In less than 24 hours, iFarm has jumped into the top 25 ranks on the iPhone AppStore, claiming the position as the No. 1 farm game. This game is probably worth watching closely, since farming has become such a huge money maker on Facebook.

Zynga’s FarmVille has become the world’s most popular game, with 65 million monthly active users on Facebook. (That’s an audience of one in every five Facebook users). Farm games have also been a runaway success in Asia. But they haven’t yet tapped their full potential on other platforms.

iFarm could draw in some good revenues from virtual goods. PlayMesh’s iMafia app had a novel virtual goods model in the days before Apple had its own way of embracing what has become an extremely popular business model for monetizing virtual goods.

The iMafia game was a hit and was designed to let players earn points within the game if they purchased other PlayMesh games. But PlayMesh ran afoul of Apple’s restrictions and went silent for a while.

Apple, meanwhile, has enabled a virtual goods model by allowing purchases to be made inside apps now. The iFarm game doesn’t yet have Apple’s in-app purchases, but PlayMesh is working hard to update the game so that it does. For now, it uses its own virtual goods system; if you want to buy a gnome to decorate your farm, you pay $1. In doing so, you’re actually buying one of PlayMesh’s other paid iPhone apps.

Mountain View, Calif.-based PlayMesh has created 15 top-25 apps on the iPhone, including iMafia and Link4 Online (a game where you link four spots in a row in a multiplayer race). It has more than 5 million registered users and serves over a million plays a day in Link4 Online.

The company managed to beat other players such as Zynga and the creators of FarmTown, Slashkey, in coming up with an iPhone version of a farm game, where you can raise crops and sell them for virtual currency, or coins. Players grow stuff, decorate their farms, rise in levels, and earn coins. Farm sizes can stretch to 100 plots of land.

The company’s goal is to bring social games to the iPhone, said Charles Ju, chief executive of PlayMesh. PlayMesh was founded in July, 2008. The company has five employees.

According to Comscore, October 2009 traffic was down 8% from from September 2009, while Compete shows a more modest decline of 2.1%. Still, on a year-over year basis, US Twitter visitor counts are up 1,271% according to Comscore, and 578% according to Compete.

Twitter’s phenomenal growth over the past year can be attributed to factors like media coverage of celebrities on Twitter, Twitter founder Ev Williams’ appearance on Oprah, and Oprah’s joining the service. But its stalled growth and slight decline since September could indicate that interest in the service is limited and has reached its peak.

Nielsen reported in April that 60% of new Twitter users drop off after a month. In response to the objection that many Twitter users access the service solely via third-party applications or mobile phones, Nielsen found that Twitter drop-off rates were the same for applications. “There simply aren’t enough new users to make up for defecting ones after a certain point,” wrote David Martin, VP of Primary Research at Nielsen Online. Even though Twitter got a huge influx of new users over the summer, as the charts show, it seems most of these users didn’t stick around through the fall. Is it possible that Twitter doesn’t have the mainstream appeal to “make Twitter essential to everyone’s lives,” as Ev Williams stated in a recent BBC interview?

Of course, traffic to Twitter is not the only indication of its health, as Twitter users so adamantly informed Nielsen last spring. Let’s look at two more factors: search and traffic to third-party Twitter sites.

Using Google’s suggestion feature for Twitter, I plotted “twitter” and some of its leading search term suggestions on Google Trends. Like the web traffic data, the chart shows a decline in search volume in the past few months after a peak mid-summer. Searches for just Twitter outnumber searches for its associated terms by at least 53 to 1 (”twitter” vs. “twitter search”).

What about searches for Twitter apps? They appear to be holding steady after a drop off from the summer rush. Since search activity tends to happen pre-download, steady interest in the apps could indicate growth in usage. But the search volume for the apps is so small compared to search volume for “twitter” that new app users couldn’t likely have made up for the 60% of new users that drop off.

An examination of actual traffic to Twitter’s arguably most popular application, Twitpic, should be a good indication of Twitter adoption. Users must go to Twitpic.com to view a photo linked to in a Twitter post when using a desktop or mobile application. (Some newer browser-based apps like Brizzly show the photo in line with the Tweet, but adoption of these apps is still low.) Data extracted from Compete.com showed a correlation of 0.994 (where 1.0 is a perfect correlation) in unique visitor counts on Twitpic and Twitter over the past year. Unique US visits to Twitpic declined 3.5% from September to October, according to Compete.com.

