Reflecting interest from the U.S. (the site’s users are split evenly between the U.S. and Europe), the company opened an office in New York in March, and today is rolling out new features that let users receive rewards as points that are redeemable as exclusive offers from merchants.

Roxanne Varza, the company’s communications director, declined to disclose the number of Shopcade users, but said the user population is growing about 20-30 percent a month and is 35 percent male. The website also features about 65 million products, including those from brands like Urban Outfitters, Adidas and Forever 21.

Users log into Shopcade with their Facebook account to follow brands, people and categories. They can also select products from the overall pool and add them to their personal “shopcades” (or individual collections of favorite items). As they recommend and buy products, users receive cash or points from the sale. (User actions generate affiliate links, which enable the site to give users a cut of sales.)

Previously, Shopcade only let users redeem points to customize their shopcades (with different colors, decorations, etc.). But Varza said the new changes will enable users to redeem their points with exclusive offers from merchants, as well as digital goods, such as music from iTunes or Spotify. The company is also exploring the use of those new points to drive offline shopping.

Previous reports have suggested that the affiliate e-commerce site encourages social spam. But Varza said users are rewarded per purchase (when friends make a purchase after entering their Shopcade) and not per click, so they’re incentivized to choose products others will buy and not just overwhelm their friends with products.

While the site hasn’t boasted of a multimillion dollar funding round, its founder and funders offer compelling pedigrees. Nathalie Gaveau, the founder and CEO, co-founded PriceMinister, a French eBay rival that was later acquired by Japanese e-commerce site Rakuten (which recently invested in Pinterest).  Its angel investors include Daniel Bernard, former CEO of European retailer Carrefour, Ian Livingston, co-founder of Eidos Games and Lord John Birt, former director general of the BBC. The company hasn’t disclosed the amount of its seed funding but is looking to raise a new round.

Shopcade’s latest changes come on the heels of Fab.com’s recent decision to step up its social options. And, like Pinterest, Varza said, people are using the site to express themselves through shopcades dedicated to specific categories and interests (like Hello Kitty or, oddly, Moose).

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• Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated
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Huffington Post Media Group: AOL’s Janet Balis has been appointed publisher of the Huffington Post Media Group, and Moritz Loew has been named head of sales specialist and SVP. Balis, who was once EVP of media sales and marketing at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, was most recently SVP and head of sales strategy, marketing and partnerships at AOL. In this new role, Balis will oversee development of partnerships and strategies for HPMG.

Loew previously worked with MSNBC, where he was chief agency officer and GM of sales for MSNBC Interactive.

The Atlantic: Hayley Romer is now associate publisher, where she’ll work closely with VP and Publisher Jay Lauf and oversee the sales team. Prior to this, Romer worked with Condé Nast Media Group, where she most recently served as executive director of corporate sales.

Everyday Health: Two promotions and three new VPs: Scott Wolf is now chief sales officer and Laura Klein steps up as EVP of sales. Tracy Chapman, Orlando Reece and Andy Jacobson join as VPs of consumer insights, broadcast and digital video sales, and sales, respectively. Wolf joined the company in 2005 to help launch EverydayHealth.com, and has been promoted from EVP of sales. Klein, who joined in 2007, has been promoted from SVP of sales.

Electus: Eli Shibley has been promoted to VP of international media and formats from executive director of the division. Electus also has two new hires: Cyrus Farrokh as executive director of international distribution and production, and Diego Piasek as director of international distribution and production. All three will report to John Pollak, President of Electus International. Farrokh and Piasek come from Shine International, where they served as director of sales and sales executive-Latin America, respectively.

PostRelease: George Carney is now SVP of sales. He most recently was GM/VP of advertising sales and operation at RealNetworks.

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• Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated
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Elliott filed the complaint after Google won a ruling this month that forced him to hand over more than 750 website names such as “googlegaycruises.com” and “googledonaldtrump.com.” He claims he needs the names to start a business based on “commerce.. charity, and more.”

The complaint, filed in Phoenix, says that Google is a common transitive verb for internet searching and notes that the American Dialect Society declared it be the “word of the decade.” It also cites a 2010 report in which Google allegedly stated that it could lose its trademark if the word google became synonymous with search. The company first applied to trademark “google” in 1997 and has since received a number of certificates covering the mark.

Brands can lose their trademarks if consumers start treating them interchangeably with an everyday word. Famous example includes “zipper,” “yo-yo” and “aspirin.”

This won’t happen, however, if Google can show that consumers still associate the word with the company.

