“We are looking to hire engineers,” he said. “Especially those who want to live in Estonia.” In addition, the company is planning to ramp up its Stockholm (Sweden) office. “We are going to be ramping our presence in the Bay Area as well,” Silverman said. Skype currently has 700 employees and wants to hire engineers and product managers who have help Skype expand as it seeks to transform itself from just a voice-based service to a multi-feature real-time communications platform.

“While Europe is going to remain our base, California is going to be a big presence for us,” Silverman said. Skype recently added SIP Guru Jonathan Rosenberg as its chief technology strategist and he is based in the San Francisco Bay Area. The company had built-up a substantial team in the Bay Area over past few months as it was trying to built a route-around the JoltID’s technology. With that need gone, the company now has enough engineering talent to start transforming itself into a platform.

“We want Skype to be embedded in more and more devices and we want to offer our APIs for developers to embed into their applications,” Silverman said. That is going to be a tough sell considering the company’s history of throwing its developers under the bus, the most recent example being the Skype Extras disaster. Silverman was candid enough to admit that the Skype Extras program wasn’t working. “APIs were hard and the extras-software uptake was low and it is important for us to have a great platform that is built for success,” he said. “So starting off a bad platform wasn’t a good idea.”

When I pressed Silverman on the embedded ambitions, he outlined a future where Skype would be embedded in connected game consoles, televisions and video phones. Skype could be embedded into different software offerings as well. The company wants to be a big player in the enterprise as well, but knows that it can’t do it all by itself. “We need to open up our platform in order to expand it,” he said, “Our aspiration is ubiquity.”

Silverman declined to offer any specific dates (and details) on when Skype will make launch a platform for others to leverage. One thing is for sure, Skype can pose a serious challenge to some of the upstarts such as Ribbit, TringMe and Twilio who are all trying to make it easy for application developers to embed voice-related functionality into their offerings. Skype’s ubiquity – over 500 million subscribers – makes it a fearsome agent of change in the Internet-based communications arena. (Related Post: How Skype can quickly and easily become a social network (and clean Facebook’s clock.))

Towards the end of our conversation, I asked Silverman about the next generation of Skype architecture and he said the company was working on it. “It will work with SIP, it will have P2P but we won’t come to it with a religion,” he said. And that includes offering Skype via a browser and making it even more savvy about video conferencing.

Photo of Josh Silverman courtesy of Phil Wolf via Flickr. Skype desktop photo courtesy of IPVEO.

• Google Lively was a web-based virtual environment that allowed as many as 20 people to sit in a virtual room and chat with each other. The offering debuted in July 2008 only to have Google pull the plug a mere four months later.
• Google Print Ads was dropped earlier this year after the company’s vision of bringing web-like automation to the world of traditional media failed to materialize. The effort went belly-up just three weeks before the death of Google Audio Ads, which ended a three-year run in February after the company failed to gain traction in the radio ad game.
• Google Answers spent a year in beta before a full-blown launch in May 2003, but the effort to create a fee-based knowledge market never gained much traction outside a small base of users and the service was dropped in late 2006.
• The social networking site Orkut launched early in 2004 as an independent project of noted Google developer Orkut Büyükkökten and has caught fire in Brazil, a market that accounts for roughly 50 percent of its membership. The site reportedly claims roughly 100 million users, which is impressive, but Google can’t be happy that its effort is virtually unknown in Europe and North America while Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and others have gained such impressive traction.
• Google Catalog Search debuted in 2001 as a way for consumers to go online to check out their favorite print catalogs that had been scanned and uploaded. Of course, retailers were already taking their inventories online themselves, and the effort was put to rest earlier this year.
• Google Health was released as a beta test in May 2008, but the service has yet to find much of an audience among insurers or the general public. Which may have something to do with the combination of the words “health” and “beta test.”
• The location-based service Dodgeball was shut down in 2009 after Google had acquired it four years earlier, and while Google continues to operate Jaiku – a social networking service it picked up in 2007 — the company has effectively abandoned the project. The technologies and expertise from both startups is being incorporated into other Google businesses and projects, however.

No company bats 1.000, of course, and a company as experimental and entrepreneurial as Google is bound to have its share of failures. As the blogosphere gushes over Chrome, though, Google’s stumbles help provide some perspective. Are there any other names that should be on this list?

Even if it’s not the most robust of recoveries, it’ll do. So why are tech companies suddenly slashing jobs again?

