Gree plans to announce today that U.S. revenue totaled $16.9 million in the second quarter, due in large part to the May acquisition of Funzio, a San Francisco mobile game developer.

On a worldwide basis, the revenue represents only a drop in the bucket.

On Tuesday, the company reported a global profit of $500 million on revenue of $2 billion for its fiscal year, ended June 30.

However, the company did not disclose its bottom line in the U.S., and no doubt its losses are significant.

Over the past year, Gree has expanded aggressively here, purchasing two U.S. companies for a total of $300 million. It also has been spending millions more on other moves to catch attention. For example, at E3 this spring, it hosted one of the biggest booths on the show floor, and threw a glitzy party that became one of the most coveted tickets at the event.

In an interview yesterday, Naoki Aoyagi, Gree International’s CEO, said that entering a competitive market like the U.S. takes a strong commitment.

“A year ago, we decided to make a huge bet. Many companies from Asia just set up an office in California and had a few people,” he said. “But it’s very difficult to compete with local players, so we believe that we need a strong team here. We really believe there’s a huge opportunity and we are doing the right thing.”

Indeed, the company does have a strong team — one might call it a small army.

It has around 400 employees today in San Francisco, and is on track to hit 500 by the end of the year. It has also been spending heavily on advertising its games, including multimillion dollar ad buys, according to several industry sources.

Aoyagi admits that the buys were unconventional, but says they were justified.

“When we were first launching games, we needed to evaluate the performance [of the various ad networks], so we bought all the inventory we could buy, which is much more than the usual marketing campaign,” he said. “We learned a lot, and now we understand the performance of each channel, and now we can optimize the marketing spend.”

There are indications that some of the investments have started to pay off.

So far, Gree has signed up multiple publishers to be a part of its mobile games network when it launches sometime later this year. The games are routinely listed among Apple’s 25 top-grossing applications.

When its platform does launch, Gree’s goal is basically to become the social network for games on mobile, like Facebook has done on the PC for social games. It will connect the players, and then charge developers a portion of their revenue for having access to the network.

Aoyagi said the company is forecasting worldwide revenue to hit $2.5 billion in its fiscal 2013 ending June 30. Of that, he said, they expect about 10 percent — roughly $250 million — to come from outside Japan. While some of that revenue could come from multiple countries, it suggests a very rapid growth rate in the U.S. that far exceeds what the company is seeing today.

In the U.S., revenue increased 38 percent in the second quarter, compared to the prior quarter (which is essentially up from zero a year ago).

Does Aoyagi believe the U.S. has the potential to generate the same kind of revenue figures in the U.S. as it sees in Japan?

He thinks so, based on how the games are performing over the past few months. He said Funzio’s titles are already generating 23 perent more revenue under its leadership, and that two of its titles are grossing $1 in average revenue per daily active user — at the game’s peak performance.

“That is pretty good compared to the U.S. industry average,” he said, which he estimates is around 25 cents per daily active user. “With high-end content and with Japanese monetization models, then we can achieve that.”

“We did it,” Caldwell tweeted a few hours ago.

It’s the latest step on the road for Caldwell — whose prior companies also include the music-sharing service iMeem which he sold to Myspace in 2009 — toward building what he calls a “paid service for mobile app developers” that won’t be supported by advertising. The idea is that ads ruin the user experience, and this is one of his primary criticisms of Facebook and Twitter. His proposition is that by not allowing ads, but charging app developers to use it, consumers could use the site, and find apps they want to use.

Now, in its very early alpha form, App.net resembles a stripped-down iteration of Twitter, and while its users post status updates, the network’s focus is the creation and discovery of mobile apps.

The whole effort has had something of a controversial birth. First disclosed in mid-July. Caldwell accused executives at Facebook of using bullying negotiation tactics.

This put Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and Facebook director, in an awkward position: He also sat on the board of Caldwell’s company, Mixed Media Labs; his firm, Andreessen Horowitz, is an investor. Andreessen resolved the conflict by resigning his board seat at Mixed Media; he was replaced by AH partner Scott Weiss.