Compete.com’s data shows that the September-October drop in visits to Twitter.com constitutes the loss of 496,336 users. Unique US visits in October to Tweetdeck and Seesmic (both sites that let users view and organize their Twitter, Facebook, and other streams in one place) combined were 583,696. (Most of the other application sites have too low visitor counts to receive reliable visitor count data in the measurement services.) It’s unrealistic to think that every single person who visited one of the app download sites downloaded an application and never visited Twitter again. Thus it’s hard to argue under any circumstances that Twitter is still growing in the US.

One anomaly worth noting, is that Tweetphoto, a service that lets you share photos on Twitter and Facebook, has grown substantially in the last few months, with more than a million unique visitors in October according to Compete. I talked to a few people about that number, and they think that Tweetphoto’s growth can be attributed to new users (in other words, people aren’t abandoning Twitpic for Tweetphoto). Thus Tweetphoto’s growth could be a result of increased adoption of photo sharing on Twitter.

With stalled growth, and no reliable business model to date, what is the future of Twitter and all of the related businesses like Seesmic (which has received $12 million in funding to date) that have built their entire business model on the back of Twitter? In the short three years since Twitter’s inception, companies like Twitpic (which display ads), pay-for download iPhone apps, direct marketers using Twitter, and social media consultants have developed potentially sustainable business models, while Twitter itself has been struggling just to keep the service up, and releasing new features at a snail’s pace. What happens if Twitter’s US growth has reached its peak?

LeeAnn Prescott is a research consultant and writer who covers internet traffic and online advertising trends. She is Principal at Research-Write, where she helps companies get the most of their data and internal knowledge base by conducting analysis and writing research reports, white papers, case studies and articles. She blogs at www.research-write.com.

[Top image credit: www.condoroptions.com]

One stat in particular caught our eye. In the US, Android had 20 percent share of smartphone traffic, up from only seven percent six months before. Now that there’s proof that these phones are selling, Android may solidify its spot as a go-to operating system for device makers looking to get into the lucrative smartphone market.

In line with Admob’s findings, last month Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney highlighted for Computerworld a research report spotlighting Android Operating System would be the second most used OS, grabbing 14 percent of the global smartphone market share by 2012. That would be second only to the Symbian Operating System that is widely used by Nokia in countries outside the U.S.

For those methodology junkies, here’s how Admob’s metrics report works.

One of our newest speakers is Randy Breen, chief operating officer at Social Gaming Network, where he oversees game development, business development, strategy and executive management. He has worked in the game industry since 1986 at companies such as Electronic Arts, LucasArts and Emotiv Systems.

Today is the last chance to get DiscoveryBeat tickets at the early-bird rate of $114. That’s a 25 percent savings from the regular ticket price per attendee of $149.

As a reminder, DiscoveryBeat is all about getting your apps noticed. The event is targeted at the intersection of social, mobile and gaming trends. The event takes place in the afternoon of Dec. 8 at the Automattic Lounge on Pier 38 in San Francisco. Check out the DiscoveryBeat site for the full agenda and speakers. We’ve got a good batch of sponsors signing up for the event. A partial list of sponsors includes apps PR firm AppLaunch PR/VSC Consulting, Peter Relan’s startup incubator YouWeb, app store operator GetJar and social gaming firm SGN.

We’ll discuss the “secret recipe” for getting discovered in an age when getting discovered can mean huge viral growth and the difference between profound success or prompt failure. We think there are five main ingredients to the secret recipe for viral growth: 1) Social networking and marketing, 2) advertising, 3) web design, 4) partnering and 5) measurement.

Our previously announced speakers include John Pleasants, chief executive of social game firm Playdom, Ge Wang, co-founder and chief technology officer at music app maker Smule; Jon Vlassopulos, CEO of Zippo virtual lighter app maker Moderati; Roy Sehgal, executive producer of the Cafe World social game at Zynga; Julian Farrior, CEO and founder of iPhone hit game maker Backflip Studios; and Sebastien DeHalleux, president of social gaming firm Playfish, which was recently acquired by Electronic Arts for as much as $400 million.

