The Droid 4 has landed. The fourth incarnation of the most important Android series is now on sale. Verizon is hawking the phone for $199 with a two-year contact, but the phone is also available through Amazon where it’s only $99 on-contract. Either way it’s a solid buy considering the LTE capability and quality hardware.

The Droid 4 shares much of the RAZR’s styling: cropped corners, silver trim, and similar soft buttons. It also packs much of the same internals with a LTE radio, 16GB internal memory, microSD card slot, 8MP camera, and the same, 12.5 hour battery. Plus the Droid 4 has a slide-out QWERTY keypad — something that is a must-have for some buyers.

We’ll have a full review of the phone in the coming days. So far we like what we see. The QWERTY keypad is tops.

Notorious industry insider Eldar Murtazin has made yet another forward-looking statement, this time regarding Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and one very special Samsung device. This leaves just one question in our minds: Is this one of his hits, or is it another miss?

According to a tweet (below) from the Moscow-based blogger, Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich will be delivered to the Samsung Galaxy S II. After its regional offices had announced which devices would receive ICS, Samsung confirmed in December that the GS II, the Galaxy Note, and Galaxy Tab models will get Android 4.0 in the first quarter of 2012.

Android 4 aka ics for sgs2 will be officially available from march 1(depends from country/operator). Update over the air or using kies

— Eldar Murtazin (@eldarmurtazin) February 10, 2012

Murtazin’s comments are in line with the time-table given by Samsung, but his prediction seems to exclude the Galaxy Tabs and the Note. At the same time, the Galaxy S II is in over 10 million hands so perhaps Mr. Murtazin just decided to lead with the flagship. Or he only has information on the Galaxy S II.

Either way, this gives us something fun to think about.

Even if the Galaxy Tab and Note updates are released a little bit after the Galaxy S II, chances are we can assume that the much-anticipated Galaxy S III will launch with ICS.

Here’s why: The GS III isn’t launching at MWC. If Murtazin is right about a March 1 OTA update, and the GS III launch is undoubtedly post-March 1, it’s pretty safe to assume that ICS will be ready to ship on the GS III along with its predecessor.

Facebook isn’t the only social network getting ready to monetize its mobile app with advertising. During today’s analyst call to discuss its fourth quarter earnings, LinkedIn executives said they will also be introducing advertising to their mobile apps.

There weren’t many details offered — LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner said only that the company has been putting the infrastructure in place, and now it’s ready to “start to introduce advertising in our mobile solutions.”

Even though ads were only mentioned briefly, mobile was definitely a big theme on the call. Weiner noted that the company launched redesigned smartphone apps last August, and he said that mobile is now LinkedIn’s fastest-growing category. Mobile accounts for 15 percent of LinkedIn’s unique member visits, he said, and it will definitely be one of the areas of investment in the coming year.

One of the analysts on the call asked about the performance of CardMunch, the business card-scanning smartphone app that LinkedIn recently acquired, and about whether LinkedIn is performing differently on the various mobile platforms. On CardMunch, Weiner repeated the already-released number that CardMunch has now scanned its 2 millionth business card.

Regarding the different smartphone platforms, he said, “We’re seeing a sharp rise in activations across both the iOS platform and Android. We’re seeing more activations in iOS but both are growing very healthy rates.”

Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, and the majority of us are likely scrambling to find that special gift. (The rest of us, meanwhile, are cursing couples.) A Valentine’s Day gift is usually more important than others because it’s a one-on-one situation, unlike Christmas or birthdays. Just one gift, to just one person — and it better be good.

With that in mind, I’d like to address an article out of AllThingsD this morning that sourced information from PriceGrabber’s Valentine’s Day Dashboard Report. The report took information from February 4 through February 5, finding that various tablets, TVs and phones are hot items for gift-crazed Valentines.

The information itself isn’t that intriguing, but it did get me thinking about handing out gadgetry as a gift.

What makes gift-giving so special to us — and such a huge part of our culture — is the fact that it’s proof of one person’s thought for another person. We’re naturally very self-centered, all of us. But by going out and thinking of, finding, buying, and wrapping a gift, we give that special someone proof that we’ve been thinking about them — proof that they’re important to us.

Of course, expensive gifts are often seen as better gifts, but that’s just a product of our consumer-driven lifestyles. To spend more on someone is nice, if thought is also a large part of the equation, but without thought the gift becomes empty. For example, last year I bought my girlfriend a pretty expensive necklace from her favorite jewelry store. I figured that since the store was her favorite, and that particular necklace was one of their most expensive, I’d be good to go.

Wrong.

She said the necklace wasn’t her style, which made a lot of sense after we went through her jewelry box and found that she only owned silver jewelry. The necklace I bought was gold.

Unfortunately, most gadgetry falls into this category. Just because it’s expensive and flashy and has an Apple on it doesn’t mean that it’s the most meaningful gift. Especially considering the fact that our gadgetry is so very personal.