The past couple of months have brought a renewed surge in job cuts at technology companies, including many that were undergoing second or third rounds of layoffs. Take AOL: It laid off 700 workers in early 2009. Earlier this month it cut another 100, followed by news this week that additional 1,000 would go. Those layoffs may cut operating costs, but they’re not exactly a cheap undertaking. AOL said that, all told, it will incur $283 million in restructuring charges.

With AOL’s latest round, I count 17,400 jobs that tech companies — since late October alone — have said they’ll eliminate or have done so already. There are undoubtedly many more that haven’t been officially announced. The pace is significantly slower than in January and February, when 30,000 or more job cuts were announced in a single week. But it also represents a marked increase over the spring and summer, when the bloodflow slowed to a relative trickle.

What’s driving the recent increase in job cuts? A few things. Companies are drawing up budgets for 2010, and it’s common for them to eliminate some positions in November and December (however heartless this seems from a human standpoint). But the cuts often extend into the new year, which suggests the bloodletting could continue for a couple of more months.

Different companies have different reasons for the restructurings. M&A activity has also been on the rise in the tech industry, and integrating two separate operations into one often means some workers must go. Adobe reduced its head count by 9 percent in conjunction with its $1.8 billion acquisition of web analytics firm Omniture, for example.

Other companies are cutting because, despite a sense of relief that the worst economic pain is behind us, much uncertainty lies ahead. Applied Materials said it would cut between 1,300 and 1,500 positions, even though it reported an increase in sales and orders. When facing uncertainty, cutting costs has a strategic appeal: It shields you from sluggish demand, and keeps profits — and the stock price — high in the meantime.

Still others are being buffeted by rapid changes in their core markets and are paying the price for failing to keep up, such as Microsoft, which announced 5,000 job cuts in January and recently eliminated another 800. Microsoft is not only seeing netbook sales put downward pressure profit margins of its PC operating software, but Windows Mobile is facing daunting competition from Android and others.

Some of the biggest rounds of layoffs have come from other companies having trouble coping with evolving markets: Nokia, struggling for a foothold in the thriving smartphone market, is shedding as many as 5,700 jobs. Sprint, facing disappointing sales of the Palm Pre, will cut up to 2,500. And AOL has been floundering in its search for a role on the web for years.

Not all tech companies will be cutting positions. A recent survey by Robert Half Technology, an employment consulting firm, found that 43 percent of CIOs interviewed see retaining workers as their top staffing priority. And companies that follow one round of layoffs with another may regret it in the end. Too many layoffs send a bad message to customers and partners, while chasing away the top talent. That can cause even more problems, and more layoffs, instead of a real recovery.

The sole aim of the group, which was unveiled this week, is to help make it easier to put Android on ARM-based devices, of which smartbooks are the emerging choice. The group of 35 companies will pool resources and make them available for developers to get Android systems going with the ARM chipset, which is particularly well-suited for the consumer electronics market.

In the meantime, the Verizon Droid, produced by Motorola, is the hottest Android phone on the market. But early adopters of the Droid were reporting that the auto-focus feature on the device’s powerful camera wasn’t working properly, resulting in lots of fuzzy images. This week, however, many Droid owners found the focusing difficulties to be a thing of the past, prompting suspicions that Verizon had pushed a secret fix over-the-air to the phones. There seemed to be no other explanation for how such a serious bug could suddenly disappear.

In fact, the auto-focus code that Android 2.0 uses reportedly has a bug that makes for fuzzy photos in 24.5-day cycles. The camera works poorly for 24.5 days, then works properly for the next 24.5 days. This is based on the improper use of a timestamp by the focusing code, a strange cause to be sure. Hopefully Verizon will have the formal fix for this bug before the 24.5-day “good” working cycle ends.

Speaking at a panel held Wednesday night in Austin, Texas, several folks from the large server shops and a distinguished engineer who runs a data center for IBM spoke about the challenges of keeping power consumption down in a world where computing demand is going up. (For a truly in-depth look at this topic, check out our GigaOM Pro report — subscription required.) The panel went beyond just power and cooling (thank goodness) to focus on how companies are increasingly viewing power consumption in the data center as a whole, rather than merely as the sum of of the data center’s processors.

IBM’s Scott Winters said he saved 30 percent on his energy costs over three years while increasing his computing abilities by 50 percent and his storage by 150 percent. He did this in two primary ways: by virtualizing his data center and creating a pool of shared resources that are used on demand, and by paying attention to software he has running that tells him what’s happening on his servers.

“My data center was whispering secrets, and now I have a way to understand them,” Winters said. He said his IBM software and linking that software to the physical infrastructure helped him reach such an understanding, especially in regard to managing power consumption. It’s a strategy that HP has embraced with its products; there are also several startups pushing data center sensor networks that allow the data center’s server hardware and its physical infrastructure like the chillers and air conditioners to communicate.

