Last month, Kara Swisher reported that Schultz and Accel Partners’ Kevin Efrusy were suddenly stepping down from the Groupon board.

Schultz’s departure was effective immediately, while Efrusy will not be standing for reelection at the company’s annual meeting in June.

In the interview on CNBC, Schultz said, “I only committed to one year. It just so happens that my exit was timed with the problem they had last quarter, and no one should read anything into that.”

When asked whether the company has enough adult supervision, he added: “I have confidence in the board and Andrew, and that’s all I have to say at this time.”

Groupon’s stock has continued a downward spiral after it revised its fourth-quarter results to account for higher than expected returns during the holiday period. Today, the stock is down 1.3 percent, or 13 cents, to trade at $9.94 a share.

At that price, it is worth half as much as at the time of its initial public offering.

On the same day that Schultz and Efrusy announced their departures, Groupon said it planned to appoint both Daniel Henry, CFO of American Express, and Deloitte Vice Chairman Robert Bass. Henry joins immediately, in Schultz’s place.

Spencer Platt | Getty Images News

According to sources close to the situation, Starbucks Chairman and CEO Howard Schultz and Accel Partners’ Kevin Efrusy will be stepping down from the board of Groupon.

Schultz’s departure will be effective today, but Efrusy — who was critical to the initial funding around the Chicago-based daily deals site — will not be standing for re-election at the company’s annual meeting in June.

The departures are voluntary, but sources said the pair will be replaced by two new directors with significantly more fiscal oversight experience, whom one source characterized as “accounting types.”

(Update: Groupon just posted a press release noting the board departures, with the names of the new board pencil pushers: Daniel Henry, CFO of American Express, and Deloitte Vice Chairman Robert Bass. Henry joins immediately in Schultz’s place. Full press release below.)

It is a move that is critical, given Groupon’s recent series of missteps around its financial reporting that have hurt both its reputation and, more importantly, its stock.

Interestingly, several sources noted that Schultz almost left the board right before Groupon’s public offering last fall, after several ongoing disputes with its management, but stayed on so as not to scuttle its IPO.

The board of the company has not involved itself as prominently in the accounting messes at the company, but it appears as if they will begin to now.

It must, given Groupon shares have been trading at a low of $11. Its stock has dipped to $10.98 today.

As Tricia Duryee wrote recently about the fall:

At that price, it is now worth just over $7 billion, down 57 percent since the company went public last November and well off the more than $10 billion it was valued at as tech’s hottest start-up of 2011.

Ironically, Groupon’s current market valuation is actually not much more than the $6 billion offered for it by search giant Google in late 2010.

The fall of Groupon has been swift, from the honorific of being the fastest-growing company ever to one that cannot keep control of that runaway growth.

That’s perhaps no surprise.

Perhaps most significantly, Groupon went public in just four years, delivering the biggest tech IPO since Google.

The quicksilver move was typical for it. In just two years’ time, the company ballooned from 37 employees to 9,625 and from serving five markets in the U.S. to 175 in North America alone. And that’s leaving out massive expansion abroad. In the past year, Groupon has acquired roughly 17 companies, including many international copycats.

The company also has entered many new segments, expanding from selling lower-priced and simpler deals on restaurants and spas to more complex and pricey arenas, including travel, physical goods and luxury items.

But Groupon is now learning that its original business does not work across just any segment, especially to more discerning customers of its higher-level and more expensive offerings.

In fact, it was those newer and potentially more lucrative markets that forced the company recently to revise the company’s fourth-quarter report after returns skyrocketed on luxury items, such as Lasik eye surgery.

The problems forced Groupon to lower revenue in the period by $14.3 million and net income by $22.6 million. It is now reporting a wider net loss of $64.9 million on revenue of $492 million, pushing it further away from its goal of profitability.

The company also disclosed at the time that independent auditors had noted “material weakness” in its financial controls. In addition, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Securities and Exchange Commission was examining Groupon’s revision. 

With many companies, investors might have shrugged off such accounting issues, but the impact on the stock has been greater since they are only the latest in a string of similar mistakes at Groupon.

In its pre-IPO period, for example, Groupon was forced to restate revenues after counting both its portion of the revenue and the revenue that goes to the merchant together. It also had to dump a controversial accounting metric that made the company look more profitable than it was, because it did not include important costs, such as critical online marketing expenses to attract new customers.

Those came after the company retracted a statement by Eric Lefkofsky, Groupon’s co-founder and executive chairman, who told Bloomberg in an interview that Groupon would be “wildly profitable.”

At least the wild part was accurate.

Much of the blame for these missteps by Wall Street is being aimed at CEO and co-founder Andrew Mason, the iconoclastic 31-year-old entrepreneur who is largely responsible for defining the company’s culture, as well as Jason Child and Joe Del Preto, the chief financial and accounting officers, respectively.

Child joined the company in December 2010, coming from Amazon, where he held several roles over a 10-year period — including VP of finance, international, and director of investors relations. Prior to joining Amazon, he worked at Arthur Andersen as a certified public accountant.

Del Preto has been Groupon’s chief accounting officer for the past year and, before that, he was the company’s global controller for three months. Before Groupon, he was controller and VP of finance at Echo Global Logistics and also served as controller at InnerWorkings, the same company where Mason was a computer programmer in his early career.

Mason, of course, is the best known and the person most responsible for establishing the company’s whimsical culture and managing — or mismanaging, depending on how you look at it — Groupon’s hard-charging growth.

It will also be up to him to turn it all around, as the company sinks in both value and investor regard. Since the restatement, Mason has said little about how he intends to do that. In February, when Mason concluded Groupon’s first-ever earnings call, he said: “Thanks, guys, this was a lot of fun, and I look forward to many more of these.”

It’s not clear fun will be on the agenda at his next outing on Groupon’s first-quarter call in mid-May.

Here is the official press release from Groupon on the board changes:

Groupon Appoints Two Directors to Board Daniel Henry, CFO of American Express, and Robert Bass, Vice Chair of Deloitte

CHICAGO — (BUSINESS WIRE) — Groupon, Inc (http://www.groupon.com) (NASDAQ:GRPN) today announced that Daniel Henry, the chief financial officer of American Express Company and Robert Bass, a vice chairman of Deloitte LLP will join its Board of Directors. Both will serve on the Audit Committee with Audit Chair, Ted Leonsis. Daniel Henry was appointed to the Board on April 26, replacing Howard Schultz, who has stepped down from the Board. Robert Bass will stand for election at the annual stockholder meeting to be held on June 19 following his retirement from Deloitte, replacing Kevin Efrusy, who will not stand for reelection at that time. “With their deep financial, accounting and operational experience, Dan and Bob will provide invaluable expertise to the Board going forward,” said Eric Lefkofsky, Groupon Chairman.