Here’s a copy of the complaint:

Google Trademark Complainthttp://www.scribd.com/embeds/94843966/content?start_page=1&view_mode=list&access_key=key-ptj2nrtmmciudwew6cg

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On Friday, NBCUniversal and CBS Corp. filed separate federal lawsuits against Dish Network. They joined Fox, which filed its own suit against the satellite TV service provider Thursday, in claiming Dish’s new “AutoHop” digital video recorder feature infringes on their copyrights by deleting their commercials.

Also read: Dish’s “Auto Hop” ad-skipping device in legal showdown with networks

However, with broadcasters loudly signaling their unease with Dish’s new product offering over past few weeks, and litigation widely viewed as a foregone conclusion, perhaps the more interesting development Friday was the public response issued by David Shull, senior VP of programming for Englewood, Co.-based Dish.

Noting that Dish had actually sued the Big Four broadcast networks first, Shull labeled broadcasters’ legal challenges as “absurd and profoundly anti-consumer.”

With networks charging pay TV operators like Dish — and by extension, its subscribers — millions of dollars to re-transmit their signals, Shull noted, “customers deserve to use content they pay for as they wish.”

Shull also said that AutoHop needs to be “put in perspective” — most of Dish’s viewers watch shows either live or the same night they’re recorded, he explained, and the feature only extends to recordings viewed the day after broadcast and must be enabled by the customer in order to work.

And besides, he added, “Customers have been skipping commercials since the birth of the remote control.”

It is here where Dish seems to have a lot of outside support.

Noting that consumers have been trained for over a decade to avoid advertising, noted media technology analyst Richard Greenfield on Friday posted a blog calling for media companies to “innovate, not litigate.”

As Greenfield noted, most DVRs leased to consumers by pay TV providers already have robust commercial-skipping capabilities.

Fair use advocate Public Knowledge also weighed in, with organization president and CEO Gigi B. Sohn arguing in a statement, “Consumers have the right to control their TV watching, using whatever technology is available to them.”

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See also: Why Amazon’s Kindle battle with IPG matters

Here’s IPG’s letter to clients:

Dear Publishers,

IPG and Amazon have agreed on terms; your Kindle editions will be available again through Amazon today.

I can’t thank you enough for your input, support, patience, sacrifice, and loyalty over the last few months. I only regret that we weren’t able to make up for all of the lost revenue when your Kindle titles were not available. We will continue to work hard for every last sale so that all of our publishers stay healthy moving forward. For the period from June 1 through August 31, 2012, IPG will not take a distribution fee on Kindle sales, and 100% of the revenue for these sales will flow through to our publishers.

IPG and our publishers also received a tremendous amount of support from much of the rest of the industry, for which we will be forever grateful. I feel that the experience has clarified some things for us and our clients, and that now we are all even better equipped to navigate through this rapidly changing industry. I look forward to sharing these insights with you in the coming weeks, and to continue to work on building your business through maximizing sales and reducing risk.

Sincerely,

Mark Suchomel

Image courtesy of Flickr / bfhoyt

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• Forecast: the evolution of the e-book market
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That’s bunk, according to Wired publisher Howard Mittman, who said in a recent interview that apps have proven “incredibly profitable” and touts the publication’s 165,000 tablet subscribers (65,000 of these are pure-digital subs). Mittman adds that Wired readers also spend a significant amount of time with the tablet version and that he “missed the memo” about the failure of apps.

So what’s going on? Is there something special about Wired, or have other publishers simply failed to execute correctly?

To understand, it’s useful to consider the key complaints set out by Technology Review’s Jason Pontin in his influential “Why Publishers Don’t like Apps” essay from early May, including:

• expensive developer costs
• difficulty quantifying subscribers
• an unnatural, walled garden reader experience.

Pontin also decried the vulturous 30 percent bite that Apple took from many sales, a figure that exceeded publishers’ own margins. He concluded that he would toss the apps and instead follow the Financial Times’ example by using HTML5 technology to provide an easy cross-platform reader experience. (The FT this week told pC2012 that it didn’t need a marketing boost from the iTunes Store.)

Wired’s Mittman, however, says that Pontin simply “chose one path that didn’t work out” and that “trail-blazing is not for everyone.” He believes that HTML5 will just be part of a “larger app experience” in which an app is a storefront or gateway for readers to have deeper interactions with publishing brands.

One upshot of this may be that publishers need to try harder to make apps work, but it’s also possible that unique factors make Wired an outlier. These include a techy readership combined with corporate and editorial support for a development team that has been building apps longer than most. Condé Nast, its deep-pocketed parent, may also be betting big in the hopes that Wired’s success can be replicated at its other publications.

Mittman’s bullish stance on apps may also be in keeping with Wired’s famous “Web is dead” cover of two years ago that described how browsers were being supplemented by other types of viewing platforms.