But as the facilities and IT infrastructure merge (the jobs of the facilities manager and the IT manager are also on a path to merge, according to members of the panel) standards are needed. The folks building the physical infrastructure typically use proprietary software in their products and sensors and getting that sensor network to talk to your servers can require a big programming effort. Once folks can manage their physical infrastructure and their hardware, the next step is to tie the physical and hardware layers to the application layer. That’s a big dream, and we’re still far off. But given the demand for computing and constraints on providing the power to meet that demand, it’s an issue that panels like the one Wednesday night will help solve.

• PEER 1: Fully Scalable Hosting Solutions
• Concentric: Hosted IT Services
• Mozy: Simple, Automatic, Secure Online Backup
• SoftLayer: SoftLayer delivers on-demand virtual data center services and solutions.
• Salesforce: Force.com Cloud Platform
• PayPal: Innovate 09 – The Intersection of Ideas and Money

TwitterJobSearch searches Twitter for posts on who is hiring. The posted jobs range from full-time to part-time work-at-home to one-off hired gun positions. Many of the positions listed are tech jobs, and the number of posts is at critical mass, with Twitter being the social phenomenon that it is. More than 410,000 new jobs were posted to TwitterJobSearch in the last 30 days. Use this syntax to, say, find web development jobs in San Francisco: “web developer San Francisco.”

oDesk is one of the largest online staffing marketplaces for people with tech skills. Developers, designers and many other tech types can post their resumes, examples of projects they’ve completed, and more, and get bids and offers from employers around the world for full- and part-time jobs. Find out more in WebWorkerDaily’s interview with oDesk CEO Gary Swart.

Do you have IT skills? ComputerJobs.com has listings from all over the U.S. if you do.

Elance is a very popular job bidding site for developers and programmers, and for people with other types of tech skills. Copywriters, illustrators and those with lots of other non-tech skills may also want to fill out a profile there. Check out more here.

Rent-a-Coder offers a very diverse collection of software development and programming jobs from employers all around the world. You can get very temporary jobs or full-time gigs.

Want a tech job search site with a name you can take very literally? Try FindaTechJob.com. It lists lots of positions for programmers and web developers, among others. You can also connect your programming skills up with businesses at ScriptLance.

For web projects in particular, put in bids showing off your skills out at Webmaster Projects.

Open Source Skills?
With record funding rolling in for commercial open-source companies and more foundations overseeing projects, there are more paying jobs in the open source software world than ever. Open source skills can also differentiate you from the tech worker pack, and many other tech workers don’t think of the world of open source as having commercial arms.

Several of the prominent open-source software foundations can help open sourcers find work. You might start by looking into the Apache Software Foundation , which oversees many open source projects, and the Drupal Foundation’s list of available jobs.

Don’t forget about the ongoing jobs available at prominent open source companies, as well as those that make extensive use of open source. Red Hat always has many jobs available, but you can also find many open source-focused positions at big Internet companies such as Google and Yahoo.

SmartData Enterprises specializes in placing outsourced open source workers on projects. You can work remotely on projects taking place all around the world, for pay.

For many useful tips on how to effectively use social networks to land a job, see WebWorkerDaily’s popular resource collection — and make sure to stay organized.

Next year, Google will introduce one of its most ambitious projects yet: Chrome OS. There are quite a few misconceptions going around about the new operating system, among them that it’s aimed squarely at Microsoft’s operating system hegemony. It’s not. Chrome OS is targeting netbooks, not desktop and server systems. Still, the operating system includes some bold gambles from Google. Here are four of them.

Return of the thin client. Take a look at this CNet news story, which reports that “Oracle’s Larry Ellison today resurrected the company that designs a scaled-down desktop system — known generically as the network computer — and announced plans to ship new models in the first quarter of next year.” But note the date: 1999, not 2009. Indeed, Ellison was championing thin clients — computers with few local hardware resources that would get applications and data out on a network — back in the late 1990s.

It was an idea that was subsequently tried many times, and failed. Yet fast-forward to today, and Google’s Chrome OS is placing the very same bet. As company officials noted yesterday: “In Chrome OS, every application is a web application. Users don’t have to install applications. All data in Chrome OS is in the cloud.” Chrome OS netbooks will be thin clients.