The type of phone you own and enjoy using says a lot about you, and it is inevitably a part of your daily life for about two years. For some of us, it’s a more steadfast, stable relationship than the one we have with our Valentine. Why would anyone ever want someone else to pick it out for them?

The same is true for tablets and PCs. Just think of how many configurations your laptop could have come in. But you thought about it, knew your needs, knew your price range, and configured your notebook accordingly. Chances are, no one else could’ve done that for you.

Of course, there are exceptions to both of the points I’ve made — that expensive gifts are empty and that gadgets need to be chosen by the owner.

Ever since I was 16, Christmas changed at my house. There were no longer a dozen small gifts under the tree. Instead, my dad asked me in October if there was anything that I really, really wanted, and that one gift is what I’d get on Christmas. This is how I got my first car, help with the down payment on my apartment, and almost every piece of gadgetry I’ve ever owned, including the iPhone 4S.

So, according to my earlier logic, my dad would be an awful gift-giver. But that’s not necessarily the case. See, in the instance of my family Christmas, my dad always asked me what I wanted, and in turn I was as specific as possible. I was getting the end-all, be-all of potential Christmas gifts because it’s exactly what I had chosen.

Plus, we’re talking about my dad and Christmas, not your lover and Valentine’s Day.

So do your Valentine a favor this year: Unless he or she has asked very specifically for this or that gadget, take an extra minute to think what would truly make this person happy, and do your very best to make it happen for them.

Tablets and phones are great, but knowing that someone has spent time thinking about you… that’s priceless.

[Img credit: Lasse Kristensen, ShutterStock]

At long last, HTC fans can finally stop holding their collective breath. After months of relative quiet, the Taiwanese company has taken to their Facebook page to spread the word: the Ice Cream Sandwich is coming, and it’s coming soon. For owners of certain HTC devices, the long-awaited Android 4.0 update will begin hitting handsets next month.

HTC originally promised that Ice Cream Sandwich would be hitting most of their top-tier devices in “early 2012,” but that doesn’t seem to the case anymore unless you own one of their numerous Sensation devices. If anything, it should make owners of T-Mobile USA’s Sensation 4G feel a little better about their phone being stripped of flagship status in just a few months. The international-spec Sensation will be updated as well, along with the flashier special edition XE and XL models.

Some of HTC’s U.S. devices will be getting the update not long afterward, although their note on Facebook lept understandably mum when it came to specific dates. That said, owners of the following devices can rest easy knowing that HTC is still slaving away on ICS updates meant for their handsets:

• Rezound (Verizon)
• Vivid (AT&T)
• Amaze 4G (T-Mobile)
• EVO 3D (Sprint)
• EVO Design 4G (Sprint)
• Incredible S
• Desire S
• Desire HD

Meanwhile, other hardware vendors have taken up different approaches to keeping their users abreast of the update situation. To wit: LG offered up a list of devices getting the update along with a tentative timeline, while companies like Sony and Motorola have been a bit less forthcoming when it comes to forecasting an update schedule.

Some of us can’t be bothered to check in, but still want to find interesting people nearby. The challenge for developers is how to do this in a way that is both useful and not creepy. Glancee, available for both iOS and Android, gets closer to solving these problems than most I’ve seen.

The app lets you sign in with Facebook, then it shows you people within 100 yards, or one, two, or ten miles who have things in common. In some ways this sounds similar another app I recently covered, Highlight — but there are key differences, that will make each app appeal to different sets of users.

Glancee works extra hard to match interests while minimizing the stalker feel. The main screen shows the Facebook profile photos of nearby people, but does not show a map of where they are, and it only summarizes the number of friends and interests in common. If you click through to the other person’s profile page, then you’ll see a list of Facebook friends in common as well as their interests versus yours.

The app compares your Likes in common with Wikipedia listings to identify similar categorical interests. Examples I’ve seen: If the other person likes The New Yorker, a line of text might say “You like The Econoimst.” If they like The Sopranos, it says “You like Mad men.” Sometimes these comparisons end up better than others, but overall the feature does succeed in showing you things loosely in common that might not have been obvious if you only compare Likes.

The app also goes very easy on notifications. During the past week I’ve been using Glancee, it’s sent maybe ten of them to me. I have to go to the app to see who’s nearby.

If you want to talk to anyone, a chat feature lets you message or voice call with them. A “News” tab on the home page shows you people with an especially large number of commonalities, as well as people who have visited your profile, or the activity of people you’ve communicated with. Also, the app goes very easy on your battery life.

In terms of future business models, Glancee’s ideas are along the lines of other location apps: targeting nearby ads, deals, etc. based on the users behavior.

Before I share my personal opinion about Glancee, I should point out that there are many other location apps that somehow use ambient location to try to create quality new connections. But very few are directly comparable to each other. Glancee cofounder Andrea Vaccari noted on my Highlight post that there’s also JoinMingle, Gatsby, Ban.jo, Shoutflow, Blendr, and Unsocial. And of course, there are many more location apps that have been around for years, like Loopt and Foursquare, not to mention Google Latitude or Facebook Places.

