ClickFuel, a Boston startup that designs, manages and tracks marketing campaigns, has recently launched a set of Internet marketing tools designed to help small businesses to promote business through attracting new customers. Some of the services include: web site design, pay-per-click advertising, search engine optimization, email marketing and social media. An appealing service as many times these businesses lack the resources and knowledge to get online.

Fuel Station, a web-based ClickFuel application, is the main muscle helping to track results including leads generated, clicks and consumer calls made to a phone number listed online. Through a strategic partnership with Intuit, Fuel Station was recently added to Intuit’s App Center which appears in QuickBooks 2010 — a longtime go-to financial tool for small businesses. The Intuit App Center provides QuickBook users with tools to help solve any business problems that might arise. Help from ClickFuel isn’t cheap, though it’s hard to put a price on generating business. The typical monthly fee runs between $1,500 and $2,500 and usually entails Web site building and managing online marketing campaigns.

If you’re a small business owner and the thought of shelling out a large amount of dough every month frightens you, there are other options. MerchantCircle, a growing Silicon Valley company, is offering a local business social network where business owners can promote their business by uploading pictures, writing blogs, publicizing events, creating coupons and newsletters, and connecting with other merchants, all for free.

Right now, the site’s navigation is split between a box on the left hand side of the page (with collapsible menus for things like your groups and contacts), and a navigation bar at the top of the page. Now all of the navigation occurs at the top of the page. When you click on any of the navigation options, you get a list of all the different pages you can jump to or actions you can take.

Judging from the screenshots that LinkedIn has shared, the changes won’t be as immediately noticeable as, say, some of Facebook’s more dramatic redesigns. But they should make it easier to find your way around the site and let you see more content on your screen before having to scroll. Now, I rarely do anything more on the site other than confirm connections, so the clumsy navigation hasn’t felt like a big pain for me. But maybe I’ll start exploring LinkedIn’s full functionality now that I can find my way around.

ReadWriteWeb spotted another aspect of the design that may be a plus for LinkedIn: Ads show up more prominently.

Oh, and if you have any comments on the redesign, the company says it’s still tinkering, so you can leave feedback at the blog post that I linked to above.

Private equity firm Silver Lake Partners leads the investor group, and is joined by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, as well as Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis.

As part of the deal, Index Ventures, a very early original investor in Skype, is being jettisoned from the investor syndicate. Very bad blood had developed between Mike Volpi, a partner at Index Ventures, and the Skype founders after it emerged that he’d tried to go behind their backs to arrange the deal without including them (not great diplomacy, because he was working for the co-founders at the time, as chief executive of video company Joost). Separately, Friis and Zennström had accused eBay of breaching a licensing deal concerning the Joltid technology, and had sued the entire investor consortium.

Marc Andreessen, partner of Andreessen Horowitz, confirmed the deal with VentureBeat this morning: “Everything is settled,” he said. All of the intellectual property disputes — a long saga that centered around the core peer-to-peer technology underneath Skype, owned by Joltid — have also been cleaned up, he said. Joltid has been transferred to Skype, he said.

Andreessen said the company is now free to build for the future. He predicted Skype will become a tremendous company — and he citied significant unrealized potential. One is the exploding smartphone market, where an increasing number of smartphones now have the ability to run Skype. Another is creating a robust set of enterprise offerings: Businesses are using Skype, but almost entirely on an ad hoc basis. Skype can do a lot more to help businesses integrate itself into their current technology infrastructure, he said.

Under the terms, the Skype co-founders get 14 percent of Skype, partly in exchange for capital, but also as credit for their transfer of the rights to Joltid, an entity the co-founders controlled. Friis and Zennström also get a board seat at the new Skype.

The rest of the investor group (Silver Lake, the Canadian pension, and Andreessen Horowitz) together will get 56 percent of Skype. eBay will own 30 percent. The deal values the whole company at $2.75 billion. EBay is expected to get about $1.9 billion in cash as well as a $125 million note.

The deal is expected to close by the end of the year.

Andreessen said there had been two possibilities to the legal tussling. One: continued, really messy litigation (indeed, the failure of Joost had led to lots of acrimony, and we’ve heard there were many facts that hadn’t even leaked yet, as if the court documents hadn’t revealed enough of the ugliness). Or two: Clearing things up, and letting the company realize its upside.