Meanwhile Google’s SVP of Social,Vic Gundotra, got in a few good punches while Facebook was on the PR defensive. Saying he wasn’t “interested in screwing over developers,” he linked directly to the Caldwell post in which the bullying accusations against Facebook were made.

So, now that App.net has some 7,300 backers who have kicked in anywhere from $50 to $1,000, what’s next? A key step: Creating a terms of service policy. As Caldwell wrote on his blog today:

“We have a great deal of work to do. One of the most important things we need to do is put together a Terms of Service for the operating site. I will [be] spending a great deal of time in the coming days creating a draft of our ToS, and our forward plan is to host it on github. This way, folks can see it, offer feedback (even pull requests), and will be kept abreast of any future changes. Along these lines, there are still a great many questions that need to be answered before App.net should be thought of as an operating service, rather than just an alpha prototype.”

In a word, now the real work begins.

The Federal Trade Commission is expected to announce Wednesday new rules that close loopholes that currently allow companies to gather information despite a 1998 law that was supposed to protect kids’ online footprint.

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Teens aren’t giving up on Facebook, but they’re treating it the same way the gainfully employed treat LinkedIn.

– Writer Dave Williams, in an Ad Age post about whether teens may prefer Twitter to Facebook

The new product, Ning VIP, is a subscription-based service starting at $1,000 monthly, offering a suite of tools for larger-scale social networks. It’s appropriate for a site with a larger customer base like an MTV or a Food Network, rather than a smaller niche community. Some of the new tools combine attributes found on other social networks, like activity feeds, badging and other game-like features.

“Call it Facebook in a box,” said Samir Arora, Glam Media CEO and Chairman. Only Ning’s networks give more granular control over community management features, Arora argues.

The fruits of the Glam acquisition seem to be found in the other half of Wednesday’s announcement, dubbed Glam Social. It’s essentially an entire ad tech platform wrapped up in a bow for the network owner, complete with a social analytics dashboard that tracks engagement inside Ning as well as social metrics on other integrated networks, like Facebook and Twitter. Glam can build ads for users inside of their own network, making it simpler on the network owner.

The other claim Arora trumpets: A full mobile Web autocreation package set up for network owners. So, for new Ning customers, an HTML5-optimized version of their network is set up for them, as well.

Since the acquisition, Arora says, Ning has been growing well, with more than 50 million monthly active users across Ning networks, adding more than 2,000 new networks per month to the nearly 80,000 that already exist.

Will the new, glammed-up version of Ning bolster those ranks? Perhaps, especially for those who don’t want to look to an outside ad tech platform to monitor community engagement.

The company, which lets users alert their friends to their location by “checking in” via smartphone from coffee shops, bars and other locations, revealed for the first time that it plans to let merchants buy special placement for promotions of personalized local offers in July in a redesigned version of its app. All users will be able to see the specials, but must check into the venue to redeem them.

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If debates rage about the meaning of the past year in the Middle East, one would not sense much doubt among over 1,000 young regional entrepreneurs and early stage investors gathered here in Beirut. Their message is clear: There is no turning back, and the demographically young, wired, connected new generation in this region plan to take business opportunities into their own hands.

ArabNet Digital Summit is the brainchild of Yale MBA and Lebanese entrepreneur Omar Christidis. His vision has remained throughout to create a hub of shared ideas, experiences and connections among the nascent but rapidly growing start-up communities throughout the Middle East. Innovators from 22 countries are networking, competing in start-up competitions and participating in sessions familiar to any entrepreneur in the United States — e-commerce, big data, mobile, the cloud and social networks — but with sensitivity to local and regional opportunities as yet untapped.