Briefly, here are the other things that some of these non-checkin apps are trying to do. JoinMingle is explicitly for professional networking, Gatsby provides a very opaque means of connecting in that it pairs you with specific people for one-hour-limited conversations, Ban.jo aggregates every other location service that it can, Blendr is dating-oriented, and Unsocial is designed around meeting people at conferences and other events. Shoutflow is the most similar that I’ve seen to Highlight and Glancee, but it’s not available in the US iTunes App Store so I haven’t personally used it. So, none of these apps appear to be that directly competitive to Glancee and Highlight (there’s lots more to say about each of these other apps, but they’re not what this article is about, sorry).

Glancee and Highlight are the ones that I’ve used that have provided social experiences that I have found to be meaningful. But, because I live in San Francisco and I’m a tech reporter, Highlight has been much more visceral for me. Being able to see exactly where other users are in relation to me makes a big difference considering that I’m in a city of hundreds of thousands of people sandwiched in a few square miles. So does the fact that it only shows people in a few blocks radius. And so does the fact that I get pinged by it whenever anyone is near. These are crucial subtle differences that totally reshape the user experience. Specifically, Highlight has been connecting me with long-lost friends and interesting new people in the tech world, who I’ve ended up having impromptu meetings with, and Glancee hasn’t.

But that’s just my tech-bubble perspective. Glancee is doing a lot of things right, and considering that a large portion of the US population does not live in dense urban areas, this could be the app for them. If you’re in a suburb or a spread-out small city or a rural area, the miles-radius range is more appropriate, and a neighborhood map is less relevant. Also, if you don’t like aggressive notifications and you like a long battery life, you’re going to like it more than Highlight.

But there’s always this caveat: Ambient location is not just something to build a company around, it is a feature that Facebook or Foursquare or any other big company doing location could also do very easily. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them test ambient out if any of these startups get serious traction. So readers, may each of you find the ambient location app that’s right for you.

Remember when the iPhone app GLMPS launched last summer, seemingly heralding the start of a new image format that blended static photos and video? No? That’s OK. Today, there’s a new twist on the idea of reinventing the mobile photo, this time by turning static photos into animated ones. With the newly launched app called Cinemagram, you can turn your iPhone pics into animated gifs in a matter of seconds.

Cinemagram isn’t quite the same as GLMPS, to be clear. “The GLMPS app embedded an entire video as a picture-in-picture onto the image,” explains Cinemagram’s co-creator and company CEO Temoojin Chalasani. “Cinemagram is just one image with a subtle animation,” he says.

The new app was designed by the Montreal-based startup called Factyle, Inc., which you may know as the makers of Smartr, the personalized, social newspaper app for iOS and desktop. And it really is kind of fun. Especially if you like making those animated gifs and posting them to social networks. But the app’s overall UI (user interface) feels a little rough, and frankly, too Instagram-like. Or Instagram-lite. I’d love to see app makers think outside the Instagram UI for a change. (Cheers, I’m looking at you, too). Besides, haven’t you heard? We’re all ripping off Pinterest now, anyway.

But back to the app at hand:  why try to reinvent the mobile photo? Especially when apps like GLMPS seemed to be, for all their bells and whistles, a flash in the pan?

“We’ve been fascinated by this art form since its first appearance last year in the world of fashion photography,” says Chalasani. (Last year? Update: Oh this.) “We see it as a way for photographers to bring out the essence of an image, and tell the story behind their pictures in a fun and beautiful way.”

What’s more, the company said they were shocked to find that photographers spent hours in PhotoShop trying to create these sorts of images, so they decided to make an app that could do it in seconds.

You can see some of the gifs in question here on Cinemagram’s blog.

Factyle, which has been in development for over 2 years, raised $150,000 in seed funding last April from Montreal-based Real Ventures. In addition to Chalasani, who describes himself as an electrical engineer with a love of mobile and social apps, there’s also co-founder Marc Provost, a former Mathworks Inc. employee.

Cinemagram ($1.99) isn’t the first to do this on the iPhone, for what it’s worth. Kinotopic’s app (free) was previously featured by Apple for a similar effort.

The “toast” is an age-old, time-honored tradition, where we raise a glass to pay tribute to — and express our goodwill towards — friends, loved ones, and sometimes even our fellow man. They are even known to be meaningfully punctuated with by a good drinking song or two. And now, thanks to BizRate.com and Shopzilla Founder Farhad Mohit, there is, as they say, an app for that expression of goodwill. Yes, “cheers” is no longer simply a word that accompanies toasts — or the place where everyone knows your name — it’s also the “world’s first positivity app,” for the iPhone.

What am I talking about? Chee.rs, a free iPhone app that launches today on the App Store, was conceived with a simple, altruistic sentiment in mind: To help people express love and appreciation for just about anything and from just about anywhere. While that may sound a little bit sappy, this is meant to be a serious business.

The Cheers founder sold Shopzilla in 2005 for $569 million and went on to start DotSpots and Gri.pe (both of which are TechCrunch Disrupt companies). DotSpots hit the deadpool, but Mohit went on to create Cheerful, Inc, bringing Gripe and Cheers together under one roof, behind an impressive team from Google, StumbleUpon, and more.