Andreessen recounted what he thinks is Skype’s enormous potential. First, the company is already successful, with a $740 million annualized run rate, and on track to hit $1 billion soon. It is one of the core Internet franchises, and is going mainstream in a “major way,” he said, adding 40 million registered users in the last three months alone. He said Skype is the main way people are doing voice and video calls today. The international long distance voice market is worth $40 billion, and Skype is “all set to go after that,” he said. Next, he said mobile is a brand new opportunity due to the explosive success of the iPhone. Mobile phones have only become “smart enough” to run applications like Skype within the last 12 to 18 months, he said, suggesting that Skype will spread from successful adoption on the iPhone to a host of other phones. Finally, elaborating on Skype’s opportunity to sell to businesses, he said that while businesses are using Skype, they still no have no controls, auditing, metering or connections to other existing infrastructure, such as integration into Blackberry or other business offerings when using Skype. That all will change, he said, when Skype offers businesses something they can “buy.”

Lists are what they sound like — groups of Twitter accounts that people can recommend to others. They’re usually centered around a theme like entrepreneurs or foodies. Twitter rolled them out to their entire community last week to help users find other interesting people to follow. Jason Shellen, who is the CEO of Brizzly’s maker Thing Labs, said the feature should be finished by tomorrow night.

In Brizzly, you’ll be able switch from reading your main Twitter stream to scanning tweets from specific groups of people. (See the example below with VentureBeat’s Twitter list.) You can also create, sync and navigate Twitter lists from the client. Brizzly stores historical tweets, so you can scroll back into a list as far as you like.

Brizzly had a very similar “groups” feature before but it was for private lists of people. If you’re a Brizzly user that has created a group before, it will be marked as “private” and you can change that if you want. Lists, by contrast, are public and are meant for sharing with others.

Thing Labs was spun out of Dogpatch Labs, a startup incubator created by Polaris Venture Partners.

Slide, which started in photo-sharing, moved into Facebook widgets and then raised funding at a reported $550 million valuation last year, shifted gears this year and went aggressively into virtual goods. The company’s looking to become a  mainstream version of Second Life, where there’s a virtual economy at work of real people buying and selling goods.

Instead of churning out new apps like many of its competitors, the company has focused its existing ones — including seven on Facebook like SuperPoke, Top Friends and FunSpace, with about 27 million users between them. Slide introduced a virtual currency into its SuperPoke! Pets application, where you can raise and care for a virtual pet. You can earn gold through the game or you can purchase 10 pieces of Slide Gold for $1.

So is the strategy shift paying off? I sat down with CEO Max Levchin to ask about how his vision for the company has evolved and how he’s changed as an entrepreneur since launching the company four years ago. Slide is the company he started after selling PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. (You can compare his answers to interviews we did last year and the year before.)

VB: You mentioned that your revenue had tripled in a recent CNBC interview. What does that mean? What base were you starting from?

Levchin: The tripling is irrelevant. We went from 90 percent of our revenues coming from advertising to 50 percent coming from virtual goods. And we were starting from zero with that. So the relevant part is that we were able to build a virtual goods business.

We’ve taken a very long-term view of how people interact in these virtual worlds. We wanted them to create a personality, become attached to a character or an avatar that represents them. Essentially all the purchases that people are making — we don’t want to think of these as fleeting, quick decisions. We want to treat them as buying decisions, ones that people aren’t too scared to admit to themselves about. The virtual goods that we sell are about self-expression.

With advertising, which makes up less than half our revenue, we have a basic ad network but it brings in so little. The relevant part of advertising comes from these large-scale sponsorships, like the deal we have with Katalyst [Ashton Kutcher's new media production company] and Hot Pockets (click here to see an episode). But these campaigns are more complicated — you can only do so many of them at one time. And it’s tricky. You have to meet the advertiser’s needs without pissing off the customers.

VB: Where do you plan to take these campaigns over the next year?

Levchin: You might see better product placements. Maybe we’ll have our pets drinking from special bottle — I can’t really go into a lot of detail.

VB: So you also said that you’re close to profitability? How soon will that happen?

Levchin: I was somehow goaded into saying that. Pretty close. I said what I wanted to say.

On a sidenote, a lot of users actually got mad at us for that interview because I said SuperPets was targeted at soccer moms. Our users got very angry. Dads, teenagers and older users were upset. I was thinking about regular folks and I thought of soccer moms. The community we’ve built is really connected. People have met real friends there. What we provide is a context. It’s not a diversion. We’re not just about cute pets. People talk about religion and the meaning of life.

Anyway, back on profitability — we’re not there yet.

VB: When do you think it will happen?

Levchin: But I could say it will happen in less than a year. We’re very superstitious about saying these things.

