We most commonly think of location within traditional mobile applications. Navigation apps were the first to use it. Local search results and social-networking apps are more relevant when mapped to a person’s current location. But location can do more than simply drive people to places where they can shop, eat or meet friends. Soon, all mobile applications will need to be tied to location if they want to stay relevant.

Applications that we currently do not think of as location-relevant, such as books, sports, reference, music and cooking all become more interesting when a user’s location is taken into account. Home cooks will be able to check out the most popular recipes in their neighborhoods. Music lovers will see where others are listening to their favorite artists around the country. Sports fans will be able to interact with other spectators in the same stadium, and book enthusiasts will be able to search for books written about their neighborhood, or find nearby book clubs to join.

Some apps are already beginning to experiment with location in unusual ways. Sportacular, a top iPhone sports app, allows users to vote for which team they predict will win an upcoming game. The votes are tallied and categorized by region and state. Three days before a recent Red Sox v. Angels baseball game, we saw that every state in the country thought the Red Sox would win except for the Angels’ home state of California. In the end, the Angels dominated, but the voting process encouraged debate and banter among users, fostering a deeper sense of community.

TuneWiki takes over a mobile device’s music player and offers a more compelling user experience by displaying song lyrics and adding community features. The app also ties in location with TuneWiki music maps, which displays the songs that are currently playing around a user’s current location. The community feature lets people see what songs are popular in their area for the current hour, day, week, month or year.

Over 3 billion mobile applications like Sportacular and TuneWiki will be downloaded in 2009. This market will explode to 7 billion applications in 2013 alone, The Yankee Group projects. These apps will make already-powerful mobile devices more functional, social and customizable to a person’s interests and style. Neither Sportacular nor TuneWiki need location. But serving up music and sports content within the context of location makes the information more relevant, engaging, and socially connected.

Data represents location apps from the iPhone App Store, Android Market, Ovi Store, Palm App Catalog, and BlackBerry App World.

The developers of these applications are driving the mobile marketplace. Some are generating millions of dollars in revenue, and are becoming hot acquisition targets. Amazon acquired Lexcycle’s Stanza, an iPhone eBook reader, in April 2009, and SnapTell, a location-based image recognition and shopping application in June. Also in April, IAC purchased Urbanspoon, a location-based restaurant search app. In July, Blackboard, an educational software provider, purchased TerriblyClever, developers of the location-based MobileEdu applications for college campuses, for $4 million. The location-based TomTom iPhone navigation app generated $4.8 million in the third quarter, Distmo estimates, while the location-aware I Am T Pain app from Smule is projected to generate $3 million alone in 2009.

The applications generating real revenue and that have been targeted for acquisition are not simple, gimmicky apps. They are highly functional and take full advantage of device capability, like location, accelerometers and graphics. Millions of dollars in revenue and high-profile acquisitions are classic early signs of a lucrative tech investment sector. As these trends continue, the size of the mobile application market will continue to accelerate.

Massive growth in these types of rich and context-relevant mobile applications will change the way consumers purchase and interact with mobile devices. Ultimately, the growth of mobile apps will help drive the device market. And while apps get even cooler over the next five years, mobile devices and data will get more accessible. Handset prices will fall, and hot devices like the iPhone, Palm Pre and netbooks will capture even more consumer attention. 3G networks will get more powerful; the demand for mobile data and connectivity will increase; and operator subscription fees will get more affordable worldwide.

We’re seeing a shift in the market away from feature phones (voice and SMS-only) to smartphones. An estimated 63 million mobile phone users upgraded to smartphones from feature phones in 2008, from approximately 15 million upgrades in 2005. We will see massive growth of the market over the next four years with 503 million smartphones projected to ship in 2013, RBC Capital Markets projects. The netbook market will also expand — 50 million netbooks will ship in 2012 alone, Gartner projects. Consumer demand for location-aware applications will help drive the distribution boom of these devices.

Developers of today’s most lucrative applications are applying location to their apps in compelling, new ways, and there’s every reason to expect this trend to continue — and to open up new revenue models in the future.

Kate Imbach is the head of marketing at Skyhook Wireless and co-founder and organizer at Mobile Monday Americas. You can follow her on Twitter @Kate8.

Nimbuzz has certainly come a long way — almost three years ago. At the time of its launch, we were pretty critical of the VoIP-on-mobile service because it was a me-too offering that was quite a pain to use. A year-and-a-half later Nimbuzz introduced a new meta client for the Symbian phones. It allowed you to sign-in to various different IM clients. In addition, it allowed some basic VoIP calling, but it wasn’t really till they introduced the new iPhone client that Nimbuzz started to see some serious traction. My previous post gives a good overview of the Nimbuzz feature set.

