The 152-page lawsuit, filed in Austin by veteran business lawyers, may also help shape the rules of what Silicon Valley can and can’t do with the personal data that sits in every smart phone.

The address book issue first gained widespread attention in February when the media reported that Path, a social sharing app, was helping itself to users’ contacts without permission. The incident also produced rumors that many other tech companies had been quietly doing the same thing.

A Path-related lawsuit has been anticipated for some time and now it’s arrived with a vengeance. It appears plaintiff attorneys were taking their time in search of deeper pockets and now have found them. In addition to Path, the other defendants include Twitter, Electronic Arts (NSDQ: ERTS) (maker of Cut-the-Rope), Yelp, LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD) and Angry Birds maker Rovio.

The plaintiffs, who want to represent every iPhone and Android phone user who downloaded the apps, say the companies violated federal computer and racketeering laws as well as a series of California and Texas state laws.

They add that Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) too should pay millions for “aiding and abetting” the app makers and failing to enforce its own policies.

The claim against Apple is interesting because the lawsuit also describes how the Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) App Store for Android and the Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Android Market (now Google Play) sell the offending apps but yet it doesn’t name them as defendants.

According to plaintiff lawyer, Carl Schwenker, this was a “strategic” decision that resulted from Apple having a “closed system” that gives the company a “significantly larger amount of control” over how the apps are used. Schwenker also suggested Apple is liable because its iOS developer library provided information that allowed the app makers to harvest address books without permission.

The lawsuit itself portrays Apple and its late founder as scheming and hypocritical over privacy issues:

For example, Apple has rejected Apps for competitive reasons .. and occasionally even for moral reasons. Mr. Jobs further expressed that Apple’s control over the approval of Apps for iOS-­‐‐‘system devices was instituted, in part, to provide device owners “freedom from programs that steal your private data” [..]

Apparently, [Instagram's] non‐‘compliance with Apple’s own App Store policies and developer agreements is not a disqualifier for Apple’s “App of the Year” award [...]

If not for Apple’s assistance, encouragement and support, the defendants’ Trojan-­horse-‐‘like Apps would never have been available to the iOS-­‐‐‘device user marketplace over the AppStore

Apple is likely to respond in court by stating that it simply provided developer tools like any other publisher, and that it’s not responsible for app makers that misuse them. I’ve reached out to Apple but the company almost never comments on lawsuits.

Schwenker, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, says the lawsuit is a seminal one in which consumers are “really looking to see reform in the industry.”

The legal case is likely to take further shape this summer when Apple and the other companies respond or file motions to dismiss.

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The startup released the Clik mobile app Thursday, letting users browse YouTube videos on their iOS or Android mobile devices and beaming them to the enabled Clik screen. The app is more of a proof-of-concept than anything, showing how the platform can be used to connect mobile devices with more or less any screen that has a browser. The most obvious example is a PC, but it can also be used with Google TV-enabled devices, as well as devices with Webkit browsers, like the Boxee Box by D-Link.

To take advantage of the app, users need only download the Clik mobile app, go to www.ClikThis.com in any supported browser, and scan the website’s QR code to pair the screen and mobile device. Multiple users and mobile devices can be used to control the same screen, by enabling multiplayer mode.

While the current Clik app adds mobile control to YouTube videos, the startup hopes to enable other developers to create apps on the platform. Currently in private beta, the startup’s partner program is targeting three verticals to start: streaming video providers, streaming music services and game developers.

Imagine, for instance, being able find to control a Spotify playlist from your mobile device while blasting it through your home theater system. Or you could play a game of Texas Hold ‘em on a TV or PC where your cards appear on the mobile device, but community cards and bets appear on the primary screen. Those are the types of experiences Clik CEO Ted Livingston, which can be powered over Wi-Fi or even mobile 3G networks.

While there are lots of smart TV development platforms out there, few now provide the same kind of flexibility in connecting mobile, PCs and TVs that Clik enables. The closest might be Samsung’s Smart TV platform, which is pushing connectivity between the manufacturer’s TVs and Android-based mobile phones and tablets. One other advantage of Clik is that developers can use today’s web standards, without having to worry about writing specifically for one mobile or connected TV platform.

Livingston and the rest of the Clik crew were the same group that released the popular Kik messaging platform. The new venture is funded by $8 million that the Kik team raised from Union Square Ventures, RRE Ventures and Spark Capital last March. The company now has 26 employees, most of which are focused on developing the new smart TV but it will continue to support Kik’s messaging apps.