The proof will ultimately be in the revenue pudding, of course. Based on a $20-a-year subscription price, Wired is set to earn $1.3 million on its digital only subscribers (minus any Apple cut). This is hardly earth-shaking but, after just two years, it may be big enough to keep Condé Nast in the app game for the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile, it seems likely other publishers will continue to join instead the “good enough revolution” (a Wired term, by the way) offered by HTML5.

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Duda is bringing hundreds of thousands of small-and medium-sized businesses to the mobile Web, giving food trucks and haute cuisine joints, attorneys and dentists, their first taste of the mobile Internet and a means for their customers to find them on their phones.

We last reported on Duda when Google tapped the Silicon Valley/Israeli startup to power its Go Mo program, which will optimize any Website for mobile and host it for a year at no charge. But the company has also licensed its service to AT&T, HP, Yahoo and Webs.com, leading to enormous growth in its business. Last August it was hosting less 100,000 sites. Now it’s up 1.65  million, CMO Dennis Mink said.

A good portion of those sites are in the personal rather than the small business category. Duda will allow any user to throw a free but ad-supported mobile-optimized version of their Website online, so anyone wanting to optimize their 100 greatest Baywatch moments tribute page or Twilight fan fiction portal can easily do so. Duda’s primary customers, though, are the ones that either pay $9 a month — or come through Go Mo — to access its premium features.

It beats advertising on public benches

Including pizzerias, restaurants are Duda’s biggest customers, accounting for 28 percent of its premium sites. Duda recently began direct integration with Open Table, allowing the more sophisticated set to place reservations directly from the mobile browser – rather than just order up delivery with click-to-call.

Food trucks, which already depend heavily on social media to bring in customers, have also begun to use the service, Mink said. For instance, Brooklyn’s Mexicue uses a Duda mobile site to broadcast its trucks’ current location, to point people to its Twitter and Facebook accounts and to detail its current menu.

Professional services makes up the next biggest category, encompassing locksmiths, plumbers and a whole lot of lawyers, Mink said. Health and Wellness businesses account for 10 percent of its sites. About half of those are beauty salons and spas, but a good portion of the remaining chunk are doctors and dentists.

“For service professionals, they want phone calls,” Mink said. “If you’re a lawyer or a dentist, that’s how you build your livelihood.”

Another major category is travel and tourism, which is dominated by small, privately owned hotels and B&Bs, Mink said. The logic here is that when people are on the road they often don’t have an easy way to access a computer. Having a mobile site is therefore key to landing last-minute business.

What Duda can’t do (but is working on)

Duda’s site builder does have some limitations. It’s not building new and distinct mobile pages for its customers. Rather it automatically plugs content from their full Websites into template pages optimized for the mobile browser. The approach may not be as slick as a custom-designed mobile Website, but it has its advantages, Mink said. It’s cheap, and you can get a mobile Web presence up within minutes. It’s also easier to manage, since any update you make to the full site is automatically reflected in the mobile version.

That said, more sophisticated features don’t carry over to the microbrowser. For the hotel and B&B sites, for instance, it’s a simple button push to call the front desk, but if you try to access their online booking features, you’re taken to a full PC browser page, which is difficult to use on a small screen. Duda also can’t carry over in-site e-commerce features, which explains the dearth of e-retail businesses among its customers.

But Mink said Duda is solving many of those problems through partnerships. Its integration with Open Table allows restaurants to book digital reservations. And it just reached an agreement with eBay to mobilize its ProStores customers retail sites, though it charges more for the feature (a $99 one-time setup fee and a $20 monthly subscription).

Duda has raised $8.4 million since its founding in 2009. Its latest Series B round brought in $6 million and was led by Pitango, Israel’s largest venture capital firm. While the company was founded in Tel Aviv, it is now based in Mountain View, Calif.

Food truck image courtesy of Flickr user edibleNY; Feature photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Lasse Kristensen

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• Updated: Forecast: global mobile subscribers, 2010–2015
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In February, we took a look at smaller changes in the pre-release version of OS X Mountain Lion that Mac developers are using. These changes are good indications of what we’ll see when the final version goes live sometime this summer. Apple has released two new previews since then with quite a few updates — some significant, some seriously minor, and some that have even undone changes since we last wrote about it.

Here’s what’s new:

General changes

• The App Store now supports automatic downloads, which is one of the things I’d hoped Apple would add. You can also go backward and forward in the App Store and Game Center with two fingers, the same as Safari. Notably, you still can’t do this in the Finder.
• There’s a new popover for choosing avatars, which is used in Game Center and the Users and Groups pane in System Preferences.
• You can no longer remove apps and stacks from the Dock by simply dragging them off. You have to do it by right-clicking, which I expect is going to draw the ire of many power users.
• Launchpad is no longer arranged alphabetically. The “Utilities” folder has also been renamed to “Others”.
• The linen background in Mission Control is slightly darker than in Lion.
• Font Book now has a full-screen mode and two smart folders in the sidebar for fixed-width fonts and monospaced fonts.
• The battery item in the menu bar has been simplified so that the only option is to show the percentage left or not. Showing time left has been removed.
• You can go from one stack to another in the Dock with one click. In Lion, clicking another stack with one already open just closes the current stack. (Updated: Sorry, this isn’t new to Mountain Lion. Turns out, it doesn’t work in Lion when your Dock is hidden — which mine was — but does when unhidden.)