VB: So I wanted to ask about the big controversy this week — offers. Where do you stand on them and why?

Levchin: We don’t do offers.

It’s harder to establish a long-term relationship if you monetize them through offers. It’s really a business decision to me — when someone is willing to pay for this product, it’s very powerful. It’s an opportunity ultimately to become closer with that user. And the financial side of the longer-term relationship is very nice.

But with offers, it’s like I’m going to send you off into some other site — and not all of them are bad — but I’m potentially kicking users off into a scary territory where I can’t promise it will be happy or healthy. It’s just dangerous. If you’re trying to build a relationship with the user, it’s super important. You can’t piss them off.

How would they think of us if they had a horrible experience with a business we referred them to?

For example, we actually did a partnership with FTD on Mother’s Day. If you bought a bouquet of flowers, we got an affiliate fee and then we’d just give that to the users in turn, in the form of game currency. We ran that for a couple days on Mother’s Day and in general, we had a very warm, fuzzy experience. The vast majority of our users said they liked it. But one person said their bouquet wasn’t delivered, and I felt bad.

It made me think that I’d rather be a lot more in control of the user experience. In general offers can be a good thing, but there’s just this slippery slope.

VB: You stress this user relationship quite a bit. Some of your rivals have a slightly different approach by maximizing user churn and distribution. Why take your strategy?

Levchin: There’s a highfalutin’ answer — I’m not sure I want to be involved in something like that. The idea of churn is fine. It’s just not something that’s to my liking.

The business side of the decision is that if you look at entertainment industry, there’s a content treadmill. If you have something that starts and ends, be it a movie, a book, or whatever you’re in, there’s this cycle of anticipation, launch, blitz of consumption and then a fast fall. If you’re really lucky, you build a franchise. You can build a sequel, but there’s still a ramp-up and that whole process, plus there’s the risk that tastes have changed.

The whole idea of bracing for impact every time you launch a product is hard and the content treadmill in the social entertainment is by far the fastest running one of them all. As a result, you have this non-stop cycle. You’re building, you’re launching, and you’re planning something else at the same time. It’s an endless pipeline of content.

You could run a business like a movie studio or a newspaper. But the long-term value of a business like that is relatively low. There’s no guarantee you’ll be able to churn out hits and it’s less predictable. We like the idea of trying to create a content-driven business where the majority of the content comes from users.

The theme of Slide from beginning was to build systems or tools to let people express themselves and entertain their friends. If we can shift the means of production, make them decentralized and have a sufficient amount of content, interesting things can happen. Our role is to provide the best tools to help people broadcast their creativity and as a result, we’ll have hopefully a near infinite supply of content.

There’s a pretty significant debate about how involved a company should be in this process. Are we hands-off? YouTube and to some extent, Facebook and Photobucket are like this. They stay away from content production and make it easy for people to consume and share it.

The tack we’re taking is we’re closer to the creation process. We give you the tools to create content. We help create an environment where the content can be of high-quality. Secondly, the products are very family-friendly. We have a more controlled environment, where people can create things for the rest of the community.

[Below is an example of a SuperPoke! Pets environment made out of virtual goods to look like Van Gogh's Starry Night.]

VB: How would you say your relationship with Facebook has changed over the life of the company? Developers end up being very dependent on their network, yet Facebook can change the rules at will like we saw last week.

Levchin: Facebook is so ubiquitous now that it’s like another manifestation of the web itself. If you’re building a social product, you’re still living in the last century if your product doesn’t work on Facebook. That’s an important consideration.

The flipside is that the web is still very large, and your product needs to work there as well. When we take a look at all these segments, we think the more important ones are through web, Facebook and MySpace.

VB: What about Twitter?

Levchin: Twitter is tricky. What’s interesting is that Twitter has yet to have a really huge explosion of content marketed in social entertainment. There’s all sorts of memes that rip through Twitter, but I have not seen a successful social game blow up around Twitter.

If we compare the two, Facebook is currently a superior place to market a product like Slide. Twitter is more like a general distribution agent. It’s like broadcast radio. I guess I’ll frame this more tightly: Facebook is better place to market social entertainment.

I don’t think we’ve waffled in terms of our relationship with Facebook. We have destination sites and we have Facebook apps. Users who are not on Facebook have found our products and have had fun with them.

Facebook has evolved their platform approach over the last two years. Originally when they launched, they said take your app and put it on Facebook. But at a certain point, you start thinking, what if I don’t want to stick it in all the way. Then they added APIs that you could use to leverage the social graph. We had to figure out ways that users could enjoy products both inside and outside Facebook.