The Cheers founder tells us that the app is meant to be the “Like button” for the world around you, except that it has the potential to be more meaningful because it allows you to create, control, and give voice to each “cheer.” Yes, there are now over 500,000 iPhone apps, and, no, we’re not aware of any apps that celebrate love and appreciation via mobile sharing.

So how does Cheers work? When you come across something in your daily wanderings that makes you want to express your love or appreciation (in socially appropriate ways, of course), you open the app, snap a picture, add some appreciative text, and share your cheer. While users are not required to be positive in their messages, nor are they required to snap a photo, the design of the app is tailored toward the inclusion of images. Both positivity and photo sharing are “highly encouraged,” the founder says.

Once a user shares their cheer, they can blast it out on Facebook, Twitter, via email, and on the Web, watching as it spreads across their social circles. Friends and other users can “like” the post or comment and reciprocate. Creating a Cheer takes less than 30 seconds, and users can create Cheers around people, places, or things, as Mohit says that he wants to keep the use case as broad as possible, to encourage engagement and sharing of restaurants, movies, books, friends, pets, and so on. The app also contains its own user rating system: In other words, the more you cheer, the more “Cheerfluence” you accrue, allowing other users to track the extent of your social cheerleading.

There’s been a lot of talk in the mobile space centering around serendipity, and the potential that location-based mobile services have to help you find something you’ll enjoy even when you’re not looking for it. While Cheers has the requisite location layer baked in, it’s not an explicitly location-based service.

But it still has some of those elements of serendipity, as Mohit cited the example of sharing a Cheers about a particular person, which was then commented on by an old friend. Through this Cheers, he was able to reconnect with that person. In that way, Cheers intends to connect people, and facilitate discovery of things you’re likely to enjoy based on affirmations of similar interests and experiences.

Those checking out the app may also notice that the app looks similar, design-wise, to some other popular social and discovery-based mobile apps. Kevin Rose’s Oink comes to mind. Mohit says that Cheers was being developed at the same time as Oink, but the real inspiration came from Instagram’s model of photo sharing.

The more jaded among us may find reason to scoff at all this mobile love fest. Maybe it’s the approach of Valentine’s Day, but I think there’s something to be said for lowering the barriers to sharing appreciation for our favorite people, events, and entertainment in an environment dedicated to making tributes.

Cheers is still very early in its development, as Mohit says that there’s plenty left to be done in terms of better tapping into Facebook “likes,” increasing activity on app itself, the ability to link to other Cheers, better browsing, and upgrades to the camera functionality, including flash. These are all things slated for future upgrades, along with developing apps for other mobile platforms.

The app has a ways to go before it reaches the tipping point, and it remains to be seen exactly how Cheers will monetize, though there is some definite potential around enabling local businesses to tap into users who blast out Cheers for their services, or branding of users with high “Cheerfluence” scores, for example. Either way, it’s probably still worth raising a glass to sharing the love. For more, check out Cheers at home here. Check it out and let us know what you think.

Appcelerator, the company behind the popular Titanium app-building platform, is announcing its third acquisition today. The company is buying Cocoafish, a mobile app infrastructure provider that lets developers add various features to apps including messaging capabilities, push notifications, photo uploads, checkins and other social features, storage, discussion forums and more. Although the name implies an iOS affiliation, Cocoafish is actually a cross-platform backend service provider supporting iOS, Android, and even Flash and Ruby.

Starting in Q2 2012, the features Cocoafish previously offered will relaunch as “Appcelerator Cloud Services (ACS)” as a part of the company’s Titanium Platform, and as complete iOS, Android, REST and Javascript SDKs for non-Titanium customers.

The acquisition follows Appcelerator’s previous buyouts of other mobile app infrastructure providers, including the enterprise-focused Aptana and, more recently, Particle Code, which brought additional HTML5 capabilities to Titanium. With Cocoafish, Appcelerator is aiming for the broader mobile market, the company explains – not just Titanium users. Now developers using Objective-C, Java, PhoneGap, Sencha or HTML5 will have access to a scalable server-side backend, similar to what other backend service providers like StackMob, Urban Airship or Parse are offering.

According to Jeff Haynie, Appcelerator CEO, the company chose Cocoafish because it’s the “most complete solution.”

“We took a look at all these companies, and what we liked [about Cocoafish] was that they have 25 well-designed, well-tested services supported,” he explained. “They’re sets of interfaces that work together.”

However, it could be argued that other possible acquisition targets simply weren’t on the market. For example, Urban Airship has been doing a little acquiring of its own in recent months, snapping up SimpleGeo to fill out its own offerings. Asked if Appcelerator considered other companies prior to Cocoafish, Haynie said they “had all sorts of conversations at different levels” with competitors, but were ultimately drawn to Cocoafish for a few key reasons, beyond its feature set. The startup hadn’t raised money, were already profitable, and they were a small, 10-person bootstrapped team based in San Francisco. It just made sense.