The company just announced a super communication client for the iPhone that allows you to communicate in a many different ways. For instance, you can make free calls over Wi-Fi to your IM buddies. You can now also call folks on their landlines and mobile phones with Skype Out using any one of Nimbuzz’s 10 VoIP partners including Gizmo5, Vyke, sipgate and A1 and of course Skype. This is a new feature in the service, and makes Skype In/Out Services more valuable.

These services also work over 3G and are described as “Nimbuzz Dial-Up VoIP” which essentially makes it possible to call others by dialing a local access number which then connects to anywhere in the world via Nimbuzz VoIP servers.

For past month, I have been using the pre-release of NimbuzzOut on the iPhone to place calls to my far flung group of friends and family. The calling prices are pretty good– about 8 cents a minute to India, 2 cents to the US and 3 cents to the UK. If you look around, that is pretty much what you pay with most services – Skype is a tiny bit more expensive.

The voice call quality is on par with Skype, which is still my communication method of choice for work-related calls. NimbuzzOut is dead simple to place calls: just hit the call button and you are good to go. You can of course use other calling services, but I don’t see any reason why you have to do it considering that Nimbuzz is offering good rates.

NimbuzzOut has a few features I personally like — you can natively use the phone client to buy additional minutes. I also like the fact that the client uses the native address book and doesn’t create a duplicate contact list. The Symbian client actually lets you edit, add and delete contacts from your address book.

There are a few things I don’t like about this client: if you leave the notifications on, the client will run down your battery and leave the phone pretty useless. If you are using it on an iPhone, then you have to use the WiFi connection, which makes me a tad upset because you can make Skype calls over 3G. You can make NimbuzzOut calls via 3G on the Symbian phones however.

Bottomline: If you are looking for a well designed, easy to use and dead simple all-in-one messaging client that also makes cheap long distance calls, well then you don’t need to look no further than Nimbuzz. I have no qualms in recommending NimbuzzOut.

PS: There is a reward for those who read the complete post. If you are among the first 50 people who send their name and Nimbuzz username to gigaom@nimbuzz.com, the company will give you a $25 NimbuzzOut credit.

At its peak, Priceline’s “name-your-own-price” business model created a stir. Its founder, Jay Walker, trumpeted the idea as a revolution that would upend the travel industry, and a lot of smart people bought it. George Soros and Paul Allen invested their money, and the stock surged to a $15.7 billion market cap, larger than most airlines. Forbes called Walker a “modern-day Edison,” and Priceline expanded into new markets like gasoline and groceries.

The revolution was over before it began. Priceline’s stock peaked nearly a year before the Nasdaq did, and it just kept falling: By the end of 2000, its market cap had shrunk by 99 percent to $220 million. Forbes regretted its praise for Walker, admitting he “hasn’t lived up to our label,” and Walker left the company soon after. Priceline backed out of the gasoline and grocery businesses, retreating to online travel, where it faced increasing competition from Expedia, Orbitz and others.

But writing off Priceline as another failed dot-com also proved premature. Its approach wasn’t revolutionary after all, but neither was it a bad idea. Somewhat ironically, it took another market crash for Priceline to begin to deliver on its promise. Its stock, which has risen 265 percent in the past year, has joined the S&P 500 — the market’s way of saying you’ve finally arrived. Its capitalization is back above $7 billion, making it larger than Expedia.

In the first six months of 2009, Priceline booked $4.3 billion in travel services, an increase of 12 percent during a period when overall bookings declined by 8 percent. The company will update those numbers for the third quarter next week, and analysts are expecting bookings to grow by more than 25 percent, faster than many of Priceline’s online rivals.

What changed for Priceline? Its management avoided the hype about the revolutionary potential of naming your own price. William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy did refer to it in commercials, but Priceline waited patiently for the concept to take root — the way Amazon has been patient about free shipping, or Netflix has been about streaming movies online with no extra fee. The company has also expanded piecemeal, buying up smaller companies like Bookings.com when it could, and expanding abroad. It now offers travel in 78 countries.

There’s a lesson in Priceline’s riches-to-rags-to-riches story for other Web companies. A lot of people watching tech companies — especially ones like me who write about them — get all antsy about their ability to deliver on their promise. This comes up when we talk about companies like Facebook not being public yet, or Twitter looking for revenue.