Daniel Henry, 62, has been the Chief Financial Officer of American Express Company since October 2007. Henry is responsible for leading American Express Company’s finance organization and representing American Express to investors, lenders and rating agencies. He has also served as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of U.S. Consumer, Small Business and Merchant Services and joined American Express as Comptroller in 1990. Prior to joining American Express, Henry was a partner with Ernst & Young.

Robert Bass, 62, has been a vice chairman of Deloitte LLP since 2006, and a partner in Deloitte since 1982. He will retire from Deloitte on June 2, 2012. Bass has specialized in e-commerce, mergers and acquisitions and SEC filings. At Deloitte, Bass is responsible for all services provided to Forstmann Little and its portfolio companies and is the advisory partner for Blackstone, DIRECTV, McKesson, IMG and CSC. He has also previously been the advisory partner for priceline.com, RR Donnelley, Automatic Data Processing, Community Health Systems and Avis Budget. He is a member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and the New York and Connecticut State Societies of Certified Public Accountants.

“I’m thrilled to have been a part of Groupon’s development,” said Kevin Efrusy. “The Company is well on its way to becoming the operating system for all local commerce.”

“Howard and Kevin helped guide us on our journey to becoming a public company and I want to thank them and acknowledge their contributions,” said Groupon CEO Andrew Mason.

“During my tenure on the Board, I was impressed by the game-changing opportunities that Groupon has delivered for both merchants and customers on a global scale,” said Howard Schultz. “Groupon has a strong sense of mission and purpose, and as I move on to focus on my other time commitments, I wish them the very best.”

Wearables have enormous potential for uses in health and fitness, navigation, social networking, commerce, and media. Imagine videogames that happen in real space. Or glasses that remind you of a colleague’s name that you really should know. Or paying for a coffee at Starbucks with your watch instead of your phone. Wearables will transform our lives in numerous ways, trivial and substantial, that we are just starting to imagine.

So what will it take to elevate these accessories from niche to mainstream? Hardware advances in battery life and the way sensors interact with each other will get us further than we are today, but the software platforms that drive the hardware hold the key to consumer adoption. In the same way that Windows took the PC mainstream and iOS and Android are powering the smartphone revolution today, wearables’ success depends on backing from one or more of the big five software platforms — Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook. These platforms — and their developer communities — hold the key to the consumer connection. How so?

Apple has the most polished marketing, channel and brand. More than any other company, Apple has the potential to make any product go mainstream (witness the iPad). Apple’s expertise in hardware manufacturing, its developer network, its marketing prowess and its channel strength in Apple Stores and partner retailers all add up to a fertile petri dish for wearables. Already, Apple has inspired a number of “app-cessories” built to sync with iOS devices, like the Lark sleep sensor wristband and the (now discontinued) Jawbone UP fitness wristband.

Google has an open platform and a license to dabble. Google’s Android is the platform of choice for WIMM Labs, the Sony SmartWatch and others because it’s open: Product strategists can build whatever products they want on top of Google’s code while still taking advantage of the growing number of developers and companies that build Android apps. Additionally, Google has crucial elements of search infrastructure, with the ability to recognize and retrieve vast amounts of information like location-based data, which could be the basis for many wearable device features.

Microsoft has the best depth sensor yet. Windows Embedded, Microsoft’s operating systems and related solutions for “intelligent systems,” powers a wide range of products from Ford’s Sync automobile information system to Polycom conference phones. But to date, these solutions have been geared more for enterprise use, and haven’t attracted the same breadth of professional and amateur developers that iOS and Android platforms have — a crucial component for taking wearables mainstream. But another Microsoft product, the Kinect for Xbox 360, has captured developers’ imaginations, prompting a Kinect application programming interface for Windows. The potential of a Microsoft powered wearable becomes much more tangible when you imagine the depth sensor of the Kinect turned outward from your body, toward the world rather than toward you.

Amazon has information on more than 100 million products and their buyers. More and more consumers are starting their product searches with Amazon. Its all-encompassing product catalog, detailed product specs and reviews and personalized recommendations would all be assets in wearables. But despite Amazon’s success in manufacturing the Kindle line, we think it’s more likely that Amazon’s wearables strategy will center on distributing apps for other companies’ devices, rather than manufacturing the device itself.

Facebook has a Rolodex — and facial recognition — for 800 million people. Facebook, like Amazon, has the tool kit to be a partner player in the wearables market. Facebook is controversially implementing facial recognition software to autotag photos from its 800 million users — software that would be a perfect fit with a wearable device. Like that guy on the train? Sorry, he’s “in a relationship.”

In three years, we believe wearables will matter to every product strategist, just as mobile and tablets matter today. And because the software platforms are the key to mainstream, these devices have the power to intensify the platform wars among the big five — over issues like talent, intellectual property and patents, developers and customers. Wearables will shift toward mainstream in three phases:

• Phase one: Apple grows the app-cessory market with a deeper investment in wearables. For instance, by adding more sensors and connectivity to the iPod nano, as well as Siri voice control, Apple could immediately spark innovation in iOS apps and more accessories for nano beyond its existing watchbands.
• Phase two: Google broadens wearable experimentation with its open platform. Our call that Google will dominate in wearables — at least in the short term — may be surprising given our skepticism about Android’s prospects on tablets in the past. But an open platform for experimentation is exactly what wearables will need to evolve out of the early stages.
• Phase three: Microsoft competes with an “anti-platform” platform. With Windows 8, Microsoft is pivoting away from .NET/Silverlight to the open Web protocols of HTML5 and Javascript. This shift will be a strength for Microsoft to build on, promoting a future OS for wearables as a more flexible, scalable platform for developers than iOS or Android.

Sarah Rotman Epps is a Senior Analyst serving consumer product strategy professionals at Forrester Research. Follow her on Twitter @srepps. To learn more about this research, visit the full wearables research report here.