VB: What about Facebook’s changes to the platform last week? How will they affect you?

Levchin: We don’t want to be premature with any pronouncements. We generally feel pretty positively about all those changes. If you look at the user experience side of it, the rationale makes a lot of sense. The only negative is that it will add some work for us. It’s a little bit like Microsoft releasing a new operating system. It remains to be seen what will happen. Obviously they’re de-emphasizing notifications and emphasizing the inbox. We have a lot to learn.

The long and short of the answer there is that if you believe you’re building a product that people like, it’s not that crucial that ‘Oh My God!’ notifications are going away. We want the vast majority of communications from our users to be deliberate. We err on the side of being careful. For example, is three clicks to posting a message enough?

And if it becomes too complicated for developers to reach users, we expect that Facebook will fix it. They want people injecting interesting and valuable messages into the community, so our interests are pretty well-aligned. This is a self-correcting process.

VB: You’ve started companies before, including PayPal. What have you learned this time around as an entrepreneur?

Levchin: [Laughs.] The list is very long.

Media is very different from financial services. People are very fickle and very vocal. They believe that things should be one way and not the other. It’s still very rewarding to build products for huge audiences. It feels like you’re making an impact.

What’s also different is that at PayPal, I was CTO, not CEO. My management issues were around engineers who are typically very straightforward humans.

VB: So business people are overly complicated?

Levchin: I’m an engineer. If someone comes over and presents a problem, it’s highly likely that I have had the same problem. If someone comes in with a complex business development problem, I have to think through it with them.

At PayPal I always felt like I was an equal partner with Peter [Thiel]. I never felt I had to defer to Peter. We felt equal all the way through, and I never though I would feel any different with Slide.

But the title CEO puts the ultimate authority squarely on you. You can be a co-founder, but CEO is very different. Every thing — whether little or huge — you’ve got to make a call. You have to make an A or B decision.

VB: Do you think you’ll ever do a media company again?

Levchin: [Pause.] Ask me again later.

I don’t know if we’re really a media company. To some extent, we’re in a similar category. We are desperately trying to avoid the content treadmill where we’re making the content all day long.

The idea of outsourcing all the content creation into the user base, giving them the best tools and determining who wants what is the unifying theme here. Our tack is different. We want to stimulate an economy and create opportunity for people to build content that interesting and engaging where there’s real economic supply and demand.

VB: How do you protect and establish the value of these goods when the marginal cost of production is near zero?

Levchin: We create scarcity, we only make 1,000 of a certain item, for example.  A large portion of tangible goods in the world aren’t truly that scarce, aside from maybe precious metals or oil. When luxury brands like Burberry produce bags, they ask themselves how unique they want to let a particular item be? How many should they make?

And people buy goods these goods because ultimately have the desire to be different. All of this sounds kind of sketchy, but people need to stand out in a crowd. A large number of these desires center around procreation and the need to attract a mate.

There are all these mechanisms we’ve created around ourselves to feel special and to evaluate fitness. People want to stand out or find their voices in a community. They want to be heard, noticed and talked to.

VB: But doesn’t it seem a little absurd to want to buy a virtual Burberry bag over a real one?

Levchin: That’s a naive view of virtual goods. People are shifting their lives to virtual goods and virtual things are encroaching into the real world very rapidly. For example, I have shares in this company. I have never physically seen them. Hopefully they will be worth a fair amount of value. I have seen them in various records. So are they real?

The vast amount of financial transactions are done electronically. I did have to get fingerprinted to buy a house but that seemed horribly archaic. So there’s this general push into value being stored as a virtual thing without a physical footprint.

And it permeates down into the society. It changes behavior in fundamental ways. Tonight I’m going to watch a movie. But I could participate in an interactive movie or create something for my friends. They’re substitutes for each other. At the end of the day, when you’re watching a movie, you’re just consuming pixels. You’re taking them in with your optic nerve.

You could also consume these pixels by participating in an online economy, by making items that other people want to buy. The point is we’re trying further the arrival of a digital society where people ultimately can earn real value inside our product. They will receive a cut of the sale. At a certain point, someone will sell enough virtual goods that they can quit their real job.

Today’s press critics aren’t ready for it. But it’s perfectly reasonable substitute. It’s a bummer I can’t film a feature-length film but maybe I can create content for my friends. I can go draw something and put it on the market. Some other users can say, ‘That’s so cool, I need to own it right now.’ Not all these things are live yet. We still have trials going on right now.