But often, consumers move at a much slower rate. It can take years to grow comfortable with a new business model. There is a lot to be said about moving quickly in a fast-evolving industry. But there’s just as much to be said about being patient with the people who are going to make you money.

Some Droid phone reviewers have taken note of the Verizon Channel in the Android Market. This channel offers apps that have met Verizon’s approval before offering them to customers. T-Mobile announced its own channel for the Android Market this week. Both channels allow customers to buy apps and have them charged to the phone bill, eliminating the need for a credit card transaction.

Meanwhile, two recently announced e-book readers could have more than the Android OS in common. Spring Design this week sued Barnes & Noble over the Nook reader, claiming it has features the bookseller gleaned from information Spring Design shared with B&N under NDA. It has requested an injunction to prevent the Nook from being sold.

Actually, I’m with him on this issue. Erickson’s company may be taking advantage of a legal loophole that the telecommunications companies and now Google want closed, but it’s not clearly illegal (although the loophole is closing). And by providing voice service for customers even as an “Internet application” Google’s decision to limit certain aspects of the service because of the costs might be reasonable for a restaurant owner running a buffet, but is less so for someone providing a telecommunications service.

Such so-called traffic pumping is an issue the FCC has known about for a while, so clearly companies like Erickson’s, which appear to be benefiting from an arbitrage play that boosts costs for carriers that have to terminate calls on higher-cost rural lines, haven’t been morally repugnant enough to get the FCC or Congress to take definitive action to stop them.

Erickson doesn’t think the FCC should step in at all on the issue of overhauling the pricing schemes that result in higher termination costs on rural lines (and generates sales at his company), he says in a letter filed this week with the FCC, but he does request more scrutiny over Google Voice. He’s lost me at this point. If you’re gonna run to a regulator to force someone to play your game, you can’t get upset when the regulator wants to make sure the rules by which you play that game are fair.

• PEER 1: Fully Scalable Hosting Solutions
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Eucalyptus. Ostatic broke the news about UC Santa Barbara’s open-source cloud project last year. Released as an open-source (under a FreeBSD-style license) infrastructure for cloud computing on clusters that duplicates the functionality of Amazon’s EC2, Eucalyptus directly uses the Amazon command-line tools. Startup Eucalyptus Systems was launched this year with venture funding, and the staff includes original architects from the Eucalyptus project. The company recently released its first major update to the software framework, which is also powering the cloud computing features in the new version of Ubuntu Linux.

Red Hat’s Cloud. Linux-focused open-source player Red Hat has been rapidly expanding its focus on cloud computing. At the end of July, Red Hat held its Open Source Cloud Computing Forum, which included a large number of presentations from movers and shakers focused on open-source cloud initiatives. You can find free webcasts for all the presentations here. The speakers include Rich Wolski (CTO of Eucalyptus Systems), Brian Stevens (CTO of Red Hat), and Mike Olson (CEO of Cloudera). Stevens’ webcast can bring you up to speed on Red Hat’s cloud strategy. Novell is also an open source-focused company that is increasingly focused on cloud computing, and you can read about its strategy here.

Traffic Server. Yahoo this week moved its open-source cloud computing initiatives up a notch with the donation of its Traffic Server product to the Apache Software Foundation. Traffic Server is used in-house at Yahoo to manage its own traffic, and it enables session management, authentication, configuration management, load balancing, and routing for entire cloud computing software stacks. Acting as an overlay to raw cloud computing services, Traffic Server allows IT administrators to allocate resources, including handling thousands of virtualized services concurrently.

Cloudera. The open-source Hadoop software framework is increasingly used in cloud computing deployments due to its flexibility with cluster-based, data-intensive queries and other tasks. It’s overseen by the Apache Software Foundation, and Yahoo has its own time-tested Hadoop distribution. Cloudera is a promising startup focused on providing commercial support for Hadoop. You can read much more about Cloudera here.

Puppet. Virtual servers are on the rise in cloud computing deployments, and Reductive Labs’ open-source software, built upon the legacy of the Cfengine system, is hugely respected by many system administrators for managing them. You can use it to manage large numbers of systems or virtual machines through automated routines, without having to do a lot of complex scripting.

Enomaly. The company’s Elastic Computing Platform (ECP) has its roots in widely used Enomalism open-source provisioning and management software, designed to take much of the complexity out of starting a cloud infrastructure. ECP is a programmable virtual cloud computing infrastructure for small, medium and large businesses, and you can read much more about it here.

