. But how many will go for it if, or when, it gets to the U.S.?

[CLICK HERE FOR LIVE COVERAGE OF THE PRESS EVENT]
But a select crowd will get to see the iPad newspaper tonight, at an equally notable Manhattan location: Rupert Murdoch’s apartment, where the News Corp. CEO is hosting a “low key” cocktail party.

Although News Corp. owns this Web site, my email invite to tonight’s pre-launch launch event hasn’t arrived, and I’m told it never will. The company hasn’t offered me a peek at the Daily, either.

But at this point I’ve still got a pretty decent sense of what Murdoch’s guests will see this evening, and the rest of us will see tomorrow: A newspaper that’s both old-fashioned and cutting-edge.

People who have gotten up  close to the the Daily describe a digital paper where many of the news stories look just like news stories you’d see anywhere else.

Others will look more like iPhone apps, featuring interactive graphics or videos, or photos you can swipe, pinch and zoom–with perhaps almost no text at all.

And there’s more! There’s no 3-D video yet, though it’s on the agenda. But there will be an audio feature so you can have stories read aloud to you. And there’s a crossword puzzle! And Sudoku!

A Daily-watcher who thinks the thing is amazing compares it to the Daily Prophet, the magical newspaper read by Harry Potter and his wizard pals.

More jaded observers tell me it’s more or less what they’ve seen in existing iPad magazine apps, particularly Hearst’s Popular Mechanics and Condé Nast’s Wired. The big difference is that those magazines come out monthly, and the Daily will get beamed to your iPad… daily.

Still, the most striking thing about the Daily has nothing to do with any technical bells and whistles. It’s Murdoch’s insistence that he can sell a digital newspaper app to consumers trained to expect that digital news is what you get on the Web, for free.

The Daily is almost defiantly anti-Web: It will have a free site, with a grudging sample of perhaps 10 percent of the newspaper’s stories, but that’s it. While Web news sites increasingly focus on aggregation and filtering of other people’s content, the Daily will focus on making its own stuff, even though plenty of other people are already doing it.

And while News Corp. officials have tried to argue that the Daily isn’t a newspaper but something else, it is most definitely produced using a newspaper model: Six sections, written once a day–the Daily team is particularly excited about its sports coverage–and delivered in the wee hours of the morning.

The Daily will allow for some midday updates, but it’s really designed to land with a digital thud on your virtual doorstep, just like the newspapers Murdoch has loved all his life.

Murdoch will charge 99 cents a week for a subscription, and he’s certainly going to get some takers at the start, especially since the Daily will be free for the first two weeks after tomorrow’s launch.

Which will be a noisy one. The press will give it plenty of free promotion, and News Corp. will augment that with a digital ad campaign, in addition to offline marketing donated and/or bartered from other Murdoch properties. Perhaps there’s a way to mention it once or twice during Sunday’s Super Bowl broadcast on Fox.

Much more important will be the endorsement from Apple, which is using the Daily to roll out a new “push” subscription feature.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who was supposed to appear onstage in San Francisco with Murdoch to bless the launch, will send content boss Eddy Cue to New York tomorrow instead.

That’s still Apple’s seal of approval, though, and I can’t think of another time the company has so conspicuously blessed a single third-party product. That alone will be enough to prompt an enormous number of people to try it out.

Remember that Apple already has a customer base of  some 125 million iTunes users–if you do want to buy this thing, you won’t need to pull out a credit card. A few button clicks will do.

The real question, of course, is how many people are going to pay for the Daily a month down the road, when the buzz is gone. And there’s no way to guess at that when you get your first look at the thing. No matter when that happens.

The program will encourage users to purchase virtual goods that their friends have already bought.

Speaking to an audience of application developers who are concerned about Facebook’s move to require developers to use its Facebook Credits virtual currency system, Liu mentioned Buy With Friends as an example of a program Facebook is providing that will help developers make more money.

