Russian firm Troika Ventures, Evernote’s first institutional investor, sold its stake in the note-taking and note-sharing company at more than ten times its investment.

Troika led a $4.5 million raise in Evernote in January 2009 (the round closed later in the year at $6.5 million), and quickly piled on with new investors in Evernote’s $10 million Series B offering.

Sequoia Capital was founded in 1972 and has invested in many companies including Apple, Google, PayPal, and LinkedIn. It’s estimated that 19 percent of the NASDAQ’s value is made up of companies Sequoia has funded. The firm is also already deeply rooted in Evernote; it led both Evernote’s $20 million Series C round and its $50 million Series D round.

The cash-for-more-land-grab exchange strikes us as a bit odd. Evernote, which purports to now have more than 20 million users, has seen substantial growth since Troika’s first investment, and has gone on to raise $95.5 million in total funding. Clearly, this is a startup that industry insiders think has a shot at a sizable exit, whether that be an acquisition or an IPO (and we know CEO Phil Libin is leaning toward the latter).

And therein lies the problem. The only obvious reason Troika would divest its stake now is because Evernote appears to be in no hurry to make its debut on the public market.

A statement from the company supports this reasoning. “The exit, at over ten times our original commitment, was a difficult decision for Troika and for me personally, but we ultimately decided to provide liquidity to our investors at a multiple return on their investment rather than await the next exit opportunity,” firm head Artyom Yukhin said.

Evernote did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Photo credit: micamica/Flickr

With the AT&T/T-Mobile merger dead, AT&T is readying to compensate T-Mobile with precious mobile spectrum that covers 128 cellular market areas. But what exactly does that look like on the U.S. map?

The fine folks at GigaOM and spectrum expert Andrew Shepherd have developed a handy map, shown above, that shows exactly where T-Mobile will be getting new spectrum additions, which will help the company improve its own 4G offerings.

As noted on the map, cities that will be getting a boost in T-Mobile coverage include Boston, San Francisco/Oakland, Washington, D.C., Houston, Baltimore, Atlanta, San Diego, Seattle, Kansas City, Mo., San Jose, San Antonio, and Salt Lake City. AT&T very carefully picked the cities it could give up spectrum in to make sure it could still launch a decent-sized 4G LTE network in those cities.

The catastrophic breakup fee from the AT&T-T-Mobile merger not only included the spectrum noted above but also will give T-Mobile a broad 3G roaming agreement that will make life easier for T-Mobile customers out of range. On top of doling out valuable spectrum and the roaming agreement, AT&T had to pay $3 billion in cash to T-Mobile parent Deutsche Telekom.

With this loss of spectrum, AT&T has little choice but to look to new deals to get its hands on more spectrum. One option could be for AT&T to buy Dish Network. Dish owns lots of wireless spectrum to deliver its television service to customers and has even talked in the past about partnering with T-Mobile to offer wireless phone service. Previous reports suggested that AT&T could pay as much to $50 a share for Dish, which would be a considerable premium on its stock.

Joyent provides infrastructure cloud computing services for customers like LinkedIn, THQ, Gilt Groupe and Kabam. The company’s core offering will now be enhanced with a wide-ranging partnership with Telefónica Digital, the global business division of London-based telecommunications company Telefónica. With the new partnership, Joyent will be able to bring its services to more countries thanks to Telefónica data centers throughout Europe and Latin America.

Joyent CEO David Young enjoys colorfully differentiating his company from his largest competitor Amazon, by far the largest provider of cloud computing services in the world. Young describes Amazon’s cloud computing technology as a “junk yard” where all sorts of technologies have been “taped together.”

“Amazon is the Kodak of the cloud,” Young told VentureBeat. “I don’t want to dump on Amazon, but I just don’t think you can look to a book seller and grocery store for cloud innovation. On the other hand, we’re building a cloud alliance around the globe.”

The new massive round was led by Weather Investment II Group, with Telefónica Digital, El Dorado Ventures, Epic Ventures, Greycroft Partners, Intel Capital, and Liberty Global also participating. Joyent’s last funding round occurred in Sept. 2010 and totaled $15 million. In its history, the company has raised around $115 million.

San Francisco-based Joyent was founded in 2004 and has about 150 employees. It also has offices in Vancouver, Singapore and Geneva. The company plans to announce other “exciting” partnerships in the near future that will enable the company’s services in even more countries.

Joyent CTO and co-founder Jason Hoffman talked with us recently to help define “the cloud”:

And you can take a look at a diagram of a Joyent data center stack below:

Cloud photo: CubaGallery/Flickr

Watch your backs Groupon and LivingSocial. A new report suggests daily deals sites are loosing steam quickly, with 798 daily deal sites worldwide shutting down in the second half of 2011.

Even since before Groupon went public in November, analysts have wondered whether the daily deals business model is sustainable. Groupon’s IPO price of $20 per share shot up to nearly $30 on its first day of trading but today the stock is trading around $21 a share. Its biggest competitor, LivingSocial, closed a massive $176 million round of funding in December and might go public this year.

But a new report, written by Daily Deal Media, says that daily deals sites are in an extremely volatile position in the market. Asia in particular seems to be a bad market for these types of sites, with 1,348 Asian daily deal sites going under in the second half of 2011.

On the positive side, Europe and Latin America saw overall gains in daily deals sites during the same time. There were 235 new daily deals sites in Europe and a gain of 324 deals sites in Latin America. Those numbers aren’t enough to detract from the rapid Asian decline but it’s still positive for those markets.

The crazy volatility could also be a testament to Groupon owning the marketplace for daily deals. Groupon has a presence throughout the world with more than 150 markets in North America and more than 100 markets in Europe, Asia and South America. The company may be taking out competition before they can fully materialize.

