At a press conference due to start any minute, the Taiwanese cellphone maker is set to show off a pair of Android phones–the Cha Cha and the Salsa–as well as its first tablet and several other Android devices.

HTC’s move follows that of INQ Mobile, which last week announced two Android models that feature heavy Facebook integration. Gemalto also announced Monday it plans to integrate Facebook into SIM cards, allowing users of low-end phones better access to the social network.

Like many others’ news here at the show, most of HTC’s had leaked out well ahead of the event.

One particularly nice touch–HTC planned ahead and ran Ethernet cables to each seat in the theater. (Unfortunately, Mobilized left the MacBook Air Ethernet adapter back in the apartment.)

Mobilized has live coverage of the event below.

9:58 am: Still waiting for the press conference–which was due to start a half hour ago–to get under way. We do have comfy seats and soothing music, but would have prefereed an extra half hour of sleep.

9:59 am: Apparently all I had to do was complain. Now it’s getting started with CEO Peter Chou taking the stage.

“2011 is going to be an amazing year,” Chou promises.

Some analysts predict smartphones will outsell feature phones, Chou says.

“Features that were once fancy, extra, are now becoming standard,” he says. “‘Nice to have’ is turning into ‘must have.’”

Hardware is important, but so are software and services like Sense and HTCSense.com. Company plans new versions of HTC Sense for phones with keyboards, larger screens, etc.

10:04 am: Some stats from Chou:

25 million smartphones sold last year, more than double the prior year, with revenue up 93 percent.

The company’s global brand awareness reached 50 percent, up from 13 percent a year and a half ago. (Of course, that means half of consumers still don’t know HTC, but a big improvement nonetheless.)

10:05 am: On to 2011: 4G networks will change everything again. HTC Thunderbolt, its first LTE smartphone, shipping this week with Verizon.

10:07 am: Company is announcing five phones today, the most it has ever announced at one time. Chou says.

“I hope you agree it has been worth the wait,” Chou says, bringing out John Wang, HTC’s chief marketing officer.

10:07 am: Talking about HTC Sense. Location-data for 83 countries. HTC spent a year and a half building the maps product. You can preload, so travel won’t cost a fortune in roaming charges.

Weather is another good example, Wang says, where the company aimed not just to provide information, but also offer an emotional experience.

“When it is sunny you almost feel the warmth on your body. When it rains, you almost want to wipe your phone dry.”

10:10 am: First demo fails as video he wants to show won’t play.

“Well, maybe later on,” Wang says, moving on to the new phones.

And another fails as whatever was supposed to happen isn’t happening.

Okay, here we go. HTC Desire S. And, we’ve got some more demo fail going on.

10:12 am: “We apologize for this,” Wang says, annoucing a few-minutes pause.

10:15 am: And we are back, with HTC Desire S, Incredible S and Wildfire S.

Desire S doesn’t have front and back. Machined out of a single block of aluminum. “It feels solid in your hand,” Wang says. Also has full HD video recording.

Wildfire S, smaller and in three colors. “It can almost disappear into your pocket. (Mobilized hates it when that happens. We’ve put two iPod Nanos through the wash.

10:20 am: HTC Incredible S. As you rotate the large Android phone, the icons on the buttons also rotate. 8-megapixel camera, integrated video chat with front-facing camera. “Incredible S combines premium design with premium experience,” Wang says.

So, essentially these are updates to the existing product line.

Next up, the Facebook phones.

10:22 am: There are 500 million Facebook users worldwide, but 200 million check it on their phones. Those users are twice as engaged. Many young people check Facebook right when they wake up with a significant number doing so from their phones before they even wake up, Wang says.

Now showing a video of HTC’s work with Facebook to build the new phones.

10:24 am: Video of Facebook CEO Marc Zuckerberg touting the device.

“A lot has been made about a Facebook phone,” Zuckerberg says, but adds that there will be more than a dozen phones this year with deep social integration. “HTC is doing that here.”

Mobilized is apologizing in advance, but I may not make it through the whole press conference.

10:26 am: The new phones–the Cha Cha (with keyboard) and Salsa (touch-only) both have a dedicated blue Facebook button at the bottom.

