McAfee Inc., acquired last month by Intel Corp., has provided content-filtering software used by Internet-service providers in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, according to interviews with buyers and a regional reseller. Blue Coat Systems Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif., has sold hardware and technology in Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar that has been used in conjunction with McAfee’s Web-filtering software and sometimes to block websites on its own, according to interviews with people working at or with ISPs in the region.

A regulator in Bahrain, which uses McAfee’s SmartFilter product, says the government is planning to switch soon to technology from U.S.-based Palo Alto Networks Inc. It promises to give Bahrain more blocking options and make it harder for people to circumvent censoring.

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The day the mall went live, Payvment said its customers’ sales quadrupled, compared to sales when they were limited to a shopping tab on their individual fan pages.

Now, Payvment’s competitor, Adgregate Markets, which also helps brands build storefronts on Facebook, is releasing data that helps define the size of the opportunity for e-commerce on Facebook.

In a study commissioned by Adgregate and conducted with the help of Webtrends, Adgregate looked at the impact of Facebook fan pages on traditional e-commerce sites.

To be sure, the idea of social commerce is so new, it’s difficult to give too much weight to early studies like these, but because everything on the topic is unknown, it’s worth taking the data into consideration.

Generally, what Adgregate found was that Facebook was generating a ton of visits to brands’ Facebook pages, providing an opportunity to convert the traffic into sales, especially as brands see visits to their traditional web sites shrink.

The study highlighted one example. Delta Airlines recently enabled customers to book tickets directly on its Facebook page. While traffic to Delta’s site lost more than a million unique visitors over a three month period, its Facebook page gained more than a 1,000 new fans.

The study analyzed the unique visits to the websites of the Fortune 100 as well as their Facebook fan pages.

From Adgregate’s customer base, the study makes a number of conclusions:

• Following the launch of a Facebook store, wall posts generate on average 1,673 percent spikes in store traffic.

• Facebook stores on average generate a 17 percent social engagement rate (merchandise “likes” and “shares” per visitor).

• Facebook stores generated on average 5.9 pages views per visit.

• Facebook commerce conversion rates range from 2 to 4 percent, which is on par with e-Commerce websites.

• Average order value of $104 with 24 percent growth month-over-month (although this largely is dependent upon retail vertical).

While Verizon declined to put a specific number on how many iPhones were allotted for pre-sales, RBC analyst Mike Abramsky estimated it was fewer than 100,000 units.

“Though the quantity of iPhones for the pre-order were very ‘limited,’ likely less than 100k, the stock out on the one day of pre-orders affirms the strong pent-up demand for the Verizon iPhone, and bodes well for initial sell-through,” Abramsky said in a research note on Friday.

For what it’s worth, the company didn’t sell out of whatever unspecified number of devices it had allotted for pre-order until 8 pm ET, although pre-sales were limited to existing Verizon customers. The device goes on sale broadly on Feb. 10 and will be at all company-run Verizon stores, Apple stores and Best Buy locations, as well as at select Wal-Mart stores and through the Verizon and Apple Web sites.

The restoration of communications comes a day after President Hosni Mubarak announced that he would not seek another term as president in the forthcoming September election. Though that seems not to have satisfied the protesters who are eager that he step down right away.

Messages on @Speak2Tweet, the Twitter account created by Google and Twitter, have grown to 1,197 overnight, though with the Internet returning to normal that may stop.

The Internet may be returning to something resembling normal, but it’s clear that Egypt itself has quite a ways to go. I heard again this morning from my friend Abdalla in Cairo via text message. He wrote:

I am close to Tahrir Square. Pro-Mubarak rallies are taking place. They are not huge crowds but many of them are complete thugs. Thank goodness I got out of there with my camera in one piece. I am seeking refuge in a hotel lobby for now. I talked to a video journalist here who had his camera spray painted by someone in the crowd. Today is going to be a really ugly day :(

Being the largest e-commerce company is an obvious barrier to entry, but there are at least two opportunities in 2011 that will drive even more traffic to its site and others: Social and mobile.