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:

Yahoo shareholders felt a little giddier earlier this week, when it seemed as if the company had finally decided to make a deal with its Asian partners.

But the happiest crew might end up being the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s outside counsel, Skadden Arps — and especially Leif King, the fantastically named legal eagle who has been advising Yahoo on the deal.

That’s because today the Yahoo board approved continuing the negotiations to come to a final agreement over the stake, sources said, which should take six to eight weeks.

It’ll surely be happy holidays for billable hours!

As costly as the legal bills will be, if it all goes well, an Asian solution will mean one major problem solved, with a possible pile of cash and new assets coming in to Yahoo.

To get there, the company signed a term sheet earlier this week with Japan’s SoftBank to sell back all its holdings there, and with China’s Alibaba Group to sell off more than half its stake (moving from a 40 percent stake to a 15 percent one).

The deal values Yahoo’s total shares in both companies at about $17 billion.

While it gets a pretty accounting name — “cash-rich split “– the vehicle to unwind it all is essentially a complex tax dodge finally cooked up by the trio, in which cash, new assets and stock will be moved around until everyone gets what they want (except the U.S. government).

I would explain it — but I am on vacation, and would rather drink eggnog and sleep — so here is The Wall Street Journal’s version, which I like because it sounds like Alibaba and SoftBank are giving Yahoo a hugely loaded Starbucks card for Christmas:

“As envisioned in the scenario, Alibaba would create a subsidiary into which it would put several billion dollars of cash, plus an operating asset that Yahoo wants to buy using additional cash from Alibaba, almost like giving Yahoo a prepaid card for an asset of its choice, the people said.”

Everyone is hoping there will not be any hiccups in the deal, which has been spearheaded by Yahoo board member and Intuit CEO Brad Smith, and Jerry Yang, who is also the company’s co-founder and a major shareholder.

Alibaba CEO Jack Ma and CFO Joe Tsai, both co-founders of that company, were the point men for the Chinese company. And for SoftBank, it was its founder and CEO Masa Son and his main U.S. exec, Ron Fisher.

Now, said sources, Yahoo’s board is hoping to still keep the bids from a pair of private equity firms — Silver Lake and TPG Capital — alive.

While initially the focus on the action, the PE bidding for partial Yahoo stakes has recently been sidelined by the Asian deal.

Now, sources said, Yahoo is hoping the new infusion of cash and assets will allow it fend off shareholder unrest — stock buybacks and dividends, anyone — to solicit higher prices from the firms to make strategic investments.

Yahoo had considered the initial bids too low, as did some very pissed-off activist shareholders.

Still, it’s not clear if those firms will jack their offers now, although sources said Silver Lake is still interested in some sort of deal that would give it influence over remaking Yahoo.

Silver Lake and others think the long-troubled company could be revived with some effort, and become a much more lucrative Web property.

But those negotiations might run into roadblocks over who gets to pick leadership for the company. Yahoo has accelerated its efforts to hire a new CEO, after firing Carol Bartz in September.

The PE firms, who would buy a large stake in Yahoo, also have wanted some level of control, including CEO and board approval, in order to be able to make massive changes at the company to turn it around.

Wall Street seems to like the Asian part of the deal, at least, since it shows some sort of forward momentum at Yahoo, and from its often-lugubrious board.

Shares are up almost 7 percent in the last few days, although they are not popping as they might be, given that new valuations based on a successful Asian deal put the stock at a much higher price.

In other words, investors like what they see, but are watching and waiting for more.

The start-up, called Mobeam, got the endorsement of such a large company because of a major glitch in the couponing system: Most scanners in grocery stores cannot read a bar code displayed on the screen of a cellphone.

“Couponing has been one of the tried and tested tools to incentivize consumers to try our products,” said Jeff Weedman, P&G’s VP of global business development. “Ads around the world have moved digital, but there was a hole in the system. You can deliver coupons digitally, but frankly our customers weren’t happy about it. It doesn’t scan at most grocery scanners, and it slowed the system down because the checkout person would have to plug in the numbers manually.”

In October, Cupertino, Calif.-based Mobeam raised $4.9 million in capital to solve this problem, developing technology that coverts bar code data into a beam of light that can be read by most checkout-counter scanners.

A host of applications are already available for download on many smartphones — Starbucks has been one of the shining examples. Its application, which allows customers to pay at the register, has enabled 26 million mobile payment transactions this year alone.

But few people realize that Starbucks had to replace all of its scanners in its stores for the app to work.

Today, couponing is $3.7 billion segment of the consumer packaged goods market in North America, with more than 300 billion coupons distributed every year.

Increasingly, they are going digital, too.

Hundreds of millions of dollars in investments have been made this year in the distribution of coupons online and via mobile. Most recently, WhaleShark raised $150 million. Others include CouponCabin.com, which raised $54 million; and Coupons.com, which secured $230 million in two megarounds.

The prospect of finding coupons online and saving them to the phone, which can then be scanned at the register, is appealing. Currently, the main two options are to clip coupons from the newspaper, or to print coupons that were found online.

But don’t expect to be able to start using Mobeam’s technology tomorrow.

Mobeam will have to convince phone manufacturers to integrate its technology into their hardware. It says it is expecting phones to start shipping as soon as next year.

(Photo credit: sdc2027)

Hearsay is a social media management tool for corporate brands that have local stores and representatives (in the mold of, say, Starbucks). It powers 16,000 such pages on Facebook, Google, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Twenty-nine-year-old Shih is the author of the business book “The Facebook Era,” and was previously at Salesforce.

Other prominent tech execs on the Starbucks board include Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Juniper CEO Kevin Johnson, though Sandberg has indicated she will not run for re-election next year.

The investment marks MasterCard’s first in the mobile payments space, and follows similar moves by both Visa and American Express.

Neither company is releasing terms of the round, but mFoundry said MasterCard was the lead investor. Intel Capital, Fidelity Information Services and Motorola Mobility also participated. Previous investors include PayPal, Bank of America and Ignition Partners.

Consumers will most likely recognize mFoundry for developing the Starbucks mobile application, which displays a bar code that can be scanned at the register to make payments from a prepaid account.

MasterCard’s SVP of Mobile James Anderson said he was more interested in mFoundry’s relationships with 600 banks and credit unions.