VB: You have secondary markets right?

Levchin: Yes, we’re enhancing our secondary markets. I think the subtle difference between us and other companies like Zynga is that we’re focused on virtual words. The difference between virtual worlds and games is subtle but important. Games have an end. You enter them and then you leave. With us, you have no reason to leave. We think of our virtual worlds as real economies where people can trade and participate in the in both the consumption and production of value. We’ve sold about 30 million user goods.

Ultimately the goal is for the company is to push this as far as it will go — the idea of a value generation by consumers who are deriving real income and real monetary value.

VB: Like a more mainstream Second Life?

Levchin: Second Life did a lot of these things right. They’re a huge inspiration. The only critique I have is that they kept it slightly too –

VB: Niche?

Levchin: Yea. Somehow they never reached the mainstream. We think they might have been better served being a family-friendly community instead of going the zero censorship route. The adult-oriented content scared people away.

I think that we could end up making these ideas mainstream. We’ve created a real community where people aren’t just talking about applications, but about religion and life. People have found genuine friendships and it went from being just a cute virtual pets thing into a community, that was more about self-expression. We have users spending several hours using virtual jelly beans and ribbons to make paintings.

Now our question as a business is how do we turn that into a profitable activity? The people in these games are supremely talented. How do I turn this into an environment where people create content for their friends? How does it become a suitable alternative for the Friday night movie?

Photo by Geoffrey Ellis

Today, the company said it is disabling two more ad network and offer companies that have consistently violated its rules.

Offerpal is the leader in promotional deals known as offers, which users can accept in lieu of making a credit card payment in a game or app. These offers have increasingly become popular in social games on Facebook and other platforms.

Nick Gianos, a member of Facebook’s platform team, said that deceptive ads are a widespread problem on the web and that “this battle is not new and it’s far from over.” Facebook had to deal with stimulus bill scam ads on its platform earlier this year and updated its policies for third-party ads in July. At that time, it also disabled two ad networks that were running non-compliant ads. It also forced more than 100 apps to comply with its rules. More than half of those apps had more than a million monthly active users each.

“Our policies are clear,” he said. “If you’re an ad network and don’t comply with them, you are doing a disservice to your customers, and you should expect your business opportunities on Facebook to cease.”

One of the neatest little features that grew out of the Twitter phenomenon last year were these trending topics. The company adopted them after acquiring search engine Summize. They pick up popular keywords or phrases that the community is buzzing about, and they’ve been a useful way to find out about news (see sample at right).

But as Twitter has grown in size, its topics have been more and more mainstream (and dare I say, dumb?) One of the top terms for the last hour is #whenimdrunk, where people tweet about what they do when they’re drunk.

Plus spammers jump on trending topics by including the words in their tweets, so they’ll show up in search results when people click on the keywords.

And then there are people who genuinely join in on the conversation — but so many of them start tweeting that it crowds out original sources on the subject. For example, even though the fallout from the Iranian elections on the Twitter community was extraordinary, if you tried to find out what was happening through Twitter, you’d just find thousands of tweets from people in places like Texas or Washington. (Not very useful if you want to know what’s happening on the ground.)

Spokesperson Jenna Sampson wrote in a blog post today:

“…today we’re starting to experiment with improvements to trends that will help you find more relevant tweets. Specifically, we’re working to show higher quality results for trend queries by returning tweets that are more useful. The improvement won’t be very noticeable at first, but this is a small step toward unearthing more value in search and getting you more relevant results.”

The interesting issue here is that despite all of its growth over the past year, Twitter actually needs substantially more data to do real work with trends. It could do trends by location, trends by people you follow, or trends by lists you’ve created. If Twitter can hold onto its growth pace, in six months to a year we’ll start seeing the good stuff.

Retweets, a way of sharing content on Twitter, are coming into their own.

Twitter’s testing a new official retweet feature after announcing they were going to incorporate the informal practice earlier this year.

As you can see in mock-ups above, there will be a link to retweet a comment on the web site and a way to track where a widely retweeted idea or link came from. As you can see above, you’ll be able to track what you’ve retweeted and what others have retweeted from you.

The company is rolling the feature out to a limited subset of users to check for bugs. Then if that goes well, they’ll bring it to the entire user base.

The company released a dashboard today that shows all the data it has from the Google products you use. That includes Gmail, Docs, Web History and YouTube among others. For example in the Gmail category, Google tells you how many e-mails you’ve sent and received and how many conversations you’ve had through its chat client.