Tickets are available here.

There have been other reverse karaoke products, most notably Microsoft Songsmith, a Windows application that lets you record your singing, then automatically generates musical accompaniment. Songsmith even prompted a series of YouTube videos highlighting the hilarious badness of many of the resulting songs.

Khu.sh’s iPhone app, LaDiDa, lets you do something similar on your iPhone. You choose a style (such as E Piano Pop or Dub Tone) and tempo, sing into the iPhone, and LaDiDa adds the music. You can also share the recordings on Facebook or Twitter. A $0.99-version of LaDiDa was first released last month, and Khu.sh added a free version (with fewer musical styles) called LaDiDa Lite (iTunes link) this week. You can check out the results in the video below.

This may seem like little more than a novelty, but if musical iPhone app developer Smule can have a hit with something like I am T-Pain (which overlays your singing with Auto Tune technology), I could see plenty of iPhone owners embracing this, too — though it’s a little more challenging without the help of a hip hop star like T-Pain.

Khu.sh is based in Atlanta and has raised $120,000 in seed funding, including $20,000 from incubator Shotput Ventures.

The company said it is cutting back investment in making games and other apps for Android-based cell phones, even though Android has won a lot of attention lately with new models from Motorola and Sony Ericsson, according to Reuters.

“We have significantly cut our investment in Android platform, just like … many others,” Gameloft finance director Alexandre de Rochefort said at an investor conference. “It is not as neatly done as on the iPhone. Google has not been very good to entice customers to actually buy products. On Android nobody is making significant revenue.”

By contrast, iPhone games are generating 13 percent of Gameloft’s revenue in its most recent quarter. Rochefort said that Gameloft is selling 400 times more games on iPhone than Android.

Not every developer is so disappointed with Android. Stewart Putney, chief executive of mobile games publisher and platform company Moblyng, said that he is very bullish on Android. His company has eight titles on Android and it deploys its games first on Android. One of his games recently hit No. 1 in the Android app store. (Moblyng makes a platform that allows it to publish games quickly on a bunch of different smartphones at the same time).

“Every app store is different,” Putney said.  “We have learned how to manage our Android app catalog presence and monetize our apps.  Android app monetization can be as good, or better, than iPhone- but it does require a different, more technology-driven, approach.  As app stores proliferate, older and bigger developers can’t just rely on being featured by Apple.”

Electronic Arts, the biggest mobile game company, also has faith in Android. Adam Sussman, vice president of worldwide publishing for EA Mobile, said, “We look for Google’s Android platform to become an important channel for EA Mobile and we have already launched some of EA Mobile’s most popular franchises on Android including Bejeweled and The Sims 3 with more to come, including Surviving High School, Spore Origins and many others.”

It is called FunMail, and it automatically offers up suggestions of images you should send along with your text messages.

Lavine points to a study FunMobility commissioned from Frost & Sullivan showing that only one out of every 70 mobile messages is sent using MMS (i.e., a protocol that allows the sending of media, such as photos combined with text). That’s because the amount of images users have on-hand is usually limited to images taken with their camera, so it’s rare when they’ve got a picture that functions as the perfect illustration for the text message they want to send. FunMobility, on the other hand, has a library of images, and automatically recommends one to accompany your message, making the process much easier.

For example, if I invited a friend to a party, I could add a party image to my message. And if they wanted to go to a concert instead, they could send me a response by adding an image of a musical instrument to their message. This isn’t exactly something I’ve been dying for, but it sounds fun — plus, FunMail isn’t aimed at old curmudgeons like me, but rather users in the 18- to 24-year-old range.

The real differentiator from other MMS and greeting card apps, Lavine said, is a technology FunMobility calls the Media Brain, which can perform semantic analysis of text in 50 languages (with some help from Google Translate) to suggest the most appropriate image. It also learns from the images you send, so the more you use it, the better its recommendations.

FunMail is free — the company plans to make money by selling a version to mobile carriers, and by charging for premium content. You can also use it to post messages to Twitter and Facebook. On all three platforms, you can send FunMail messages to friends who don’t have the app installed themselves.