A 78-page presentation by J.P. Morgan on the Internet Sector Outlook of 2011, which focuses a lot on the e-commerce market, predicts that the big losers will be physical retailers as more spending shifts online.

If you’ve been reading eMoney, you already knew this. Last month, we referred to these trends as the so-lo-mo trifecta, referencing the impact of social, local and mobile on e-commerce.

In 2010, J.P. Morgan found that nearly 8 percent of Amazon’s traffic was coming from Facebook, compared to 20 percent coming from Google, and that e-commerce revenues are expected to grow by 13.2 percent in 2011.

But as more consumers discover products and services through social networks, like Facebook, and compare prices on their smartphones in stores, traditional brick-and-mortars will lose market share and face bankruptcy, J.P. Morgan concludes. (It’s a small coincidence that Macy’s said it expects to add about 725 new positions over the next two years to beef up its Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s Web sites).

Here’s how J.P. Morgan makes the case for the future of e-commerce:

–U.S. e-commerce revenues totaled $28 billion in 2000, soaring to $166 billion in 2010. Revenues are expected to grow by 13.2 percent in the U.S. this year alone.

–In 2010, 36 percent of people said they bought something online at least once a month. Slightly less, or 32 percent of people, said they purchased one to two items online a month. However, less than 2 percent of folks bought more than 10 items a month.

–Traffic to Amazon’s sites is increasingly coming from Facebook, jumping 328 percent over the past year to almost 8 percent. That compares to almost 20 percent of referrals coming from Google.

–Facebook is driving less traffic to eBay than to Amazon, or roughly 4.7 percent, compared to 11.4 percent from Google.

–E-Commerce 2011 Top Picks: Amazon, Priceline and Latin American e-commerce provider MercadoLibre.

Within two days, sites like LinkedIn and later Blizzard Entertainment and Yahoo had advised their users to change their passwords.

The latest company caught up in all this is the New York Times. A little more than an hour ago, the Times sent an email to customers (see below) whose email addresses appeared in a searchable database of compromised Gawker commenting accounts, warning them that if they used the same password on nytimes.com as they did on Gawker, it would be a good idea to change it. There is no evidence of any funny business on the Times’ Web site.

Incidentally, in case you missed it, Gawker’s technology head, Thomas Plunkett, circulated a memo detailing what happened at Gawker and what it plans to do in response to the incident. One thing it will do is offer disposable commenting accounts that users can ditch easily, and for which storing an email address won’t be required.

Here is the email from the Times:

NYTimes.com Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 5:15 PM
Reply-To: nytdirect@nytimes.com

In case you missed our recent article “Gawker Sites Hacked and Passwords Compromised”
http://nyti.ms/hjNvlY we are writing to inform you that databases belonging to Gawker Media were compromised and hackers obtained more than one million user names, e-mail addresses and passwords.

While there is no evidence of suspicious activity on NYTimes.com we wanted you to know that
the e-mail address you registered with NYTimes.com matches an e-mail address that was on
the list of Gawker e-mail addresses and passwords that were published online.

If you use the same password for NYTimes.com as you did for Gawker, we strongly recommend you change your password. Changing your NYTimes.com password can be accomplished by visiting the Member Center page: http://www.nytimes.com/membercenter. After logging in to your account, click on the ‘change’ button associated with the password field which can be found under the Account Summary heading.

Here’s a Gadgetwise post with tips on developing a good password (in brief: do not make it a real word, keep it long and mix in an unusual combination of letters and numbers).
http://nyti.ms/gGR3kz

Please contact Customer Support at 1-800-698-4637 or e-mail customercare@nytimes.com with any questions.

Have a safe and happy holiday season.

The New York Times Company
620 Eighth Avenue
New York, NY 10018

The social version of Pulse will be available only for iPad for now, and is to be released this afternoon at 3 pm PT.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Alphonso Labs, which makes Pulse, recently stopped charging for its apps and raised $800,000 in venture funding. CEO Akshay Kothari came up to San Francisco today and showed me the new iPad app.