VentureBeat contributor Rocky Agrawal has also made the point that merchants have gotten savvy about daily deals, which in turn mean less attractive deals for consumers. As consumers the world over see less good deals across the board, the less interest they have getting e-mails from that site.

Do you think Groupon, LivingSocial, and similar sites can be sustainable in the long term?

Money burning image via Shutterstock

AT&T’s primary motivation to buy T-Mobile USA was to get access to that company’s spectrum, a high-value commodity that makes it possible for customers to make calls and send and receive wireless data. AT&T simply doesn’t have enough 4G spectrum to provide a good experience for future customers, especially if its customer base grows. Chief AT&T rival Verizon Wireless, on the other hand, has much more spectrum available thanks to an enterprising $3.6 billion deal it made with cable companies.

A Dish Network acquisition, as first written about by Bloomberg, could be the solution to AT&T’s woes. Dish owns lots of wireless spectrum to deliver its television service to customers and it even has talked in the past about partnering with T-Mobile to offer wireless phone service.

Bloomberg’s report suggests AT&T could pay as much to $50 a share for Dish, which would be a 77 percent premium. That would be the biggest acquisition premium in more than a decade. Dish’s stock is currently trading at about $29 a share.

Other options for AT&T (or its rivals) to get more spectrum could be to purchase regional carriers or mid-size carriers like MetroPCS, Cricket, Leap Wireless, and Clearwire. But Dish would be easier to get regulatory approval from the government versus a carrier, because we all know what happened last time.

Do you think buying Dish would be a good move for AT&T?

I’m delighted to confirm that VentureBeat has acquired Bitmob, the respected gaming news site known for its passionate community of users. Bitmob will be integrated with our GamesBeat channel.

The best part of the deal: Bitmob co-founder Dan “Shoe” Hsu, an industry veteran with significant street cred with gamers, will become the Editor-in-Chief of GamesBeat. He’ll join Dean Takahashi, our lead games writer, who has done an incredible job getting GamesBeat off the ground over the last couple of years.

Together, along with Sebastian Haley, who is GamesBeat’s review editor and will lead our video coverage, this is the perfect powerhouse trio to help GamesBeat become the bible of the games industry.

Shoe just posted about the merger.

The GamesBeat channel will expand significantly over the coming months, after Shoe starts with us Feb 1. This will include a “relaunch” of GamesBeat, which will essentially give GamesBeat its own identity separate from VentureBeat. It will also mean the integration of Bitmob’s community features. Most importantly, it will bolster GamesBeat’s mission to cover the most disruptive and interesting stories in the games industry — everything from the amazing saga around social gaming companies like Zynga and Crowdstar, to how giants like Electronic Arts, Activision Blizzard, Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo are responding. GameBeat will also expand its reviews of top games that define the industry.

Dean Takahashi

To be clear, it was Dean who first approached me saying he wanted us to acquire Shoe and Bitmob, so that Shoe could run GamesBeat, while Dean focuses on writing. Shoe has a 16-year track record. He communicates well and has managed big teams, including at EGM, 1UP and Gamers.com. Dean has already attracted some promising new writers to GamesBeat, including Haley. It’s all a perfect fit. Though Shoe is justifiably “freaked out” at the thought of managing a veteran like Dean.

The merger continues the momentum we’re seeing at VentureBeat. Today we’re also announcing the hiring of Ben Popper, founding editor of Betabeat, the influential Silicon Alley blog from The New York Observer. He will be VentureBeat’s East Coast Editor. He’s done an excellent job covering the New York start-up and wider technology scene there and quickly caught our attention by the scoops he was getting about the New York scene. He’s got a “comer” reputation. We’re super excited about him joining us. Ben just blogged about the move here.

Benjamin Popper

Ben will join Devindra Hardawar and Sean Ludwig, our two other New York-based writers. Devindra becomes our national editor. While Ben will wake up early, and break East Coast news and focus on taking the New York scene by storm, Devindra will start shaping our national coverage for us early in the day. He’ll work closely with executive editor Dylan Tweney and senior editor Heather Kelly as they wake up on the West Coast, to guide coverage through the rest of the day.

VentureBeat plans to open an office in Manhattan next month. Ben will lead the local expansion there over the next two years. Expect more hires.

Previously, Ben has written about the culture and business of technology for The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Slate, and Fast Company. Prior to Betabeat and the Observer, he was a blogger at CBS Interactive.

We just can’t wait until both of them get started. While Shoe officially starts Feb 1, he’ll be working hard to get ready for the transition in the meantime. We’ll plan to syndicate the best of Bitmob’s content in the meantime, so readers can track all of the best stuff on GamesBeat beginning today.

Ben Popper starts Monday.

The new Flagship Ventures Fund IV L.P. was set at $250 million, but investors exceeded that amount. Investors included all types of organizations from foundations to corporations to individuals, including a few new limited partners that had not contributed to previous funds.

Flagship’s portfolio companies seem to be tackling big, human-scale problems from energy to epidemics, and the firm has seen exits that match that ambition. Some of its more notable exits include Adnexus Therapeutics, which was sold for $430 million to Bristol-Myers Squibb; Morphotek, which was acquired for $325 million by Japanese big pharma company Eisai; and Hypnion, which was bought by Lilly for an undisclosed sum.

“We are quite pleased by the market’s reaction to our fourth fund,” said Flagship CEO and managing partner Noubar Afeyan in a release.

“Despite the difficult environment for fundraising, especially for early-stage venture firms, we received strong support from our prior investors, as well as from several new important limited partners. We believe that the firm’s investment strategy and … history of building valuable, transformative companies are well aligned with the world’s ever increasing reliance on innovation, entrepreneurship and value creation.”