All data in the cloud? Many of the smartest people predicting the future of cloud computing are noting that companies want to deploy hybrid public and private cloud applications, namely because they don’t want to have all of their data on a remote network, with little control over it and the potential for lock-in and losses. However, Google’s Chrome OS is a bet that consumer and business netbook buyers will be perfectly happy to trust everything to the cloud. There won’t even be hard disks on Chrome OS netbooks — only solid-state drives. Will users accept such an absolutist model?

Poof goes the OS. Chrome OS is architecturally very different from other operating systems, bypassing many types of boot processes and others in order to optimize performance. Additionally, however, the OS will actually reimage itself if malware is detected. If Google pulls this off, Chrome OS systems may be free of the guaranteed performance decay that Windows systems tend to have over time. Still, users may be wary about an operating system that’s ready to exit stage left at any given moment.

Drivers? Support? Fuhgeddaboudit. Have you ever called Google for Google Docs support? I haven’t either, even though I use the applications. When you release an operating system, though, if it reaches a large audience, that audience is going to want support. Just ask Microsoft, which spent years trying to effectively support and patch Windows Vista.

In addition to excellent support, which I don’t think of as Google’s specialty, users of Chrome OS are going to want their netbooks to work seamlessly and instantly with their printers, digital cameras, smartphones and more. Chrome OS isn’t being built from scratch. It’s Linux-based (the Ubuntu team at Canonical has been helping it take shape), so Google can get a headstart by incorporating existing driver libraries and the like. But Microsoft spent years trying to catch up to Apple in terms of automatic hardware detection and installation with its Plug-and-Play initiative, and Apple users will tell you that it never quite succeeded. Is Google about to find out what a huge headache it can be to support an operating system? History argues that will be the case.

Don’t get me wrong. I think Chrome OS will be one of the most interesting tech stories to watch next year. In many ways, though, it’s a Hail Mary.

And because Aircell currently only has regulatory approval and the antenna coverage that enables airlines to offer Wi-Fi in the U.S., Air Canada passengers can only get their Wi-Fi fix when flying over U.S. soil. Perhaps that accounts for the slight discount on Air Canada’s prices for Wi-Fi when compared to American’s charge of $12.95 for in-flight access.

Achieving the seemingly impossible task of building up more hype about Twitter’s business model, Costolo promised Twitter’s advertising will be “fascinating,” “non-traditional” and “really cool.” Some partners already pay Twitter to use certain parts of its APIs, he added, though Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur noted from the audience that his company does not.

Costolo emphasized that Twitter will continue to offer free access to users and partners, and that small startups who start building on Twitter’s APIs won’t be expected to pay up front.

These comments fall in line with recent lofty predictions from Dell founder Michael Dell about Windows 7 driving the PC market forward. But is that, in fact, true? Moreover, is it not still too early to measure the operating system’s success?

At a Churchill Club event that I attended in Silicon Valley in October, Michael Dell said that many businesses were running Windows XP, which is eight years old, and that Windows 7 would usher in a major upgrade cycle. The fact that Dell just missed profit estimates amidst declining market share has nothing to do with Windows 7, of course, but there are some signs that a truly major upgrade cycle toward the OS hasn’t yet happened.

While research shows that Vista users are upgrading to Windows 7, keep in mind that Vista has only 30 percent market share after several years in the wild. Windows 7 is not replacing the huge installed base of Windows XP at anywhere near the rate that it’s replacing Vista.

The Wall Street Journal estimates that some 30-40 million copies of Windows 7 have sold since its October release, and most estimates put the operating system’s market share at about 4 percent. These numbers are nothing to shake a stick at, and I agree with Michael Dell that Windows 7 will spark a major upgrade cycle — eventually.

In the meantime, however, we are in a period of relative limbo in the PC buying cycle. Holiday shopping hasn’t taken off yet, and, for safety reasons, businesses tend to wait and watch whenever a brand-new version of Windows is released before implementing widespread adoption. Hardware incompatibilities, driver issues and many more things get resolved in an operating system’s first months, prompting many businesses to sit on the sidelines.

Historically, January has a much higher PC-buying profile than October and November do, and by that point holiday shopping numbers for Windows 7 will have started to roll in. Indeed, it will take a few months before we have truly accurate numbers for Windows 7 adoption, but I don’t doubt that it will eventually spark an upgrade cycle that — love or hate Microsoft — will benefit the tech industry.

The idea is to observe every page an Infoaxe user visits, not just the ones they share on social web services. This aggregate attention data adds 7 million URLs per day to its index, as compared to some 300,000 URLs on Twitter and 10,000 on Digg. Of course, those other sites’ URLs are shared for a reason.