Liu said Buy With Friends gives developers tools to help users share their in-game purchases. In testing so far, she said “more than 50 percent of users elected to share a purchase.” As an example, after a friend has made and shared a purchase, a player might see a message that says, “Your friend has unlocked this deal for you–get 40 percent off this special monster food,” Liu said.

I’ve argued in the past that much of what we call “social commerce” isn’t very social yet, but this seems like an example of a product that actually deserves that label.

Facebook is also offering incentives, including promotion and premium ad targeting, to developers who use Facebook Credits as their in-game currency.

Facebook Credits are used by some 150 developers, but many of them elect to also use their own branded currency so as not to be locked into the Facebook system. This introduces a silly amount of complexity, with users often having to convert their real-world money into Facebook Credits into in-game currency, all at different exchange rates.

Liu also said that Facebook is testing a feature that improves users’ ability to purchase additional credits without leaving the game environment.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Confused by all those options? There’s also a basic RunKeeper app that has enough tracking and reporting features for many users and has always been free. I wrote recently about its social features.

Apple recently said RunKeeper Pro was one of its top-grossing apps of 2010. FitnessKeeper, a small Boston-based start-up that just raised $1.1 million in funding, wouldn’t disclose revenue or download numbers, but said it has been cash-flow positive every month since it was founded two-and-a-half years ago.

The company announced this week it would take down one part of its pay barrier from now through the end of January, giving away RunKeeper Pro for free during New Year’s resolution season.

Launched yesterday on iPhone, that promotion has already been highly successful, with 171,000 RunKeeper Pro downloads yesterday on the iPhone, more than 10 times as many as it gets in a normal day. The app is currently quickly climbing the Apple App Store charts, now at No. 5 in the free app category (it was No. 12 this morning). The promotion is also launching on Android this afternoon.

And as of this writing, it’s only New Year’s resolution time in about half the world.

Now as head of HP Networking, he has a job that is no less daunting: Wrestling with none other than Cisco Systems, the powerful grandaddy of the networking business. HP’s networking unit, recently bolstered by its $2.7 billion acquisition of 3Com last year, caught some attention this week with an audacious promotion offering networking customers a 20 percent discount on certain products if they trade in old Cisco gear.

To be fair, HP has yet to take much business away from Cisco. As The Wall Street Journal noted, Cisco has so far held on to its 70 percent share of the enterprise Ethernet switching market in Q3, up from 67 percent a year ago, according to the research firm Infonetics. HP’s share was 11 percent, the same share that 3Com had before it was part of HP.

Still, it’s an interesting time to be trading barbs with Cisco, in part because it appears vulnerable given its uncertain market outlook when it reported earnings last month, but also because it’s eyeing some of HP’s home turf for expansion.

I met up with Haas at HP Headquarters in Palo Alto recently to talk about how the matchup with Cisco is shaping up, and what to expect from HP in 2011.

NewEnterprise: Marius, let’s start with the big question about the coming year. You were deeply involved with the EDS deal and several HP deals before that. Is there still an appetite for big deals in IT or at HP?

Marius Haas: “It’s not going to stop. The big are going to get bigger. The appetite for some of the niche technology players to get some funding so they can grow to a sufficient scale is not gone. Now it’s becoming clear that Cisco, Oracle, IBM and HP are all pretty much starting to build out their end-to-end stacks and I don’t see any stop to the deal-making. In order to get the kind of muscle you need to compete in this market you have to be pretty big and you have to be global.”

NE: So HP is not done doing deals?

MH: “No.”

NE: What kind of deals might we see?

MH: “I’ll give you a hint. Look at who our new CEO and Chairman [former SAP CEO Léo Apotheker] is. You can probably draw a conclusion that maybe we’ll continue to expand in the software arena, and then move up the stack. That’s a logical path he could be taking.

NE: Let’s talk about the competition, specifically Cisco–a networking company that’s going after the data center and IT. You run the networking division of an IT company. Talk to me about that dynamic.