10:27 am: Can use button to post updates, but also if taking a picture can use that button to share social network. “When you press this button, the photo is instantly uploaded to Facebook,” Wang says. Button blinks also when reading an article on the Web. Press the Facebook button and it will share that on Facebook. Similar, when you are listening to a song, pressing the button will share that information.

If you hold button down, you check in on Facebook Places.

Both phones also support Facebook messaging and chat.

“We did not just add social networking to the phone,” Wang says.

10:30 am: Bringing up Facebook VP Chamath Palihapitiya to talk about the partnership.

“I’m just frankly very thrilled we are taking this very important step, which I think will be the first of many,” he says, saying he expects Facebook and HTC to do more things together.

10:32 am: Chou back up, saying he could just stop with five great phones and ensure another great year. But he’s not. There’s a tablet coming.

10:34 am: Chou says the company could have rushed out another “me too” experience, but says that wasn’t what the company wanted to do.

Showing video of how the company came up with its tablet, the HTC Flyer.

10:37 am: Chou holds up the Flyer, then hands things back to Wang. Flyer also has unibody design, which he says makes the tablet feel solid but keeps it lightweight.

HTC wanted it to be comfortable to hold in hand. At 415 grams it is about the same weight as a paperback book.

Here are a few features: 1.5GHz chip, 6-hour battery life, dual cameras, Flash 10 and HTML 5 support, along with new 3-D-based HTC Sense experience.

10:40 am: Also has a stylus–unique among Android tablets–HTC Scribe technology.

Allows you to share things more easily, Wang says. Just scribble “let’s go” on a restaurant Web page and press a button and it is sent.

You can also use it to do audio note taking–a la Livescribe, where notes are synchronized to the audio.

Mobilized has to jam to our next meeting, but I think we have hit the high points.

“The experience has to be the same,” Costolo said during an afternoon keynote speech at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. “I shouldn’t have to think how to use Twitter.”

About 40 percent of tweets come from a mobile device, while half of all active users are active on more than one device, he said.

Until not that long ago, Twitter built only the product for the Web and let third parties handle phones and other devices. In recent months, though, it has scooped up various app makers and now offers official apps for the major smartphones. However, given that those official apps stem from different acquisitions, they often work in different ways.

Costolo said the company also wants to make sure that one doesn’t have to sign up and follow lots of people to get something out of the service.

“We want Twitter to be instantly useful,” he said.

With Twitter for Windows Phone 7, the company introduced the notion, already present on the Web, that one shouldn’t have to be an active user to have Twitter on their phone.

His talk is still ongoing and I’ll update things as it continues.

5:32 pm: Costolo said the company will begin offering crowdsourced translations of the service into Russian, Turkish and Indonesian and, later this year, will have its own translation to Portuguese.

5:33 pm: Some stats from Super Bowl, this year.

4,000 tweets per second at the end of the game and 3,000 tweets per second during the game. That was 27 tweets per second in 2008.

The overall record is New Year’s Eve in Japan (the country has a single time zone) and the prior sporting event record was from last year’s World Cup.

5:34 pm: Twitter is actually bringing things back to live TV and away from the DVR.

“That’s not just happening with live sporting events,” Costolo said. He cites game shows in the U.K.

5:36 pm: “Glee,” for example, has 30 times the number of tweets about it when the show is on.

Takeaway: the long-talked about second screen of interactive TV is here and it is Twitter.

5:38 pm: About Twitter as a business: The short answer is we are already making money, Costolo said. The really good thing, he said, is that businesses can use the service in the same way as others–building community around shared interest.

5:41 pm: A viral campaign of note. Al-Jazeera highlighting its coverage of the events in the Middle East and North Africa with the hashtag #demandaljazeera to get its programming on U.S. cable systems.

5:44 pm: Costolo, on the role of Twitter and Facebook in recent events there:

“I think that takes away from what these people have accomplished,” he said. “We are probably a very small piece of the puzzle.”

5:47 pm: On to Q&A. Battery is running low, but hoping to make it through the question period.

First question came in over Twitter and asks what is the company’s biggest fear.

“Twitter’s biggest fear is lack of execution,” Costolo said, saying he tries to convince workers not to focus on competitors. “If we execute on what we are trying to do we will be successful.”