Joyent. In January of this year, Joyent purchased Reasonably Smart, a fledgling open-source cloud startup based on JavaScript and Git. Joyent’s cloud hosting infrastructure and cloud management software incorporate many open-source tools for public and private clouds. The company can also help you optimize a speedy implementation of the open-source MySQL database for cloud use.

Zoho. Many people use Zoho’s huge suite of free, online applications, which is competitive with Google Docs. What lots of folks don’t realize, though, is that Zoho’s core is completely open source — a shining example of how SaaS solutions can work in harmony with open source. You can find many details on how Zoho deploys open-source tools in this interview.

Globus Nimbus. This open-source toolkit allows businesses to turn clusters into Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds. The Amazon EC2 interface is carried over, but is not the only interface you can choose.

Reservoir. This is the main European research initiative on virtualized infrastructures and cloud computing. It’s a far-reaching project targeted to develop open-source technology for cloud computing, and help businesses avoid vendor lock-in.

OpenNebula. The OpenNebula VM Manager is a core component of Reservoir. It’s an open-source answer to the many virtual machine management offerings from proprietary players, and interfaces easily with cloud infrastructure tools and services. “OpenNebula is an open-source virtual infrastructure engine that enables the dynamic deployment and re-placement of virtual machines on a pool of physical resources,” according to project leads.

It’s good to see open-source tools and resources competing in the cloud computing space. The end result should be more flexibility for organizations that want to customize their approaches. Open-source cloud offerings also have the potential to keep pricing for all competitive services on a level playing field.

Cerf has been working with NASA since 1998 to develop DTN as a way to overcome limitations in the TCP/IP protocol when fast, one-to-one communications aren’t possible, especially over long distances. NASA has already show DTN to be effective for communications between Earth-based networks and outposts in deep space. Can the protocol greatly increase the coverage and service reliability of our mobile networks and devices?

The protocol uses a store-and-forward, rather than a continuous communication model, to reliably communicate packets back-and-forth over long distances, as explained in this NASA note on its successes with DTN:

Unlike TCP/IP on Earth, the DTN does not assume a continuous end-to-end connection. In its design, if a destination path cannot be found, the data packets are not discarded. Instead, each network node keeps the information as long as necessary until it can communicate safely with another node. This store-and-forward method, similar to basketball players safely passing the ball to the player nearest the basket means information does not get lost when no immediate path to the destination exists. Eventually, the information is delivered to the end user.

DTN is also slated for many applications involving communications between Earth-based networks and satellites, and even long-distance underwater communications tasks. Cerf also has his eyes squarely on high-reliability DTN deployments for use with Earth-based wireless networks, as The Register’s Cade Metz reports:

“Mobile operations are highly stressed,” Cerf said. “Mobiles are used where people congregate…In a sense, mobile is already a dense and hostile environment. We all know that when you drive around, coverage isn’t very good. It’s so hostile, it’s clear that mobile could take advantage of these more-resilient protocols. TCP/IP is very brittle.”

Cerf’s work on DTN has been space-focused for many years, but, just as the Android operating system is open source and forking into many new types of deployments, DTN is moving beyond Cerf’s initial intent for it. Given its roots in space applications, doesn’t an operating system dubbed Android have the perfect name for it?

Found Money: Zennström and Friis are the real winners here. For a few hundred thousand in legal bills, they have not only managed to wipe out an investor competitor, they have shifted the focus away from the ignominious failure that was Joost. They have turned their ownership of a P2P technology into yet another payday and, most importantly, they are now sitting in the catbird seat to reap the rewards of Skype again. Verdict: Winners

Double Dipped: In order to get the deal done, both the investors and eBay took a hair cut. Investors now control 56 percent of the Skype while eBay’s stake is down 5 percent to 30 percent of the new Skype. There is a lot of spin in the press release issued by Skype, but the fact remains as I pointed out on the day this deal was announced, Zennström and Friis had them by the curlies. It was clear that this deal wasn’t going to get done without their blessing.

“Skype will be well positioned to move forward under new owners with ownership and control over its core technology,” said eBay President and CEO John Donahoe. “At the same time, eBay continues to retain a significant stake in Skype and will benefit from its continued growth. We look forward to closing the deal and focusing on growing our core e-commerce and payments businesses.”

Poor John is stuck being the mop-up man. eBay, thanks to the stellar work of its previous management team including Meg Whitman, currently running for governor of California, is paying twice for its mistakes. If my previous employer, Business 2.0, was still publishing the 101 Dumbest Things list, I would make eBay’s original Skype deal as the No. 1 dumbest thing…ever! Verdict: Losers.