For the past five years, the company has been focused on the mobile banking space, by developing applications for banks that enables users to check their balances and conduct other financial services from their phone. He said millions of customers at banks, such as Citi and Bank of America, use the applications three to four times a week on average.

Going forward, MasterCard wants to work with mFoundry to enable those applications to make payments at the register using MasterCard’s near field communication (NFC) technology called PayPass.

Near field technology allows a consumer to tap their phone at the register to pay for items. By integrating with these banking applications, the purchase could be deducted straight from a person’s bank account, and without the need to carry around a wallet.

MasterCard is also working with Google Wallet and ISIS, the wireless carrier-led initiative, but it views this partnership as a third approach. “Some consumers will see value in Google; others will want to use their telco provider, and then some will trust their bank,” Anderson said. “At some level those options will be competing, but we believe the choice is up to the customer.”

MFoundry’s CEO and founder Drew Sievers said the relationship is not exclusive, so his company will be free to work with Visa or others, but MasterCard will naturally have a head start since they will be the first ones integrated into the application. Deployments will occur as soon as the middle of next year.

MasterCard is not the only payments provider making investments in the mobile payments space.

Earlier this year, Visa made a large investment in Square, and American Express has opened up an office in San Francisco and created an intimidatingly large $100 million investment fund to make sure it doesn’t miss out on any opportunities.

Sievers said for companies in the mobile banking and payments space that are gaining traction, there’s not only venture capitalists eager to invest, but a ton of companies looking for strategic investments.

In fact, he said, “there’s fewer opportunities to invest in than there are companies willing to invest.”

Lately, though, the company’s “pick of the week” program has expanded. It started last month with giving away the paid iPhone app Shazam Encore, and this week’s freebie is an extended book sample from Erin Morgenstern’s “The Night Circus.” The expansion could soon extend to TV shows as well, I’m told.

The Starbucks partnership is one of Apple’s oldest iTunes partnerships, and Starbucks has also been beefing up its digital offerings to take advantage of its in-store Wi-Fi.

This is perhaps the most perfect commentary on the overwrought hue and cry over Netflix raising its prices recently on DVD-by-mail rentals.

While any hike on costs is annoying, I actually just had to talk one high salaried dude down from the ledge, after I pointed out the new monthly price for the online video service was less than he spent at the Starbucks that day on a needlessly elaborate latte.

Kudos to Funny or Die for uncovering “literally the worst thing that has ever happened to white people”:

What that means to advertisers: They’ll now have an improved chance to get their messages directly in front of some users, by inserting ads directly into their main “timelines.”

What that means to users: Depends. Marketers will only be able to deliver the ads — which will use the “Promoted Tweet” format the company rolled out more than a year ago — to users who already follow them on the service. And they’ll only appear on Twitter’s main Twitter.com site.

So if you don’t follow any brands/marketers/companies on Twitter, you won’t see the ads. And if you’re checking Twitter on your iPhone, or via clients like TweetDeck, you won’t see them there, either.

Here’s how Twitter described it to advertisers:

UPDATE: Here’s Twitter’s blog post about the new ads — or, if you prefer, new ad delivery system.

One important note is that even this program can’t guarantee that an advertiser’s message will reach their followers. That’s because Twitter will only show a certain number of Promoted Tweets using this system, and Twitter will use a bid/exchange system on the back-end, which incorporates both pricing and “relevance” into picking a winner.

As I noted earlier this month, delivering ads into users’s main timelines has been on Twitter’s agenda since April 2010. But this move doesn’t get them all the way there. Eventually, CEO Dick Costolo and company want to deliver ads to users who aren’t following particular companies by using targeting that finds likely recipients.

That is, Twitter wants a way for Starbucks to reach me even if I don’t follow the company, or any other coffee-related companies on the service. You know — just like lots of Web advertising works (or is supposed to work).

The fact that the company has been slow to do that is telling, I think — it shows that they’re quite content to move slowly on ads, despite the braying of outsiders (sometimes including me). Then again, when they’ve got outside investors lining up to spend $800 million on a $8 billion round, that confidence is a little easier to come by.

This isn’t the equivalent of Google’s AdWords, which was Twitter’s original intention when it started its ad platform a year ago. But Twitter may not need that kind of magic bullet to make this thing work — Facebook hasn’t found one, and things are working out okay over there.

Twitter is pushing a new ad product called “Promoted Tweets To Followers,” set to launch by early August.

They will give marketers a chance to place their message directly in front of users who follow particular brands, via ads that will show up when a user first logs on to Twitter.com.

Twitter has been selling “Promoted Tweet” ads, which look and act like regular Tweets, for more than a year. But it’s entirely possible for most users to spend all day on Twitter.com and never see one, since they usually only show up when a user searches for a particular term.

That’s created an inventory problem for CEO Dick Costolo and his sales team, since Twitter users don’t use search in the same way Google users do.

“Promoted Tweets To Followers” are supposed to help solve that problem in two ways. They allow brands to send messages directly to people who have already said they care about them — that is, Starbucks can target people who are already following Starbucks on Twitter. And they can ensure that Starbucks’ followers actually see the ad, by inserting them at the top of their timelines.

Twitter is moving cautiously with the new ads. It’s telling marketers that it will limit the number of Promoted Tweets users see, and tweaking that number as it gauges consumer reaction.

And it’s not pinning the ads at the top of users’ timelines, like it had briefly tried to do with its ill-fated Twitter “quickbar” on its iPhone app this year. The ads will move down the timeline like any other Tweet.

Twitter has already tested Promoted Tweets in timelines via the Hootsuite Twitter client, but this will be the first time it has run the ads on Twitter.com. At the start, the ads won’t run on any other clients, like Tweetdeck or Twitter’s mobile apps.

The company has been pushing the ads to marketers over the past few weeks. Twitter wouldn’t comment on its plans directly, but offered this statement via email: “We are taking a deliberate and thoughtful approach with our advertising platform. As that platform evolves, we will continue to focus on delivering value for both marketers and users.”

Plans for ads in timelines have been in the works since Twitter first unveiled Promoted Tweets back in April 2010. And Twitter has occasionally told advertisers that they’d be coming soon: Last February, for instance, it said ads in timelines would be here by end of Q1.

I think it’s striking that it’s taken Twitter so long to make its ads more visible, even as its valuation keeps skyrocketing. And even this is a modest step — if you don’t follow any advertisers on Twitter, you still won’t see their ads.