The new Appcelerator-branded product will roll out on March 31st, but the company is already planning to continue the work Cocoafish had started. By Q3, the plan is to launch an on-demand, private cloud offering so developers with increased security needs can run the whole stack in their own cloud. There are also plans to support Node.js, expand the common services to offer more features (like video), and offer more identity management options for enterprise customers, like RSA SecureID and Active Directory support, for example.

Appecelerator today has over 35,000 apps that have been built using the Titanium platform, and those apps have been deployed on 40 million devices. But there are also 1.6 million web developers with the company who already use a Javascript API to build native or HTML5 apps, all of whom could also take advantage of ACS.

Although the acquisition makes Appcelerator a direct competitor to the other backend services it already supports in Titanium, Haynie assured us that there would be no change in terms of which backend services developers can use. “Like any platform company, you compete on some things, but on other things you’re helping each other out,” he said of how the new offering impacts competing services.

If you’re one of the 12 million drivers who use real-time traffic data from Waze, there’s a drawback — the smartphone app depends on users to collect traffic data, but if a driver is stuck in traffic or spots an accident, that’s exactly when they shouldn’t be fiddling with their phone. That’s why the Kleiner Perkins-backed startup  developed a new voice interface, which it’s launching today.

Michal Habdank-Kolaczkowski, the company’s director of communications, recently demonstrated the new controls for me. The demo took place in the TechCrunch office, rather than a moving car, but I still think Waze has come up with a pretty elegant solution. Habdank-Kolaczkowski showed off reporting traffic to Waze with just a couple of voice commands — “report traffic”, then, when prompted to choose from different traffic levels, he said, “moderate.”

And when Waze team members say the experience is “hands free,” they mean it. To activate voice control, Habdank-Kolaczkowski didn’t have to touch his phone at all. He just waved his hand in front of the device, a gesture that was detected by the iPhone proximity sensor. (So, okay, technically, you’re using your hand, but in a natural way that shouldn’t interfere with your driving.) You’ll need to have the Waze app on for this to work, but that’s normal procedure anyway — drivers are supposed to leave the app on during the commute, so that’s it’s automatically gathering traffic data as they drive.

Waze VP Community Geographer DiAnn Eisnor says Waze already prevents users from typing when they’re driving and the app is open. Voice controls were an obvious next step, and for a while, the company was hoping that Apple would make Siri voice commands available to third-party app developers. Eisnor said she’s still hopeful, and when if it happens, Waze will happily jump on-board. In the meantime, the company moved forward on its own, building the new interface using open source voice technology.

For now, the voice commands are iPhone-only, and they’re limited to a few key use cases — reporting traffic and asking for directions home or to the office. Eisnor said Waze plans to expand the app’s vocabulary over time, and also bring voice commands to its Android app.

I remember my freshman year of college. It was a tiny campus, but I still found myself looking for classes and wandering through a maze-like library for most of the first year I was there. At the time, my phone wasn’t much help to me, but now that smartphones are taking over the market, Modo Labs is ready to help college students spend even more time on fiddling around on their phones.

The company today made the latest version of its Mobile Campus Solution available, which is meant to give Universities the ability to create a mobile platform for their students. The platform will work on mobile web, iOS, and Android, just to make sure no one’s left out.

Students will be able to access Learning Management Systems, course catalogs, schedules, announcements, materials and grades from the courses module. Athletes, sorority girls, and other sports fans will be able to check out scores and game-related information via mobile, while book worms will have access to a library module, offering up locations and various resources.

The platform — built on Kurogo Mobile Optimized Middleware — will have “live update” functionality for on-campus transit, as well as dining information and a photo hub.

As of right now, over 150 universities including Villanova and Boston College are using mobile offerings powered by Kurogo.

Japanese mobile gaming giant DeNA bought mobile app developer Ngmoco last year for $400 million. Since then, the company has acquired a range of other outfits and worked to tie the San Francisco startup in with everything else it does.

In general, things seem to be improving. The conglomerate just posted a strong third quarter, with net sales up 16%, which in turn boosted the stock price by more than 8% for a valuation of $4.8 billion. However, net income declined versus the same period the previous year, from $106 million to $79.2 million.

And maybe cost savings had something to do with a rumor we heard last week and have since confirmed: Ngmoco recently had a round of layoffs — maybe somewhere above 30 people, according to one source. The number isn’t huge, but among the departed are senior leaders including a director of platform tech and the chief marketing officer, this person tells me. One game has apparently been shut down, while another has been pared down, with some engineers remaining to see it to launch.

Here’s the company’s response today, from the normally pithy Ngmoco chief executive Neil Young: “Armed with the insights we’ve gained from both the Western and Japanese markets and after completing the integration of a series of key acquisitions, we’ve organized our global operations to best support and deliver on our mission to build the leading Global Social Mobile Game Platform company.”

“We’re incredibly proud of our company and our products,” he added. “We thank everyone that has helped us get to where we are today.”