Adobe just announced a bunch of upgrades to Acrobat.com, its suite of web collaboration applications. The most important: It’s releasing an application for the iPhone and BlackBerry.

Mobile support has been a big missing piece for Acrobat.com, since a big selling point of applications like Adobe’s (as well as Google Docs and the upcoming web versions of Microsoft Office) is the ability to access your documents anywhere. Now Acrobat.com users can not only read and share files from their phones, but also upload documents and send faxes. The mobile app was developed by scanR.

Acrobat.com started out as a free service, but in June it launched premium versions, where users pay for web meetings and the ability to create PDF documents. The mobile app follows that model. Free users can send two faxes and upload up to five documents from their phone each month, but if you want to do more, you’ll have to upgrade to a pay version.

The other major improvement is the creation of a central environment to view all your files in Acrobat.com, rather than having to view all your documents in Buzzword, all your spreadsheets in Tables, and all your presentations in, uh, Presentations. This may be what Product Manager Erik Larson was referring to when I asked him in June about future improvements, and he said, “I don’t necessarily think presentations, spreadsheets, documents are these three separate things, even though I know that’s the way the world thinks right now.”

The new version of Acrobat.com will launch at 3am Pacific on Saturday, Nov. 21. Larson told me in June that the site has 5 million registered users. (I’ve asked for more recent numbers and will update if I receive them.)

Update: Adobe says Acrobat.com now has 6.5 million sign ups for the free version, and is adding about 100,000 per week. It’s not releasing numbers on the paid version.

The buyer is an investor consortium led by Silver Lake Partners, the private equity buyout firm. It includes participation from Joltid, the company founded by Skype’s founders. Other members include Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and venture firm Andreessen Horowitz.

eBay is getting $1.9 billion in cash and a note from buyer worth $125 million. eBay retained about 30 percent of the ownership of Skype. The deal came after the end of a big legal battle. Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis had settled with eBay over the ownership of Skype’s technology in return for a 14 percent and board seats.

The new cities take the service across six continents, but it’s not so long since it was a strictly a tech-insider phenomenon in the US. As cofounder Dennis Crowley (pictured below) told me last week “The goal is to build something that everyone wants to use”. The company first took its service outside the US almost by accident.

It started, like a Coen Brothers film, with two Dutchmen in Texas. Young Dutch entrepreneurs Alper Cugun (of Tipit) and Robert Gaal (of Wakoopa) discovered Foursquare at this year’s SXSW conference and had so much fun collecting points that they resolved at the airport to bring Foursquare to Amsterdam. On April 7 Gaal sent the first email to Crowley, Cugun got the venue data together — Amsterdam restaurants and other destinations worth including in the game — and within a few weeks Foursquare’s first European city was up and running. It wasn’t an overnight success. Apart from anything else, the iPhone application wasn’t approved for the Netherlands until much later, but they kept checking in. “It’s just addictive,” says Cugun. “It lures you in.”

For those unfamiliar with Foursquare, it’s a game that lets friends track each others’ location and earn points and badges by checking into various venues throughout a city. The player who checks into a particular venue most frequently earns the title of Mayor of that location.

Dennis Crowley, co-founder of Foursquare, visited Amsterdam last weekend for a Mobile Monday event and used the opportunity to announce Foursquare’s new API. The new API opens up the service to third-party developers, promising new kinds of expansion going forward. Several applications developed locally in Amsterdam are already using the Foursquare API including a Foursquare Layar (Layar is a mobile augmented reality browser also from Amsterdam).

Gaal explained how there are certain fundamentals in how young people socialise: hit as many places as possible, find your friends, prove your social worth and be conspicuous about it. Foursquare’s game mechanics for collecting points and competing to be the mayor of a particular location fit in perfectly with those objectives. Soon, pitched battles were breaking out over rankings on the Foursquare leader board in Amsterdam. Things stopped just short of defenestration of rivals for the title of mayor of De Burgermeester. “The app gets mapped onto a part of your brain,” says Cugun. “It becomes like an extra sense. When you are outside the scope of Foursquare, it’s like your peripheral vision is gone.”

