Twitter COO Dick Costolo, speaking today on a panel at TechCrunch’s Real-Time CrunchUp event in San Francisco, shed some light into the micromessaging service’s revenue plans, promising that it will begin taking a cut of its partners’ advertising revenues “early next year.” Meanwhile, it will “foster mechanisms that allow partners to do more sophisticated things” with its APIs. Twitter also plans to offer commercial accounts that contain premium features like analytics dashboards and multiple authors, according to Costolo.

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

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

Updated: Infoaxe is revealing to the world today its alter ego: a search engine. Unlike other real-time search engines such as OneRiot, Infoaxe doesn’t depend on Twitter streams and the like (Update: OneRiot emailed to note that it also uses a panel in addition to social sharing streams). Instead, it anonymously harvests data from its millions (low millions, for now) of people who use its personal search history plug-in.

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

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

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deals and hosted web streams of TV and movies — the kinds of query for which another search engine might deliver an outdated pile of spammy SEO junk, or a more timeless link like an IMBD page, respectively.

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

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

In my first week back on the web beat at GigaOM, one of the topics I wanted to focus on was location. Let’s just say that hasn’t exactly been a difficult task. Coming at us from Boulder, San Francisco and London, here are today’s top three geo-tagging developments:

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

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

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

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

What’s interesting is that Flook comes from two Symbian founders, Roger Nolan and Jane Sales. Said Nolan on a call from London today, “Apple seemed to just do all the things that Symbian and Nokia should have done for a long time.” So he and Sales (they’re married) along with two other co-founders raised $1 million 1 million pounds ($1.65 million) from Eden Ventures and Amadeus Capital and founded Ambient a year ago. Flook is the company’s first project.

As AOL lays off a third of its work force as it prepares to go independent, it’s looking to drop its ICQ and MapQuest units, according to reports by Kara Swisher. But with the deluge of information hitting web users these days, location and presence are two of the most promising ways to parse the online world (GigaOM Pro sub. required). They’re also two of the most innovation-rich veins of the last year, with projectile growth of mobile location apps and the ongoing real-time status arms race. While AOL is busy revising itself to be about content and advertising, both of those areas of focus benefit greatly from context and relevance.

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

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

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

Though there’s no lack of venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, you can count one more. Maveron this week announced it is opening a San Francisco office, headed by partner Amy Errett, the former CEO of Olivia.com who joined Maveron as an entrepreneur in residence two years ago.

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

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

Employee shares of Facebook are selling for $21 on SecondMarket, valuing the social network’s common stock at $9.5 billion, Bloomberg is reporting today. That’s up 42 percent in the past four months, which SecondMarket takes to mean that an IPO is nigh, but could also just reflect Facebook’s recent announcement that it’s cash-flow positive. And $9.5 billion doesn’t include the preferred shares issued to investors.

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

With of an infrastructure of social location information just starting to coagulate, the monetization side is raring to go. Since real-time mobile advertising is inherently somewhat invasive (and by extension, somewhat creepy), these products end up less groundbreaking than they could be. (Which is OK by me.)

A new offering from a San Francisco-based company called 1020 Placecast — which is announcing today that it’s raised a $5 million Series B — will be trialed with three retailers over the holidays; it uses a double-opt-in relationship built directly between users and their favorite shops. Once users sign up to receive alerts on a phone that has persistent location information (BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Android), they get pinged with marketing messages from that brand every time they enter a “geo-fence” targeted area, as small as a single city block.

Another way to geo-target users is to advertise to them when they’ve checked into a known venue — say, a baseball stadium for a game. Startups like mDialog are trying to make this work. To me, that makes a little more sense than waiting for a previously identified customer to wander onto your block.

1020 Placecast raised the Series B round from Quatrex Capital, Onset Ventures and Voyager Capital; it brings total investment in the 3.5-year-old company to about $10 million. The company makes money by charging brands a set-up fee and then a monthly fee based on number of users. It says its technology is ready and it just needs the cash for marketing and biz dev.

Though 1020 Placecast is really more of a mobile marketing company, any startup involved in advertising or mobile is pretty psyched about what Google’s bid-up $750 million AdMob buy does to its valuation.

For more on the promise and worry of push-based location-aware mobile advertising, see this panel writeup from our Mobilize conference a couple months ago.

Nextstop, a user-generated travel site, is releasing an API for its location-specific short-form recommendations. The self-funded company, founded by former Google product managers, only launched in June and has attracted low hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors, however it has ambitious plans to be a global (read: not hubbed around a few cities like Yelp) and comprehensive resource of recommended places and activities.

For now Nextstop is just a web site, and an English-language one at that, but the API enables things like automated Twitter queries (built in-house as an example) where you can ask @nextstopbot what’s good and near to an address. The six-person Nextstop team, said co-founder Carl Sjogreen (best known as product manager of Google Calendar), has put much focus into laying the groundwork to scale to be “a Wikipedia of all the great places in the world,” spending much of its time working on things like a reputation system to give good users more contribution powers.