5:48 pm: A couple of questions on local trends and translations. Costolo said that crowdsourcing offers a way to do more translations quickly, while the trends piece requires more work on Twitter’s part, some of which should be done this year.

5:53 pm: What is the biggest mistake Twitter has made?

Costolo said company’s founders would say they shot themselves in the foot, head and everywhere else not hiring or scaling fast enough.

“I think we are out of the woods on that one,” Costolo said.

Next question is on what Twitter is doing in response to its pivotal role in Arabic-speaking countries right now. Costolo noted that Twitter doesn’t yet support right-to-left languages.

On being blocked, Costolo said Twitter is only a 350-person company and doesn’t have the resources of some larger companies. “We try to just leverage our own platform to plead for help,” he said.

5:58 pm: Costolo is asked if there is a need for Twitter-branded smartphones.

“No,” Costolo said. “I believe there is a need for Twitter in the existing platforms.”

Earlier in his keynote, Costolo said he wants deep integration so that when a user takes a picture they don’t have to open a separate app to tweet out that picture.

6:03 pm: As for rumors that Google might be willing to pay $10 billion for the company.

“I don’t know where these things come from,” Costolo said. “It’s just a rumor.”

6:03 pm: End of keynote. (just as my battery was on its last sliver of red, too!

And if you guessed it was from all of those people putting up their unwanted presents on eBay, you are completely, 100 percent…wrong. Dec. 25 and 26 saw record mobile traffic to Zillow.

In general, mobile traffic to the real-estate site surges whenever people are out of the office. During the average weekday, Zillow says that only about 15 percent of traffic comes from mobile devices. On a typical weekend, anywhere from one-fifth to one quarter of Zillow’s traffic is from phones. On Thanksgiving, that figure reached 30 percent, while Christmas Day saw a record number of visits to the mobile site, with phones accounting for a third of all Zillow’s traffic.

As for eBay, it said Dec. 12 was its busiest mobile sales day ever, with the number of transactions well more than double that of the busiest day of 2009. That marked two years in a row that the second Sunday in December was the busiest eBay shopping day.

For those who want to slice eBay’s mobile business in all sorts of ways, the company has posted an interactive graphic with all sorts of fun facts. For instance, auto parts represented 15 percent of mobile sales in Germany as compared with only 8 percent in the U.S.

• 300 Apple Stores in 10 countries (soon to be 11)
• More than 1 million visitors to those stores on some days
• 120 million iOS devices sold since the first iPhone debuted
• 230,000 iOS devices activated each day
• 6.5 billion apps downloaded from the App Store to date
• 200 apps downloaded from the App Store each second
• 1.5 billion games and entertainment downloads to the iPod touch alone
• 250,000 apps currently available in the App Store
• 25,000 of those are iPad apps
• 275 million iPods sold to date
• 160 million active iTunes accounts
• 12 million songs in the iTunes store
• 11.7 billion songs downloaded from iTunes
• 450 million TV episodes downloaded via iTunes
• 100 million movies downloaded via iTunes
• 35 million books downloaded via iTunes
• The iPod touch is the No. 1 mobile gaming device worldwide, outselling the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP combined
• Apple’s share of the portable gaming market: 50 percent

Here’s the latest evidence, via Search Engine Land: An “Internet stats” page, distributed via the search giant’s U.K. arm.

What’s the point? Google (GOOG) says it will help those looking for “killer stats for a presentation or maybe just looking to keep abreast of key trends in the digital space.”

But it’s easy to tell what Google is really up to: This is perfect fodder for content farmers, or “content object makers,” casting about for data points to fill up slideshows. And if those slideshows are stuffed with AdSense units, everyone makes (some) money. A virtuous cycle!

True, many of the stats are U.K.-specific, and it’s hard to establish the truthiness level for any given data point. But whatever. People love stats. And many of them are sort of useful, in a hard-to-define way. For instance: Did you know the average Android user who watches YouTube sees 10 clips a day?

Every week, BoomTown is calling all those who make cool graphs, charts and stats done prettily about tech to send them to me pronto.

I am–truth be told–a secret stats fanatic. A bargraphaholic. Yes, even a closet pie-charter.

The last set of data I posted was a comparison of the share and consumer loyalty of the three big search engines–Microsoft (MSFT), Yahoo (YHOO) and, of course, Google (GOOG).