Index-ed to Nothing: Now let’s look at this great spin quote:

The investor group will no longer include Index Ventures, which has withdrawn from participation. Commenting on its decision to withdraw, Danny Rimer of Index Ventures, said: “We are pleased that Skype will now be able to put litigation behind it, and we wish Josh Silverman, his team and the Skype investors well in continuing to grow a great business. Although Skype has the potential to be a great investment, the deal terms changed for Index such that it no longer matches our investment criteria and thus we have decided not to participate in the transaction.”

Index Ventures and Mike Volpi were the architects of the deal from day one, and so no, they didn’t opt out of the agreement. No one opts out of a deal for which they are happy to bend a few rules. What it means is that they were hustled out, and that tells me two things: This was way, way personal. I have heard it from my sources that there is no love lost between the various entities involved and the lawsuits just brought the hostilities out in the open. Verdict: Losers

Making a Marc: Earlier this morning I spoke with Marc Andreeseen of Andreessen Horowitz and asked him about the deal. “We wouldn’t go through this for just a company, but this is Skype, so from our standpoint it was worth going through,” he said. He pointed out that his firm is all about founders and “we like founders being part of the company.” He added that there is “no emotional baggage and we didn’t take this personally.”

This was a high-profile deal for a new fund. Given that Andreessen Horowitz bet so much of their fund’s total money on this deal ($60$50 million of $300 million), any successful conclusion is a win. Verdict: Winners

Silver Lake Partners: The rest of the investors can breathe easy that this got through. Those personal emails didn’t make pretty reading. The fact that they don’t have to deal with Volpi and Index might be a blessing in disguise. Verdict: Winners

Canada Pension Plan Investment Board: Are they still there…oh cool! Verdict: Meh!

No Silver Lining?: One person who I totally feel for is Silverman, the current CEO of Skype. He gets to run a company which will have the looming presence of its founders.

Whatever the press spin might say, the new investor group is like a poisoned well. It will be a polarized group, always looking over their shoulders. Silverman is going to need to keep a lot of people happy, and those board meetings with nearly two-dozen people aren’t going to be fun, either. But as Biggie Small once said:

“It’s like the more money we come across, the more problems we see.”

Those revenues come from 49 million voice subscribers and 82 million broadband subscribers worldwide. The revenues of cable companies have grown 28 percent every year since 2003, versus overall wireline business growth of 4 percent. CableCos now account for 29 percent of broadband subscribers and 9 percent of voice subscribers in countries where they are allowed to compete with the phone companies. That works out to about 15 percent of residential telecom revenues in countries where cable and telecoms are allowed to compete.

The reason we are seeing this growth is primarily because of North America. The presence of highly competitive players such as Time Warner Cable and Comcast is a major reason why telecoms are on a weak footing in the US. And there is no sign that US CableCos are easing up the pressure on phone companies.

For instance during the third quarter of 2009 (ending Sept. 30), Time Warner added 117,000 new residential high speed internet customers (up 32% from Q2 net additions of 88,000 subscribers) and 62,000 voice subscribers (down 39 percent from 103,000 new voice customers added during Q2 2009). Comcast on the other hand added another 361,000 broadband subscribers (up 455 percent from 65,000 new additions during the Q2 2009) and 375,000 voice customers, up 61% from 233,000 new subscribers added during the Q2 2009.

Even in the highly competitive and mature markets of North America and Western Europe, the leading cablecos have grown their telecoms revenue by almost 10% relative to the third quarter of 2008. Despite the added pressure of a deep recession, these leading cablecos have seen their broadband internet subscriber bases grow by 7% and their telephony subscriber bases by 13% over the last twelve months. “Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Liberty Global all now feature in the top 15 ranking of broadband internet service providers, and telecoms remains an engine for growth for many cablecos around the world,’ added TeleGeography’s John Dinsdalee.(Telegeography)

CableCos are likely to have a major impact in Eastern Europe and Latin America. In Asia, the role of cable is being viewed as very limited. In places like China and India, cable is not allowed to compete with phone companies.