The new Pulse for iPad gives users three feeds of Facebook information: Friends’ status updates, friends’ shared links and a historial look at the user’s own Facebook wall. In keeping with Pulse’s design, items are image driven and easily swipe-able, and expand into a second panel when users tap on them (see screenshots). Users can add comments or “Like” statuses and shared links as they would on Facebook, but this is more of an alternate way to consume content than a full-featured Facebook client.

As with other content feeds, Pulse caches the 25 most recent Facebook updates in each category, so a user who goes somewhere without Internet access could continue to read the content there.

As Alphonso grows from being some young folks with an interesting design approach into a real company, it is exploring closer relationships with publishers like the Huffington Post. “We don’t want to be a company that makes a news reader,” said Kothari. “We want to help people discover awesome content.”

Kothari added that with the influx of new users since Pulse went free two weeks ago, Alphonso is looking to improve content discovery by mining user data to show a “most-emailed” story list across all feeds.

He said his aim is to get away from the hierarchical structure of Web sites–where one must return to the homepage before moving on–and help people scan quickly through potential reading material. Ultimately, Kothari said, recommendations will be done through a balanced combination of machine and social factors.

Further reading: Earlier this year, Pulse was mentioned as an example app by Steve Jobs, then yanked from the App Store due to complaints about content usage by the New York Times. The app was quickly reinstated and Alphonso has an open dialogue with the Times about how best to send it new readers and subscribers, according to Kothari.

Starting tomorrow, users who want to participate can download a new browser extension called the Meebo MiniBar. Starting in December, Web sites can add check-ins through embeddable buttons and the Meebo Bar itself (which counts 8,000 publisher users, with a combined 180 million uniques). Brands such as Macy’s, Sprint and L’Oréal Professionnel have already committed to participate.

To check in on Meebo, a user will need to have a Meebo account. The idea is for people to be motivated to share in order to become VIPs on the sites they visit often (another extension of the Foursquare metaphor). Users can also subscribe to feeds of people who like similar Web sites so they can find new places to visit.

This is not a new idea–if you take the pitch and replace the term “checking in” with “social bookmarking” you’ll find a pile of (mostly discarded) companies. More specifically, back when OneRiot was called Me.dium it launched just such an extension in 2006, and the current start-up Badgeville makes a white-label loyalty platform for publishers. And Facebook, of course, has its “like” system of allowing users to subscribe to Web sites and brands.

The Beijing-based company has raised $20 million from DCM and Sequoia Capital China in its first round of venture funding. The capital will enable the company to expand its business offering brand-name clothes, accessories, makeup and home furnishings through time-sensitive online discounted offers.

The company has 1.5 million members across China and is one of a handful of start-ups taking the model popularized in the U.S. by companies such as Groupon Inc. and Gilt Groupe Inc., European companies like Spanish internet retailers BuyVip GmbH and Privalia Venta Directa S.L., or the French site Vente Privee, which is backed by Summit Partners LLC.

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In the first half of 2010, six venture-backed e-commerce companies in China raised at least $180 million to reach out to buyers increasingly comfortable with shopping online, according to reporting in VentureWire and local Chinese media outlets.

It’s a sign that investors have recovered from any concerns associated with the global financial crisis’ impact on China’s domestic merchants. In 2009, during the throes of the economic downturn, Chinese venture capitalists invested at least $57.3 million in eight reported deals, according to data from the industry tracker Zero2IPO.

Recipients of the new money range from specialized sites selling shoes, handbags, lingerie or non-perishable teas, wines, and spices to wholesalers and retailers of multiple products and online clothing stores, investors said.

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The company has done this by bucking the trends, both when it was founded during the dot-com bubble–when a slew of companies launched to marry the power of the Internet with the age-old desire to meet Mr. or Ms. Right–and more recently, when a new crop of sites has focused on casual dating through features such as social networking or video chat.

Now, as it expands internationally and prepares new services in its existing markets, the matchmaking site must continue to address its built-in challenge – how to keep its business expanding even when its most satisfied customers stop using the service.