“Even though Twitter and Facebook have exposed the chink in Google’s armor, we don’t think they are the cure,” Infoaxe founder Jonathan Siddharth said in a recent interview. He and co-founder Vijay Krishnan met while doing their computer science masters’ degrees at Stanford a couple years ago.

Infoaxe’s results are fresh, but they don’t form an up-to-the-second real-time stream, which is a plus for relevancy. Rather Infoaxe puts an emphasis on pages where its users have stayed for a while or revisited often — so it’s good at discovering things like product deals and hosted web streams of TV and movies — the kinds of query for which another search engine might deliver an outdated pile of spammy SEO junk, or a more timeless link like an IMBD page, respectively.

As Infoaxe tries to secure deals to incorporate its results into larger search engines, it’ll be important that it has a good sample of users. And to some extent, that will never happen, because the people who contribute to Infoaxe will only be those who are motivated to save and parse their own search histories. However Siddharth and Krishnan brag that their 2.1 million registered users are starting to break out of the early adopter mold, with more total IE plug-in downloads than Firefox, and an even balance of men and women.

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Infoaxe has five employees; it raised $900,000 from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Labrador Ventures, Band of Angels and Amidzad Partners in 2008.

The Finnish company’s success selling low- to mid-range smartphones in developing markets is well documented, but Nokia continues to lose ground in the U.S. and Europe as superphones from Apple and Research In Motion chip away at its market share. And Nokia is increasingly threatened by Android, which has gained sudden momentum in the wake of its Verizon Wireless Droid initiative.

Nokia may feel a pinch as it severs the R&D personnel, but the company will surely continue to innovate with its Maemo OS and S60 devices. And it’s not like innovation has ever been a problem for Nokia — its struggles since the emergence of the iPhone have stemmed from its aging Symbian platform, its unwillingness to bow to U.S. carriers and an utter lack of affordable, iconic devices. Shifting its focus toward higher-end handsets that produce better margins will be a step in the right direction.

However, New York City is a nice case study for competitive broadband, so I hope Genachowski took notes while he was there. Verizon, Time Warner Cable and Cablevision all serve the city (although they don’t all compete head to head in every block), so some residents there have access to both fiber to the home and cable’s wideband service using DOCSIS 3.0. Our own Ryan Lawler, who lives in Harlem, is paying $33 a month for Internet service from Time Warner Cable, which currently has the monopoly in his building. However, he says he just got a note informing him that Verizon FiOS will also soon be available, so we’ll see what happens to his cable speeds (which are currently 9 Mbps down and 500 kilobits per second up) and service in the next few months.

The state’s CIOwants to collect real data on broadband penetration and speeds so that it can get a sense of customers’ level of satisfaction with their service as opposed to just knowing which areas have broadband and which don’t. A Congressman from the state is also attempting to pass legislation that would give the FCC the power to regulate certain aspects of net neutrality and broadband access. So given the competition, better data collection and consumer-friendly legislative efforts, I hope Genachowski is doing some learning, not just politicking for a symbolic victory on net neutrality.

SimpleGeo launched today, promising to build a contextual infrastructure of points and eventually polygons for the world so that people can build apps that incorporate where users are located. The company says it’s already received 600 beta inquiries in its first day out, and it also received both audience and judges’ choice accolades at the Under the Radar event where it debuted.

“We’re selling shovels at the beginning of a gold rush,” is how co-founder Matt Galligan put it on a call today. “You want to add location, just come to us — it’s done.” Though four-person SimpleGeo still measures its age in months, it already has a price sheet: free, $399/month for small businesses and $2,499/month for custom implementations. Galligan said he expects to announce a funding round soon. (BTW, this follows the launch of competitor PublicEarth, which calls itself “the wiki for places,” yesterday.)

While Boulder, Colo.-based SimpleGeo may have moved quickly in its short life, big social sites aren’t necessarily waiting for little startups to come fill their location-based needs. Today Twitter launched a geotagging API, at first only available as an opt-in feature for outside apps like Birdfeed, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twidroid and Twittelator Pro. When used, this feature associates a tweeter’s exact location (as best as it can be determined) at the time of tweeting with the tweet itslf.

And lastly, Ambient Industries debuted a social location app for the iPhone today called Flook. While there’s no lack of competition for fun iPhone apps that enable users to mark up the world, Flook is built to be quirky, easy to browse and contextual-ad ready. The basic interface consists of virtual geo-tagged “cards” with facts, photos and recommendations left at particular locations by Flook users. Users can swipe through cards and turn them over to leave comments in a jaunty orange and purple interface manned by cute little robots (see video demo above).