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Raj Marya is the CEO of a Silicon Valley company called Amazing Controls that provides software services to the building industry. To communicate with his friends and clients he uses a variety of messaging services such as Kik and Blackberry Messenger. Last Friday, he claims to have sent a message to friends via WhatsApp suggesting they try the service called PingMe. To his surprise, he received an apparently sarcastic response from WhatsApp that read “WhatsApp Server thinks you should switch to PingMe since it’s so free and awesome.” Soon after, Marya claims, the company deleted his account.

Marya provided screen grabs of his exchange with WhatsApp that appear to back up his account. The screen grabs are embedded below and show Marya’s initial message and the message he allegedly received from WhatsApp.

The allegations — if true — are damning and suggest that WhatsApp is monitoring and interfering with its customers’ personal conversations. This would be like receiving a scolding voice mail from AT&T (NYSE: T) after recommending Verizon in a personal phone call.

WhatsApp did not respond to repeated email requests for comment about the messages’ authenticity. News accounts this week reported that the service has been down in some places due to technical difficulties. For now, it is unclear if the message (if it is authentic) was sent by an individual, an outside hacker or as part of an automated service.

In an interview with paidContent, Marya said he has no financial or personal ties to either PingMe or WhatsApp.

WhatsApp, which lets users send messages and videos, is sold for 99 cents in U.S. app stores and is available in many other countries on a variety of platforms, including Nokia (NYSE: NOK). Reports suggest it has between 10 and 20 million users.

WhatsApp is one of a number of companies trying to cash in on discontent with the carriers’ rising text-message rates which have jumped to $20 per month. The charges are especially galling because of the tiny amount of data they contain — one recent estimate said that current rates are the equivalent of $1,250 per megabyte (consider that smartphone data plans can provide thousands of megabytes for $15). The upstart companies also appeal to consumers because they allow consumers to text internationally at no charge.

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Well the start-up is set to reappear on BlackBerry devices with a new Java ME-based app  that will allow Kik to distribute the app directly to BlackBerry users from its website, sidestepping its ban in BlackBerry App world. Kik has rebuilt the app from the ground up, which has actually resulted in a more streamlined app that performs faster than the original native BlackBerry Kik app. Messages aren’t pushed from RIM’s servers but rather, are going through Kik’s servers.

Kik is taking advantage of the fact that BlackBerry Apps are built on two layers of code, first Java and then the actual BlackBerry OS. By building a Java ME app, it allows Kik to skirt around building on the BlackBerry OS, which it’s blocked from doing and allows Kik to distribute its Java ME apps on other feature phones that support it. And more importantly, it enables Kik to reestablish cross-platform service between iOS, Android and BlackBerry, a key differentiating point as Apple, RIM and Google push their own messaging platforms. Said Kik founder and CEO Ted Livingston:

“While we don’t think BlackBerry is necessarily the key to driving our success in the long term, we wanted to show our fans on the platform that we still cared and had not stopped innovating ways to bring them the fastest and cleanest messaging app available. Also, many of our existing users have friends/family on BlackBerrys, so giving them the means to connect with each other made good sense. We actually think the ‘cross-platform’ nature of mobile messaging is key – it’s very rare for someone’s social graph to be composed of a single device type.”

While the BlackBerry ban has been tough, it hasn’t stopped Kik from growing. It’s up to 4.5 million users, who are sending 300 million messages a month. But still, it’s a nice win to get back on BlackBerry devices, especially for a company built in the shadow of RIM. The feud with RIM hasn’t scared off investors either. The start-up raised $8 million in March from Union Square, RRE Ventures and Spark Capital. The patent case is still ongoing, and Livingston isn’t commenting on the litigation.

To get the app, you’ll need to download it here. And be warned, Research In Motion hadn’t approved this app, so you may have to wade through permissions to do a lot of things.

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The answer might surprise you, especially if you’re following the falling star of RIM, at least as it’s generally depicted in the press. The surge in users is because LiveProfile just introduced a BlackBerry version of its messaging client on March 25. The client offers instant messaging with status updates, message delivery confirmation and photo/video messaging. LiveProfile CEO Phil Karl said in an email interview that he thinks LiveProfile’s success has a lot to do with the product’s advantages over SMS, and its “unique feature set and beautiful interface,” along with the fact that LiveProfile “is much more than just a messenger,” with planned social network feature additions in the pipeline. But Karl also acknowledges that there’s no doubt the recent addition of BlackBerry prompted “rapid growth on all platforms.” BlackBerry and Android are currently the fastest growing platforms for LiveProfile, though the iPhone is “not far behind.”