Eventually, that will change. Twitter executives say that one day, they’ll have a targeting system that allows marketers to find receptive audiences for their ads even if they don’t search for certain terms or follow their brands. But that’s not happening anytime soon.

Following the early success of its iPhone application, Starbucks has released an application for Android that will enable users to pay for their extra hot Vente Caramel Macchiato or Iced Mocha Frappuccino with their phones.

The mobile application lets consumers reload their Starbucks payment card, view transactions, track awards, and, ultimately, pay by scanning the barcode on the phone’s screen.

The Starbucks Android app is available in the Android Market and will work on phones running operating systems 2.1 or higher.

Starbucks will soon accept mobile payments at 9,000 locations with the announcement today that it will be rolling out soon to 1,000 cafes in Safeway grocery stores across the U.S.

Starbucks first launched the iPhone app in January and reported that within three months, more than three million people had paid using Starbucks Card Mobile.

At an event last month, K.C. MacLaren, Starbucks’ director of mobile and emerging platforms, said the application isn’t about adding incremental revenue, but about driving loyalty. Other evolutions in the pipeline include the ability to order a coffee for pick-up later in the store.

Our source also says that Dave Donatelli, executive vice president and general manager for enterprise servers, could be in line for a big promotion. He’s a 22-year EMC veteran. I’ve got several calls in to HP, but haven’t yet heard back.

Bocian joined HP in 2008 during the Mark Hurd era, following a one-year stint as CFO and chief administrative officer at Starbucks, and before that was a 24-year veteran of NCR, including a period as its CFO. At NCR he would have worked for its onetime-CEO Mark Hurd, who eventually became HP’s CEO. Hurd, of course, resigned suddenly last summer amid a bit of a scandal involving a marketing contractor, and eventually landed a job as co-president at Oracle.

Bocian is the latest senior executive to leave HP in recent week. The most notable was Marius Haas, the former head of the networking business. He left HP last month for a job with Kohlberg Kravis & Roberts. Others who have left recently include Tom Iannotti, a senior vice president who ran the enterprise business in the Americas, who retired, and Gary Budzinski, a senior vice president in HP’s services business. The Wall Street Journal summed up HP’s executive churn in a story last month.

Groupon VP Mobile Partnerships Michael Shim said: “Mobile is huge for Groupon…I believe we could see us doing 50 percent of deals sold/purchased in the next couple of years.”

Shim made the statements this morning at Mobile Northwest, an all-day event in Seattle sponsored by Miller Nash, where a good portion of the day’s discussions are focused on the intersection of mobile and commerce and payments.

The opening morning keynote was delivered by K.C. MacLaren, Starbucks’ director of mobile and emerging platforms. MacLaren said the coffee retailer is the largest mobile payments company, with 8,000 outlets. In January, it rolled out an iPhone app nationwide that allows people to scan their phone to pay for a drink.

MacLaren said so far usage of the application has exceeded expectations, with millions of users. Three months after the app launched, the company revealed that more than three million people had paid using Starbucks Card Mobile.

Right now the application isn’t about incremental revenue, he said, but about driving loyalty. Other iterations in the pipeline include an Android application and the ability to order a coffee for pick-up in the store.

Shim talked about a new service launched last Tuesday called Groupon Now, which allows users in the Chicago area to make a timely purchase decision on when and where they want to eat lunch or dinner–or maybe even go see a movie.

Shim said the service has also exceeded expectations, with more than 1,000 merchants already signed up to offer real-time deals. “We’ve been inundated with demand. Groupon Now is about local discovery. What can I find around me?…We are just getting going on where we think it will take our business.”

Right after BoomTown heard the sad news this morning that Cisco was jettisoning its Flip digital video camera division–part of a transparent effort to assure Wall Street that it was no longer serious about its wacky foray into the consumer market–I lobbed in a call to its founder Jonathan Kaplan to get him on video talking about the loss.

The Flip, of course, has been my go-to tool to harass and annoy Silicon Valley moguls, since it appeared on the scene many years ago. The technique for the simple device was to essentially stick it up someone’s nose until they cried “Uncle!” and told me what I wanted to know.

It’s not entirely clear why Cisco didn’t make more of an effort to sell Flip–I got three calls from big consumer Internet and electronics companies that would have been logical buyers this morning alone, all of whom said they would have seriously considered purchasing the iconic brand. It remains the top-selling camcorder in the U.S., with 21.6 percent of the market.

Cisco bought the start-up behind Flip, Pure Digital, in March of 2009 for $590 million in stock, and the product has sold many millions of units in its short and cruelly ended life.

The first commercially-branded Flips were, in fact, introduced at the third D: All Things Digital conference in 2005 by Kaplan, and he first talked with Cisco CEO John Chambers about selling the innovative Flip at D4 in 2008.

While Wall Street has been worried about the impact of smartphones, especially the iPhone, on Flip’s business–helped in part by Apple CEO Steve Jobs making that point in the photo here at a music event in the fall of 2009 (after which, Cisco defended Flip on Twitter)–it still boggles the mind why Cisco could not have found a new home for it, rather than lopping off all those jobs.

Flip has reportedly been profitable on a standalone basis, several sources said, although probably not when you glom all those shared Cisco corporate costs on top of its puny shoulders.

Flip’s axing, in fact, is clearly a lame attempt to get serious by Cisco–whose shares have been suffering of late–in order to assuage investors that it was focusing on its core business of networking after a series of consumer-facing experiments. While these consumer efforts were but a drop in the giant Cisco revenue bucket, killing them gets lot of ink.

Expect more such “We’re back!” announcements from Chambers and Cisco in the coming months, as it is part of the classic CEO Playbook 101.

Kaplan remained mum on all that in our chat in the Noe Valley Starbucks, which you can see below, along with my favorite Flip moment, where I got all up into Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s business. I also added two other videos I did when my various Flip cameras met new versions in 2008 and in 2010.

Big single tear–it’s just not the same with an iPhone:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110412/video-after-cisco-sacrifices-his-baby-to-the-gods-of-wall-street-flip-founder-jon-kaplan-speaks/feed/ 10 http://allthingsd.com/20110401/seven-more-questions-for-gil-elbaz-ceo-of-the-data-mercenary-factual/ http://allthingsd.com/20110401/seven-more-questions-for-gil-elbaz-ceo-of-the-data-mercenary-factual/#comments Fri, 01 Apr 2011 14:00:27 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=4622 When we last left Gil Elbaz, his company Factual had just landed a $25 million round of venture capital funding from Andreessen Horowitz and Index Ventures.