Saad Khan, one of the few American VCs here, is a young veteran of Silicon Valley — having been a part of one of the world’s first incubators at Garage.com (which launched Pandora) and now at CMEA Ventures (where he sits on Blekko’s board). He has travelled extensively throughout the region over the last two years, and he believes that something pivotal is happening in the Middle East. “This is not about looking for ways to transport Silicon Valley here,” he notes, “MENA is a different market. Building connections with tech smart people in the Valley is great — shared, reciprocal learning both ways can be more powerful. Mobile is on fire in this region, everyone has a cellphone and smartphone penetration is deploying rapidly as pricing has dropped. Look for mobile innovation here to come from MENA, even leap-frogging the US.” He adds that some of best innovations in the cloud computing and ad analytics (like Cloudera, Revenue Science, AdMob and Bre.ad) are coming from Arabs and Arab Americans connected to the States and globally.

Moderator Alex Tohme, entrepreneur and Digital Strategist for Ogilvy One in Dubai, argues that while she prefers to run a company with the team under one roof, technology facilitates connections among skills around the region. “My ideal start-up would have tech engineers from Jordan, creatives from Egypt and have Lebanese sell it,” Alex Tohme notes. “ArabNet is great, as we’ve all connected regularly online over the last year and can meet here in real life. Talent is in many places, and many ‘hubs’ will spring up and connect with each other.”

Many of the more successful start-ups at ArabNet are regionalizing/arabizing ideas that have worked elsewhere in English. In fact, some of the leading competitors at the start-up demo competition would be familiar to the western world. Cinemoz announced significant business development partnerships with the best in Arabic TV and movie content, creating a Hulu for the region. ReserveOut is a fast-growing reservation-booking and backend for restaurants and spas similar to OpenTable. Arab Rooms allows business travelers in Saudi and beyond to find cheap, clean and convenient rooms somewhere between a Hotels.com and an AirBnB.

Habib Haddad is a Lebanese entrepreneur who created the first Arabic translation search engine, Yamli, and has created wamda.com in Beirut as the cornerstone of an entrepreneurial ecosystem of breaking information, education, research and angel investing in the region. He believes that such “copycats” are a great thing. “The Middle East and Arabic market is huge, has perfect demographics and has hunger for services for them on their terms and in their language. As success breeds success, more innovation will follow.”

Panelists and participants concur universally that the mere act of creating content and services in Arabic offers significant opportunity. Surveys have shown that over three quarters of Internet users in the region would prefer content in the Arab language, yet a tiny fraction of content online is currently in Arabic. Barry Newstead, Chief Global Development Officer for Wikimedia Foundation, noted in his talk here that on Wikipedia there are over 22 million individual articles in 280 languages. Only 100,000 are in Arabic. Denmark alone has over 200,000.

Rob Kniaz, General Partner of Hoxton Ventures out of London, who specializes in early investments in emerging markets, told me that Arabizing the web not only creates services to large markets who wish to have them in their own languages, but also opens up new, now-dormant business opportunities. “Local, Arabic advertisers have nowhere to go, so aggregate dollars are small and ad CPMs can be a few cents. Think of the pent-up demand over time as this is addressed by more Arabic content,” he notes.

Demo Competition winner May Habib founded Quordoba first as a B2B platform for businesses to outsource translation needs online, creating a network of over 400 vetted translators, many with industry expertise, to turn around documents in a matter of hours. But rapid demand is now also coming from English consumer media companies looking to reach Arabic audiences — and not only book publishers, but authors themselves, want them to both translate and distribute their books digitally and offline in the Middle East.

There is plenty of grumbling about infrastructure issues at this gathering — each country with its own challenges of logistics, delivery and regulation. But there is a special place of frustration among attendees over mobile broadband quality and cost. During a panel with executives from some of the region’s telecom giants, many participants drilled into the quality of services, the scaleability of capabilities as more smart phones come on board, and the access charges that are high by any global standards. The Twitter feed of #ArabNetME retweeted themes like, “Only Skype matters” while the executives also described their hopes for expansions into 4G and beyond.