Kik was the last service to offer BBM-style messaging across Android, iPhone and BlackBerry devices, until RIM pulled the app and began legal proceedings against the company. Kik, too, experienced massive early success before it first ran afoul of users with a spam email campaign, and then the BlackBerry client was pulled, after which it fell out of the App Store rankings. Karl is confident his app won’t suffer the same fate, he believes RIM’s primary reason for going after Kik was the possibility that former RIM employee and Kik CEO brought over and used trade secrets at his new company.

Karl also maintains that LiveProfile is a different type of product. Clearly, though, LiveProfile hopes to capitalize on its similarity to BBM, or it wouldn’t have used a typeface for its logo that looks remarkably similar to the one used for BlackBerry’s branding. It even provides a PIN number that allows others to add you to their network.

Following the introduction of the BlackBerry client, LiveProfile made its way into the upper end of the App Store charts in some countries, including Canada, where it’s currently the number one free app. Based on info from developers I’ve talked to, a coveted position atop the chart generally leads to a massive uptick in downloads. The app is currently seeing around 250,000 to 300,000 new registrations per day, from all sources. The excess load led to an unscheduled eight-hour service outage on Wednesday, and the LiveProfile team has been scrambling to recover, installing two to three servers per day to the in-house cluster it uses to host the app. The team is also rewriting the backend at the same time to make the service more efficient. It just completed a major system upgrade late Thursday to make sure it can scale properly to meet demand going forward, and Karl also credits infrastructure-as-a-service company SoftLayer with providing servers on short notice to help scale, and Amazon S3 for allowing them to scale “indefinitely with little effort.”

New York-based LiveProfile was co-founded by Phil Karl and William Key, both of whom bootstrapped the company. Working alone, they “designed, developed and launched the initial Android application and infrastructure” in just one month, according to Karl. In January 2011, two more engineers were brought on board to help aid the platform’s expansion to iOS and BlackBerry platforms. Karl says LiveProfile is currently working on raising Series A funding from “some amazing investors” who have yet to be announced. For the foreseeable future, at least, LiveProfile will not be charging for any aspect of LiveProfile, nor will it be introducing any in-app advertising, and will work instead to continue to improve the experience and feature set using invested funds.

LiveProfile may not have been an overnight success, but it is a remarkably explosive one that seems well positioned to continue to experience rapid growth. Between LiveProfile and Kik, the message is clear: users want more options for cross-platform communication. Instagram and Viber are proof that some apps will succeed even if the developers focus on just one mobile platform, but reaching all major smartphone users seems to be a fast-track to startup success. It may be that because of the network effect, reaching one user on a platform that’s normally left out of the party, like BlackBerry, translates into that person’s contacts choosing one client over another on their own, more popular platforms, but that’s still a good reason to consider casting as wide a net as possible.

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The Series A funding by some well respected names shows there’s little slow up in the mobile messaging space. In fact, things are accelerating as companies gear up for South By Southwest, which is turning into a major showcase for group messaging apps, just like it highlighted the check-in location market last year. My colleague Darrell had a good round up of some of the group messaging apps.

Kik joins GroupMe, FastSociety, PingChat, TextPlus and others along with new start-ups like Ditto and Yobongo, which launched last week. And then there’s Beluga, which is now owned by Facebook, but will also be showing off new features at SXSW. RIM is also rumored to expanding its footprint in group messaging by possibly extending its BBM messaging client to other platforms. RIM, by the way, sued Kik for patent infringement last year, cutting off the app on the BlackBerry platform. Kik has denied the charges and countersued. Despite the loss of the BlackBerry platform, Kik is up to 3.4 million uniquely registered users since launching in October.

Ted Livingston, CEO of Kik, said the space is hot right now because the smartphone helps address a need for more private network communications among friends, something Facebook and Twitter don’t currently address well. He expects Kik will hold its place among its competitors by emphasizing its speed of messaging, which it owes to its own architecture. It is also focusing on the way people naturally communicate. The company just announced it is adding group messaging to Kik for up to ten users. It is not forcing users to create groups, instead allowing them to just add members to existing conversations. Kik is also enabling photo sharing, but only with photos that have been taken during a conversation, to underscore real-time communications.

“We feel that mobile messaging is the next frontier of social,” Livingston said. “It’s a huge space and we think we’re at the front of it.”