I came up with the phrase “data mercenary” to describe in a fun way what Factual aims to be. If you’re developing an application or a Web service, and you need lots of data, you’re faced with several big problems up front. Where is that data going to come from? How up to date is it? How will you keep it fresh? These are questions that Factual aims to answer, both by supplying the data and helping ensure that it’s maintained. They’re big, complicated questions, and if you were going to ask someone to try and wrestle with them it would be Elbaz. He sold his first company, Applied Semantics, to Google, which went on to turn it into AdSense. Earlier this week I caught up with Elbaz in advance of his Web 2.0 talk.

NewEnterprise: So it’s been a few months since your funding announcement. How have things been going at Factual since then?

Elbaz: They’ve been going really well. We moved into a larger office. We’ve been bringing in lots of good people every other week, and we’ve accelerated the adoption with lots of leads. The places data is really taking off. We decided on a vertical approach to marketing and improving our data, so local is where we’re putting a lot of our resources. We are dabbling in other verticals and when we feel comfortable we’ll invest heavily in other areas. We just haven’t figured out which ones yet. We did recently launch a database of US physicians, which was a pretty significant effort. That’s an example of seeding the environment and starting conversations around a second vertical.

So everyone is talking a lot about “big data” and your talk at the Web 2.0 Expo is about data “haves” and “have-nots.” What do you mean by that?

The focus is to talk not just about big data as in a set of tool you need to process that data, but how do you get access to that data in the first place. The brand new startup in many cases doesn’t have any access to data, so that’s a big challenge, versus someone like LinkedIn, which has a huge batch of data to work from. But then I think every company really needs to act like they need access to much more data. Because no matter who you are there’s a lot of information you can’t access. The question is how does the ecosystem grease the wheels of efficiency of information movement, so that everyone can build much better information services. It’s still fairly stuck in my opinion in terms of easily getting information into your app.

So what do you suggest is a solution?

I break it down into many problems. There are six or seven categories of problems, and there’s many solutions for each one. One is findability, that is finding the information you need to access. The Web was built to make information findable by humans, it doesn’t necessarily mean its easy to find data you want to download. It may be government data, or data you want to license from someone. Or it could be an API. There are no big catalogs of structured data, though there’s been some progress from places like Infochimps and Microsoft Data Marketplace, though its just starting to happen. Another key issue is if you know a resource that’s available, is it easy to integrate. Many legacy data companies don’t have APIs. A lot of government data you have to request on tape and have it shipped to you. But with the advent of faster and cheaper networks, that’s improving. But it’s a chicken and egg. People have to push for these things or they don’t get fixed.

That’s two problems. Do you think people are figuring out that if they have data they need to make it useful by providing some kind of API support?

I think so. A typical Web site is much more likely to use several data sources than it would have several years ago. But I think the average will become greater and greater each year. Really there’s no limit to how many information services you want to access and integrate. That leads to my third issue which is standards and semantics. A big reason why developers will usually choose only a few sources to integrate is that they tend to be difficult to merge, unlike APIs, because of the lack of common languages for integrating. So if you have several feeds of business information, there’s no universal public identifier for businesses. You’d have to do a lot of work to integrate that information. At Factual we’re trying to popularize our own unique business identifier that we’re happy to distribute and hope that people use. We’re also trying to publish other people’s identifier, like Foursquare’s. In some way we really don’t care which one people use as long as a standard emerges.

That’s three problems. What’s number four?

Another one is the economics of data sharing. While in some cases the data that is moving around can be made free by a government or by an e-commerce site that has a big motivation for sharing it, there are many cases where there aren’t any fully fleshed-out models of sharing data, because a lot of companies are worried that if they share their data they’re not going to get paid for it, and they put effort into collecting it. The data marketplaces I mentioned before are a start. There are sites like Mashery that help you monetize your APIs. At Factual we’re trying to build a new model where companies share data with us and we share it back with the community free for most developers, that is our API stays free. We charge for high usage rates via service level agreements, but for most developers it ends up not being an issue.

So someone like say Starbucks might share data about store locations, and this one closed and this one just opened, and this one was just renovated etc. They could share that data with you?

When I usually talk about a larger company, I’m usually thinking an app developer who going to be doing millions of data lookups a day. But in terms of integrating Starbucks’ own data on their own site, it’s probably more accurate than data from anyone else. Which brings me to a fifth issue, which is how do you test data and decide which data you can trust. It’s easy to decide based on the brand, whether its the United Nations or Starbucks. But it’s hard to scale it out and be automated. We have some of our own internal tools. But it’s not something people tend to ignore. People assume that if they’re paying for data it’s probably good.

By my count that’s something like five problems you’ve identified, which means we’re somewhere near the bottom of your list.

I’ve covered most of them. Another is ownership and rights. If you’re a search engine and you access data on the Web, it doesn’t scale well to understand the terms and conditions of publishing data because a computer can’t read terms and conditions agreements. If you’re a search engine the fine print can probably be ignored. That’s maybe not surprising, but it is interesting that ignoring them has become the norm because it’s simply impossible for a computer to consider them. Creative Commons created six different designations for how you can use content from a given site, say for commercial use or for non-commercial use with attribution. Flickr is an example of a service that’s put Creative Commons tags to use. But I’d love to see more automation happen around this. But there’s fewer standards when someone doesn’t want to give their information away for free, and how they get paid when someone re-uses it. I’d love to see more automation around that. And there’s a little of that happening around APIs. But the state of the art today is a lot of phone calls and business development. And that’s fine, but if we’re really going to scale the integration of Web-wide information into information services, there’s going to have to be a better way.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110401/seven-more-questions-for-gil-elbaz-ceo-of-the-data-mercenary-factual/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110324/can-social-media-predict-companies-share-prices/ http://allthingsd.com/20110324/can-social-media-predict-companies-share-prices/#comments Thu, 24 Mar 2011 21:42:32 +0000 Jennifer Valentino-DeVries http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=38082 Can the number of Facebook fans a company has tell you how its stock is performing?

At least one researcher thinks so. Arthur O’Connor, a doctoral student at Pace University in New York, is testing whether social-media popularity–as measured by Facebook “likes,” Twitter followers and YouTube views–is correlated with stock prices.