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The survey conducted by the Online Trust Alliance said only eight percent of major Web sites surveyed made it onto the organization’s “honor roll” of sites taking stringent measures to reduce online fraud enabled by forged emails, phishing sites and malware. The survey, conducted between late March and early April, looked at 1,200 Web sites and 500 million emails purporting to be from those sites, all of which were either Fortune 500 companies, top Internet retailers and federal government Web sites.

To make it onto the honor roll, the Web sites had to be free of malware–malicious code that can be used to steal personal data from Web surfers–or links to sites containing malware.

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RockYou CTO and co-founder Jia Shen said at a social game summit in Beijing Friday that the company, which plans to expand its presence in Asia, is “actively” looking at acquisition targets in China rather than more users because social games are less lucrative here than in other markets, mostly due to a lack of openness of Chinese social networking sites.

According to Shen, companies that operate social networking Web sites in China, including Tencent Holdings Ltd., have huge user numbers, but demand an average of 40 percent to 50 percent of revenue from the games distributed on their Web sites, or more than is standard in other markets. And though a higher rate of Chinese users pay to play the games, they spend much less, he said.

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A group of 25 entrepreneurs took a bus last week from San Francisco to Austin, Texas, with a zany plan–to break up into groups and build start-ups in 48 hours to pitch to investors at South By Southwest, the tech and music showcase.

Despite fighting motion sickness, a spotty Wi-Fi connection and sleep deprivation, the six teams turned out finished ideas from scratch, and two were names winners by a panel of investor judges.

One winner was DateBrowsr.com, a site that aggregates photos from a range of dating Web sites to give people quick access to what they want to see most when seeking a potential date–what people look like. The idea for the site came about almost as a joke, but the group decided it could work.

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ComScore credited Americans seeking off-season travel deals and planning ahead for their spring vacations for the industry’s rise. If comScore is right, then last month’s performance was merely a seasonal effect and doesn’t necessarily indicate a broader trend. Indeed, a look back to January 2009 shows travel sites posting impressive gains then, too.

But we think the monthly numbers only hint at the big picture. If venture capitalists are any indication, the travel industry is poised for an extended period of massive growth. And it’s not limited to just the U.S.

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While Maples has helped hatch plenty of potential Thunder Lizards–Chegg, Digg and Twitter, to name a few–one of his start-ups won’t have a chance to mature into a hulking market terror. Austin, Texas-based B-Side Entertainment Inc., which operated Web sites for film festivals and offered distribution and marketing services to filmmakers, has gone belly-up, according to indie film publication Filmmaker Magazine.

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Bells ring out as the hero and his comrades combine forces to defeat the villain in “War of Internet Addiction.”

The network engineer from Beijing, who says he is in the “post-1980″ generation, as people in their 20s are currently known in China, finally agreed to answer some questions. He said his video was removed from Chinese Web sites Youku.com and Sina.com when it was first posted in January, but it has since been restored. Even with that blip, the video has been viewed at least several million times. According to online video Web site Tudou.com, where he first published it, the video was viewed two million times within three days on the site.

Corndog also explained that the movie’s main character, Kan Ni Mei, whose name is made up of the characters “see you sister,” was the leading character in earlier films made by his team, including one for which he won an award at a film festival held by Tudou, and that the name has no significance. He declined to give his own real name, though.

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Since Google’s Jan. 12 announcement that it might withdraw from the Chinese market, two knockoff Web sites have appeared in China bearing an intentionally uncanny resemblance to Google sites.

Goojje.com, a spoof of Google’s Chinese site, was founded by a female college student in Guangdong and put together by a group of about 20 people around the country, according to Chinese media. Its Chinese name (??, whose Mandarin pronunciation is Romanized as “gujie”) is a pun that can be translated as either “Google’s big sister” or “valley girl.” (Google’s Chinese name translates as “valley song,” and it also sounds like “valley big brother.”)

On the Goojje home page, the lettering of the logo features nearly identical font and coloring as Google’s main search page, but with the addition of a blue pawprint that nods to Baidu’s similar logo. The home page features a slogan in support of the site that obviously inspired it: “When older brother stayed for older sister, sister was delighted as before.”