The race to build a database of the world’s coolest locations may be moving faster than San Francisco-based Nextstop, though, with companies like Foursquare — which also just released an API — using the real-time and personal nature of mobile, as well as social gaming, to incentivize user contributions. Others working on location databases include Mozilla, uLocate and Geodelic. Though it seems folks like Twitter and Facebook could easily propel themselves past the competition with their highly social user bases.

With only less than a week left until our NewTeeVee Live conference, we’re raring to go. Some of the sessions I’m most excited about for next week’s conference are the startups and the stars, so I wanted to call them out for you. We are getting close to a sell-out crowd, so you’re highly encouraged to snag your ticket ASAP.

Presenting startups at NewTeeVee Live include:

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

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

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

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

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

Vdopia, a profitable iPhone advertising platform, has raised $4 million in Series A funding from Nexus Venture Partners. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company, which only launched in the U.S. in March, claims it’s seeing 4 percent click-through rates for its pre-roll videos before applications start — an impressive number that Vdopia says does not include accidental clicks, as so many ad stats do.

The iPhone makes an an ideal advertising environment because it eliminates the clutter of a web page, said Vdopia founder Srikanth Kakani during a phone interview Tuesday. Vdopia claims it now reaches more than 10 million U.S. iPhone users through apps like iBaseball and Arcade Hoops, with advertisers including Coke Zero, Warner Bros. and the National Guard.

Alongside the funding, Vdopia has brought on tech entrepreneur and investor Rohit Sharma as its president and CEO. Sharma was previously an investor at Mohr Davidow Ventures and CTO of ONI Systems. Next up for Vdopia is the Android platform. The company also maintains a web-based video ad business in India, where most of its 17-member team is based.

MySpace’s recent reorientation to emphasize entertainment over friends makes it more similar to Twitter than Facebook, said News Corp Chief Digital Officer Jonathan Miller at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. “Twitter is about asymmetrical relationships,” said Miller, while Facebook users have mostly symmetrical friend relationships. “MySpace is in between. One of the things we have to focus on right now is you have to declare a major.”

But ultimately MySpace will end up more like Twitter. “MySpace is more about interests, which is followers and followed, than just the pure friend thing,” said Miller. “But obviously I believe we have the ability to be much richer [than Twitter].”

In some respects this shift is quite obvious, but it’s interesting to hear News Corp spell it out. And Miller is right: Though Twitter is quite the phenomenon right now, MySpace does have more features. Twitter is at its core a broadcast system, whereas MySpace can get a lot deeper into music and other content.

Time to stop procrastinating and reserve your ticket to NewTeeVee Live! Today, Oct. 16th, is your final chance to buy a discounted pass to the conference. For just $395 (a sliver of other industry conferences, and $200 less than our walk-in ticket), you’ll get a jam-packed day of interviews with industry heavyweights, demos of the devices soon to hit your living room, and previews of the next generation of video giants.

Some of the timely topics our speakers will be addressing:

TV HERE, THERE AND EVERYWHERE:

Amy L. Banse, President, Interactive Media & SVP, Comcast
Brian Fuhrer, SVP, Program Leader, TV/Internet Integration, Nielsen
Erik Flannigan, EVP of Digital Media, MTVN Entertainment Group

OVER-THE-TOP AND THROUGH THE WOODS:

Reed Hastings, CEO, Netflix
Anthony Wood, Founder and CEO, Roku, Inc.
Marc Whitten, GM of Xbox LIVE, Microsoft
Kevin Lynch, CTO, Adobe Systems

THE VIDEO SOCIAL CLUB:

Hunter Walk, Director of Product for YouTube, Google
Randi Zuckerberg, Marketing, Facebook
Andy Mitchell, VP of Digital and Development Marketing, CNN

This morning I received an email from Ian Gardiner, CEO of Viocorp, who said he’s flying out from Australia for the event. So the rest of you have no excuses!

Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom’s Joost and Joltid today announced and filed a lawsuit against Michaelangelo Volpi, Joost’s former president, CEO and chairman; and his current private equity firm and Joost investor, Index Ventures. The suit claims that Volpi and Index breached fiduciary duty, interfered with prospective business advantage, misappropriated trade secrets, breached contracts, breached confidence, and committed civil conspiracy.

The gist of the lawsuit is that Volpi learned how to modify Joltid’s proprietary software to run on the web without the aid of a peer-to-peer software when he was transitioning Joost from a peer-to-peer service to a web-based Hulu clone. And with this knowledge, he was able to pitch a version of Skype that buyers could take over from eBay while side-stepping ongoing litigation.

Continue reading the full story on NewTeeVee.

The concept of attention is fascinating, Bernardo Huberman, senior HP fellow and director of HP Labs’ Social Computing Laboratory, said at Mobilize 09 today.