In a pilot study, Mr. O’Connor found a “statistically significant” correlation, although he tested only three brands–Starbucks Corp., Nike Inc. and Coca-Cola Co.–over a 10-month period. The more social-media fans a brand had, the better its stock was likely to do, even accounting for general market conditions.

The finding held true even though the three companies studied had very different returns. During the test, Starbucks stock increased 29 percent, Nike grew 14 percent and Coke fell by nearly 6 percent.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110324/can-social-media-predict-companies-share-prices/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110128/seven-questions-for-sunny-gupta-ceo-of-apptio-a-cios-new-best-friend/ http://allthingsd.com/20110128/seven-questions-for-sunny-gupta-ceo-of-apptio-a-cios-new-best-friend/#comments Fri, 28 Jan 2011 14:30:23 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=2535 All CIOs say they want to get a deep understanding of the costs and benefits of all the IT gear and services they buy. Yet too often the information they need to make decisions about how to spend precious IT dollar is murky.

It was a complaint that Sunny Gupta heard often around the time that the company he was working for, Opsware, was being acquired by Hewlett-Packard. “CIOs kept pulling me aside and telling me their jobs were changing,” he said. “A job that used to be about managing technology was quickly becoming one of managing costs.”

It was a rare opportunity to launch a service that numerous big companies were clamoring for. His response is Apptio, a cloud-based service that tracks IT costs and other metrics for CIOs who are constantly under pressure to justify their budgets to CEOs. Backed by $41 million in venture capital funding from Greylock Partners, Madrona Venture Group, Shasta Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz–the venture firm run buy Gupta’s former Opsware colleagues Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It’s growing like crazy, and customers include Cisco Systems, Starbucks, Facebook and J.P. Morgan Chase. Cisco liked it so much it joined with the venture firms in a $16.5 $20 million Series C round of funding that closed last November, and it also resells Apptio to its customers.

I caught up with Gupta by phone while he was on a trip to London to talk about Apptio’s business and how it’s shaping up.

NewEnterprise: Sunny, let’s start at the top. What does Apptio do?

Sunny Gupta: IT has a lot of raw materials like labor, hardware and software. A lot of these things are tracked at the company level. But the CIO’s job is managing the IT products. We aim to help the CIO really understand the cost structure of all their IT assets. We do this by producing what we call a Bill of IT. It captures the supply and demand of IT resources to the business. It helps the CIO show what the levels of demand and spending really are. We also help them with planning and budgeting and forecasting. And then we help them make cost-reduction decisions and benchmark their performance against other companies in their industry.

How many customers do you have?

We have about 60 customers, and we are managing more than $50 billion in IT spending.

So every company does a return-on-investment analysis on its IT spending. This sounds like it’s a lot more detailed than that.

You can think about it as a detailed ROI, but the way our customers think about it is as an ongoing management system that tracks the fully loaded cost structure of the products and services they provide to their businesses on a month-to-month basis. It tracks costs, but also utilization, so you can see how the resources are being used, and whether or not it makes sense to, say, consolidate a data center.

You said Facebook is a customer. Can you tell me a little about how it’s used there?

The CIO there uses Apptio to track monthly telecom expenses, and to help understand costs and to make decisions around getting the most out of what they spend.

A lot of companies are struggling with decisions about moving their IT to the cloud or keeping it on-premise, or some mix of the two. How does Apptio fit in a situation like that?

We’re seeing a lot of hybrids. At the large companies, the biggest portion of their costs are still in-house. Without naming names, some of our largest customers have 50,000 or 100,000 servers. These are systems that have been in use for a long time and they’re critical to the business. But we also see large enterprises adopting external cloud services. It may be Amazon Web Services or something from Rackspace, or they may be using a software-as-service like Salesforce.com. The trick is to get a handle on what the costs are and if you think it might be time to move something to an external provider so you can make an objective decision.

A lot of the time a CIO has to decide between something that’s really good and really expensive or something that’s good enough and less expensive. Can you help in cases like that?

That’s one of our prime use cases. If you talk to Rebecca Jacoby, the CIO at Cisco, she says she’s stopped asking “Why not IT?” and started asking “Why IT?” If what you have is good enough based on the cost structure and utilization, you get the granular visibility into all those metrics so you can make decisions. For example, it may be that you don’t need as much storage as you think you do, and so the best move isn’t to switch to the cloud but to stop paying for some of the storage that you’re not using. For the first time, executives are able to make business decisions around technology based on true business metrics. We find on average that customers are able to save 5 to 6 percent of their spend, and over 12 to 18 months they can reduce it by 10 to 15 percent.

What’s involved? If it’s a cloud based service, I presume there’s nothing to install at the customer site.

It’s fully cloud-based, so there’s nothing to install. It takes the financial data from enterprise resource planning software, like SAP or Oracle, and it also takes IT operational data, support tickets and other data. It combines them with the financial data. Once you have all that data you can start working on what-if scenarios and make decisions about what to do–or not do–next. If you want to control or reduce costs, having that detailed visibility is the first step.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110128/seven-questions-for-sunny-gupta-ceo-of-apptio-a-cios-new-best-friend/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20110126/facebook-brings-back-part-of-beacon-and-no-one-blinks/ http://allthingsd.com/20110126/facebook-brings-back-part-of-beacon-and-no-one-blinks/#comments Wed, 26 Jan 2011 12:30:51 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=28585 In 2007, Facebook unveiled a plan to let brands turn Facebook users’ online activities into ads. Cue uproar, and an eventual apology from Mark Zuckerberg.

Yesterday Facebook unveiled a plan to let brands turn Facebook users’ online activities into ads. If anyone is complaining, it’s news to me.

Easy enough to see why: There are some very big differences between Facebook’s ill-fated Beacon and Sponsored Stories, the site’s new ad unit.

For starters, Facebook unveiled yesterday’s news in the trade press, not in a high-profile, Apple-aping event. More important is that while the new ads can tell your friends what you’re doing outside of Facebook, they’re mainly focused, for now, on what you do on the site.

Most important: The ads are replicas of the updates your friends are already seeing in their Facebook newsfeeds. So while Starbucks doesn’t pay a cent when this shows up on on the center of your friends’ pages:

It can now pay up and place this on the right side of your pals’ pages, too.