MH: “We like the position we’re in. We have all the things you need in order to bring together and deliver a sort of holistic kind of cloud strategy for customers. It takes a lot of IP and we’re the only company on the planet that has it all. Servers, storage, networking, management software, services. And all the devices as well. No one else has that. And Cisco doesn’t have it. They will come from their position of strength which is networking, but they are going to have to partner to deliver the broader ecosystem. It’s easy to put on paper, but harder to deliver.

“They’re used to their network model with proprietary products. Customers are saying they don’t want proprietary stuff. They want something that’s standards-based, interoperable and at a much lower cost. Our offering is resonating. We don’t see the kind of slowness they are seeing. And the enterprise customers are telling us they no longer want a single-vendor-dominated networking market. They want competition for their business.”

NE: So where are you seeing demand?

MH: “Historically HP before we acquired 3Com was strong in the mid-market and in the edge of the enterprise. We were strong in the K-12, local government, hospitality and health care segments. Now we’re seeing broader momentum in the enterprise, especially from companies who are modernizing their environment and getting ready for the cloud. People are getting tired of paying a premium for Cisco. And you’ve got about $9 billion worth of gear from Cisco that is going end of life soon. Out of our top 1,000 enterprise accounts, 458 are doing proof of concept trials with us. People are now convinced we are that second horse in the race.”

CityVille is the perfect hospital waiting-room activity. You click to create buildings and plant crops, click to harvest them and collect money from your shops, click to visit your friends’ cities and help them do the same things.

Unlike in a real city, everything you can possibly accomplish in the game is good. You receive money, goods, reputation points, energy and random bonus prizes constantly.

Most of these are useful, but some of them are not. For instance, I currently have a stock of 22 virtual danishes received as bonuses from my in-game coffee shop, and no way to spend them.

Among the early adopter types I know in the tech industry, there’s a sense that casual gaming on Facebook serves an entirely different demographic from their own. The thinking is that games from Zynga and the like replace relatively mindless activities like watching soap operas.

But as someone who has just reorganized her virtual retail shops to be surrounded by virtual trees, so as to accumulate more virtual bonus points, I can see how social gaming–especially as it gets more social–might appeal to the desire for mindless diversions in all of us.

And, I began to get an answer to a question I am asked a lot: Why are so many people playing these seemingly meaningless games?

CityVille is Zynga’s latest attempt to extend the dominance of its breakout social game FarmVille, which has long been the most popular such diversion on Facebook.

Of all of Zynga’s games, CityVille has been heralded as the most social to date, with new features such as a franchise system that allows users to actually participate in the building of their friends’ cities. Personally, I’ve never gotten into FarmVille, although it’s obviously quite addictive as well and hugely popular.

Chalk it up to the new social features, the slightly less awkward and cutesy 3-D graphics, or a momentary openness to mindless diversion on my part, but CityVille is the only Facebook game that’s truly sucked me in so far.

Zynga says CityVille is its fastest-growing game ever. According to AppData, CityVille has 54 million monthly active users, for second place overall (and only two million behind FarmVille).

There are no consequences in CityVille and there is no strategy. There’s also no winning (rather, as in FarmVille, an endlessly extending horizon of tasks to complete).

The worst thing that can happen is a crop can wither or you can allocate your “energy” to collecting rent and not have enough to empty the cash registers at your stores.

But, not to worry–come back in five minutes and there’s another unit of energy waiting for you.

CityVille is satisfying on a superficial level that I hadn’t thought possible. It’s not even like Angry Birds, my former casual game of choice, which breaks all sorts of age and language barriers in its simplicity, but still requires you to position the slingshot correctly and think through the physics of the various projectiles.

In CityVille, all you do is click, click, click.

Zynga seems to want three things from users: Their time, their money and their recruitment of their friends. As for time, I’ve given plenty of it, although you usually run out of stuff to do about 15 minutes into any one session (Zynga wouldn’t want game play to be a burden or feel too complicated).