Kik, which previously raises $1.6 million in Angel funding, has some great backers. But I wonder how this whole market will shake out. There are so many messaging apps right now, it’s hard to see how they will all survive. MG Siegler at TechCrunch called the onslaught of apps the App Wall, in which consumers ultimately get overwhelmed by the choices. Users don’t need half a dozen messaging apps. In fact, even if they opt for a messaging app over SMS at all, they’ll likely want to narrow it down to one, maybe two solutions. That will make it tough for smaller competitors to compete. And it makes you wonder how well Facebook will utilize its Beluga acquisition. If it can integrate it into its current messaging platform, it could put a big hurt on many competitors.

Still, I think it’s early days and the funding announcements by Kik and earlier by GroupMe suggest that we have a lot of growth ahead. The winners will have to move quickly but also figure out elegant ways to make their systems stand out in an ever more crowded field.

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Updated: Research In Motion, maker of the popular BlackBerry OS and handsets, filed suit in Canada on Tuesday against Kik, creators of a popular third-party instant messaging app. According to David Lam, an Ontario-based lawyer, the suit alleges that Kik has infringed on RIM patents with its messaging software, which attracted 2.5 million users roughly one month after launching in October.

This legal action is the third shot RIM has taken at Kik, which rivals RIM’s own BlackBerry Messenger Service by providing real-time instant messaging, even across multiple phone platforms. On Nov. 12, RIM pulled Kik out of the BlackBerry App World software store, citing a breach of contractual obligations. According to Kik, just two weeks later, RIM disabled push access for Kik, leading to delayed messages for Kik users on BlackBerry devices. In addition, RIM removed Kik’s access from the BlackBerry Developer Kit and Signing Keys, effectively stopping any future BlackBerry development on Kik.

While I haven’t seen the legal complaint nor the alleged breach of contract, I’d like to see RIM and Kik work out the issues for the sake of BlackBerry users, if possible. Clearly, with such demand for Kik, it provides a service that RIM currently doesn’t — or provides a similar service that’s better. If Kik broke some contract to provide the service, that is an issue, of course, and RIM should indeed protect its rights.

But the situation illustrates another alarming example of contentious control in the mobile space: Apple has it with iOS hardware and software, Google has it in Android with its apps and marketplace and RIM has control with the centralized infrastructure services it provides. This current control issue with Kik is currently only rearing its head on BlackBerry devices; versions of Kik that are available for iOS and Android are unaffected by RIM’s actions.

Update: The full statement of claim from RIM is embedded below. Kik has also posted a response to the lawsuit on the company’s blog, entitled “A Sad Day in Waterloo,” which states:

RIM sued us yesterday… the company I worked for as a co-op student. The company I loved. The company that I thought could benefit from Kik’s vision for a mobile community. The company that placed Kik on Blackberry App World without issue. The company I shared our entire plan with every step of the way, is suing us. I’m not afraid. I’m not surprised. But I am disappointed. RIM, I wish it could have been different. I wish you would have returned our calls. I wish we could have worked together to bring great things to all of our users. Maybe next time.

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What will be the next big feature that Facebook introduces in terms of mobile applications? It’s not hard to come up with an answer to that question; it’s obvious that the Palo Alto, Calif.-based social networking company will launch one-to-many “chat” as part of its mobile suite. Earlier this week in an interview, Slide CEO Max Levchin pointed out what Facebook has done well is become the “address book” of the web. By doing so, it can easily become the communication center for all sorts of services. Instant messaging is only a part of that communication.

Facebook launched an “instant messaging” app for chatting on its web platform a few years ago, and it is now is one of the largest IM networks in the world. It’s still not available on many mobile handsets, even though Facebook has 200 million mobile users and has made mobile its top priority.(iPhone App currently allows you to IM your Facebook friends, one at a time.)

Mobile IM/chat is definitely hot. Earlier this year, the Canadian startup Kik launched a real-time, cross-platform chat app, has signed up over a million users and is adding about 200,000 more a day. (The company is also getting some shellacking for harvesting emails to produce that growth.) Kik is one of the many startups seeing demand for text messaging and chat-style services on mobiles.

As we’ve seen in the past, Facebook is pretty good at paying attention to hot new trends, then incorporating them into their core offering. When Twitter became hot, it rolled out Twitter-like features. When Foursquare became the bomb, the company started to work on its location strategy. Now that Kik and other mobile IP-chat services are hot, it won’t be long before Facebook drops it into its next big mobile app upgrade. Of course, a one-to-many mobile IM/chat app is necessary if a Facebook-based phone is to become a reality.