Users can’t opt out of the ads, which seems like a red flag given Facebook’s history. But if a brand wants to shell out money to tell your friends something you’ve already told your friends, who cares? No one, apparently.

Still, recall what Zuckerberg was saying less than four years ago, when he was going to “build a new kind of ad system” based on “social actions” and “information that is shared between friends.” At the time, that sounded wildly ambitious, and maybe a bit creepy.

And look what Sponsored Stories does now. Marketers can purchase ads that tell your Facebook friends when you’ve “liked” something of theirs. Or posted on one of their Facebook pages. Or checked-in to one of their outposts or played with one of their apps.

And they can do it when you’re not on Facebook, too, via “likes” you make on sites that have tied up with the social network.

This is what Zuckerberg was talking about in 2007, right? He just needed time to get there. So did his users.

Remember that when Facebook rolled out Beacon, the site was a big deal, but not the biggest: A mere 50 million users, not 600 million. Many of those people were still trying to get a handle on how the site worked, and what they ought to do with it.

And recall that the newsfeed itself–more or less the core of today’s service–was still a relatively new idea too, introduced just a year earlier. (Another controversy, and another Zuckerberg apology.)

Now, I think, just about everyone who uses Facebook knows, more or less, what they’ve signed on for: A place that wants you to share as much of yourself, with as many people, as you can.

Letting advertisers help you share that much more? No big deal. This is isn’t 2007, you know.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110126/facebook-brings-back-part-of-beacon-and-no-one-blinks/feed/ 11 http://allthingsd.com/20101103/liveblogging-the-facebook-mobile-event-single-sign-on/ http://allthingsd.com/20101103/liveblogging-the-facebook-mobile-event-single-sign-on/#comments Wed, 03 Nov 2010 17:55:54 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=36691

BoomTown arrived late to the Facebook mobile event for the press due to traffic related to the parade today for the San Francisco Giants’ World Series victory–and where I would much rather be right now.

Go Giants!

10:53 am PT: In any case, I am here in the cafeteria of Facebook again, where the company continues its attempts to take over the known digital universe before Google does.

Currently, the social networking giant notes “200 million people around the world are now actively using Facebook from a phone, more than triple the number just one year ago.”

Thus, some new tries of a lot of stuff, such as single sign-on.

Meaning you sign on a Facebook and it signs you on all over the Web (or at least at those in partnership with the company).

Such as at Groupon and Zynga.

This single sign-on stuff has been tried by many before, a kind of Holy Grail of the Web, and where everyone has failed.

But it also the proverbial camel’s nose poking in your digital tent.

As in, the whole Facebook body is surely coming in next.

Facebook’s exec in charge of all this, Eric Tseng, talks about a virtuous circle of single sign-on, happy users and happy developers, sounding as if this is the single biggest problem facing humanity.

A password crisis! Silicon Valley to the rescue!

Perhaps the only issue the now damaged administration of President Barack Obama could actually get some legislation passed on now.

“My fellow Americans, we have too long be stuck in a miasma of forgetting which name of our dog we used for our password plus the number one…”

How much do I want to be at Giants parade right now? Much!

11:02 am: Next, we move onto more ability to show your location to friends on Facebook better and make sense of it by opening location APIs.

More heavy pontificating about what a disaster it is that we cannot properly see where our friends are on Facebook in the real world.

Of course, this leaves out the pertinent point that my “friends” on Facebook are exactly those I do not want to run into at the Starbucks on El Camino Real in Palo Alto, Calif.

Loopt Founder Sam Altman comes up to show off the integration with Facebook Places, where this problem is solved anyway.

“We believe data wants to be unified,” says Altman.

Certainly if you are the Borg, you want it to be unified. Me, not so much.

11:11 am: Now comes the attempted Groupon-killer from Facebook, which is creatively called “Deals.”

This is essentially allowing Facebook Places to locate a person and then merchants to offer deals when a user is nearby via a platform offered by Facebook.

You can do individual deals, such as getting a beer at a bar when you check in. Then, there is a loyalty deal on the phone, taking the place of that dog-eared card you always lose.

And there is the “friend deal.” This is not friends with benefits, sadly.

It means if you check in and bring a lot of folks, one eats free–which sounds just a little naughty.

Also, there is one deal type related to charity.

For the Gap, for example, you get a free jeans if you are among the first 10,000 to check in at a Gap store. There are 500 million Facebook users, so you do the math.

Essentially, it is about getting stuff if you check in, including experiences.

So, just like little white mice in Facebook’s lab, we push the button, we get the cheese. Sigh.

But I wonder if I check in right now, I can be transported to the Giants parade via a time machine. Now that might be something worth handing over my privacy to Facebook.

“The big takeaway for today is that there is obviously a lot of change in the social space,” says Facebook CEO and Co-founder Mark Zuckerberg. “You can rethink any product area and make it be social.”

Indeed, you can. And Facebook obviously is going to be plowing on through a lot of them in order to solidify its stranglehold on the consumer.

11:23 am: Q&A!

The first question is on privacy and third-party developers giving up your location.

Yes, that!

Zuckerberg makes assurances that the current privacy steps now in place are working just fine and also users need to consent.

“The place information about people is not public,” he says.

There is question from Ben Parr of Mashable, about whether there is an iPad app for Facebook coming.

“It’s not mobile…it is a computer,” declares Zuckerberg, dismissing the very good question.

“I think Apple would disagree with you,” countered Parr, correctly.

“Well, sorry,” said Zuckerberg with more than a little bit of snark.

For a second, he sounds just like the guy from the Facebook movie.

But Zuckerberg quickly declares his love of Apple products and apologizes, although he should not have as it was a funny exchange.

A question about single sign-on. Zuckerberg notes that it has been tried, but the experience was bad.

“What we think is going to happen now is that it is so easy when it works, it is a whole different experience,” he said, comparing it to the way YouTube made video uploading on the Web easier.

Zuckerberg’s goal is that all apps become social, which is also a virtuous circle for Facebook, of course.

A question about the deals offer. It seems for Zuckerberg that Facebook is not getting a cut from retailers right now, as Groupon does.

Ruh-roh, Andrew Mason!

Zuckerberg then notes that the Places offering is going well, without giving a lot of specifics.

At the end, PR maven Brandee Barker wraps it up by saying what I have been thinking this entire time:

“Go Giants!”

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