All in all, it seems that Ngmoco went on a big hiring spree, then had to figure out what was working in coordination with everything else that was happening at DeNA. These types of organizational changes happen in business. The good news for those laid off is that there are lots of other mobile app developers who are hiring (including Ngmoco, it appears).

Editor’s note: Guest author Keith Teare is General Partner at his incubator Archimedes Labs and CEO of newly funded just.me. He was a co-founder of TechCrunch. Just.me is a stealth company in the mobile space and as such Keith’s opinions on this issue are likely to reflect his product focus.

Addressgate seems like an appropriate name for what is dominating Silicon Valley headlines: Path’s mobile app uploading all of your contacts. Today Michael Arrington suggested that Path delete the data gathered and start over, and now Path CEO and founder Dave Morin has decided to do just that, and apologized.

The past 24 hours of discussion has mainly been characterized by shock, horror or forgiveness. Although all well-intentioned none of these get to the heart of a very significant issue that will only get more important as the mobile and cloud architecture of consumer apps replaces the desktop and cloud combination that has characterized the past 10 years of web services. Beneath the drama there are some big issues. Here I want to try and surface them.

Background to address book issues

It helps to understand what is happening at a macro level in order to grasp why Path was hammered while Google Plus and Facebook largely get a free pass when it comes to the question – “who owns the address book?”

The past 10 years of web apps and services created a set of assumptions about where one’s address book should sit. In the early days of Web 2.0, when Plaxo built an early cloud-based synchronization platform, it was full of controversy. In January 2006 our own Michael Arrington, writing on Crunchnotes, entitled his piece “The Plaxo Virus”, and asked:

“Plaxo, can you please find a way to run your business but never, ever email me again?.”

Subsequent TechCrunch pieces were notably reluctant to endorse the service to say the least.

This was the dawn of cloud-based address book management.

The rise of Web 2.0 and the normalization of the cloud based address book.

Since then Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and others have normalized the notion that the right place for your contact list, or “friends,” is in the cloud. Indeed, given the cloud-centric architecture of web 2.0, that is the only place they can be. Almost all of the functionality of these services derives from being able to host the address book and to make comparisons between the address book of person ‘A’ and other people.

Facebook even goes so far as to restrict an individual’s access to the records in the address book. It considers that details like a friend’s phone number or email address are private to the friend, and thus blocks the ability of the address book owner to download the address book from Facebook to their mobile phone or other device. A user has to log into Facebook and look up those details on its web service if he or she wants to check on an email address or phone number. In this scenario Facebook is not hosting your address book, it owns it and merely gives you permission to look it up.

From Web Services to Mobile Apps

Now that we are moving out of the era of web services and into a mobile era, decentralization of one’s address book becomes the norm. Your phone contacts become the center of gravity for your relationships. In this world, mobile-first applications have to make a decision about how to think about the address book.

Now we are mobile, where should the address book sit?

Answer 1: In the Cloud

They can, as Path has done, choose to still host the address book and perform algorithmic queries on it in order to provide a set of services—like friend suggestions—based off of it.

It is worth noting that this decision does not require the download of a person’s address book. That was simply Path’s method of doing it. There are many other ways the goal could have been accomplished. Indeed Path’s decision to host the address book seems old-fashioned and harks back to a pre-mobile era, but it is also normal in that context.

The only real crime, if one was committed, was failure to alert the user.

In a mobile context this becomes an issue because it is taking something from the user. In the web era the user was putting this data onto a service via an explicit upload process.

Answer 2: On the Phone

A second way of thinking about the mobile address book is that its inherently distributed characteristic is a good thing, and the services that utilize it should sit on the device and be under the control of the user. In this distributed model it is still possible to provide services like friend suggestions, but without needing to host the data from the address book in the cloud. The data could remain on the device and accessed through the cloud by other devices instead. That way, nothing is stored in the cloud, it just passes messages back and forth. Clearly this architecture is more mobile centric, more under the control of the user, and not vulnerable to service providers mismanaging a person’s contact lists. In theory such an architecture reverses the web 2.0 power relationship between a merchant and a user but does not reduce the functionality that a user can expect.

This set of issues reinforces once again that privacy is a product issue, not merely a policy issue. Products that empower the user to act on their address book without taking the content of it and hosting it will likely find favor in a decentralized mobile world as it emerges. Those who want to persist with hosting the address book will need to ask for explicit permission again, or face the “Plaxo is a virus” style of reaction.

Facebook is huge on mobile — as an application developer. But questions have circled for years around how it can be a real mobile platform on top of operating systems controlled by Apple and Google. But we got a little more data on what it’s already accomplishing on the platform front, today at the Inside Social Apps conference here in San Francisco.

Facebook product director Carl Sjogreen said on stage that out of the 425 million monthly mobile users that it currently counts, 60 million are going to third party apps. And this isn’t just once a month apiece — this is 320 million times total per month, which means an average of five times per user.

