The Boggle-inspired game, available for iOS and Android, is the first self-published title from Swedish studio MAG Interactive. The numbers behind its growth are seriously impressive, but data obtained by AllThingsD suggests that, like last year’s mobile sensation, Draw Something, its popularity may have already peaked.

For the uninitiated, the game works like this: Two competing players each have three minutes to swipe their fingers across a square grid of letters, finding as many words as they can and scoring points in the process. Each game is divided into three rounds, and each round ends with the ominous, perfectly calculated sound of a tick-tick-ticking 10-second countdown.

First, the good numbers: Ruzzle product manager Daniel Hasselberg said more than 100 million rounds (so, more than 33.3 million games) are played every day. With 28 million active users in January, the game has topped the iOS App Store charts in 30 countries.

Ruzzle players have spent, in aggregate, more than 10,000 years playing the game, Hasselberg added.

And according to mobile intelligence service Onavo — which uses anonymous user data from its popular data-compression app to estimate apps’ market share — 7.51 percent of all iPhones in the U.S. opened the game in January, up from 1.29 percent just one month before.

To put that in perspective: The original Angry Birds, which Onavo ranks as the most popular in the series, was opened by “only” 4 percent of American iPhone owners in the same month.

However, Onavo now says that those January numbers may have been the peak for users’ engagement with the app. Although it is still handily beating Zynga’s similar Boggle-esque title, Scramble With Friends, the number of Ruzzle’s daily active users has dropped consistently since the first week of February.

The second graph in the image below shows the trend. The purple line represents Ruzzle, and the gray line represents Scramble With Friends.

Of course, it’s still possible for the developers to turn that curve around, and Hasselberg promised new features for the iOS and Android versions of the game “over the next few months.”

But just two days after Ruzzle peaked, on February 5, MAG Interactive released a new game called QuizCross that’s already bringing in rave user reviews. Despite its youth, the company seems to understand the M.O. of mobile: Like Ruzzle’s ticking countdown, hits don’t last forever.

High-profile Silicon Valley entrepreneur Max Levchin is launching a new mobile payments startup today called Affirm.

It’s the first project emerging from Levchin’s San Francisco tech incubator Hard, Valuable, Fun (HVF), which he started after selling his last company — Slide — to Google and then eventually leaving the search giant. Previous to that, Levchin and investor Peter Thiel had sold PayPal to eBay.

While it might seem at first as if Affirm is in direct competition with other mobile payments-focused companies such as Square and Stripe, it seems to be aimed at another layer of the value chain in an effort to improve conversion for mobile payments.

In fact, Stripe — in which Levchin is an investor, too — will be processing credit card payments on the back end.

But it will be an uphill battle for Levchin in the current payments arena, with a range of challenges from a multitude of rivals to regulatory scrutiny to the risks associated with credit in general.

Its most similar competitor, for example, is Klarna, a hugely funded company based in Sweden that offers payment solutions for a wide range of online storefronts across Europe that did $200 million in revenue last year. Klarna, which means “clear” in Swedish, is likely to be eying the U.S. market and has well-regard VC Mike Moritz of Sequoia Capital on its board.

As part of its effort, Affirm will use Facebook for authentication of consumers, and also use a number of other social and data signals to assess risk. It will then guarantee payment to merchants — who will pay Affirm a fee — after this check.

“We are trying to get as close as possible to one-click, which has always been the case on the desktop,” said Levchin in an interview today. “In mobile, it has become an imperative to be able to buy it now or you lose a customer quickly.”

Levchin described Affirm as a digital charge card rather than a credit card, trying to be valuable to merchants by lowering the abandonment rate of mobile transactions. Affirm’s beta launch retail partner is 1-800-Flowers.

“You will essentially be putting a purchase on a digital tab, and we are going to make it work for us by looking at all available data to determine if you are someone who will pay it back,” said Levchin.

Like an American Express or other charge card, consumers will have about 30 days to settle bills, although Affirm will not be making any money from them.

As to why he decided to enter the increasingly competitive online payment space — which is also rife with regulatory and fraud issues — Levchin said that his efforts at PayPal did not go far enough.

“Payments online are still too hard — we started the revolution with PayPal and democratized payments for small businesses, but we stopped short of changing the system,” he said. “The world is now awash in data and we can see consumers in a lot clearer ways.”