What’s interesting is that Flook comes from two Symbian founders, Roger Nolan and Jane Sales. Said Nolan on a call from London today, “Apple seemed to just do all the things that Symbian and Nokia should have done for a long time.” So he and Sales (they’re married) along with two other co-founders raised $1 million from Eden Ventures and Amadeus Capital and founded Ambient a year ago. Flook is the company’s first project.

If we compare it to infrastructure-as-a-service providers such as Amazon’s Ec2 or Rackspace’s CloudServers products, Azure attempts to handle more of the actual management and provisioning of virtual machines for a user. The biggest issue the target customer faces isn’t the hardware cost but the expense of managing an application on the hardware, Amitabh Srivastava, senior vice president at Microsoft with responsibility for Windows Azure, told me, so the goal was to allow Azure to run so developers don’t think about the underlying hardware as they might on a pure IaaS product.

This is where the idea of Azure as Microsoft’s OS for the cloud comes in. Azure is a platform-as-a-services play that seeks to leverage what Microsoft has learned through its OS dominance. First, it’s playing nice. Microsoft ensures that developers can use a wide variety of programming languages to build on Azure such as PHP, Eclipse and Java, which is pretty unique among platforms. Earlier this year, I spoke with Microsoft about its plans for Azure and came away with the clear sense that the company’s programs and .Net would really shine on Azure, even though other programming languages would also work. It seems the company has now backed off of that with a more inclusive and open message.

Second, Microsoft is hoping Azure can play on many machines. If we view the data center as akin to a machine, Microsoft wants folks to be able to create applications that can run on a Microsoft Azure cloud or internally on an in-house cloud. AppFabric, launched this week, is the solution for that. AppFabric is software that folks can run in their own data center to create an internal cloud that can talk to and share information with the public Azure cloud if the client wants. Rackspace and IBM are both attempting to build these types of bridges between internal and their external clouds.

Finally, Microsoft is trying to keep its own offerings separate. Instead of bundling Microsoft products with Azure, Srivastava outlined a software-as-a-services strategy that will offer customers Microsoft Exchange on Azure or SharePoint on Azure as a service. This may explain why some offerings such as SharePoint Services and Dynamics CRM Services, announced last year, are now divorced and missing from the Azure announcement this year. However, competing software can be offered on Azure as well.

Larry Augustin, CEO of Sugar CRM, has chosen to offer customers the ability to host Sugar CRM on Azure, and says the platform was easy to build on, even though SugarCRM is built using PHP. He also mentioned that Microsoft’s database offerings were more complete than the newly launched Amazon Relational Database Service, and offered me a possible model for future clouds. In his vision, customers will be able to choose which clouds their software as a service are hosted on, so an enterprise can choose the applications and the clouds those run on. This is the polar opposite of the vision espoused by SugarCRM’s biggest rival, Salesforce.com, which hosts its software on its own cloud. But the power of the modular and open approach is hard to deny, and Microsoft is smart to embrace that.

Fully half of the company’s first-time users are now signing up via mobile devices, he told me, and since Pandora arrived on the iPhone in July 2008, 9 million people have created new accounts on smartphones, including iPhones, BlackBerrys, Palm and Android phones. That’s 24 percent of Pandora’s total user base, which is currently at 38 million and growing. Pandora has been installed on 13 million smartphones to date, meaning that about 70 percent of its smartphone users didn’t have desktop accounts previously.

Moreover, a quarter of the music streamed on Pandora currently goes to mobile listeners, and 25 percent of the songs bought by users clicking through to the iTunes or Amazon MP3 stores are acquired via mobile devices, suggesting a real movement toward mobile usage rather than just experimentation. New market research from Ando Media (PDF) suggests that Pandora is by several measures the most popular Internet radio provider in the U.S., even without the mobile listenership included. And while mobile ads don’t deliver as much revenue as desktop display ads do, Pandora’s extraordinarily popular mobile apps are surely familiarizing new users with its brand name — and driving them back to the desktop as well.

ICQ was long ago eclipsed by other instant-messaging services (AOL’s AIM among them) and the last person to prefer MapQuest over the competition was probably Andy Samberg in “Lazy Sunday,” but those services are hardly tiny. MapQuest alone accounted for more than 40 percent of AOL’s U.S. search queries in October. ICQ reportedly has 40 million to 50 million unique monthly visitors and still leads the market in countries like Germany, Russia, Ukraine and Israel.

Given the overlap, it’s understandable that AOL no longer needs ICQ as much as it once did, but a sale of MapQuest is pretty strange — though AOL might be able to get a decent price for the unit out of Apple, which clearly would be happy to wean its mobile self off of Google and its Maps.