Interestingly, if Facebook launches mobile IM/chat, it’s going to eat into one of the big money generators for carriers: SMS. The free IM/chat via an always-on mobile app is going to slowly start eliminating the need for using the for-pay (and not so cheap) SMS and MMS services. Thanks to mobile notifications, it’s becoming hard to distinguish between an SMS and an IM-based notification. Mobile messaging (which includes SMS, MMS, email and IM), according to research firm Strategy Analytics, is going to grow at a combined annual rate of 2.7 percent to $139.2 billion in 2015. Of that total, nearly 74 percent of the revenues are going to come from SMS and about 19 percent from email, while MMS will account for 5 percent of the revenues.

I’m pretty confident that Facebook is going to roll out some kind of one-to-many mobile IM/chat on its apps within months. The only question is which platform will first get it — Android or Apple’s iOS.

Update: I wanted to offer some clarifications. The iPhone app has IM, which allows you to IM one friend at a time. What I am talking about is a chat-type scenario, where you can conduct a chat-style conversation. Typically one would use Group SMS. Secondly, I am talking about chat within Facebook apps. I know, IM capability is available on multiple other apps.

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Instagram has gotten a lot of attention for growing to 300,000 users in a matter of weeks, but a new cross-platform chat application called Kik makes Instagram’s torrid growth pale by comparison. Within just two weeks of its release on October 21, the app had signed up over one million users, and co-founder and CEO Ted Livingston says that based on its current rate of growth, the company will likely cross the 2 million mark by tomorrow. But even as he is celebrating — and trying to cope with — all of that growth, Livingston is having to apologize for the way Kik got there, which involves a somewhat sneaky method some would call “email harvesting.”

When you sign up for the service on your iPhone or BlackBerry, it automatically ingests your contacts from the device and then cross-references that against the Kik user database. It doesn’t ask you first, which is a privacy faux pas. Kik users are then pinged by the service with messages saying “You may know…,” with the user name of someone who matches a name in their contact list. Livingston stressed in an interview with me that the service doesn’t auto-add anyone, and doesn’t store any of the information, but only uses it once and then discards it. But the feature has still made some people nervous — and is probably against Apple’s terms of service.

“We really just wanted to make it as easy as possible for users to get started, and to find people they might know,” the Kik co-founder says. While understandable, this is the same rationale that Google used when it launched Buzz, and auto-populated people’s Buzz contacts with everyone from their email address book — something that caused a huge outcry from privacy advocates as well as a lawsuit that Google recently settled. Livingston says that Kik doesn’t make public any user information other than a user name, and doesn’t send other users anything but your Kik contact info, but he admits that not asking for permission before ingesting people’s contacts was a mistake. If anything, it sounds like the young startup was so eager to launch that it simply forgot that some people might not like this approach.

“We feel really, really bad about that, and we have apologized across the Internet for doing that,” the Kik co-founder said. “And we have a fix ready for upload, just as soon as Apple approves it, that will allow people to opt out of that feature. It will be crystal clear.” Livingston also added that the company has gotten a lot of feedback from users who love the fact that Kik connected them with people they knew who were already using the service. “It’s a very small subset of people who don’t like it,” he said. And the auto-suggestion feature has likely played a huge role in helping Kik go viral so quickly, unlike some social services (Apple’s Ping, for example) that require you to add people manually.

In an interesting twist, Kik didn’t start out trying to create a chat application. Livingston says the startup was originally focused on a music-sharing service that allows any cellphone user to take control of any web browser and play music or videos through it. The Kik co-founder says that service should be ready to roll out soon, once negotiations with record companies are complete, but while the company was waiting, the founders decided to use the platform they had built to experiment with a dead-simple chat application, and Kik was the result.

“There are three parts of texting that most people hate,” he said. “It is unreliable, it is slow and it’s expensive.” There are other companies that have focused on making it free, says Livingston — including Pingchat, which shares office space with Kik at a startup accelerator in Waterloo, Ontario — but “we wanted to make it blazingly fast and reliable.” So Kik shows you when someone has received your message, when it has been read, and even when someone is typing a response. And the response has been incredible, Livingston says: the service has been adding more than 200,000 users a day for the past week or more, and had to fly new servers in to beef up the data center it uses because of the demand.

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