Indeed, VC fundraising had a lackluster year in 2011, according to Dow Jones analysts. On average, a U.S.-based venture capital firm in 2011 was only able to raise around $120 million.

Flagship’s last fund, which launched in pre-economic-meltdown 2007 with a healthy $235 million raise, fed a portfolio of 24 ventures such as Joule Unlimited, which aims to solve the global energy crisis with a biofuel alternative, and Selecta, which produces nanotechnology-powered vaccines.

Counting the new fund, Flagship now manages more than $900 million of early-stage capital and has cultivated a portfolio of more than 65 companies. Also, 25 of those companies came from inside Flagship itself via the firm’s in-house venture creation group, VentureLabs.

In addition to continuing its investment in early-stage companies, Flagship will use part of the new fund to invest in later-stage companies.

While U.S. VC funds finished the year with a strong fourth quarter of fundraising, funds raised by VCs during 2011 came in at barely more than half of the 2008 total.

“The industry has not yet bounced back from the recession,” said a Dow Jones spokesperson in an email.

The numbers for 2011 were slightly higher than those from 2010 (by 5 percent, to be exact), though that was largely driven by activity in early-stage funds.

All told, 135 U.S. venture capital funds raised $16.2 billion, representing a 12 percent decline in the number of funds raised this past year. Fundraising for the fourth quarter alone came to $5.2 billion — that’s more than the total funds raised during the second and third quarters put together.

While the state of VC fundraising in the U.S. could best be described as “meh,” the story in Europe was even less positive.

European VCs, said Dow Jones, hit a record low in 2011, when 41 funds raised just $3 billion in 2011. This represents a year-over-year deep decline — a 20 percent drop in the number of funds raising cash and an 11 percent drop in the total amount raised.

We asked Dow Jones for some historical context — just how much have funds dipped and surged since the 2008 crash?

“You’ll see that investment in early-stage and multi-stage funds dropped significantly between 2008 and 2011,” said a company representative, who kindly provided us with data for the graphs we’ve created below.

“Later-stage funds, however, are faring better in terms of capital collected having raised $4.7 billion in 2011 versus $3.9 billion in 2008,” the rep concluded. “The drop in the number of funds collecting capital is also notable and shows consolidation in the industry. In 2008, 205 funds won commitments from LPs. In 2011, 135 funds won commitments.”

“While brand-name firms are able to raise funds, most firms face significant challenges in fund-raising,” said VentureWire editor Zoran Basich in a statement.

“Limited partners remain wary of the industry after a decade in which returns have not matched expectations. Unless that changes, limited partners are likely to stick with what they view as the tried-and-true fund managers.”

Internap provides “intelligent IT Infrastructure solutions” for enterprises and uses a variety of solutions to lower IT costs, including Colocation, Enterprise IP and Hybrid Hosting. With Voxel’s inexpensive VoxCLOUD cloud hosting services and data centers all around the world, Internap is picking up extra resources to stake its future on the cloud.

“As IT Infrastructure outsourcing advances, enterprises increasingly seek service providers to support myriad applications and workloads throughout their entire IT lifecycle,” said Eric Cooney, president and CEO of Internap, in a statement. “This acquisition of Voxel increases Internap’s market share and growth rate, accelerates our product roadmap and creates an unmatched competitive position as an IT Infrastructure services provider.”

The deal between Internap and Voxel closed on Dec. 30, with an all-cash transaction of about $30 million. Internap has also offered up an “additional potential $5 million in cash tied to the delivery of specific objectives during the next two years.” Translation: if Voxel makes a boatload of cash in the short-term, key investors are getting a nice extra payday.

New York City-based Voxel was founded in 1999 and serves more than 1,000 customers. Voxel’s presence in North America, Europe and Asia will help Atlanta-based Internap with global penetration. Voxel was backed with a $5.5 million round by New York-based Seaport Capital.

Internap’s share price on the Nasdaq exchange is almost unchanged on the news and sits at $5.95 per share.

Overall, the year saw a 14 percent drop in deal activity between 2010 and 2011. Dow Jones VentureSource‘s data shows 522 total exits for the year — that’s 69 deals fewer than in 2010.

However, companies in 2011 were exiting earlier than yesteryear’s counterparts. They took less capital along the way, and they also generated more money during their exit events than did exiting companies in 2010.

Throughout the past year, all exit activity combined brought in $53.2 billion, representing a 26 percent increase in capital raised from similar deals in 2010. Also, the median price paid for an acquired company rose by 77 percent to $71 million in 2011.

“Despite a slower acquisition pace capped with an uncharacteristic drop in deal activity in the fourth quarter, there are some positive signs heading into the new year,” said VentureSource global research director Jessica Canning in a statement.

“Acquisitions of companies liquidating their assets were halved in 2011 and companies are benefiting from lower start-up costs by taking capital farther toward a larger acquisition.”

Venture-backed startups that exited in 2011 raised a median of $17 million in venture capital each, a 12 percent decrease from exiting companies in 2010. These startups had a median age of 5.3 years, a slight drop from a 5.4-year median age startups that exited in 2010.

Despite heavy turbulence in the general market beginning in August, 2011, the $5.4 billion raised from 45 startup IPOs in 2011 was higher by a significant percentage than the $3.3 billion raised by 46 such events in 2010.

Although a record number of IPOs were delayed in the week following the U.S. credit downgrade by Standard & Poor’s (and although a few IPOs went overseas), the year ended on a high note largely due to two IPOs: those of Groupon and Zynga, which raised $1.7 billion between them.