But many entrepreneurs find opportunity in infrastructure weakness. Rasha Khouri, Lebanese Palestinian founder of diaboutique.com and dia-style.com — the largest growing fashion and e-commerce website that allows global access to some of the most innovative and hard to find fashion brands — noted: “I’m very impressed with the number of start-ups here trying to solve issues we face infrastructurally. More efficient online banking, mobile charging, billing, teaching advanced computer skills. Some of these aren’t necessarily ‘innovation’ as in ‘new technology’ — but critical for innovation to flourish.”

Jordanian entrepreneur and competition finalist Fouad Jeryes could not agree more. He co-founded Codely as the first fully online education platform for schools to teach specific programming and tech skills to high-school age kids, offering supplemental but often unique educational opportunities. “We surveyed kids and asked them what computing skills were all about and most said ‘Facebook,’ or ‘a way to play games’ or ‘secretarial skills.’ Our programs not only teach skills but create awareness of whole new worlds they really never have understood existed for them. We are lighting a fire in kids minds to make this understanding real. I believe we will help create the next generation of entrepreneurs in the Middle East, and eventually completely globally.”

Regional venture capital — from the Arab world and Turkey — is hovering closely over the ArabNet attendees. Egyptian VCs Sawari Ventures and Amman incubator Oasis 500, some of the most active regional investors with nearly 50 investments last year, split their time equally here with portfolio companies and looking for new investments. Middle East Ventures announced five new investments from the stage, including two follow-ons in music, job discovery, gaming and mobile payments. Noted Oasis 500′s Salwa Katkhuda, “I came with good expectations to be about the same as last year. But so much more is going on now in the region in terms of start-ups funded, a few success stories, more VC funds and so on.”

Will western investors be far behind? Saad Khan notes with conviction: “The answer to what will happen in five years is in the hands of the people in this room, period. And wins tend to beget wins.” He likes what he saw at ArabNet.

Christopher M. Schroeder @cmschroed is a U.S. Internet entrepreneur and angel investor. His most recent company, the social and content online health platform healthcentral.com, was acquired in December 2011. He has been active in following entrepreneurship in emerging markets, especially in the Middle East, and has written for AllThingsD on these experiences.

I am totally convinced that the world of social media is not consolidating around one “winner takes all” social platform.

– Fred Wilson

Sometimes I feel like it would be easier to find the Fountain of Youth than get apples-to-apples metrics about Web site and app usage.

Here’s what Google CEO Larry Page said: “Plus users are very engaged with our products. Over 60 percent of them engage daily, and over 80 percent weekly.”

I tried all sorts of nice ways to persuade Google spokespeople to clarify what exactly that means in terms of active users of the Google+ service. They told me that the text of Page’s remarks and an accompanying post by Google’s head of social, Vic Gundotra, spell it out exactly.

That is to say: Over 60 percent of Google+ users use Google products on a daily basis. Over 80 percent of Google+ users use Google products every week.

Gundotra worded his version of that stat slightly differently. He said in a Google+ image post that the same numbers refer to Google+ users who “sign in” to use Google products on a daily and weekly basis. (See image above.)

So, if you registered for Google+ any time since it launched this summer, and you used any other Google product — say, search! — in the past day or week, while signed into your Google account, you got counted in those percentages.

The thing is, Google envisions Google+ as a binding layer between all its products, rather than a discrete entity. While Gmail may have 350 million active users, as Page disclosed today, it’s not so easy to split out Google+.

The blurry numbers do make some sense. For instance, Google+ content will now show up in an increasing amount of search results for signed-in Google users. How do you count that?

The unspoken reference here is that Facebook has said for years that half of its active user count is composed of people who log in on a daily basis. (I can’t remember a time when Facebook ever gave out a registered user count. Those hundreds of millions of people you hear them talk about all log in at least once a month.)

So nope, no apples to apples to see here.

Back in 2008, hi5 trailed in popularity only behind MySpace and Facebook. In June, News Corp., which owns The Wall Street Journal, sold MySpace for just $35 million, a major comedown for a company that was purchased for $580 million.

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