But I’m not sure my obsession is paying off for Zynga. I’ve spent a grand total of 50 cents on the game. That’s because I wanted to spend the 15 Facebook credits I’d gotten as part of a launch promotion, but Zynga had a minimum purchase of 20 credits. Coughing up two quarters got me the difference–and it also hooked up my Facebook account to my PayPal account for the first time.

I currently have 20 CityVille “neighbors.” They are Facebook connections from all different parts of my life, including high school friends, tech industry people and fellow reporters. We get credits for heading over to each other’s cities and helping out, accepting roles at each other’s city halls and other municipal buildings and setting up franchises in each other’s cities and resupplying them.

And Zynga constantly harasses us to post on our own or other people’s Facebook walls to ask them for in-game gifts and brag about in-game achievements.

Conscious of polluting other people’s walls and admitting to people how much CityVille I play, I usually decline all the offers to broadcast my CityVille needs and accomplishments. But it’s clear Zynga could stand to add even more communication channels if it wanted to; a friend recently emailed me off-game to ask if I could hurry up and send him a CityVille zoning permit.

I get the sense most of my particular set of neighbors haven’t given Zynga a lot of cash for virtual goods, considering our cities are growing at about the same rate and I see them on there at least once a day helping tend to my crops and resupplying their franchises. There are no in-game advertisements.

A few of my neighbors, however, have accumulated premium goodies galore. A certain Facebook exec’s city is decorated with paid-for doodads like a basketball court, tennis court and bronze statue–but I imagine it’s not too hard for him, of all people, to stock up on Facebook credits.

A particular start-up CEO who’s my virtual neighbor seems to play on an hourly basis. He has already hit level 35. You know that somewhere a Zynga engineer is scurrying to create more tasks and content to add more levels to keep up with him and other addicts.

And only one of my neighbors appears to have never returned to the game after setting up her initial city.

Meanwhile, my own city keeps on growing. I’m currently at level 26. I’m now the mayor of my city and considering a run for governor.

But, now that I’m back from the hospital, I’d honestly really like to stop playing this game and let the healing begin.

Update: Since I first wrote a draft of this post on Sunday CityVille added 10 million users. I’ve updated the stats as of Wednesday morning.

The marketing of the Oprah Winfrey Network, set to debut January 1, 2011, is definitely ratcheting up.

OWN is being backed by Discovery Communications.

But what will be interesting to see is how much of a digital element there is on OWN, which is obviously heavy on the television shows for the new cable network.

Robert Tercek, who headed digital media for Winfrey-related online properties, left the company earlier this year. Under Tercek, there were several big live events for Oprah.com, as well as one of the biggest book downloads.

But, so far–besides the requisite Facebook and Twitter links–the digital parts on OWN seems to be limited to a lot of promotions for its content, asking the audience for its input about those various shows, casting calls and “Your OWN Channel.”

That would be “a destination to tell your stories and express your passion through video.” Apparently, according to one of the OWN videos, about 10,000 videos have been uploaded using its tools.

One video was titled, “Auntie Bernie’s Cinnamon Stick Fried Chicken,” while another posited, “There Is An Answer To Every Question, You Just Have To Find It.”

Indeed, although BoomTown thinks all answers are in cinnamon stick fried chicken.

Here is a sizzle reel for OWN, as well as another promotion for the cable channel.

Multicolored balloons and a whole lot of hope seem to be the big themes.

As well as a whole lot of Oprah, natch.

A spokesman for the studio, a unit of Time Warner Inc., declined to say whether it had yet figured out the source of the leak, but said an investigation was underway. The spokesman said the early release wasn’t a promotional gambit.

The watermarked footage was made available for download on BitTorrent file-sharing sites such as IsoHunt.com and thePirateBay.org. Copies were still available Wednesday, though Warner Bros. said it was working to remove the illegal copies.

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The program, called ShopRunner, will cost $79 per year—the same as the Prime shipping program offered by the largest online-only retailer Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN).

Participants include many existing GSI Commerce e-commerce service clients such as Toys “R” Us Inc. and GNC Corp. In the coming weeks, outside retailers such as Borders Group Inc. (BGP), Barnes & Noble Inc. (BKS) and Drugstore.com (DSCM) will also join ShopRunner.