“The IPO market saw some gains through the first half of the year, but the momentum was not strong enough to survive the volatility in August,” said VentureSource editor Zoran Basich in a statement. “During 2012 we’ll get a sense of whether the last two years of flat IPO activity is the new normal for the industry or if there’s room to grow.”

Finally, 2011 saw a slump in fourth-quarter acquisition activity. Acquisitions in the fourth quarter were below third-quarter activity for the first time in five years. For all of 2011, 460 venture-backed startups were acquired for a total of $46.4 billion. These figures represent a 13 percent decrease from the number of M&As in 2010, but the amounts were up from 2010′s $35.6 billion total.

In 2011, buyouts accounted for 17 deals and $1.4 billion, both figures down from 32 deals and $3.4 billion in 2010.

Samsung will be buying all of Sony’s shares of the venture, S-LCD Corporation, for KRW 1.08 trillion, roughly $934 million.

Pending regulatory approval, the deal is expected to close by the end of next month, January 2012. As a result of the deal, Sony expects to record Q3 2012 losses of roughly $847 million, but it expects this one-time loss to be offset by an annual savings of $642 million, simply due to the fact that it won’t be operating an LCD manufacturing facility.

In the near future, Sony will have access to a “flexible and steady supply” of S-LCD Corp.’s panels from Samsung (at market prices, of course) without having to maintain and operate its own manufacturing plant.

In a press release, the companies stated that each has “entered into a new strategic agreement for the supply and purchase of LCD panels with a goal of enhancing the competitiveness of both companies.”

While the companies plan to continue their cooperative engineering of LCD panels, the S-LCD Corporation, which was established in 2004, will be entirely Samsung’s.

S-LCD Corp. is based in South Korea and currently manufactures seventh- and eighth-generation amorphous TFT LCD panels. The venutre has a market cap of around $2.8 billion. Both Samsung and Sony use the displays for LCD television sets as well as for mobile phones.

Sony also recently announced it was ending a longstanding brand name shared with Swedish telecommunications company Ericsson and will continue making mobile phones solely under the Sony name.

The deal is a convertible bond ($200mm) which converts into Sina stock at $65 per share. In addition to that, DST might also buy straight stock in SINA (equity). And the convertible bond likely has a small interest and could be converted into the stock at $65 per share at any time.

This deal will give Sina Weibo a $1 billion valuation.

Is it a better deal than what was reported in July? Then, Sina’s stock was $120 per share and the report said the valuation offered by DST was $5 billion. And now its stock is down to $52 per share, partially due to new rules that require microbloggers to verify their identities. Sina Weibo claimed 250 million users in November. Twitter, which claims 100 million active users, recently received a $300 million investment from the Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal and his firm Kingdom Holding.

The interesting part is that DST is partially owned by Tencent Holdings Ltd. which holds 10.26 percent of its shares. Sina Weibo’s biggest competitor is Tencent Weibo, which claims a larger user base of 310 million registered users as of Nov 2011.

This article originally appeared on TechNode, a VentureBeat editorial partner.

Because its proposed $39 billion merger fell through, AT&T now has to give up piles of cash and benefits to T-Mobile. AT&T will enter into a 7-year 3G roaming agreement that will boost T-Mobile coverage, and it has to give up a valuable package of AWS (Advanced Wireless Solutions) mobile spectrum that covers 128 cellular market areas (CMAs), including 12 of the top 20 U.S. markets. Overall, the agreements will boost T-Mobile’s blanket coverage from 230 million to 280 million people in America.

On top of doling out valuable benefits that will help the competition, AT&T will also pay $3 billion in cash to T-Mobile parent Deutsche Telekom. That $3 billion amount is one of the highest break-up fees ever.

The new service agreements will be important to T-Mobile USA if it wants to stem the tide of customers leaving its service. At the very least, T-Mobile’s current customers will benefit from the company having more coverage and spectrum that can help deliver data on smartphones.

T-Mobile said early today that there was “no Plan B” and the company is scrambling to figure out what to do next. Because the company doesn’t officially offer the iPhone, it has a major disadvantage when going up against AT&T, Verizon and Sprint.

The company, which initially started out as Fabulis, a social network for gay men, announced yesterday that it has raised $40 million in a second round of funding led by Andreessen Horowitz.

Additionally, Fab says it has grown by a 300,000 new members in the past two months, with a subscriber base of 1.2 million today. In its social network days, Fab struggled to reach more than 150,000 members.

The funding comes just six months after Fab.com launched, and the company says it will be used to “rapidly grow the business” throughout the next year. No big surprise there, but it’ll be interesting to see what else Fab can do to differentiate itself from its flash sales rivals like Ideeli. The company currently offers design-focused deals across categories like jewelry, artwork, and clothes for up to 70 percent off retail prices.

New York City-based Fab.com previously raised $8 million in its first round of funding after becoming profitable at just six weeks old. Existing investors include Menlo Ventures, First Round Capital, SoftTech VC, Baroda Ventures, and Ashton Kutcher. Andreessen general partner Jeff Jordan will be joining Fab.com’s board.

The buy isn’t too surprising if you’ve been paying attention to new HP CEO Meg Whitman’s comments over the past month. In mid-November, Whitman spoke about rebuilding the company’s financial position and acquisitions. She said: “No large acquisitions in 2012. Nothing the size of Autonomy, and maybe more like sub-$500 million.”

HP made the move to acquire major enterprise software player Autonomy for $10.3 billion in August, so the company is still digesting that deal. That acquisition was made under former HP CEO Leo Apotheker, who was ousted and replaced by Whitman.

Hiflex was founded in 1991 and is headquartered in Aachen, Germany. The company’s focus is on “web-to-print and management information systems solutions for printing services.” Hiflex also dabbles in cloud computing services that relate to imaging. The company said its users represent all areas of the graphics industry, including “commercial printing, periodicals, newspapers, labels and packaging.”