To that effect, Huberman mentioned a couple of Labs products that he’s been working on that came out of research on mobile and web attention habits:

Friendlee: Builds an on-the-fly list of people you’ve been communicating with. This sounds a bit like Xobni, but for mobile. The app was originally developed for Android and is preparing for a pilot launch. It maps your friends’ location and availability (silent, vibrating, etc). If you stop communicating with someone, he or she eventually disappears off your list. Huberman said this might also be applicable in a corporate setting, for instance, for sales teams, but he’s mostly interested in consumers. It came out of research HP did on Twitter, where the average number of connections/followers is far greater than those with whom people have actual interactions.

i-catcher: This one comes out of research on the disproportionate popularity of some content on sites like Digg and YouTube. “A small fraction of content gets an inordinate amount of attention,” said Huberman. “Attention decays in a universal fashion; it has a half-life.” The tool sits on a web site and monitors the rate at which people are accessing content, then reorders that content to maximize the number of hits a piece of content gets. Sounds like Baynote.

When asked for takeaways about mobile design, five user experience experts had this to say on a panel at Mobilize 09:

Prashant Agarwal, Managing Director, Fjord New York, Fjord: While understanding of mobile interaction has improved dramatically, display sizes are not keeping up. The big visual design challenge is reconciling this.

Robin Boyar, Founder, thinktank research & strategy : Give anything you’re developing to your 7-year-old kid and 70-year-old mother. (This got a smattering of applause.)

Jesse James Garrett, President and Founder, Adaptive Path: Make sure you understand the purpose your application fills in the life of your users: when, where, what context, etc.

Denise Gershbein, Creative Director, frog design: What do you mean when you say innovation? Do you mean near-term or long-term paradigm shifting?

Crysta Metcalf, Principal Staff Anthropologist, Social Media Research Lab, Motorola: Stop looking at mobile design in isolation.

Other interesting design challenges suggested by the panel and the Mobilize audience:

• Gestures: They “will be a big pain in the ass for a while,” said Garrett. “With every finger you add to the interface it goes exponentially more complex.”

Augmented reality: This “is the opportunity that’s just going to blow the lid off of everything,” said Gershbein. “That’s the moment when you stop looking down at a device and hold up a lens to the world.” Mobile users could emerge from their insulated bubble of staring into their handsets and back into the social context, she said.

• Battery life: Even the newer BlackBerrys now die quickly if “push” apps are left on, said Agarwal.
• 4G/LTE: Research has to look at the wide angle to understand how people will use new mobile capabilities, said Gershbein. You have to look at patterns and trends in entertainment, culture and elsewhere.
• Platform and demographic mismatches: Boyar brought up the issue of young and digitally native people not necessarily using the top-of-the-line phones. “The more advanced handsets are not adopted by the younger generation because cost is an issue…so some of the most interesting applications actually aren’t meshing with people who grew up digital,” but rather affluent people above the age of 30, who often have devices subsidized by their work.
• Set-up: Agarwal said one of the best user experiences he’s seen is on the Amazon Kindle. “You get the device, turn it on, it’s yours — you don’t have to log in, your books are already there. I think it’s a really great experience.”
• Marketing: “Right now context means location more than anything else, but it has to be much more than that,” said Agarwal. In the near term, that might mean a phone having awareness of the user’s taste in music or a calendar.

Following Motorola Co-CEO Sanjay Jha’s presentation at Mobilize of the new Moto phone Cliq and Android-powered OS MotoBlur, Jha paused amidst a papparazzi-like onslaught of attention for his new phone for a lively on-stage discussion about the big picture with Google VP Engineering Andy Rubin and GigaOM founder Om Malik.

Jha diffused expectations for the Cliq by saying it’s not “the make-or-break phone,” but rather “the first step in a long journey,” and promised tens of products over the next 15-18 months in the MotoBlur family.

Rubin described the goal of Android and MotoBlur as bringing the web to people’s pockets. “The Internet is the destination,” he said. When a phone is connected to the Internet and cloud services, it can be in your pocket, with its screen off, working on your behalf (and bring more people to the web to see Google ads), he said.

Rubin explained he expected many industries — the enterprise, schools — to be transformed by the modern smartphone, but not directly. “When it becomes personal, it’s up to the consumer to bring it into the industry.”

Jha elaborated, “I see the smartphone as the future of consumer and prosumer computing. For enterprise it’s possible there are other form factors. But for consumers, I can’t see that in 5-10 years’ time, people don’t view this as their primary computer. If it doesn’t fit in the pocket, I don’t think it’s going to be a relevant device from a consumer/prosumer point of view.”

Rubin said the next big development in smartphones is for modernized browsers (aka HTML 5) to get mobile, so the developer base becomes broad and unified across various platforms. Jha said circa 2011 he thinks the big stories in smartphones will be context awareness, trust, healthcare and fitness, and multimedia/4G.

The only jab Om could get out of Rubin or Jha with regards to Apple’s iPhone was for Jha to say that he thinks having applications deeply integrated into the phone is preferable to swiping through seven pages of 16 icons.