One of the most interesting things about Foursquare is the way it shapes social behavior. Players use it to avoid people as much as to find their friends. A new behavior has emerged in New York called the “pre-check in,” where a user checks in on on the way to a venue or even earlier. When friends see the check in they will assume he has arrived and will be “fooled” into showing up before he does. Players will also purposely check in at a venue far away from where they know a friend will be, to passively send a signal that they probably won’t catch up with that friend tonight. One notable aspect of Foursquare in Amsterdam was that it wasn’t just for tech insiders. Gaal says “First it caught on with our friends, not necessarily with the tech-savvy crowd”. This has obvious relevance to Foursquare’s ambitions to go from tech media darling to mainstream application. More on that below.

So what is Foursquare, really?

This answer isn’t that straightforward. As Crowley says, “If you put 10 different people around a table, they will give you 10 different answers about what it does”. Is it a social utility, a recommendation service, a game? Foursquare actually brings multiple ideas together; presence, location-tracking, the real world as a video game, personal metrics, discovery and even “mediated serendipity”. There is something unique about that odd mixture that users (100,000 of them to date since the launch in March of this year) find very compelling. Like smokers who need a cigarette first thing in the morning, checking in is the first thing players do when they arrive somewhere. It’s hard to avoid some comparison to the practice of sending tweets about what a great time you are having instead of having too great a time to report on it. But if Twitter is about what you are doing now, Foursquare is about “what next?”

I asked Crowley about his objectives for Foursquare. “Now that people are giving us their location, and have been doing that over a set period of time, what other interesting things can we bubble up? What can emerge out of that? That’s something we never got to figure out with DodgeBall (an earlier service sold to Google in 2005), and that’s the primary reason we are doing Foursquare. With Dodgeball we didn’t really understand how much value the history of where you have been can have. Foursquare is specifically built to take advantage of that history.”

When it comes to competitors, and there are plenty, including Loopt and Gowalla, Foursquare doesn’t seem too worried. Crowley says, “We feel like we know what we are doing. We are not focusing too much on the competitors because we know exactly what to build next.” On the implications for Foursquare if Facebook decides to buy a location-tracking company, Crowley is cagey. He merely suggests that since privacy is a very important part of Facebook’s DNA, the company will be extra careful in how it approaches location-tracking.

Crowley sees Foursquare’s business model being based on three main sources of revenue:

* Sponsorships and branded badges, which form part of the marketing campaigns of major brands.
* Customer loyalty programs from retailers and large hospitality business chains. There is currently only one mayor in each venue, but these businesses want to reward a selection of their best customers.
* Local merchants might reward customers for things like introducing new clients to the store. Foursquare can detect which users are friends, when they checked in together, and chop up all kinds of other interesting statistics.

Foursquare’s new cities bring the total number of cities covered to 100. The Blackberry version is due out sometime in December, and the objective is to get the application on to many more devices. The last few months have been spent refactoring the infrastructure rather than adding new features; what Crowley calls “3 months of awful”. That should be changing soon. The features most requested by users are new cities, new badges (apparently there are endless ideas for these) and the Blackberry version.

Crowley’s visit to Amsterdam also reminded him of how important the new user experience is. When you are in an unfamiliar neighborhood Foursquare “should give you something awesome to do” even if there are not many other players yet. Other new directions could include incentivizing people beyond entertainment. Intriguing possibilities in that area are suggested by Foursquare’s recent partnership with BART and the phenomenon of users going to the gym more often just to earn the Gym Rat badge on Foursquare.

Foursquare may finally be going global but Amsterdam was happy to be the first at the party. As Cugun says, “It may be worthless to be the mayor but it’s cool to have the crown next to you”.

[Image credit: mediamemo.allthingsd.com]

The company said in September that it’s service was seeing big growth, but it has made more progress now. It’s announcing today that 12 more game developers have signed up to use its mobile payments system. These new companies alone will help Boku reach 200 million more customers who play 250 social and casual games.

With Boku, game players can use their mobile phone numbers to pay for virtual goods in social games on Facebook and other platforms. They simply enter their phone number when prompted to pay for something. Then they reply “y” to a text message that verifies the transaction.

The San Francisco-based company is also announcing a new user interface, allowing partners to increase their revenue dramatically. It will be interesting to see how much Boku can grow in the U.S.

European and Japanese users have embraced using their cell phones to pay for items. But the U.S. has lagged.