“HP wants to break the traditional barriers of how and where business customers print, making it easy for them to produce custom or personalized materials anywhere, anytime,” said Vyomesh Joshi, executive VP of HP’s Imaging and Printing Group, in a statement. “Hiflex’s technology provides a powerful platform to deliver on this goal as part of our overall cloud printing strategy.”

A promo video for Hiflex can be viewed below:

StyleCaster’s main web site, Stylecaster.com, and its social channels offer news and features related to style, fashion and celebrities, and the company focuses intently on fostering conversations around those topics. Stylecaster.com and sister site Beautyhigh.com, attract more than 2 million uniques visitors per month, and the company sells ads through other blogs as well.

“It’s not all about the Anna Wintours of the world,” StyleCaster CEO and co-founder Ari Goldberg told VentureBeat. “Anyone who wants to have a voice in fashion can do so through StyleCaster.”

StyleCaster will likely become profitable this year, Goldberg said. The next step for the main site will be a strong re-design that will go live early in 2012. It will also “unveil a proprietary and exclusive take on commerce.”

The addition of Van Natta and Ko to StyleCaster’s list of investors will almost certainly draw more attention to the company. Former MySpace head Van Natta stepped down as chief business officer from Zynga earlier this month and reportedly gave up millions of pre-IPO shares in the social games company. Ko has been helping Zynga transform mobile gaming with popular games like Words With Friends, CityVille, FarmVille and Zynga Poker.

The new funding round was led by previous investor Dan Gilbert, founder of Quicken Loans and owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers. Other participants in the bridge round include Mike Keriakos, President of Everyday Health; Abbey Doneger, President of Doneger Group; Jamie Driver, Managing Director of Morpheus Media; Joel Perlman, President of Copal Partners; and Josh Linkner, CEO of Detroit Venture Partners.

“We’re honored and humbled that we were able to get such high-quality investors involved in our business,” Goldberg said.

StyleCaster has now raised a total of $5.5 million, including the new round.

Cyber Monday sales may reach $1.2 billion this year, reports the LA Times, up from over $1 billion last year. 122 million Americans are expected to take part in Cyber Monday deals, and the number of consumers using their smartphones to shop is expected to double, according to a recent survey by BigResearch.

By comparison, Black Friday sales this year were $816 million (up 26 percent from a year ago), according to ComScore.

Not surprisingly, the rise of Cyber Monday seems to follow the rise of e-commerce in general. As ComScore’s Andrew Lipsman points out, Cyber Monday was just the 12th-biggest online shopping day back in 2006, but it steadily rose through the years, reaching the No. 1 spot for the first time last year.

Shop.org first coined the term “Cyber Monday” in 2005 as a marketing term to explain the noticeable rise in online shopping sales the Monday after Thanksgiving. The notion was that consumers were returning to high-speed internet connections at work and following through with purchases they had in mind over the holiday weekend.

Last year, over 12.1 percent of consumers surveyed by BigResearch said they planned to shop at work. This year that number has jumped to 15.9 percent. The company recently found that 76 million Americans will likely shop online during the holiday season.

It’s worth noting just how much mobile shopping has exploded when it comes to Cyber Monday. 3.6 million consumers used their phones to shop for deals in 2009, a number that is expected to triple to 17.8 million this year. That’s double the number of consumers who used their phones on Cyber Monday last year (7.3 million), according to BigResearch.

Amazon just revealed some of its deals for the conveniently made-up holiday, which includes a 250-gigabyte Xbox 360 (with Halo: Reach and and Fable III) for a cool $199, and Nokia’s former flagship phone, the N8, unlocked for just $299.99.

Other discounts include a recent 10-megapixel Sony Cybershot model for $199, and a Pentax K-5 DSLR camera for $999.

The company revealed that last Cyber Monday was its busiest day last year, with over 13.7 million items ordered at a speedy 158 items per second. It’ll be interesting to see if the same is true this year, since Amazon is also offering some deep discounts for Black Friday.

Cyber Monday used to be an easy way to classify e-commerce sales during the Thanksgiving holiday period, but with so many online retailers now offering Black Friday deals, it seems there’s less of a reason to justify another consumer spending orgy.

Photo via Scott Akerman

We’ve compiled a list of our favorite apps and services to make you a Black Friday master:

TGI Black Friday: If you haven’t come across this nifty app yet, then you’re likely new to the whole Black Friday app business. TGI Black Friday, available free for the iPhone and Android, compiles leaked deals and flyers from both online and retail stores. You can keep track of deals, share them with friends, and download PDFs of store flyers. If you download just one Black Friday app, this should be it. (All of TGI Friday’s deals are also available on its website, but since you can’t synchronize saved items between the site and app, we recommend you do most of your browsing on the app.)

Black Friday by Fatwallet: This app provides deals to retail stores from Fatwallet.com’s forums. It doesn’t cover online stores, but it may contain some deals to brick and mortar retailers that TGI Black Friday doesn’t offer.

ShopSavvy: Before you snap up a supposed deal, you can use ShopSavvy to scan product barcodes to search the web and competing retailers to see if there are any better offers.

FastMall, Point Inside, Micello: These apps all offer indoor mall maps, which will help you to keep your bearings if you need to trek out to far off shopping centers.

Lemon, Slice, OneReceipt: All of these services help you manage your physical and electronic receipts, which will help you keep better track of Black Friday spending. They all offer mobile apps to let you snap a photo of physical receipts, as well as the ability to scan your inbox for digital receipts. OneReceipt has yet to launch, but you can sign up for the private beta right now.