In addition, he added, the “overwhelming transformation of everything toward mobile changes all the fundamentals.”

Relying on Facebook could be an issue, of course, opening up a thicket of privacy issues and also worrisome reliance on the social networking giant. But Levchin said that Affirm’s system depends on the company for confirming identity more than anything else and there will eventually be a number of ways to do that.

Other data Affirm will be using, he said, range from incomes per zip code and even a user’s mobile device ID.

Affirm has been funded by Levchin and a group of friends in the “low-digit millions,” he said, with only a few dozen employees compared to bigger mobile payments efforts from others.

He said he knows the risk of entering the space, especially given that there are only so many solutions and a limited retailer attention.

Still, Levchin noted: “I just think there is so much more to do. Technology has come a long way since PayPal.”

And even when you have sufficient storage, you run into another problem: No matter how good they are, the systems you buy have a way of getting clogged up as data gets pushed through the pipes. Between you and your storage system are gateways that direct traffic to those storage systems, and they tend to get bogged down.

Last week, I met with a company from Sweden called Compuverde, which has a solution to that problem. Basically, it’s software that redistributes the traffic flowing in and out of the pipes and evens it out. In essence, all the storage hardware gets a more orderly and equally distributed stream of data coming in and flowing out, and, as a result, it runs a lot more efficiently. That’s one piece of the puzzle.

But there’s a more interesting problem. A lot of the data getting created is basically copies and then copies of copies for the purposes of backup, and then backups for backups. It’s inefficient, and makes for a world where storage gets both energy-hungry and expensive, and therefore expensive to operate.

Compuverde attacks this problem, too. Its Object Store product is software that ties basic commodity hardware together and makes it act like a much more expensive and fail-safe storage environment. The result, the company says, is a rock-solid storage environment that can handle hundreds of petabytes of data, and that’s more efficient and cheaper to own and operate than the higher-end storage systems from the likes of EMC and NetApp.

Stefan Bernbo, Compuverde’s CEO, says the company has customers who have tried out its software who have seen a 400 percent improvement in efficiency. It’s kind of a bold claim, but at the company’s HQ in the city of Karlskrona, in southern Sweden, it operates a big 13-petabyte storage array that prospective customers can try out on their own and see the results in action.

The company is being bankrolled for now by its executive chairman Mikael Blomqvist, a seasoned Swedish entrepreneur who founded a cable-isolation company called Roxtec, which he later sold to Mellby Gård, a Sweden-based industrial concern.

The move is both expected and a sore spot with some Netflix investors. The company’s expansion outside the U.S. (starting with Canada, moving to Latin America and then the U.K.) has been an expensive one, with mixed results.

Netflix had already announced that it would be expanding again in 2012; last month, it told Wall Street that it would lose money in Q4 because of a move into “an additional attractive European market.”

More than 3.6 million of the company’s 27 million streaming-video subscribers come from outside the U.S.

Canada has worked well for Hastings, but he admits that the company has stumbled in Latin America. In the U.K., Netflix says, it has acquired a million subscribers in its first six months of operation, putting it ahead of Amazon’s Lovefilm, which it will also compete with in some of its Scandinavian markets.

Shakil Khan, the well-known head of special projects for the popular Spotify music service, is taking a job with the same title at Path, the fast-growing personal social networking start-up.

Khan will be focusing on growth and international issues, and based out of London but with global duties. Path’s HQ is in San Francisco.

That’s important, since Path has been growing strongly outside its initial U.S. market, especially in Asia. In February, Path CEO Dave Morin announced that it had two million users.

In an interview last night, Khan said he will remain an adviser to Spotify’s CEO and co-founder Daniel Ek, noting that he is also an investor.

Interestingly, said many sources and also a number of reports, both Path and Spotify are in the midst of large funding rounds with hefty valuations.

In fact, Spotify is being valued at $4 billion, which was not the case when Khan came to the then-fledgling company in 2008. Taking up a job essentially as a kind of fix-it guy for Ek, he worked on a number of important initiatives, from gaining early user traction to hiring its early management to wrangling celebrities to use the service.

Khan said that he decided to leave Spotify, which has recently had a huge spurt of growth due to its recent integration on Facebook, because he has “always been a start-up guy.”