Verizon Wireless isn’t the largest carrier to join the Android bandwagon — that honor goes to Vodafone, which launched the HTC Magic in February — but the debut of the Droid looks to be the operating system’s biggest single step since Android debuted with the HTC G1 last year. And while Verizon is also launching the $100 HTC Eris today, Motorola clearly has more at stake in the Google/Verizon tie-up than any other OEM. In fact, Droid “promises to reverse Motorola’s fortunes” in mobile, according to a statement this morning from iSuppli:

“Droid is potentially a game changer for Motorola,” said Tina Teng, senior analyst, wireless communications for iSuppli. “Motorola now is no longer just emphasizing slick form factors, such as it did with its RAZR handset. The company now has focused on the hottest segment of the global mobile handset market — providing compelling smartphone products that are usable and expandable through third-party applications.”

Indeed, Motorola wisely joined the Android bandwagon ahead of some of its competitors, and it appears to have produced a compelling handset at a competitive price. Just as importantly, it is benefiting from a big-budget marketing campaign backed by the nation’s largest carrier. But that campaign is focused entirely on Verizon Wireless and its Droid initiative — not on Motorola or any other manufacturer. For Motorola to fully leverage the momentum it’s gaining from the launch of the Droid, it should produce its own marketing campaign to push its suddenly hot brand — just as HTC is doing with its compelling “You” campaign.

Mistry has created SixthSense, writes Lisa Hoover on OStatic today, a wearable gesture interface that uses a camera and mini projector to display data and information onto surfaces, walls, and even your hand. Customized fingertip sensors let you manipulate the data and use your hands to interact with it. The Ph.D. student announced plans during a presentation at the TEDIndia conference this week to release SixthSense under an open-source license in the coming months. You can check out a video of SixthSense here, and more photos here.

Today when FOX Business Network’s Neil Cavuto asked him about recent comparisons with Microsoft, Schmidt zinged back: “Hopefully we won’t repeat the same mistakes that Microsoft did ten years ago that ultimately led to all these things that have been happening with them.” I bet Bill Gates must have said the same about IBM.

He also talked about Twitter and Facebook, the economy, the recession and a whole bunch of other current events during his interview. Actually this clip is worth watching and Cavuto is actually rational in his questions. So if you do have time, check it out.

Photo courtesy of Charles Haynes via Flickr.

So enter AT&T, Orange, Telefonica, TeliaSonera, Verizon, Vodafone, Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Nokia Siemens Networks, Nokia, Samsung Electronics, and Sony Ericsson, which are all stepping behind the One Voice effort that will use a standard version of the IMS framework to route voice calls between the IP and circuit-switched networks. It’s easy to understand why the equipment makers are behind this — they’ve been trying to sell IMS gear for years, and because most of the carriers involved have their own IP-based wireless network they’ve already got their own IMS equipment.

However, a few notable players are missing from the One Voice effort, such as T-Mobile and some of the Chinese carriers. There is also still the question of when these standards will actually be implemented and, thus, able to be deployed in the network. Verizon plans to have its LTE network covering 100 million people by the end of next year, and AT&T will start trials at that time as well. Given that yesterday’s announcement was the beginning of a process that could take a year or longer to cement, we’re still going to need an interim solution if carriers want to provide voice on LTE networks.

This standard shows that voice over LTE is finally a big issue for carriers, said Steven Shaw, VP of marketing for Kineto, which is part of a competing LTE voice effort called VoLGA. He denied that One Voice obviates the need for VoLGA given how long it will take for a standard to be ratified and implemented. Carriers can use VoLGA in the meantime, he notes, which would generate revenue for Kineto. Regardless, getting big industry players to get a standards effort rolling is a key step for those who want 4G handsets — even if they won’t be out in 2011.

Presenting startups at NewTeeVee Live include:

• Hotshot box maker Roku
• Parallel processing pioneer Elemental Technologies
• Video advertising manager FreeWheel
• Cord-cutting darling Boxee
• Live event powerhouse Inlet Technologies

And we’ve also got some stars of the PC screen:

• Ryan Higa, operator of the No. 1 most-subscribed YouTube channel of all time
• Michael Gregory, creator of the fantastically irreverent “Auto-Tune the News”
• Lindsay Campbell, former host of Wallstrip and Moblogic and web video entrepreneur at Bright Red Pixels

And — bonus! — we’ll throw in some sessions with tech giants like Comcast, Netflix, Adobe, Microsoft and Cisco as well as media titans like CBS, CNN, Comedy Central and the NFL.

So don’t delay, if you buy your ticket by Friday you get $50 off.

The news of this development was first reported by Mickaël Rémond on the company blog of Process One, a Paris-based messaging start-up. “It now seems the launch is close as the XMPP software stack has been deployed on chat.facebook.com,” writes Rémond writes, who is a leading expert on instant messaging and ejabberd and is an active member of the XMPP Standard Foundation.