Mint: Want to keep track of your spending on a broader level? Mint will help you to make sense of Black Friday spending, as well as all of your other everyday expenses. If you need help figuring out a personal budget, Mint is the ticket.

And, as always, we’ll keep you in the loop on particularly great deals here at VentureBeat, like Apple’s upcoming Black Friday plans.

Have any useful Black Friday apps or services in mind not mentioned here? Let us know in the comments, as we’ll be updating this post throughout today and tomorrow with your suggestions.

Photo by Tshien on Flickr

In addition to settling on a good price for the Palm goodies, HP is also demanding that potential buyers license webOS back to it on the cheap for use in printers, a source with knowledge of the negotiations tells VentureBeat.

As for the status of the Palm sale, which includes webOS and Palm’s lovely treasure trove of patents, our source says that Intel has just begun discussions with HP. Our source also says that Qualcomm is still in the running for Palm, but the company has adamantly denied previous rumors about the deal.

Now I’m all for more innovative printers from HP, but it seems like a strange demand when the company is losing money every day it continues to hold on to webOS. (Pictured above, HP’s inexplicable printer/Android tablet combo.) HP paid $1.2 billion for Palm last year, and it revealed in its earnings report today that it spent another $1.66 billion just to wind down its webOS business, as AllThingsD points out.

HP has said previously that webOS could eventually make its way to printers and PCs, but now with a Palm sale imminent, it seems strange for the company to hold true to that initial promise. I can’t imagine that many consumers are chomping at the bit for webOS-enabled printers, and much of the benefit from using webOS as the basis of printer software — including ease of development and potential third-party app support — could be seen by jumping to Android.

Then again, it’s possible that HP has webOS printers near completion, so by licensing the software it’ll still be able to move forward with those products. Given that no major printer competitors are aiming for Palm, a potential buyer shouldn’t have any problem licensing webOS to HP (though that depends on how cheap HP’s demands are for the licensing fees).

And what of Amazon? In September we reported that Amazon was in deep negotiations to snap up Palm, but it’s unclear if that’s still the case now. I still think Amazon would be a good fit for webOS — definitely more so than other alternatives like Intel, Qualcomm, or, God forbid, RIM — because it would be able to take advantage of Palm’s software in future tablets. And of course, it wouldn’t hurt for Amazon to be sitting pretty with Palm’s patents.

Evelyn Rusli of The New York Times reports that the company plans to raise approximately $114.3 million by issuing 8.79 million shares, with underwriters Bank of America Merrill Lynch keeping open the option of adding an additional 1.3 million shares, if the initial flotation is oversubscribed.

Angie’s List, which lets users review a wide variety of service providers, from landscapers to surgeons,  is not a pure-play technology company. Angie’s List earns much of its money from paid search results, with contractors who wish to appear more often paying for placement.

Technology companies are once again testing the public’s appetite for their stock, beginning with the IPO of LinkedIn this past March. Social Games site Zynga has filed its S-1 and its IPO is expected before the new year. Yelp, another local reviews site for restaurants and services has also expressed its intention to go public and recently selected its underwriters.

Groupon, which became a publicly traded company on Nov. 4, listed its shares at $2o for its initial public offering. Groupon shares initially soared, hitting $28  per share on their first day, but have continued to cool. At the close of trading today, Groupon shares were trading at $24.07. LinkedIn shares, which debuted at $83 per share in May, were trading at $71.56 at the close of markets today, just as the employee lockout period comes to a close.

In the case of Groupon, Yelp, and Angie’s List, and to an extent, LinkedIn, the companies’ core products are not technological. So, while the public offering signal a return of tech stock offerings to the market, it is a bit of a mischaracterization, because none of the companies make and sell software.

Angie’s List, while not as well-known as other IPO contenders, is a 16-year-old company that raked in $38.6 million in revenues during the first six months of 2011, though the company is not yet profitable.

[Image Credit: Stuck in Customs/Flickr]

The free Yipit app will be location aware and will enable users to take advantage of nearby deals similar to Scoutmob, TheDealMix and TheDealMap, which all allow map-based navigation based on what is discounted nearby.

With the ever-present threat of “deals fatigue,” does the world need another deals app? The answer to that question might be yes, if Yipit were just any other app. While many of the features of Yipit’s app will be familiar to anyone with a smartphone, functionality such as location awareness and push notifications, it’s the company’s mastery of daily deals data that will set its app apart from the crowd.

Yipit is a leading data provider to analysts who watch the daily deals industry. The company has also offered a daily email aggregating deals offered by  hundreds of national and local daily deals providers across the U.S. The company has aggregated more than 1 million deals nationwide, all without spending a dollar on marketing, says Yipit co-founder Jim Moran.

Moran disputes that there is such a thing as daily deals fatigue. ”Nobody complains there are too many products available online,” Moran says, because e-commerce sites such as Amazon and eBay do a good job of filtering products and putting the right offers in front of the right people. Moran says that if consumers received an email with every product available online, they would have ecommerce fatigue the same way people talk about deals fatigue. According to Moran, the true power of algorithms like the one powering the Yipit app is evident not from what you see, but from what you don’t see–namely, the deals that aren’t relevant.

And as the holiday shopping season approaches, Moran says he is excited about using the app to find gifts for his two sisters who live in San Francisco. Yipit is hoping to decouple the idea of local shopping from local consumption. The app will make it easier than ever for someone who doesn’t live in a local area to buy products or experiences for someone who does, without having to sign up for emails, or sift through offers.

Time and again Yipit proved to be a bee in Groupon’s bonnet, as the company geared up for its Nov. 4 IPO. By tracking the number of deals Groupon sold, and calculating the revenue split with merchants, Yipit was able to issue reasoned estimates of Groupon’s true profitability, even as Groupon itself was loathe comment. So Yipit may yet have a strong hand to play with its mobile app.