The dashboard is also a central hub with links out to the privacy settings on all of these apps, so you can manage your personal information easily. It doesn’t include several of Google’s newer apps including Wave, along with analytics and book search.

It’s a smart move for the company as it wants to assuage growing consumer and political concern about the sheer amount of data it collects and its clout over the Internet ecosystem.

What I’d be curious about is if there are any secondary inferences about us that Google makes from this corpus of data. Based on our search history and Google Reader subscriptions, what does the company know about our general interests for advertising purposes? What adjustments has it exactly made to improve our personalized search results? That I don’t know yet.

In August, Kevin Halpern filed a breach of contract lawsuit against Shukla. He alleges that he helped start the company in 2006 with Shukla but was cut out of promised stock ownership after a third founder, Michael Liu, joined the startup, according to the suit filed in Superior Court in Alameda County.

Offerpal declined comment. The lawsuit does not name Offerpal itself. Shukla declined to comment, and Halpern’s attorney did not respond to a request for comment.

Shukla has been in the limelight this week because of a public battle with Techcrunch editor Michael Arrington over the ethics of offers, which are special ad deals that users of social games can accept in lieu of paying for items in a game. She also stepped down as CEO yesterday as the company hired George Garrick to replace her. In an interview, she said she will remain at the company.

This lawsuit is another headache that will keep the company in the limelight. In Silicon Valley, where the stakes in founding startups are so high, such disputes among founders are common. Facebook recently settled a founder dispute over the beginnings of the company and restored the name of Eduardo Saverin as a co-founder of the company — presumably along with a large settlement fee.

Shukla has said that the idea for Offerpal arose after she signed up for an Amazon.com credit card in exchange for an offer for $30 off her Amazon purchases. But in the lawsuit, Halpern paints the company’s beginnings differently. He says that Shukla and he formed a close professional relationship between 2003 and 2006. She even invited him to her parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. Shukla, who had founded Rubric, contacted Halpern in April, 2006, to tell him she was moving on from her latest startup, mybuys.com. She wanted to start a social network and wanted to know from Halpern what the latest trends among youths were.

Halpern said he began researching ideas. In May, 2006, they met for lunch at the Sofitel Hotel in Redwood City, Calif., where Halpern alleges that Shukla promised he would get 15 percent to 20 percent ownership in the new startup, although they had no idea what they were going to do yet. In June, Shukla invited Liu, a successful entrepreneur, to join them. Halpern found that the social networking market was getting too crowded, as Friendster and Facebook were already off to a head start. Then he set up a meeting with Jonathan Abrams, a major thinker on social networks who had a lot of knowledge of MySpace, Facebook and Friendster. Abrams suggested that they set up a business to feed offers, trials and surveys to social networking users as an alternative way to pay for goods in social networks.

After that meeting, Halpern, Shukla and Liu spent several weeks conceiving the Offerpal offers platform. In July, 2006, they agreed to create a company called Offerpal. They tried to get the web address but had to settle for myofferpal.com. They met again with Abrams on Aug. 1, 2006, to seek his feedback. After that, Halpern alleges, the monetization engine concept for Offerpal was solidified. By September, 2006, Halpern says he had attended more than 50 meetings on the subject. But as they incorporated and divided up the stock, Liu told Halpern that he would not be considered a founder and was only a “friend of the company.” Halpern demanded his stock from Shukla, but she allegedly told him he would get no equity and threatened legal action against him. The company was incorporated as Offerpal Media in October, 2006. The suit alleges that Abrams was promised advisory shares but did not receive them.

If Halpern wins the suit, the damages could be lucrative, since Offerpal has since registered more than 160 million users in the past two years.

[Update: Jonathan Abrams sent this comment via email: I often take meetings with entrepreneurs who want my advice, as a favor to a mutual friend.  I'm a bit hazy on the details, since it was three years ago, but I believe in 2006 I met with Anu Shukla as a favor to Kevin Halpern, and helped them with some early ideas that may have evolved into OfferPal.  I didn't receive any compensation, and I don't expect to get stock for just some advice and a couple of meetings.  It was just a favor from my perspective.  You are correct that I'm not a party to any lawsuit involving OfferPal, and I don't really know much about this company or these lawsuits.]

Christmas e-cards are probably among the five most boring things ever, but Pixorial is offering a nice improvement, by embedding your movies within them. After all, if you’re going to get all warm-and-fuzzy, isn’t it better to do so on-camera? And I’m sure you get bonus points if you have cute kids.