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The pope’s message proclaimed that “priests can rightly be expected to be present in the world of digital communications as faithful witnesses to the Gospel” through means such as “images, videos, animated features, blogs [and] Web sites.” A brief clip of the speech that the pope gave can be viewed through the Vatican channel on YouTube.

This pope’s message this year stood in sharp contrast with a speech he gave late last year when he accused the mass media of poisoning human souls and making us callous to violence.

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FriendFinder, which operates more than a dozen Web sites aimed primarily at people looking for relationships or flings, changed its name 18 months ago from Penthouse Media Group. It isn’t profitable, and until recently was in default on its debt covenants.

It struck a deal in October with its creditors to waive its defaults in exchange for all the money it raises in its initial public offering.

It is hoping for $200 million in net proceeds from the sale of 20 million shares through RenCap Securities and Ledgemont Capital Markets LLC, according to its prospectus, with an estimated price range of $10 to $12, and a listing on the New York Stock Exchange with symbol FFN.

The company is portraying itself as a potential catch in the social-networking industry, a sector that has few stand-alone stocks and a lot of buzz. It describes itself as a leading “social networking and multimedia entertainment company,” and in prerecorded roadshows compares itself with privately held Facebook Inc. and MySpace, owned by News Corp. (NWS), publisher of The Wall Street Journal.

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The ranks of these networkers, dubbed “conversationalists” in a report released today by Forrester Research, have grown in the past couple of years. They’re mostly women, and they aren’t only young people–70 percent of the adults in this category are 30 and older. (The report looked only at people 18 and over, so the youngest users aren’t included.)

Although Twitter might seem to be the most likely outlet for these conversationalists, Forrester’s surveys “indicate that there are actually even more people conversing this way through Facebook.”

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If Beijing decides to put the site on the other side of the “Great Firewall,” as the country’s system of Internet controls is informally known, college student Shi Yuchen has a workaround already planned. She’ll simply fanqiang, or “scale the wall.”

“No matter what, I will continue to use [Google] by applying some ‘scaling the wall’ tools,” Ms. Shi says.

To help people like Ms. Shi, a small but influential number of tech-savvy Chinese have been schooling their fellow citizens on how to gain access to blocked sites.

A search for the term fanqiang on Google or Baidu Inc., China’s largest search engine, turns up dozens of Web sites with instructions on how to get around the country’s Internet restrictions.

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Before you snicker, bear in mind that Carol Bartz’s “B-” aside, people are still buying a lot of ads on Yahoo (YHOO), at least when it comes to display ads, where the Internet giant dominates. JP Morgan (JPM) puts the company’s share of the U.S. market for display ads at 17 percent, well ahead of No. 2 Microsoft (MSFT) at 11 percent and AOL (AOL) at seven percent.

Here’s a highlight reel of some of the more interesting inventory the company has sold in the last year. From the outside, at least, a lot of this stuff seems fairly similar to other big attention-getters that marketers are running on other Web sites. Apple’s (AAPL) inventive ads, for instance, are all over the Internet.

And lots of publishers are pushing oversize ads (and I bet that Web surfers will soon develop the ability to ignore those, just as they do with conventional banner ads).

Note that not everything here is a holy-cow-wouldya-lookit-that presentation, though. One of the highlights, for instance, is simply the addition of video to a search result for Charles Schwab (SCHW).

In any case, the clip works as a pretty good survey of Web advertising, and it’s reasonably short. Though if you’re not a huge fan of hairband guitar solos, you may want to turn the volume down.

Integration software seems pretty far afield from, say, Twitter. But Tibco CEO Vivek Ranadive makes a direct comparison, calling his company’s forthcoming product “Twitter on steroids for the enterprise.” Similar to the way people use Twitter to share a sentence or two about their lives, Ranadive says Tibco will let business people turn corporate information like an expense report or a sales figure into a short update.

Tibco’s more traditional software has long accessed these data and making it available to humans and not just machines was relatively easy for the company, Ranadive says.

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