About a year-and-a-half ago, Facebook had announced that it would build “a Jabber/XMPP interface for Facebook Chat” and that the “users will be able to use Jabber/XMPP-based chat applications to connect to Facebook Chat to” communicate, check their friends’ profiles and set their statuses.

Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol or XMPP has but surely becoming the defacto standard for messaging and presence. After a big push from Google Talk, XMPP is going to get the next major push from Facebook. World’s largest social networking service with over 350 million subscribers is about to launch the XMPP connection interface which would allow you to use the Facebook chat with any XMPP client – whether on the desktop or on the mobile. A good example of this is Adium, a popular open source IM client that allows you to communicate with disparate IM networks. The latest version of the Adium supports Facebook Chat.

Why is this news disruptive? Simple: So far in order to use the Facebook Chat to communicate, one needs to be logged into the Facebook website or mobile service. However, if the chat can be accessed on any device regardless of being logged into Facebook website, the usage of that IM is going to only increase. This would in turn mean tough times for older IM networks such as AOL’s AIM and Microsoft’s MSN.

To understand why independent Facebook Chat on the web (and on the wireless networks) is disruptive, just take a look at its amazing rise. It was prototyped in January 2007 at a Hackathon and become a real project in Fall 2007 with four engineers. In April 2008, the service went live for consumers and was available to 70 million Facebook users right now. As of last September 2009, nearly billion user messages were being exchanges every day with 1 GB traffic at its peak, according to a presentation made by Facebook development team at a conference in Edinburgh in September 2009.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project sought answers to such questions through phone interviews with 2,512 adults in the U.S., and there are surprises in the survey results. I do wonder, though, how the results might skew differently if people under 18 had been included. Here are just some of the findings, with more results below the fold:

“We find that the extent of social isolation has hardly changed since 1985, contrary to concerns that the prevalence of severe isolation has tripled since then,” Pew researchers report. The survey, released yesterday, also found that the overall diversity of the average person’s social network — including close family and friends as well as acquaintances — is greater through usage of social networks such as Facebook: “For instance, frequent Internet users and those who maintain a blog are much more likely to confide in someone who is of another race.”

Internet use does not pull people away from places such as parks, cafes and restaurants, Pew researchers conclude: “Internet access has become a common component of people’s experiences within many public spaces.” Also, in opposition to the conclusion that Internet usage primarily bridges gaps between people who are geographically far from each other, the survey found that there is little difference between local social usage of technology and distant communication. The following graphic based on the survey results shows that people who belong to a neighborhood online forum are much likely than the average person to have diverse interactions with neighbors:

Does mobile phone usage outpace face-to-face contact as a primary way for people to stay in touch with their closest family and friends? No, according to the survey results: “On average in a typical year, people have in-person contact with their core network ties on about 210 days; they have mobile phone contact on 195 days of the year.” The following graphic breaks out days of contact per year via various communication mediums, according to how far away others are:

Younger people are overwhelmingly more likely to belong to social networks than older people are, the Pew survey also finds, and it’s worth noting that all the people surveyed were over 18. Results could be different for teenagers and children. There are many more findings and graphics from the survey, found here. For the most part, although your smartphone still doesn’t make you the life of the party, the results argue against the long-standing presumption that technology usage is social poison.

As we’ve seen with Spotify’s still-too-low paid-user conversion rate, the vast majority of users are loath to shell out monthly fees to improve on the free-streaming experience. Drawing subscription revenue from a low percentage of power users to cover streaming costs that aren’t offset by advertising income isn’t yet proven as a business model, and Deezer is going to have a difficult time showing that it’s different from its rivals in that respect. Paid subscriptions for music have always been a tough nut to crack, and mobile apps aren’t yet bringing in new customers. And as free desktop streaming services continue to improve, largely due to better user interfaces and shorter loading times, premium offerings from stream providers actually become less attractive rather than more appealing.

Unlike Spotify’s, Deezer’s service is already available in the U.S., though its Stateside catalog is severely limited at present. (Want one of Green Day’s hits? You’ll have to settle for a cover band.) The company reportedly has agreements with all four majors, but its licenses obviously vary from country to country. The premium services will be rolled out first in France, then elsewhere in Europe.

Deezer revealed a €6.5 million round of funding from AGF Private Equity and CM-CIC Capital Prive last month, bringing its total funding to €12.2 million over two years. But with a far-better-funded rival in Spotify, Deezer still has an uphill climb to win consumers’ attention.