“I loved the days when people used to say, ‘What is that, how do you spell it,’” he said about Spotify. “I need those kind of butterflies, and Path is just that kind of amazing product with huge global potential.”

In an email, Path’s Morin said:

“We are beyond delighted that Shak has chosen to join the Path family as we continue our mission to build the first global personal network by helping people journal and share life with family and close friends. Shak brings a unique global perspective and skill set to Path which will help us reach and serve our members and partners across the globe in a uniquely personal way.”

And Ek, calling in from Sweden (where it is 80 degrees!), said that he was sad to see Khan go, and was also in his debt for his service to Spotify.

“I am kind of an introvert guy, and Shak is definition of social, so he was the link to the rest of the world in many ways for me and for the company,” said Ek. “So where he is going and what he will be doing at Path is perfect.”

AllThingsD.com

Yet now that the attacks have subsided, it’s time to see them for what they are: Nothing more than a blunt instrument that accomplishes nothing constructive.

As of today, only one of the Web sites attacked by the hacker troupe Anonymous is still apparently affected, and that belongs to the Universal Music Group recording label. It currently displays only a message saying “The Site is under maintenance. Please expect it to be back shortly.” Others that had been attacked yesterday, including the sites of the U.S. Department of Justice, the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America all seemed to be operating normally.

Thursday’s attacks, which have been described as the biggest action yet organized by Anonymous, were launched in apparent revenge for the FBI’s arrest of several people associated with the file-sharing site Megaupload.com over suspicions of online piracy. Taking place against the backdrop of a wider, more civil protest against anti-piracy legislation currently before the U.S. Congress, the atmosphere around the attacks has been politically charged.

As Molly Wood of CNET put it, the #OpMegaUpload attacks — coming as they did on the heels of Wednesday’s peaceful anti-SOPA protest — seem like an “unsettling wave of car-burning hooligans that sweep in and incite the riot portion of the play,” spurring equally unsettling reactions from the powers that be.

Many outlets have portrayed the attacks as “hacks,” implying that someone had picked a lock in order to commit some kind of sabotage. But the tactic used — a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack — is more aptly compared to a blunt instrument, requiring neither skill nor knowledge, only large numbers of willing participants who team up to swarm a site with more requests than it can accommodate and thus overwhelm its ability to function normally.

The adjective “willing” is debatable, and perhaps inaccurate. Anonymous was able to generate such impressive numbers with the operation — it claimed more than 5,000 participants — by spamming a link in chat rooms and via Twitter that, when clicked, triggered a tool used to launch the attack. People tricked into following the link are given no context or information, and so may or may not have any idea that they’re participating in the execution of a crime.

For the record, it is illegal in the U.S., the U.K., Sweden and other countries to launch and participate in a DDoS attack like the one Anonymous organized. As anyone who has observed the evolution of Anonymous (and its various affiliates using the names LulzSec and AntiSec) should know, the FBI arrested 16 people last July, many of them charged with participating in a DDoS attack against PayPal in protest of its shutting down an account used by WikiLeaks.

In 2009, a New Jersey man was sentenced to a year and a day in prison for launching a DDoS attack against the Church of Scientology. And in 2010, a 23-year-old Ohio man was sentenced to 30 months in prison for launching DDoS attacks against several prominent U.S. conservatives, including the author Ann Coulter, former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly.

Records like that suggest to me that DDoS attacks never accomplish anything that the people who organize and carry them out attempt to do. At most, they inconvenience the people who visit and operate the targeted sites for a few hours, until the attention spans of the attackers shift elsewhere. They also generate headlines that are forgotten by nearly everyone except the targets, and sometimes law enforcement.

And so it will be this time. Mark your calendars, because the Megaupload revenge attacks will spur a series of arrests later this year. Some of those arrested will be people who didn’t know they were committing a crime. And that certainly won’t help Anonymous’ image. Nor will it further a single bit of what passes for the Anonymous agenda.

A Swedish-based company called Wrapp is creating a new way for people to easily give gift cards to their friends through social channels like Facebook, where mutual acquaintances will also be able to contribute additional funds to the card if they wish.

To provide incentive to consumers, Wrapp is partnering with retailers to give the first $5 or $10 off the card.

The logic is that no one will actually give only the minimum. But even if they do, it might drive traffic to the stores and get consumers to buy something when they normally might not have.