This week, in its annual survey of consumer technology attitudes and adoption, titled “The State of Consumers and Technology,” Forrester Research found that…wait for it, wait for it…the kids love the Internet!

As you can see in the chart labeled 4-1 below (click on the image to make it larger), new media beat traditional media for consumers younger than 40 years old, in terms of hours spent.

Still, the under-40 group also use traditional media, through both online and television channels, as you can see in the chart labeled 4-2, although TV is the most likely way everyone accesses most big-media offerings.

Well, except the Weather Channel, which leads in “cross-channel media use,” which means it is doing swimmingly in diversifying its distribution.

Lastly, in the 4-3 chart, as with the first chart, while Web sites like News Corp. (NWS) social networking site MySpace and its rival Facebook show up on the 10 most regularly consumed channels for the youngs, the olds are still mostly chomping on networks, newspapers and cable.

In other words, traditional media’s demographic is the group more likely to die first! But at least they’re loyal!

According to the research house, Palm Pre search activity, which more than doubled in late May thanks to Sprint’s “Now Network” advertising campaign, suffered a significant decline in mid-June, right around the debut of the new iPhone (click on chart below).

“The final two weeks in June saw the [number of weekly searchers on terms relating to the Palm Pre] fall to approximately half the number of the peak week of activity,” comScore noted in a release today. “Interestingly, this decline in Palm Pre search activity coincided with the launch of the Apple iPhone OS 3.0 on June 17 and launch of the iPhone 3GS two days later. Throughout May and the first week of June, the number of unique iPhone searchers remained fairly consistent at approximately one million people per week. In the week prior to the launch of the 3GS, however, the number of iPhone searchers more than doubled to 2.3 million people during the week of the launch.”

ComScore offers no correlating evidence beyond this, and the end of the Sprint campaign obviously played a role in the decline, but this is clearly not a simple coincidence. (Google Trends shows virtually the same thing. Click on chart below.) These are rival devices in a unique market we’re talking about. That said, comScore suggests that the Pre does resonate with an audience different from the one interested in the iPhone.

“Of the people who searched for Palm Pre-related terms during the eight weeks of the study,” comScore notes, “just 11 percent also searched on iPhone-related terms, suggesting that the majority of the people interested in the Pre have little interest in the iPhone.”

According to the research house, Palm Pre search activity, which more than doubled in late May thanks to Sprint’s “Now Network” advertising campaign, suffered a significant decline in mid-June, right around the debut of the new iPhone (click on chart below).

“The final two weeks in June saw the [number of weekly searchers on terms relating to the Palm Pre] fall to approximately half the number of the peak week of activity,” comScore noted in a release today. “Interestingly, this decline in Palm Pre search activity coincided with the launch of the Apple iPhone OS 3.0 on June 17 and launch of the iPhone 3GS two days later. Throughout May and the first week of June, the number of unique iPhone searchers remained fairly consistent at approximately one million people per week. In the week prior to the launch of the 3GS, however, the number of iPhone searchers more than doubled to 2.3 million people during the week of the launch.”

ComScore offers no correlating evidence beyond this, and the end of the Sprint campaign obviously played a role in the decline, but this is clearly not a simple coincidence. (Google Trends shows virtually the same thing. Click on chart below.) These are rival devices in a unique market we’re talking about. That said, comScore suggests that the Pre does resonate with an audience different from the one interested in the iPhone.

“Of the people who searched for Palm Pre-related terms during the eight weeks of the study,” comScore notes, “just 11 percent also searched on iPhone-related terms, suggesting that the majority of the people interested in the Pre have little interest in the iPhone.”

Depending on your perspective, this is either interesting news or heartening news: Michael Jackson’s funeral and memorial were indeed a giant Internet event. But they don’t seem to have been as big as Michael Jackson’s death, and they weren’t as big as Barack Obama’s inauguration.

So let’s call them the third-biggest Web event of the year. To date.

That sounds more like what I was thinking this morning: Everyone had to watch Obama’s inauguration or read about Jackson’s death, but not everyone felt compelled to see his burial or memorial.

It also explains why the Akamai people were so uncomfortable with my earlier reading of their traffic stats this afternoon, when I concluded that the events were responsible for the content delivery service recording more visitors per minute than any other time in the last year. Though I’d still love it if someone could explain why that did happen. (Jennifer? Anyone?)