I couldn’t get more details on how these numbers break down, except that they do not include Facebook’s own native or web apps. Rather, they seem to mean any mobile app that has somehow integrated Facebook. So, like what Zynga has done with the mobile version of FarmVille, or how you can find Facebook friends to add to Path, or any number of other implementations out there.

Facebook’s goal as a company is to create a social layer on top of everything, everywhere. For mobile, it already offers a variety of platform-style options including login identity, social channels including requests, the news feed, bookmarks, search, social plugins and email. Many of these features only became available in October. The numbers today mean that this stuff is getting some traction. Mobile app developers, maybe it’s time to look closer at how to use Facebook for your next update.

It’s a sign of the times, though not a particularly surprising one: Nokia has finally eliminated its European phone assembly infrastructure and will be moving those 4000 jobs to Asia, according to a Reuters report. The factories are not being shuttered altogether, and localizing and finishing work will still be done there, but the primary assembly work is being relocated.

The news and layoffs were expected, as the company has slashed many more thousands of jobs over the last year, but this particular cut is symbolic: the intensely European company has been battered into submission, and will join the others in the now-standard configuration of “design here, build there.”

The job losses are 2300 in Hungary, 1000 in Finland, and 700 in Mexico. They don’t represent all of Nokia’s employees in those countries, just those involved with basic assembly. Nokia did not say where or to what contractor the jobs would be sent, but considering their need to cut costs, the majors in China, Taiwan, Thailand, and others in the area are the natural choice.

Naturally, the countries losing the jobs expressed disappointment, but Nokia’s got to do what Nokia’s got to do, and these job losses have been telegraphed for some time. It’s likely that they were announced today only after extensive negotiations with unions and local contractors.

Whether this approach will prove effective at lowering costs without damaging the company or brand is yet to be seen; it may be that saving money on manufacturing might not be enough to counter the enormous drop in sales Nokia has seen over the last two years.

All smartphones do not depreciate equally. 18 months after purchase, iPhones can be sold for 53% of their original price, while Androids can only be sold for 42% and BlackBerries for 41% on average according to a study by Y Combinator second-hand price guide startup Priceonomics.

That frown on Android fanboy faces gets even larger the quicker they try to resell. 12 months after purchase, iPhones can pull in 63% of their day 1 manufacturer suggested retail price, compared to 46% for Android. Early adopters who must have the latest model would do well to stick with Apple. 6 months after purchase iPhones claim 89% of their original MSRP, while Androids fall to just 66%.

Priceonomics says “We examined all iPhone models and the 70 most popular Androids and 30 most popular BlackBerry models. iPhone is wiping the floor with Android and BlackBerry in terms of resale value.” This study doesn’t take into account the high, off-contract price of iPhones or the economical options for Android buyers. It’s based on hardware alone, doesn’t compare carrier charges, and may be skewed towards American resale values due to the location of Pricenomics’ user base.

The numbers indicate enduring confidence in Apple hardware, and that a liquid iPhone resale market could make the device a wiser purchase. Carriers, on the other hand, aren’t doing so well selling the iPhone. Verizon, AT&T, and especially Sprint are seeing profits shaved down by subsidizing iPhone purchases, CNN Money repots.

Some other interesting findings include that paying for extra memory hardly enhances resale value, breaking your contract and paying the termination fee is cheaper than buying off-contract, and pre-paid Android phones are cheap and hold their value quite well compared to contracted Androids. The lower resale value may make some Android models more expensive to own per month.

Finally, Priceonomics composed some fanboy location indices showing where the highest volume of certain phones were being resold on its site. Long Island, New York, Miami, and New Jersey have the most BlackBerry resales , while Santa Barbara, Anchorage, Orange County, Boulder, and San Francisco see the most iPhones changing hands. Looks like the adages are true. Smug cities full of supposed cool kids love their Apple products, while bro’ed out popped collar-types are propping up RIM.

You’d be excused for not paying much attention to Thismoment or Position2. They do the dirty work a lot of entrepreneurs don’t want to do, namely run marketing promotions and, in their wake, figuring out how many people actually paid attention to those things. In a world of “organic eyeballs” and viral va-va-voom, there’s little place for Mad Men style commercial promotion… or is there?

Thismoment just paid an undisclosed sum for Position2 and will begin folding Position2′s technology into its offerings. Thismoment began life as a photo-sharing site (“It was Facebook Timeline before Facebook timeline,” said founder Vince Broady) and pivoted do supply content management tools for major brands.

“With our Distributed Engagement Channel (DEC) platform, we’ve focused on social content management, and the creative layer – the app, promotion or campaign – through which the content is delivered,” said Broady. “With the Brand Monitor acquisition, we complete the picture by adding conversation monitoring and advanced analytics – including sentiment analysis – both of which provide real-time feedback on the success of social content and creative initiatives. So now, you cannot only execute a program, but actually see if it’s working and react in real-time.”

By connecting content delivery – essentially sites dedicated, say, to a specific promotion – and Position2′s brand awareness tools, users can create a branded page and then watch as users respond through multiple channels including Facebook, Twitter, and on the web.