This is a pretty natural extension of Englewood, Colo.-based Pixorial’s video-editing technology, which may be be a better fit for non-techies than software like iMovie, because it’s simple to use, and if any video editing seems too hard for you, you can also send the Pixorial team members your VHS tapes and they’ll handle the online transfer.

The new e-cards (which, to be clear, don’t have to be Christmas-related) add to Pixorial’s free services. You can also download your videos and share them on Facebook without charge, but you’ll have to pay a small fee if you want the high-resolution version, or if you want a DVD.  With the holiday season coming up, this seems like smart way to expose many more consumers to the company’s technology.

The company is self-funded. Here’s a sample e-card.

In the same way that Google is taking on traditional enterprise search companies with the Google Search Appliance (for searching within your company’s files) and Google Site Search (for searching your website),  it now wants to replace the older solutions used by web retailers, said Nitin Mangtani, the company’s lead product manager for enterprise search. Retailers just feed Google their catalogs, and the company handles the search experience.

In addition to Google’s general search expertise, Commerce Search includes a number of features that make it particularly well-suited to online retail, Mangtani said, such as spell checking and synonym suggestions. It also allows merchants to customize the experience to their needs, not just with a nice-looking search interface, but also for example by making sure a particular product always shows up at the top of the results. Commerce Search integrates with other Google products, so you can check its effectiveness using Google Analytics and upload your catalog to both Commerce Search and Google Product Search (which highlights products in Google’s standard web search) at the same time.

And since the service is hosted on Google’s servers, retailers don’t have to worry about finding the extra infrastructure to support increased searches during holiday shopping.

Google is already reporting one happy customer — Birkenstock USA, which said Commerce Search led many more site visitors to actually make purchases. The product is aimed at medium-to-large retailers, Mangtani said. (The pricing starts at $50,000 per year, so that puts it out of reach of a small artist or mom-and-pop store trying to establish on online presence.)

One of the areas being explored by newer retail search companies such as Like.com is visual search, where you can look for products that have a similar appearance to one you’ve already found. Asked if Google might incorporate such technology into commerce search, Mangtani said the company would consider it “if we see this as a common requirement from our customers.”

The panelists said that one of the hurdles to convincing enterprise-scale organizations that these new tools are worth their money is the difficulty in quantifying the business benefits. It’s hard to calculate an exact return on investment when it comes to better collaboration: “When somebody figures that out, they’ll make a million,” said Greg Lowe, social media architect and program manager at Alcatel Lucent.

But the inefficiency of older technologies has a real cost, said Megan Murray, community manager/project coordinator of Booz Allen Hamilton. She said her company once calculated that all the time wasted by an email that was sent to thousands of employees, where many recipients hit “reply all” to unsubscribe to the mailing list, was worth a total of $250,000. That number is only “an indicator” of the huge amounts of money that could be saved by adopting Enterprise 2.0 tools, she said.

Murray also argued that regardless of what skeptics say, company workforces are already adopting a new technologies: “That’s happening, period. These [Enterprise 2.0] technologies are simply allowing us to get that done smarter, faster, better, now.”

More broadly, the panelists identified five principles when it comes to bringing these applications into enterprises:

I’d elaborate on how those principles are supposed to tie into Enterprise 2.0, but I found a lot of that discussion rather vague. That’s a general frustration I (and others) had with the panel — there was little direct engagement with the skeptics. Is it any surprise that a bunch of social media consultants and community managers would argue in favor of social, collaborative tools? I would have liked to hear fewer “Yay collaboration!” homilies and more specific responses to criticism. Even when the speakers offered real examples, they tended to involve “knowledge-based” industries, which is the one area where Howlett acknowledged Enterprise 2.0 really makes sense.

With that in mind, I’ll close with a quote from Howlett’s piece:

Therein lies the Big Lie. Enterprise 2.0 pre-supposes that you can upend hierarchies for the benefit of all. Yet none of that thinking has a credible use case you can generalize back to business types – except: knowledge based businesses such as legal, accounting, architects etc. Even then – where are the use cases? I’d like to know.

[image:flickr/mikomatsumura]

To solve this, companies have begun to get smart about helping users figure out which iPhone apps are right for them through what we are calling social data. Notably, Chorus, an iPhone app that launched yesterday from envIO, seems to have the answer. Chorus is a free app that enables you and your friends to review apps and share your opinions. Ultimately, Chorus lets your friends do the searching for you. Based on the principal that friends have similar likes and dislikes, you’ll arrive on a set of apps that you may find interesting and want to download.