AOL paid $287 million plus earnouts for ICQ in 1998 and $1.1 billion for MapQuest in 1999. The soon-to-be-spinoff itself is also possibly thinking about getting rid of recent acquisition Bebo, cause, you know, social networking’s another boring sector these days.

Text-only ads generated the highest recall rates of 11 types of mobile come-ons, with 49 percent of respondents saying they noticed such pitches all or some of the time, the market research firm said during a webcast today. Ads at the top of a mobile web page were the second-most noticeable, with 45 percent of users recalling them. Click-to-call ads fared worst, with 27 percent of people noticing them, and movie trailers were recalled by only 31 percent.

Fascinatingly, though, the least-noticed ads drew the highest response rates in Parks’ study. Movie trailers drew a 38 percent response rate, outperforming all other ad types, while 35 percent responded to click-to-call campaigns. Meanwhile, text-only ads managed to draw responses from only 26 percent of users, and ads atop web pages generated a 30 percent response rate.

Parks’ figures highlight why advertisers need to have a wide assortment of weapons in the mobile arsenal as they try to target users via their phones. Nearly every phone on the market supports text, allowing advertisers to potentially reach broad swaths of mainstream users via SMS (GigaOM Pro, sub. required), for instance, but advertisers also have a chance to engage tech-savvy consumers via mobile video and to encourage would-be customers to call them directly with click-to-call ads.

Mobile advertising has long underperformed amid excessive hype, and the space will continue to endure growing pains over the next several years. But Parks predicts the North American market is poised to take off as the economy recovers, exploding to $1.5 billion in 2013 from $208 million this year. For those figures to become reality, though, advertisers will need to employ a number of tactics — and pick the right ones based on what they’re trying to sell and who they’re trying to reach.

Errett (a fly-fishing enthusiast, as pictured) told us that Maveron differentiates itself because it will only fund consumer-focused businesses, and it spans the range of seed to late-stage investments. With portfolio companies such as kids’ browser KidZui, language education site Livemocha and online college enabler Altius Education, Errett said her two main areas of focus are “web-enabled consumer services — classically things consumers did offline — and online education.”

Some areas she’d like to invest in: social shopping (where Maveron is already incubating a company), virtual goods and currency, disintermediation of markets (Errett was formerly an executive at Etrade), real estate, autos, classifieds — basically, any business usually conducted offline that can become more efficient online. How does that thesis apply to the venture business? Errett said she expects venture to become more efficient, too, but that Maveron’s close relationships with its companies through all the stages of their business will pull it through.

Goals

With Chrome OS, Google had three goals, according to Pichai: speed, simplicity and security. ”Chrome on Chrome OS will be even faster than Chrome [the existing browser],” he noted. “In Chrome OS, every application is a web application. Users don’t have to install applications. All data in Chrome OS is in the cloud. If a user loses a Chrome OS machine, the user should be able to log back into the cloud and retrieve cached data.” Pichai also demonstrated that Chrome OS loads in only a few seconds.

The demonstrations made clear that the OS relies heavily on “panels,” pop-up windows housing web-based applications that are similar to multiple open windows in a browser. Papakipos, meanwhile, characterized the security model in Chrome OS as very much like the one in the Chrome browser, and unlike the one in standard operating systems: If malware is detected, all cached data is saved; Chrome OS is subsequently re-downloaded, then freshly imaged on a machine. If an application crashes in a tab, only that tab goes down.

Coming to Devices Next Year

The target date for delivery of Chrome OS machines is the end of next year. Google is working with hardware partners to bring Chrome OS to market, Pichai said, and doing so in unusual ways. Chrome OS is not aimed at hard disk-enabled machines, for example, but rather at systems with solid-state drives. Google is also working with hardware vendors on what Pichai described as “slightly larger netbooks,” with full-sized keyboards and large displays. All the open source code is available today, as are all the design documents, said Papakipos. You can find the source code for the OS and other links here.

So does Chrome OS have a fighting chance in the hot netbook market that it’s squarely aimed at, given that it won’t make its debut on devices until late next year? Chrome OS will run on both x86 and ARM processors, which as jkOnTheRun has noted, will give it a broad spectrum of coverage on devices, and could make it a significant player in the emerging ARM-based smartbook hardware category. Still, the OS will significantly trail the arrival of Microsoft’s Windows 7, which is also squarely aimed at netbooks.