The new game developer partners include 6Waves, Cie Studios, Cyberstep, GameDuell, IGG, King.com, NHN USA ijji, Ntreev, Outspark, PerfectWorld, Snap Interactive and Zoosk. With these new partners, Boku has a number of the top Facebook apps covered. It also has a strong presence on web sites using virtual goods models. Full told, Boku has more than 1,000 merchant partners who accept its payment system in 56 countries.

Boku, a startup competition finalist at our recent MobileBeat conference, is funded by Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures and Khosla Ventures. The company was founded in 2008 and raised $13 million in June. It used a bunch of the money to buy payment firms Mobillcash and Paymo. Rivals include Zong, Obopay, and PayPal.

The platform is a natural extension of the analytics business that has become very popular. With AppCircle, Flurry can offer something valuable to developers. And, with luck, those developers won’t mind sharing revenue with Flurry, given that the platform should help them generate lots more sales.

Peter Farago, vice president of marketing at Flurry, said that it all starts with analytics. Developers can use Flurry’s analytics for free, just by putting some code in their iPhone/iPod Touch apps. Flurry can then get lots of data about what users do, such as how much time they spend with an app, what other apps they use, and how much money they spend on apps.

“Flurry can effectively solve the problem of discovery for thousands of developers,” Farago said.

About 14,000 developers, from Viacom to Namco, are using the analytics. As a result, Flurry is able to track the habits of 40 million unique users per month, or about two thirds of the population of iPhone and iPod Touch users. Flurry is also tracking about two thirds of the Android-based phone users in the same way.

That data becomes extremely relevant in coming up with a list of recommended apps. Apps that use Flurry’s AppCircle can then make a recommendation to the user about other apps they should buy. The recommendation appears much like a mobile ad: it’s a single line at the bottom of the app which a user can tap. Because the recommendation is based on the users own tastes, it can be much better targeted. All the user has to do is tap on the recommendation, which brings up a description of the app and then another link to tap for purchase.

If users purchase a recommended app, Flurry knows about it. It can thus take its cut of the purchase and the developer keeps the rest. It’s a kind of razors and razor blades strategy, where Flurry gives away its analytics and potentially makes money on the recommendations.

The payment works like this. A user pays the regular AppStore price for a recommended app.  The developer whose app is sold takes 70 percent of the gross sale and Apple keeps 30 percent. Then the developer whose app is sold, shares another 50 cents or 30 percent of the app gross (whichever is higher) with Flurry. Flurry splits that between itself and the host app (or the one that does the recommending).  Later, Apple gives 5 percent to Flurry via Linkshare, a marketing program that rewards companies that generate AppStore purchases. So Flurry’s total winds up being 20 percent of the gross in the end. Flurry doesn’t get anything unless a transaction takes place.

It is not so different from the way that AdMob, which was purchased by Google last week for $750 million, makes money via mobile ads. But Flurry’s technology is interesting because it is based not just on what users purchase, as is the case with Apple’s Genius application. Rather, it’s based on usage of those apps. Farago says that this fact makes the apps a lot more useful.What’s more, ads tend to work best in free apps. In paid apps, users show less patience for ads.

Dozens of developers are trying out the system, Farago said. Five or ten of them may launch by the end of November. The platform has been submitted to Apple and there are no red flags. Flurry has been working on the technology for six months. One of the developers trying it out is PlayFirst. And Farago showed off a game, Digit Defenders, that uses the AppCircle platform.

“We’re pretty excited about it,” Farago said. “We think this can be just like driving word of mouth.”

Besides AdMob, other rivals include Scoreloop, Ngmoco, and Aurora Feint. The latter three focus on games. But Farago noted that other apps such as books are coming on strong. It’s possible for Flurry’s AppCircle to make recommendations that cross product lines, such as recommending a Harry Potter eBook to someone who bought a Harry Potter game on the iPhone. If a publisher wants to block certain apps from being recommended, it can do so.

Overall, the benefits for apps developers could be reaching new users, better return on investment in acquiring new users, affordably priced advertising, a higher ranking in the AppStore, a charge only when a download occurs, and the automatic generation of ad material. The latter is true because Flurry’s descriptions use the available AppStore assets.