Wrapp was founded by a number of successful entrepreneurs from companies you’ve probably heard of.

The company’s co-founder and CEO, Hjalmar Winbladh, previously helped start Sendit, a mobile Internet company purchased by Microsoft; he later co-founded Rebtel, a mobile VoIP company. Also participating is Andreas Ehn, the founding CTO of music phenom Spotify, and Carl Fritjofsson, an advisor to Groupon.se.

The service launched two weeks ago in Sweden, and now the executives are focused on launching in the U.K. and the U.S. before the end of the year.

“Gift cards are a $100 billion business in the U.S., and it has not had that many innovations,” Winbladh said. “It went from a piece of paper with manual logs to a piece of plastic that is integrated with the cash register. It’s still a physical product.”

There’s a ton of social-gifting sites experimenting with different models, including Giftiki, Thoughful, Shareagift, Friendfund, Friendgiftr and eBay’s Gifts Project.

Here’s how Wrapp works: Download the app to either an iPhone or Android phone; log in to your Facebook account; click on a friend, who might be celebrating a birthday or anniversary; pick from one of the gift cards available, which can be targeted based on the intended recipient and contribute as much money as you want.

The recipient will receive a message on their Facebook wall, saying that they have received a gift. Other friends will see the message and have the chance to contribute.

The recipient then shows the mobile application at check-out to redeem it.

Windbladh said many of the gift cards will come with $5 already stored on them.

“If I’m cheap, maybe other common friends will add more money, or maybe I will add more money. The average gift card in the U.S. is $20 to $30,” he said.

But he figures, if someone walks into the store, that’s cheaper than most advertising campaigns.

Wrapp is focused on partnering with large big-box retailers, like Best Buy or Target, which have large marketing campaigns, an interest in seeing their brand on Facebook, and absolutely no interest in offering a daily deal on Groupon or one of its competitors.

The business model it is proposing to retailers is that Wrapp doesn’t get paid until someone redeems the gift card. Then if someone uses it, Wrapp collects a commission on both what the retailer’s contributed to the card and what others contributed beyond that.

So far, the company has raised seed funding from Swedish angels, and is looking to raise money in the next three to six months to support the roll-out in the U.S. Today, it has 15 employees, but will be beefing up its presence in San Francisco for its U.S. launch.

A judge at London’s Westminster Magistrates Court ordered Mr. Assange remanded into custody until Dec. 14. Bail was denied Mr. Assange despite offers from several individuals including filmmaker Ken Loach, English socialite Jemima Khan and documentary filmmaker John Pilger–to post £20,000 ($31,444) each for his bail.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

So here’s Global IP Solutions, which specializes in Internet voice and video chat. Google plans to buy the publicly traded company, which began life in Sweden and now hails from San Francisco, for $68 million.

As PaidContent notes, it’s fairly easy to see why Google (GOOG) would be interested in the company: Last month, GIPS announced a product that makes it easy for developers to integrate voice and video chat with Android apps.

GIPS will be Google’s 15th publicly disclosed buy since last summer, assuming there’s no On2-like drama with the deal. Google’s offer represents a 26 percent premium over the current trading price for GIPS and a 140 percent premium since the company announced it was playing footsie with a potential buyer back in January.

In one of the more interesting battlefields of the multifront war between Google and Microsoft, Bing Maps today added what it calls its “largest imagery update to date, adding 6.7 million square kilometers of new imagery.”

That includes the Russian Federation, Australia, Mexico and most places in the United States where there is existing black-and-white imagery, as well as bird’s-eye imagery for Sweden.

The ongoing innovations to online mapping by both Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT) have been a boon to consumers, who are getting increasingly cool and substantive looks at our world.

In February, Microsoft debuted a series of eye-candy features in its ongoing one-upmanship with Google with a new series of enhancements to its spatial search offerings.

Coolest new ones from Microsoft: Indoor panoramas to move mapping inside and real-time video overlays to maps.

Google Maps is also not resting, adding a series of features over the last months from Google Goggles (which takes pictures of an object or location and then identifies it via search) to spoken, turn-by-turn directions on its Android-powered smartphones.

I, for one, can’t wait to see what’s next from these archrivals.