Safari

• There’s a new button for iCloud tabs, which allows access to tabs on other devices.
• There’s a new page-loading animation, which you can see in this YouTube video.
• Web apps can send native notifications through Safari, as evidenced by the new Notification Center tab in Safari’s preferences.
• Reading List has a new look, with a more neutral background color and paper texture instead of linen. It also supports offline reading.
• When you download a file in Safari in Lion, the file flies into the downloads button. In Mountain Lion, it flies into the downloads stack in the Dock, and a progress indicator appears over the stack.
• Safari has a more “responsive” UI: when you resize a window past a certain point, buttons will be hidden to save space.
• There’s a new tab button next to the bookmarks bar when only one tab is open and the tab bar is hidden.

Notification Center

• There’s a new “do not disturb” mode, which disables notifications when active.
• The menu bar icon has a gray dot in the middle, rather than black. It also changes into a moon when do not disturb mode is on.
• There’s a new button in the lower-righthand corner that’ll take you to Notification Center’s preference pane in System Preferences.

System Preferences

• The General perefence pane has been simplified. The options for smooth scrolling and double-click to minimize are gone, with the latter being moved to the Dock preference pane. The three dropdowns for the number of recent items has been consolidated into one. The dropdown for choosing the sidebar icon size has been moved to the top section. Finally, there’s a new checkbox for “Ask to keep changes when closing documents.”
• The preferences for “tap to click” have been moved into the Trackpad pane and are enabled by default.
• The Mission Control pane now has the option to disable grouping windows by application, so all windows will be shown the same way.
• Time Machine’s pane has been updated slightly, with flatter buttons and a simpler explanation of what Time Machine does.

What do you think of the new changes? Tell us in the comments.

Header image via Flicker user sigsegv.

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This week’s featured title: ”Bared to You” by Sylvia Day. It’s #20 on the New York Times e-book bestsellers list this week and

What it’s about: The first in a trilogy, this erotic novel tells the story of a recent college grad, Eva, who meets billionaire businessman Gideon.

How it became a bestseller: Day self-published “Bared to You” on April 3, 2012. The book immediately invited comparisons to “50 Shades of Grey,” the originally self-published erotic trilogy that Random House’s Vintage acquired for seven figures in March and that has now sold over 10 million copies. Jane Litte, who runs the romance blog “Dear Author,” writes that “if I were to recommend any book today to readers who enjoyed 50 Shades and was looking for another book like it, this would be the first one I would offer. However, Bared to You is far better written with much hotter sex scenes.”

Like “Fifty Shades of Grey,” “Bared to You” has now found a traditional publisher: Penguin’s Berkley imprint snapped it up this month and has already released the e-book with a new, “50 Shades of Grey”-esque cover. (That’s Day’s original cover on the left and Penguin’s cover on the right.) Penguin will release a paperback edition on June 6. (Day writes a bit more about the Penguin acquisition here, and notes that Penguin’s ability to get the paperback into bricks-and-mortar bookstores was one of the main reasons she signed up with them.)

“Bared to You” is $5.99 on … Amazon  | Barnes & Noble  | Kobo

New York Times bestseller list, week of 6/3/12

Here are the titles in the top-35 that appear on the e-book bestseller list, but not on the print bestseller list (click the link to expand the chart).

USA Today bestseller list, week of 5/24/12

USA Today includes all formats and genres in one list and notes which format of a book sold best. Here are the titles in the top-35 where e-books outsold print (click the link to expand the chart).

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• Evolution of the E-book Market
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1

• 5 key takeaways from paidContent 2012 (paidContent)

• NBCU Exploring Buyback of MSNBC.com (AdWeek)

• Why Facebook Needs Two Photo Apps (SplatF)

• New Orleans Newspaper Scales Back in Sign of Print Upheaval (New York Times)

• The New Yorker Will Serialize Jennifer Egan’s Short Story on Twitter (New York Observer)

• Google takes down 1.2 million search links a month over piracy, copyright issues (GigaOM)

• Dish’s “Auto-Hop” ad skipping device in legal showdown with TV networks (paidContent)

• New Jersey mayor, son, arrested on charges they nuked recall website (Ars Technica)

• Why rich people are investing in newspapers, again (Poynter)

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