If the plan works, Flurry will be on its way to its first meaningful means of monetization. The company was started in 2005 and has raised $5 million to date. It has 12 employees.

[The excitement in this industry is one of the reasons why we're holding an executive event called DiscoveryBeat on Dec. 8 in San Francisco. The event will explore the secret recipe for getting your social game or mobile phone application "discovered" in an age of increasing noise. Get your early bird ticket by today to get 25 percent off]

The upcoming Android device would be thinner than a Motorola Droid (another recently launched Android phone on Verizon), this phone is called the Google Phone. We don’t know if the rumor is true. Google declined comment.

It’s always an interesting choice when a platform creator chooses to make its own platform device. It’s like Microsoft creating the Xbox 360 or Intel building its own computers. It enables one company to have complete control over both hardware and software, but it also turns off potential third-party allies.

Techcrunch says that Google is building a branded phone that it will sell directly through retailers and that the device will ship in early 2010. The phone may be a web-only phone that uses voice-over-Internet protocol.

As an aside, Google is also holding a press event tomorrow to talk about its new Chrome OS, a browser-based operating system that will compete with Android in the market and be the brains of beefier devices such as netbooks or computers.

Placecast, which previously raised $4 million, pushes advertisements from major brands to the consumer’s phone depending on their physical location, but allows users to opt-in to the system. Here’s a scenario: You’re shopping and have opted in to receive advertisement alerts from your favorite store, say GAP (you can do this by visiting the retailers store, website, or even Facebook page). You’ve parked your car and happen to be walking just a few blocks from a GAP — bang — your phone goes off and there’s a “30 percent-off” message from GAP on t-shirts.  While some might think this would be annoying, remember you did opt in.

For retailers, the service gives them an opportunity to combat dropping foot traffic at stores and energize regional specific marketing campaigns. Focusing on Fortune 500 retailers and brands, Placecast has several well recognized partners, including: Yellowbook, FedEx Office, Avis and Budget Rental Cars and Hyatt Hotels.

Placecast recently comissioned a survey by Harris Interactive that determined that 27 percent of consumers would be somewhat interested in receiving cell phone alerts about sales, assuming it was an opt-in system. As for what alerts they would be interested in receiving, the majority noted either restaurants, events or weather.

Similar companies like Useful Networks and Creativity Software are also providing global brands  – Burger King, BP, Samsung, Pearson and Walt Disney  – with location-based systems.

Round two funding included Quatrex Capital and current investors Onset Ventures and Voyager Capital.

“All the apps that count will be ported to every one of them,” he said. “I don’t think there’s going to be differentiation at the app level.”

It’s a completely different situation from the PC market, where software’s built to run on a Windows or a Mac, he said. Mobile apps require very little development, so it’s much easier to bring them onto every platform

Of course, Ozzie would want to believe that, since the iPhone has a huge lead in the number of apps (which Apple loves to crow about). Ozzie’s statement also contrasts with Google’s Vic Gundotra, who has been advocating more mobile-friendly websites, rather than native apps — Gundotra even said Google isn’t “rich enough” to build apps for every smartphone.

Ozzie made his comments during a group interview with a number of tech bloggers. Earlier this morning, he announced the launch of Windows Azure, Microsoft’s platform for running applications in the Internet cloud. Just-announced users of Azure and other Microsoft development tools include social network aggregator Seesmic, blogging platform WordPress, and Cheezburger Network, which runs a number of popular humor sites. He also announced a project code-named “Dallas” that’s built on Azure, where developers and users can access different kinds of data, with datasets from the Associated Press, NASA, Data.gov, and others to start.

The interview also covered some of Microsoft’s approaches to web and cloud development. One reporter asked about the competition between Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, which powers web applications and media, and standardized web formats like HTML that aren’t owned by any company. Bob Muglia, president of Microsoft’s server and tools business, said the two can coexist. It makes sense for many developers to use HTML, especially as it becomes more powerful, but “there will always be opportunities for people to build apps that go beyond what standards can do,” he said.

Ozzie also noted that as browsers and web apps become more powerful, the distinction between websites and client software that’s installed on your PC will continue to blur. At a certain point, developers may have to wonder, “Is the client just a piece of a website?”