A similar iPhone app that leverages social data for recommendation includes Yappler – which lets users create app lists and show your friends through email, Twitter, Facebook or MySpace. A great tool for friends who may have a new iPhone and need a little help.

On a similar note, AppStoreHQ, a website dedicated to making it easy to browse and discover the best of the mobile web, released a new feature today that’s also looking to social data for recommendations. AppStoreHQ is pulling tweets together into a feed that shows which iPhone apps are currently receiving the most tweets and, through a rating system, creating a list of “hot” apps on Twitter. Oh, and the number one app on Twitter, according to AppStoreHQ? Chorus.

VB: How did you get involved with V?

JH: When I discovered that Warner Bros. actually owned the intellectual property of V through my co-worker Jamie O’Brien Moore, we got very excited. Jamie and I actually sat down and thought, “How could we, re-imagine what V was to make it into something that made sense for the audience that we know today.” I believe that the audience that I’m used to serving through videogames is fairly intelligent and also likes to have a certain amount of depth associated with the content that they’re viewing most of the time. Plausibility is a huge factor when it comes to science fiction for it to really stick. With V, everything needed to make sense. There needed to be rhyme and reason for everything, so we spent months creating a bible for this universe.

VB: Can you explain how other mediums will be involved with V?

JH: No, because doing so would expose and degrade the fun that I know everybody wants to have with it.  All I can tell you is I spent a huge part of my career dealing with online and interactive components. I know how powerful and effective they are in terms of helping to support and drive ancillary story, tangent story, or a main story if the integration is done well enough. But in order to actually have a television show that can support such a thing, you have to conceive of these items all together at the beginning, which is what we did. Part of the fun of V is the fact that we have thought through, with great energy, the background for things, and we’re able to create content elsewhere that works within that framework. There are some fun discoveries to be made. If I tell you exactly all the different things, then it ruins it.

VB: Will you direct viewers to websites through the show, itself, like Lost did?

JH: Well, certainly there will be those kinds of exploitations, but that’s not what I’m talking about. You have to think far more abstract, and far more plans within plans, so to speak. You will never be directed to these things. You will find these things naturally through your own interest in those things legitimately, and those things will guide and direct you to potentially have interest in V, the series, itself. These will be choices that you make on your own. It’s a very covert approach.

VB: Will a videogame be part of these plans?

JH: Well, there are obvious videogame opportunities that exist if the show is successful, and if it’s going to continue with everybody. You don’t want to get ahead of yourself. We still have to premier and prove that what we’ve been doing actually is something of interest. Yes, there’s obvious opportunity for directly related videogames. There are also opportunities for interactive things indirectly associated with the show in very creative and interesting ways.

VB: How will you solve the conundrum of creating a game based on a TV series that doesn’t seem outdated by the time it hits retail shelves – like we’ve seen with Ubisoft’s Lost game and others?

JH: The challenge you have with things like Lost or whatever is they’re telling this linear story, and you have to try to get the game out in time to match what’s going on.  That’s fine, but that’s very difficult. “V” starts off as a universe that’s been created much like the Star Wars universe. Whether or not your game tracks with the story of Luke Skywalker is irrelevant to whether or not a Star Wars videogame is viable. And you can actually do something that works in conjunction with whatever may be showing on television for Star Wars. For example, you can do a whole videogame about a random storm trooper attacking the planet Hoth. What we created with V supports that kind of exploration.  The kind of games that I would hope would be developed in the future relating to V are not going to try to track the specific narrative of the television series. If you want that narrative, watch the TV show. However, if you want to participate in what’s going on in the “V” universe, you can actually have a game that does that regardless of where you are in a season. It still will be interesting, and it still will be additive to what has been happening in the season.

VB: Having come from the games business, do you see Hollywood opening its doors to other game creators?

JH: I think that my ability to get traction in Hollywood has created a slight crack in the door on the perception. What’s going to be the biggest factor is how well V performs as a television series. If it works…if people watch and enjoy what’s being presented, then that will crack the door open a little bit further to altering the perception. Hollywood will start to look at creative people in the videogame industry as viable authors, or resources, to come in and create interesting television and film programming. I’m trying really hard to sort of represent some of the best, because I’m one of the first people to do it. But I’m certainly not the most talented, or the smartest of the people in the videogame business. If I can come in and do this, and show it successfully, I’m hoping that it helps pave the way for others in the videogame business to push their talents into this area. Because honestly, I would watch the programming they come up with.