Here’s Microsoft’s blog on the improvements:

March 05, 2010, 09:00 AM by Chris Pendleton

Last month we pushed out our largest amount of new imagery EVER in terms of square kilometers. This month, we’re blowing THAT record out of the water. You thought 1 million+ sq. km. was large? How about 6.7 million square kilometers! It’s pretty much unfathomable. The big winners? Aerial: The Russian Federation, Australia, Mexico and most places in the US where we had black and white imagery. Bird’s Eye: Sweden. Deets:

Aerial

Australia 524,645 sq. km.
Botswana 61,433 sq. km.
Estonia 618 sq. km.
Hungary 3,369 sq. km.
Mexico 236,624 sq. km.
Morocco 13,303 sq. km.
Namibia 72,162 sq. km.
New Zealand 14,987 sq. km.
Poland 6,254 sq. km.
Romania 3,695 sq. km.
Russian Federation 553,244 sq. km.
South Africa 123,138 sq. km.
Turkey 16,148 sq. km.
United Kingdom 15,221 sq. km.
United States 4,961,758 sq. km.

Oblique (Bird’s Eye)

Austria 238 sq. km.
Belgium 898 sq. km.
Denmark 718 sq. km.
Finland 1,634 sq. km.
France 2,001 sq. km.
Greece 931 sq. km.
Ireland 1,340 sq. km.
Netherlands 1,709 sq. km.
Norway 2,425 sq. km.
Portugal 2,184 sq. km.
Romania 1,534 sq. km.
Spain 5,143 sq. km.
Sweden 6,747 sq. km.
Switzerland 424 sq. km.
United Kingdom 13,094 sq. km.
United States 56,007 sq. km.

Check out the Bing Maps World Tour for visuals. Also, Johannes has a sweet application for viewing imagery based on shape files. Niiiice.

CP – Follow me on Twitter @ChrisPendleton

Now Armstrong is entering the second phase of his corporate slimdown and is firing some 1,000-plus employees.

AOL (AOL) officials say the company has begun notifying European employees of its plans to shut down many of its offices there and has started tapping some American workers as well. The bulk of the U.S. layoffs are slated for this Wednesday, the company says.

The goal is to cut payroll costs by a third.

The layoffs have been in motion for many months: Armstrong came onboard as CEO last spring and it has been clear since then that he would need to cut costs either before or after the company spun off from Time Warner (TWX).

AOL hasn’t released a breakdown of cuts by territory or by department. But I’m told that the company’s editorial/content production staff, which Armstrong and his lieutenants have been emphasizing as a priority in recent months, will not remain untouched.

Here is AOL’s statement explaining the cuts:

Since we’ve talked in the past about AOL’s restructuring effort, I want to update you. As you know, in November, we announced that the company would take a $200 million charge and that we planned to decrease the size of our global workforce by one-third. Late last year, we offered Voluntary Separation Program to enable employees to decide what was in their best personal and professional interest. We had approximately 1,100 employees opt to join the Voluntary program. At that time we announced the Voluntary program we noted that if we didn’t reach our target reduction of a third we would need to follow the voluntary program with an involuntary action. We did not reach that target.

The next phase of our restructuring plan will include an involuntary layoff. Our process internationally varies by country and is subject to local laws. We began meeting with employees throughout Europe today. For example meetings have already taken place in the UK, Germany and France, and we announced plans to shut down many of our offices in Europe, beginning with those in Spain and Sweden.  In addition, we will be beginning the consultative process with the Workers’ Councils in relevant countries this week.

In the United States, we will begin notifying a limited number of individuals impacted by the involuntary layoff today, with the majority of notifications taking place in the U.S. on Wednesday, January 13. As of this point, this layoff will not trigger the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN) in any of our locations. For many of the employees impacted in the U.S., Wednesday will be their last day in the office.

As you know from covering the company, since April, we have been moving through a process that started with strategy, then focused on structure, and has most recently been centered on aligning our costs with the company’s strategy and structure. As a part of this process, we’ve looked at every aspect of this business. We evaluated our competitive position and product portfolio in every market–and we asked the hard questions about areas that were no longer core to the strategy and our profit profiles in the businesses and countries where we operate.

We will be offering packages to impacted employees in the U.S. that will include severance, benefits and outplacement assistance, among other things.

All of our cost alignment work is about ensuring AOL’s sustainability and future success. Project Everest is the completion of phase one of AOL’s turnaround.