The dynamics of firm age, moreover, point us away from a discussion on the existing distribution of employment and toward a focus on the annual changes in jobs. Let’s ask not where people work, but where each additional increment in net job creation occurs. This approach immediately forces one to recognize that companies in a given size class are not necessarily homogenous: a company with fifteen employees that is twenty-five years old will behave differently than one that is only two years old (differences that will multiply if we classify firms according to economic sector).

First the report points out that, while companies with more than 500 people make up about half of the nation’s employment and payroll, a business’s size is not a good indicator of where new jobs come from. Dane Stangler and Robert E. Litan, who wrote the report, offer up this graph to show that without startups overall job creation in the U.S. would have been negative in most of the years since 1977.

There’s also discussion, but no data, about how M&A at large companies — through which they typically acquire smaller, younger firms — accounts for the job growth at larger companies. The report offers a ton of data about economic sectors, and acknowledges that relying on startups for job creation is both messy and hard to track. It’s all very well to say at a macro level that young companies create jobs even though they have a high likelihood of failure, but at the individual level, relying on an uncertain startup for employment can create enormous personal risk.

The report recommends that to foster job creation, young companies need help. The authors think credit should be made more accessible to businesses as well as banks, and note efforts happening in these area today. They also suggest a payroll tax holiday for new and young businesses, while noting that such a move could add to the deficit.

I would suggest rather, that the government consider some level of universal health care that would reduce costs for a young company, as well as offset the difficulties faced by employees who have to navigate the turbulent nature of working at a startup. Overall, it’s an interesting report, although I’m not sure big business should be written off so easily. They may not be engines of job growth, but in many cases they are engines for startup growth as they buy services, equipment or even ads from them.

T-Mobile USA is fighting heated battles on both ends of the mobile spectrum: It has introduced competitive prepaid plans in an effort to compete with cut-rate service providers such as Leap Wireless and MetroPCS, and it is vying for revenue-boosting, smartphone-using consumers with devices such as the Android-based Motorola Cliq and myTouch 3G. But while the carrier’s strategy may be paying dividends for shareholders of parent company Deutsche Telekom, it will have to address the serious network hiccups that have infuriated customers in recent weeks.

DT blamed increasing competition and competitors’ “handset innovation” for its 2.4 percent churn rate, which was unchanged from the previous quarter. T-Mobile USA’s $5.57 billion in revenue was up 2.8 percent from the year-ago period, and its all-important data traffic grew by 45 percent quarter over quarter.

The carrier spent $800 million to build out its 3G network in the U.S. during the quarter, though, and said the network will cover 200 million Americans by the end of the year. T-Mobile brought 5,200 cell sites online during the period and said it plans to add nearly 4,000 more sites by the end of the year, reaching 25,000 total sites. That build-out will be necessary to meet the demands of T-Mo’s rapidly expanding base of data-hungry customers.

But if there’s no expiration date on how long people can use the data, even at a huge markup, these plans might help get people hooked on mobile broadband by allowing them to start using data without an expensive monthly commitment. However, folks will need to purchase a $130 USB modem in order to access the cell network. I’m waiting to hear from Verizon to see if the data expires or if the daily, weekly and monthly titles are mere suggestions of how much someone should use in that time period. The plans are as follows:

• Daily – $15 for 75 MB (20 cents a MB)
• Weekly – $30 for 250 MB (12 cents a MB)
• Monthly – $50 for 500 MB (10 cents a MB)

For comparison’s sake, I pay $60 a month for 5GB or 1.2 cents per MB, although the 250MB plan Verizon offered for $40 on contract seems like a loser when compared with getting the same amount for $30 on prepaid. My guess is these things expire.

“[Google's Wave team is] getting ready for a much broader distribution. Ready means very soon. Very soon is like weeks not years,” Schmidt said. “The experiment has yielded a very, very innovative model and a lot of buzz. We want to see if it will scale.”

Maybe when more people are using it, there is a good chance someone will figure it out and explain to me how it is supposed to improve my online life. (If you want a good Google Wave Primer, check out this research note over on our subscription research service, GigaOM Pro.)

Amongst other things, Schmidt commented on media, news and bloggers, reminding me of what my mother once told me: it is better to keep quiet about things you don’t know much about. Just because they can sell online ads and do search, who do Googlers think they know everything about media and politics? Why do they think they have all the answers, when they can’t get more than half their products right?!

Photo courtesy of Charles Haynes via Flickr.