Even though netbooks have already been exploring new low-priced territory for portable computers, Chrome OS-based netbooks could also take prices much lower. Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in July that “we do not plan to charge for it, in an open source form,” but that “there may be other ways we can make money from it.” He added that:

“The rough argument is we do things that are strategic because they get people to ultimately use the Internet in a clever and new way. We know that if they use the Internet more, they search more, watch more on YouTube, and we then know that our advertising [will reach them]. We do not require each and every project to be completely profitable or not profitable — we look at them in a strategic context: are they making the web a better place?”

Could Google subsidize Chrome OS-based netbooks in an effort to attract users with low prices and feed them into its search-and-advertising ecosysytem? As is true for most of Google’s projects, feeding that lucrative ecosystem tends to be a high priority for the company. It will no doubt be one as Chrome OS makes its way into devices next year.

WiMAX Test

Sprint held a happy hour last night to show off the WiMAX launch in here Austin, Texas, so I wandered over for some BBQ and broadband. I want to love WiMAX, but I can’t get excited about the promise of upload speeds of some 400 kilobits per second, which are only a wee bit more than what my Verizon 3G connection delivers. However, on the download side things are decent for a wired network and awesome for a wireless one.

And before any WiMAX boosters despair, I was told that the local 4G network should continue to improve over the next few weeks, which is why I’m holding off on an all-out review. For a sneak peak, check out the experience in the video below. You can see some freezing in the Hulu video stream during the demo; John Taylor, the Sprint spokesman I interviewed, said the location we were in had only two bars of coverage, which may have been the problem. Given the paucity of devices on display for mobile use and the lackluster network quality so far, I’m still thinking the bet that Clearwire (which is powering the 4G part of the Sprint network) and Sprint made on WiMAX is a bad one, but I’m hoping to be proven wrong.

However, a recent report by Next Up Research (reg. req.) put out by a competing private company stock exchange, SharesPost, puts Facebook’s value much lower. Interestingly, it doesn’t use data from SharesPost’s own stock trades — though that may be due to the fact that the exchange’s last noted Facebook transaction is from August at $12 per share — but rather uses revenue projections, value vs. comparable companies and Digital Sky’s recent investment in the company (which included purchasing of employee stock). Those three methods give Facebook a total valuation of $5.48 billion, $5.07 billion and $6.5 billion, respectively.

Like AT&T, O2 has drawn criticism regarding its network performance as smartphone usage increases. The increased traffic is directly attributable to the iPhone 3G S and the Palm Pre, which are the best-selling devices on its network, CTO Derek McManus said in a release:

“World-class smartphones have brought about an unprecedented demand on mobile data networks,” according to McManus. “Data on our network has increased 20-fold in the last year alone. As a result, we have recently experienced some isolated pressures in London where there is the highest concentration of smartphone users.”

O2 has effectively leveraged its exclusive iPhone deal, gaining nearly 300,000 net mobile subscribers in the third quarter and emerging as the only UK operator to increase revenue in the first nine months of the year. The company isn’t likely to keep up that pace as rival carriers begin to offer the iconic device, but if O2 can address its network problems it could retain its crown as the top carrier in the region — until Orange and T-Mobile consummate their merger, anyway.

Laptops are still consuming most of the data on carrier networks that don’t have iPhones on them, but once folks get a touch-based smartphone such as the iPhone (and right now it’s the most popular touch-based smartphone out there), the volume of data used by those devices far exceeds that of laptop usage. In other words, when it comes to the network and data consumption, the device does matter. The report also offers some self-serving data about video consumption on mobile devices that may help carriers save on bandwidth consumption. (GigaOM Pro, subscription required).

Cisco expects mobile data traffic to increase 63-fold over the next five years, driven in part by video. But while it’s clear that laptops and touch-based smartphones make video consumption easier, the rise may not be as steep as Cisco predicts. The report found that while the average video online is about 5 minutes in length, about half of the people only watch 60 seconds of a video, which means that sending the entire file to a user would be a waste of bytes and bandwidth. Only 31 percent of people watched all of a video, and 30 percent watched less than 10 percent. The rest of the viewers stopped watching somewhere in the middle. In addition to bandwidth consumption, such findings also could help determine where best to place ads. Although I for one hate getting pre-roll ads on my phone because that data consumed counts against my mobile bandwidth cap. But maybe I’m just super cheap.

Regardless, the problem with the iPhone is that it’s both a gateway drug for consumers, who’ve now tasted the mobile web and want more of it, as well as a canary in the coal mine, as it shows carriers what’s likely to happen as other touch-based smartphones become more popular on their own networks. Curtailing video, as suggested by the report, will solve some issues, but once you give folks a taste of broadband, they’re going to want more.