“If it wasn’t for the scale, these retailers were likely to have done something like this on their own,” said Mike Golden, president of Shop Runner Inc., which is wholly owned by GSI Commerce. He declined to say how much the companies were paying to participate in the program, but GSI is spending about $5 million this year to launch ShopRunner.

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The Chinese entrepreneur makes equipment to mount GPS navigation devices onto car dashboards. The mounts are sold by U.S. companies under their own brands. Now, Mr. Yang is promoting his own line of dashboard mounts, with higher-end features, under his own label.

To promote his line, he has teamed up with two American partners who provide branding and distribution services—a tack many Chinese companies traditionally have balked at.

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It’s nice to hear enthusiasm on the part of Linkin Park band member Mike Shinoda about an innovative-for-the-music-industry effort to give fans a chance to be part of the iconic Grammy-winning rock band.

That’s because most artists or content creators–while making all the right sounds about the Internet’s impact on their business–often privately cringe at the ongoing flood of user-generated material that has drastically changed the industry.

Not Shinoda, who is certain he will find some real talent via a new online contest, called “Linkin Park, Featuring You,” that gives anyone an opportunity to collaborate with the band to produce an original song based on some of the tracks from the forthcoming single “The Catalyst.”

The song is on Linkin Park’s next album, “A Thousand Suns,” to be released September 14.

“We looked at it as both risky and fun to save a spot on the record that could be just anything,” he said in an interview with BoomTown earlier this week. “It’s creative, lets the fans be heard and, of course, is a great way to promote the album.”

Of course it is, but Shinoda said he is not expecting to have to put any bad-quality music on the record just to sell more music.

“The album could not be any more sacred to us and this is certainly an X-factor, which is kind of a move against the grain for us,” he said. “But the Internet has actually given a lot more people a chance to be heard and, as it has turned out, amateurs are so much better than we ever expected.”

So far, Shinoda said, he has just sampled a few dozen of the thousands of submissions so far, either selecting randomly or via a popularity ranking system the contest uses. He said he’s also using a range of people who are part of the Linkin Park team to filter material.

But, ultimately, Shinoda and his bandmates (pictured here) will pick the winning submission, with either the song to be included on the band’s new album or the winner to be invited to perform with the band on a song on the upcoming record. Either way, a pretty good prize for an aspiring musician.

Shinoda said he is hoping to hear a lot of different sounds from electronic music to keyboards to guitars and even horns (“No one has submitted a horn version so far,” he laughed. “But I hope someone does.”)

Linkin Park is using a group of Internet companies to carry out the massive user-generated effort, including: MySpace Music (platform, promotion and direct fan messaging); Indaba Music (hosting the MySpace application that allows musicians to auto-syndicate their remixes on MySpace); Top Spin Media (using their email for a song widget to deliver audio stems to all participants); and Ning (the back end to Linkin Park’s Web site, where they are also distributing the audio stems to push back to the contest)

There have been remix contests online done before, such as Snoop Dogg’s “That Tree” Remix Contest, which had 8,000 entries and generated a lot of fan interest.

But this effort is clearly more ambitious, perhaps because Shinoda is clearly a techie, with an ongoing interest in filling the Linkin Park Web site with puzzles, games and other interactive features.

In fact, Linkin Park had already conducted a smaller contest for fans to submit designs for characters used in a game the band released in April, called “8-Bit Rebellion,” for the Apple (AAPL) iPod touch, iPhone and iPad. And, after the game was completed by a player, it unlocked a new song, “Blackbirds.”

Shinoda said the band hopes to do even more digitally, trying to involve and engage fans in ways that they never would have tried before.

“There is a huge unknown factor and this is not something we would have done five years ago,’ he said of the latest collaboration contest. “But I am not afraid of my fans being good at music, even if it turns out they are better than me.”