Statistics are tumbling in from different sites and services (if you’d like to share yours with me, I’m all  ears).

Here’s what I’ve got for now:

• Akamai (AKAM) says it delivered 2,185,000 “live and on-demand streams” today. If I’m comparing apples to apples here (Jennifer?), that’s much fewer than the seven million simultaneous streams the content delivery network delivered during Obama’s inauguration. Akamai also compares the number of visitors on its “Net Usage Index for News” and says that number peaked at 3,924,370–that’s nearly double average traffic of 2,000,000, but fewer than the 4,247,971 visitors who were looking for Jackson info when he died on June 25.
• Facebook, which integrated its service with live video feeds from CNN, E! ABC and MTV (why wasn’t Twitter doing this?), says that one million users posted 800,000 status updates during the event, with the overwhelming majority coming through CNN. There were 1.8 million updates with the word “Obama” in them during the inauguration.
• CNN says it served up 781,000 concurrent live streams during the event; during the Inauguration it served up 1.3 million. It served a total of 4.4 million streams during the event, and 10.4 million for the day.
• MSNBC claims three million live streams–which are different from concurrent streams–and says that is its second-highest total, after…well you can guess. More if they roll in.

But while Hearst isn’t ready to declare victory, it does say that the first two months of seattlepi.com’s life have been “encouraging.” Via a press release, Hearst offers up a bevy of traffic stats that show the site has grown even as its staff has shrunk. Hearst doesn’t offer up any info about revenue, but does say that its “sales and marketing team is highly energized.”

I sincerely hope so, and I sincerely hope it works. I still don’t get the math: Hearst says seattlepi.com is attracting 4.3 million monthly unique visitors. Chris Batty, who runs sales for Nick Denton’s Gawker Media empire, figures that traffic could support a staff of perhaps a dozen editorial workers at one of his sites–not the 20 or so that Hearst has working in editorial.

And bear in mind that Gawker’s titles have a national focus, not a regional one, which makes it much easier to sell than Seattlepi.com.  There may be a thriving business for regional/local online ads one day, and we’ve been hearing about the potential for many years. But it’s not there yet, and it’s not close.

Still, better to have Hearst says it’s encouraged than to have Hearst pull the plug after a few days.

Two months after becoming the nation’s largest newspaper to move to an all-digital news model, seattlepi.com’s year over year numbers show that it has more users this April than last April, when the Post Intelligencer was still publishing with an 80% larger staff, an amazing feat for an online venture with a newsroom of 20.

In April, its first full month of operation, seattlepi.com had 4.3 million unique visitors, up 1.6% from 4.2 million in April 2008 (source: Omniture). Total page views for the month were 37.3 million.

During the last week of April, the site broke its one-day unique user record since going online-only. There were 324,000 unique visitors on April 30—the 4th highest day in terms of unique visitors in 2009—breaking previous records set since going online only on April 29 (290,000) and April 27 (283,000). Total page views for those days were 1.5 million, 1.4 million and 1.5 million, respectively.

Two months into our online-only experiment, we are encouraged by this growth in visitors and expect our numbers to improve as we continue to establish new partnerships.

We get a lot of feedback from readers cheering us on and thanking us for continuing to bring them the local news and information they want and need. It’s great to see that not only have we not lost readers, we’ve actually gained new ones.

A new team of more than a dozen sales and marketing representatives and managers has been tasked with building advertising and marketing partnerships and creating a unique Seattle digital advertising agency.

Our sales and marketing team is highly energized to be working with such a vital and dynamic product. We will leverage existing partnerships with Yahoo!, Kaango, Metrix4Media, and others to create what is essentially a local digital advertising agency offering unique opportunities for business in the Seattle area and across the country. Advertisers and other partners understand that seattlepi.com is in an unrivaled, popular destination for news and information, offering tremendous value for exposing their products, services and brands to a large and very desirable audience.

CBSSports.com reports that its March Madness on Demand video player had about 7.5 million unique visitors by the end of the tournament, a 58 percent increase from 4.8 million users over the same period last year. The first four days of the tournament saw more unique visits–5.6 million–than last year’s total traffic.

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