If there’s anything we can learn from this acquisition it’s that brands are looking more closely to social media and following the feedback loop from eyeball to Tweet to Facebook rant with an intensity heretofore unrivaled. We can scoff all we want about ham-handed attempts at social media interaction, but Thismoment works with over a hundred Fortune 500 companies and those guys, as they say, aren’t fooling around.

It looks like Path has heeded the words of investor Michael Arrington.

Yesterday, the startup faced a major privacy backlash when it was revealed that the social app was uploading user’s address book data without actually telling the user. Co-founder and CEO Dave Morin was apologetic, and there was a lot of argument about how big a deal this was (especially since the practice was in-line with Apple’s policies), but Arrington had a simpler suggestion: “Just nuke all the data.”

And in a new blog post, Morin says that’s exactly what Path has done. Well, first he explains that the app was using the data for innocuous purposes (alerting users when one of their contacts joined Path). And there’s a new version of the Path asks you to opt-in before it uses this data. But Morin also says:

We believe you should have control when it comes to sharing your personal information. We also believe that actions speak louder than words. So, as a clear signal of our commitment to your privacy, we’ve deleted the entire collection of user uploaded contact information from our servers. Your trust matters to us and we want you to feel completely in control of your information on Path.

As Arrington noted, it shouldn’t take too long for Path to collect the data again from the users who want to share it. Still, this seems like an effective symbolic gesture that says, “Yes, we screwed up, and we want to make amends.”

Call it a sort of a bear hug: Sprint, the also-ranniest of the also-rans in the carrier world, lost money selling phones that, on the aggregate gained them subscribers. It’s also Catch-22, a blindside, and a mess.

According to Sprint, the company reported a net loss last quarter while still selling 1.8 million iPhones and increasing their subscriber base by 1.6 million. How? The costs associated with provisioning and supporting these new phones drove operating losses to $438 million, up from $139 million in Q4 last year.

The company reported increased subscriber numbers – 55 million this year. Forty percent of Sprint iPhone buyers were new customers. They nearly doubled capital expenditures this year.

Sprint is in a strange place. Like T-Mobile, the company has always been overshadowed by the bigger guys and never gained traction after acquisition. While using ostensibly the same hardware, Verizon has roundly trounced Sprint by advertising improved coverage and reception.

However, unlike T-Mobile, Sprint has the iPhone. This move – beyond any network improvements or handset acquisitions – is what’s keeping the company afloat. The net loss shown this year happened because Sprint was supporting the iPhone, a wild situation in which a company’s best-seller is actually dragging it down.

If the iPhone taught consumes anything it’s that mobile broadband is a right, not a privilege. The right to Instagram, Yelp, and browse all day and night is seemingly god-given and that same god knows that the iPhone hasn’t been useful for making calls these last few years. In short, we’re looking at a product that would upend any carrier’s view of the world, not just Sprint’s.

For decades, carriers worried about getting calls from point A to point B. Now they have to worry about tethering, massive data downloads to small devices, and always-on connectivity. They have to worry about angry Tweets, upset Facebook posts, and maintain gear that is cutting edge and prone to failure. So, in the end, it didn’t make financial sense to go the popular route, but hopefully it will buoy Sprint’s prospects in the long term.

The iPhone taught carriers that it wasn’t enough to dump out a feature phone or two and keep the power on in the switch room. Sprint’s troubles – masquerading as opportunity – is the finest example of the change that is currently rolling over the operator landscape.

photo credit: ucumari via photopin cc

During the lackluster moments of this year’s Super Bowl, we turned to our second screens. A study released by Flurry today shows that during great ads and the half-time show we kept our devices stowed, but returns from commercial breaks, boring ads, and waning interest in the 3rd quarter caused spikes in mobile app usage.

This means advertisers and TV producers need to get flashier, because every viewer has a wildly engaging device in their pocket. Subtle, conservative, slow-building ads just don’t cut it any more. 

Overall, the Super Bowl was still more popular in the U.S. than apps, with 111 million people watching the game, while 98 million people accessed mobile apps in the same time period.

Flurry employed a clever new way to measure how entertaining broadcast content is by charting how our often our fickle population moved to check Facebook, Twitter, and play games. The chart above shows dips in app usage during eye-catching ads for Battleship, Coca-Cola’s polar bears, Madonna’s half-time show, and the tense final minutes of the game — which means the only thing people were doing as the clock ran down was updating social media. Tweets spiked to 10,000 per second in the last 3 minutes, the 2nd highest frequency ever.

Hulu, General Motors, and General Electric had the most boring ads according to the study, as app usage spiked while they were on screen. Meanwhile, Verizon’s Droid Razr and TaxAct.com’s ads inspired the least compulsive app usage of the tech companies and websites paying for airtime.

This year’s Super Bowl was the most watched television program in history and more people in the US watched it than opened apps. Next year the NFL might not be so lucky, though. It will have to analyze what moments caused spikes in app usage, and consider how to jazz them up. The streaming experience could also use some refinement, considering it didn’t show the half time and made users click around to see the commercials.