Groupon and LivingSocial together account for more than 75 percent of the revenue of the entire daily deals industry, but they have less than 20 percent of the total inventory, which means that it falls to consumers themselves to take advantage of additional 80 percent of discounted local products and services that are available.

With the Yipit app the many small players who make up the “long tail” of daily deals, such as InBundles,  now may have a fighting chance.

Gilt Groupe announced today that its online flash sales site will soon be available in over 90 countries outside of the US.

The news is yet another sign of growth for Gilt, which helped to popularize the members only flash sales trend when it launched in 2007. The company also recently purchased the luxury daily deals site BuyWithMe, the third-place daily deals site behind Groupon and LivingSocial. With global ambitions, Gilt’s audience, as well as its list of participating designers (it’s already working with over 6,000 designer brands), will surely skyrocket.

Gilt will offer free shipping to international customers for a limited time. Users outside of the US will be able to make purchases thorough its mobile website and apps, including iPhone, iPad, and Android, starting next month. The company is working together with global commerce company FiftyOne to manage international currency conversion, transactions, and delivery.

Gilt Groupe’s recent $138 million funding round valued the company at $1 billion. The company had 3.5 million members as of May.

The IPO has been planned since late August. In updated SEC documents filed today, the company indicated that it plans to offer about 10 million shares at up to $13 apiece. After the offering, 49 million shares will be outstanding, which would put the company’s value at $641 million. No date has been set for the IPO.

The company lost $8 million on revenue of $61 million in 2010. It has about $1 million in the bank.

Angie’s List was founded in 1995 by Angie Hicks (referred to as Angela Hicks Bowman in SEC documents) who initially collected reviews by going door-to-door in her hometown of Columbus, Ohio, according to the company’s official bio. She left the company in 1998 to get an MBA at Harvard Business School, according to Bloomberg BusinessWeek, and later returned at the company’s chief marketing officer.

Hicks holds 1.8 percent of the company that bears her name, while chief executive William Oesterle holds 7.5 percent.

Chief backers include TRI Investments, Battery Ventures, BV Capital, and T. Rowe Price.

Mendix offers enterprise and mid-size customers its Mendix 3.0 platform, which helps companies plan, develop, integrate and deploy custom-made applications to run smoother. Because of the platform’s flexibility, Mendix’s apps can be deployed in the cloud, locally or through smartphones and tablets. Mendix claims its service helps businesses take apps to market at six times the speed of normal development.

The $13 million round was led by Prime Ventures, with additional participation from HENQ Invest, which provided an unnamed sum in 2006 for Mendix’s seed funding. Some of Mendix’s customers include General Electric, TNT, Royal Bank of Scotland and Adventure Media.

“To date we have always organically achieved triple-digit growth on the results of delivering business value and solving real pain-points for our clients,” said Mendix CEO Derek Roos in a statement. “Our customers are looking to increase their business agility and turn to Mendix to jumpstart their productivity and app deployment.”

Boston-based Mendix was founded in 2005. The company currently has offices in the U.S., U.K., the Netherlands and South Africa, and claims to have 20,000 users around the world.

Mendix’s quirky video below also illustrates how the company is changing business app development:

There are two ways to run a deals business. You can build a dedicated sales force and seek out willing businesses who want to run a deal with you. But it takes a lot of time, effort, and financial dedication to successfully locate and convince business owners their deal will go far. Because deals are so hyper-local, it also takes a large knowledge base or team to know who to contact. Indeed, big names like Facebook and Yelp had to scale back or close down deals operations altogether.

In order to combat this expense and the big potential for failure, some players in the deals space have instead opted to aggregate deals from other deals sites.

Now, it seems, there is a third, hybrid option, which Google is taking: partnering while conducting its own business.

So in addition to the deals its generated on its own, Google offering deals from partners, including family-specific deals, outdoor adventure sports, high-end products and experiences, classes and more. Without the partners, Google would be hard-pressed to expand so quickly. But with new verticals and broader offerings, the company must also combat deals-spam, which it is doing with a personalization quiz.

The idea is to help Google understand what kind of deals you like, so you are not as quick to toss a Google Offers email in the trash. The quiz will allow you to tell Google where you hang out and what categories most interest you, with the option to change and update these preferences later.

In order to flesh out Google Offers, the company has also been busy acquiring deals businesses around it such as DailyDeal and The Dealmap, which Google said was directly influential in these new partnerships. Google’s quarterly report released on Wednesday also showed the company bought German deals site DailyDeal for $114 million.

Companies Google partnered with include Dealfind, DoodleDeals, Gilt City, GolfNow, HomeRun, Juice in the City, kgbdeals, Mamapedia, Plum District, PopSugar Shop, ReachDeals, Active.com Schwaggle, TIPPR and zozi.

The new deals will be available in San Francisco, Calif., first and will gradually roll out to more cities.

“We were told on Tuesday at 5 pm an alarming majority of employees were being laid off with no severance, and a small group of employees would be retained in a last-ditch effort to sell the company,”  Ian Boschen, BuyWithMe’s former of director of marketing, told VentureBeat. He said fewer than 10 of the 100 New York-based staff members remain. We have contacted BuyWithMe for confirmation, but it has not yet responded.

The layoffs come after the Boston-based company was unable to raise a new round of financing at a valuation of $500 million. BuyWithMe had raised $21.5 in Series A and Series B funding as of July 2010, according to CrunchBase.

Crowley said in a statement provided to media that the company was reducing its headcount in order to continue to serve customers and merchants in some capacity:

“BuyWithMe did have a significant reduction in staffing this week. We did this so the company is in the best position to continue to serve its merchants and members. As an organization we’re continuing to pursue our business and to support our customers throughout the country.”