Until a winner is selected, here’s a most excellent music video of my favorite Linkin Park song, “Shadow of the Day,” because I wish I had written the perfect and simple line, “Sometimes beginnings aren’t so simple/Sometimes goodbye’s the only way” (maybe some fan will write something as good):

And here’s a blog post by Sam Wick, SVP of marketing at MySpace Music, about its partnership with Linkin Park:

Linkin Park Wants To Put You on Their New Album

Linkin Park is arguably one of the biggest rock acts in the world with more than seven million fans on MySpace and iLike, two Grammy wins and a boatload of accolades from the music community. So, needless to say, we were more than a little excited to help the band launch their next album, “A Thousand Suns.”

This is a band that’s almost as passionate about social media and technology as they are about the music they create–and they came to MySpace, because we have a proven track record of successfully architecting custom album campaigns that uniquely marry music to innovation on a global scale. With this in mind, we knew we had to do something that not only raises global awareness of the new album, but really plays into the intimate artist-to-fan connection that Linkin Park has been cultivating on our platform for years. And so “Linkin Park, Featuring You” was born–a multi-phase program that each of our 30 territories across the world are rolling out locally.

Linkin Park, Featuring You begins on MySpace with a music application that allows fans to create their own original version of the band’s new single “The Catalyst” and ends with the rare opportunity for one worthy fan to have his or her song stripped onto the next album. SERIOUS. To make this happen, Linkin Park and MySpace Music brought together Topspin Media, Ning and Indaba Music–a true technology trifecta–to allow fans to interact and play with the music before it is even released. Again, SERIOUS.

Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park has this message to share with his fans on MySpace and across the Web:

“In the lifetime of Linkin Park, the evolution of community and music technology has blurred the line between artist and fan. With the release of our new album we want to push it even further and so we are making a commitment to our fans that is a first of its kind: We are blindly dedicating a spot on our new album to something unknown. That space is reserved for you and we’re confident that you will create something that we can be proud to include on “A Thousand Suns.” This is not just a “fan-remix” contest; we want to collaborate with you. This effort is made possible by the global 360 music platform of MySpace, and the dedication and talent of our incredible fans. Thank you. We look forward to hearing your submissions.”

Here’s how it works: By installing the Indaba Music-powered app on MySpace, fans have access to five stems from “The Catalyst” that they can use to re-arrange and re-imagine the song using either their own Digital Audio Workstation or with Indaba’s free, Web-based software. Once submitted, users can vote for their favorite versions and help the band in their quest to identify new talent and ultimately pick a winner.

“Linkin Park, Featuring You” is just the beginning of a much larger partnership between the band and MySpace Music that will provide Linkin Park fans with recognition worldwide with access to live shows, exclusive content and premieres as well as opportunities to connect and interact with the band in ways that only MySpace Music can offer.

Be sure to get your entries in by July 25th and don’t forget to spread the word about the contest to your friends around the world–and go buy the new single on August 2nd.

Walt Disney Studios is Twitter’s first partner for its @Earlybird promotional account, which the start-up hopes will bring in a new source of revenue. Through @Earlybird, announced last week, various companies pay Twitter to offer deals to those who follow the account.

Disney is the first to deal through @Earlybird, offering followers in the U.S. a two-for-one ticket promotion for the new Jerry Bruckheimer film.

“We’re just getting started — we’ve got an amazing lineup of deals to share in the coming days and weeks with people following @earlybird,” Twitter wrote in a blog post. “Several times a week, @earlybird will help consumers discover Twitter-exclusive deals in entertainment, fashion, technology, beauty, travel and more.”

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Sony’s $30 discount only lasts through April 4, just in time for the April 3 arrival of Apple’s (AAPL) $499 and up iPad in stores on April 3.

Why just two weeks? Sony’s president of digital reading Steve Haber offered this statement: “Sony’s overall mission is to expand digital reading to a larger audience by offering consumers the most access, choice and value,” he said. “The pricing promotion is representative of that mission and occurs naturally as part of the consumer electronics industry.”

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