Another former employee of BuyWithMe told BetaBeat the company burned through its cash trying to buy its way to growth and profitability, but was unable to make the strategy play out successfully. In the past year, the company acquired deal sites Scoop St, DealADayOnline, Swoop, LocalTwist and Edhance, a loyalty program.

“We would buy a new company and see growth from some of their users, but that’s it,” the former employee told BetaBeat. At issue was the fact that BuyWithMe was investing heavily to build its own technology in an effort to create a viable national brand based on deals. However, the challenge of building a generic, national franchise may have proved too much.

“I think that this is further proof that the branded side of daily deals sector is over, “said Martin Tobias, the CEO of Tippr, a leading provider of white-label deals technology for publishers and websites. “I expected it. I’m not surprised,” Tobias said.

Is the news a bad omen for the daily deals sector as a whole? Companies such as Groupon and BuyWithMe have been very successful in creating awareness that local businesses can reach new customers online, though it remains to be seen whether their prodigious, and expensive, marketing efforts will result in long-term success. Yesterday, Groupon announced the schedule for its IPO roadshow, with a significantly lower valuation than was expected. Groupon has repeatedly come under fire for its accounting practices, and the company spent $432 million on marketing and customer acquisition in the first six months of 2011, according to company filings.

Vinicius Vacanti, CEO of Yipit, a daily deals aggregator and industry data provider, thinks brands and media companies with existing audiences are poised to capitalize on the awareness created by pioneers such as Groupon.

“What really matters to the space is that the Googles and Amazons are expanding,” said Vacanti.

Both Tobias and Vacanti think media brands with an existing audience that are beginning to promote their own deals through existing channels, rather than trying to create consumer brands from scratch, will win. Tobias said that over the past six months more than 200 media brands have begun offering their own deals, and around 90 of them are using Tippr.

While consumers’ appetites for deals may not be waning, the landscape is very challenging to any startup looking to get in on the deals space. The door may be closed for any company with national ambitions, unless it’s very crafty.

Of all the people to defend AT&T’s $39 billion purchase of T-Mobile, Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam comes as one of the biggest surprises.

Speaking at a Goldman Sachs investor conference on Wednesday, McAdam said the massive deal has to occur, unless the government can better focus on giving telecoms more wireless spectrum, according to the mobile site Boy Genius Report.

“I have taken the position that the AT&T merger with T-Mobile was kind of like gravity,” he told investors. “It had to occur, because you had … T-Mobile that had the spectrum but didn’t have the capital to build it out. AT&T needed the spectrum, they didn’t have it in order to take care of their customers, and so that match had to occur.”

McAdam went on to say that he has told the FCC that blocking the merger will harm American consumers. (Verizon Wireless is co-owned by Verizon and Vodafone.) The U.S. government filed papers to block the T-Mobile deal on August 31, saying that it would “substantially” reduce competition. Sprint followed up with its own lawsuit a few days later.

AT&T reiterated Wednesday that it’s seeking a “prompt trial” for the DOJ’s suit, Bloomberg reports. “We’re seeking a prompt trial because we’re very interested in closing this transaction,” AT&T attorney Mark Hansen said. “We need to have the cloud of uncertainty removed. We’re already a month beyond where we want to be.”

It’s interesting that Verizon’s CEO would be so gung-ho about letting his biggest rival become even more powerful. It could be a hint that Verizon Wireless wants to keep the door open to acquire Sprint. McAdam can’t trash talk the T-Mobile merger now when the company may need to convince regulators in a few years that it needs to purchase Sprint.

Photo by Stuart Isett/Fortune Brainstorm TECH

Amongst all the niche deals websites out there, JustFabulous attempts to make its user experience closer to that of a book club. The site targets women and offers a variety of handbags, shoes, denim and sunglasses based on a personality test taken upon joining. The personality test determines whether your style is classy, conservative, trendy, or other classification and assembles a boutique of discounted items matching your preferences. All of the offerings on the site are priced at $39.95. The site also offers fashion advice and recommendations based on the offer.

JustFabulous was born out of incubator Intelligent Beauty in March 2010. The company has since gained 2.5 million members and is seeing over $3 million in monthly revenue. In October, JustFabulous will add jewelry to its offering.

“The fashion industry has been slow to adopt technology,” said Josh Hannah, general partner at Matrix Partners. “But it’s not turning a corner and this is where some of the most exciting new business models are surfacing, particularly when it comes to personalization.”

Hannah is joining JustFabulous’ board of directors in this round.

JustFabulous has 130 employees and is headquartered in El Segundo, Calif. Currently, the company has raised $62 million in total, investors including incubator Intelligent Beauty, Matrix Partners, Technology Crossover Ventures, and Kimora Lee Simmons.

Google has been off to a somewhat slow start with its still-young Offers service, which it created after Groupon declined a $6 billion acquisition offer from Google back in late 2010. Google Offers is now live in nine U.S. cities and will be launching in more in the near future. This will mark Google’s second acquisition to help its deals presence; the first was the buyout of DealMap last month, which enabled Google to shows deals on Google Maps.

DailyDeal offers deals in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, so it will give Google a quick way to add customers in those countries. It launched in December 2009 as a two-person startup and has quickly grown, with a reported 252,000 coupons sold in the first quarter of this year. The Austrian version of the site has already reportedly surpassed Groupon in the country.

Google Offers and the newly acquired companies will likely get more attention with the introduction of Google Wallet, a service that is quietly launching today and should become more prominent in the coming months. Wallet is Google’s long-awaited mobile payments service that will let users pay for goods using their Android phones.