News from the HIMSS healthcare technology conference: New joint mobile solutions for healthcare from Verizon and Motorola, HP announces healthcare alliance program, Avaya showcases health collaboration innovations.

Well, you have to hand it to the strategy team over at Zipcar. Arguably the largest on-demand car-sharing network, Zipcar went public last year and not long after saw its market cap cross $1 billion. It’s since fallen back, and with collaborative consumption and the market for car-sharing heating up, the big players have to make moves. Zipcar has since forged a partnership with Ford, making it the largest provider of cars for Zipcar’s University program, and, in December, the company took a controlling stake in Spain’s largest car-sharing network, Avancar.

Today finds Zipcar making another strategic move to get its mitts in fellow car-sharing companies, again with a focus on universities, whose students are among the most eager adopters of car-sharing models. What do I mean? The company today announced that it is a lead investor in the $13.7 million series A financing of Wheelz, a junior, university-focused version of itself.

The Detroit-based Fontinalis Partners, a transportation technology investment firm, also participated in the round. As a result, Mark Schulz, the former President of International Operations at Ford and a founding Partner at Fontinalis, will join Zipcar CEO Scott Griffith on the startup’s Board of Directors. (Former Vice-chairman of Ernst & Young Jim Freer also joins the board.)

This adds to the $2 million in seed funding Wheelz raised pre-launch last summer, which was led by former Facebook VP and creator of the Social+Capital Partnership venture fund Chamath Palihaptiya, and included contributions from Felicis Ventures, Red Swan Ventures, and an impressive list of angel investors, including Freer and Sebastien De Halleax, the founder of Playfish. Wheelz’s total funding now sits just under $16 million.

For those unfamiliar with Wheelz, you can check out our coverage of their launch back in September. But, essentially, Wheelz aims to bring P2P car-sharing to campuses with a platform that enables students to connect safely and swiftly through Facebook integration, mobile apps, and its proprietary in-car hardware system called DriveBox. The startup initially launched at Stanford and has since popped up at UC Berkeley, USC, and UCLA.

Among other things recommending it, Wheelz offers a wide selection of cars (sedans, hybrids, luxury cars, convertibles, vans, SUVs, and trucks), free, 24/7 customer support and roadside assistance, and users are protected by Wheelz’s million-dollar insurance policy, without affecting the individual’s own auto insurance.

As to how it works, once a student installs DriveBox in their car (for free), and has listed their car on Wheelz, other users can rent it, unlocking the car using the company’s iPhone app or Wheelz card. What’s cool is that the owner doesn’t have to be there to hand off the keys once they’ve agreed to sharing their car, as the company provides a “Key Box,” in which owners can leave their keys. The key box also comes with a gas card, so that when gas falls below a quarter of a tank, renters fill ‘er up using the card. The owner of the car decides how much the renter pays, setting hourly, daily, and weekly prices.

It’s a cool model, and one that looks to capitalize on the fact that campus, P2P car sharing is on the rise. In a statement today, Zipcar CEO Scott Griffith said that he thinks P2P will have a big effect on the car-sharing market going forward: “We chose to make this investment because we believe that Wheelz has the right leadership, technology and business model to succeed in the emerging P2P space,” he said in a statement.

Wheelz does indeed have an experienced leadership team, as CEO Jeff Miller is a veteran of building sustainable transportation solutions, having worked for electric vehicle network provider Better Place. And Co-founder and CTO Akhtar Jameel (also the architect of Wheelz’s technology platform) was formerly the CEO of Mercedes-Benz R&D and has held senior product and technology positions at Daimler, Better Place and Xerox PARC. (He was also awarded a Smithsonian Computer World Innovations gold medal for developing the world’s first Internet connected car back in 1997.)

But what the Zipcar CEO didn’t mention was that there’s a lot of interest in the space, and competition is heating up. General Motors funded RelayRides in a very similar move and is offering its cars to the Google Ventures-backed startup to help it expand its reach, and, of course, there’s TechCrunch Disrupt winner GetAround, which has been getting a lot of buzz and has raised $5 million from a number of high-profile investors.

Again, it’s no surprise that Zipcar wants to tap into startups focusing on colleges and universities, something it’s done itself through its universities program. Campuses are early adopters and since a lot of students don’t own (or can’t afford) cars, they get used a lot more than they do in other places. Wheelz has a good-looking platform, some great technology, so the move makes a lot of sense. It will be interesting to see how the car-sharing tug-of-war plays out in 2012.

For more on Wheelz, check ‘em out at home here.

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Done right, it can also help the imitator tap into the zeitgeist and pick up more followers as a result.

That looks like it might have been some of the logic behind the relaunch of the website of Easy Living, a UK magazine published by Conde Nast, which relaunched this month with a Pinterest-like grid interface on its home page.

To be clear, the site is not about Easy Living turning into a social network itself — there are no followers in different categories, and users cannot “pin” content on the site (not yet, at least) — but the borrowing of the image-based layout, big on images and shorter on text, is unmistakeable.

There are others that have noted how Pinterest has affected the development of web-based content: sites like Quora have topic boards, for example, that also speak to the evolution of content discovery from straight linear timelines to those based on subjects.

This could be one of the first examples of a magazine’s website taking that to heart. It’s a fitting one: Easy Living’s subject matter is squarely in the area of lifestyle, home and fashion, three areas where Pinterest has particularly done well, picking up millions of pinners in the process.

The drive to make magazines more in the mold of hot web properties is something that we may see a lot more of in future, as publishers take tips in their attempt to keep their readers (and advertisers) loyal in the face of a wave of sophisticated (and free) online content. Let by companies like Pinterest.

At Conde Nast, this looks like it is just one part of a big push that Conde Nast is making into digital: today the publisher revealed in London that it is now selling 200,000 digital editions of its UK magazines, and now has 965,000 Facebook fans for its various magazines. Those magazine’s twitter feeds, it said, has nearly has many followers.

It now has a total of 13 iPhone apps, but it looks like tablet content might be a major point of investment in the months ahead:  it said that Vogue UK will start publishing a monthly iPad edition from September; and that 28 percent of its readers now own a tablet, with that number even higher among some of its titles: in the case of Wired UK, 50 percent of its readers own a tablet. With GQ, it’s 42 percent. Smartphones still blow all that out of the water: 90 percent of Conde Nast’s UK readers use smartphones, with more than half of them iPhones.

Still, there is more opportunity to get those mobile types more engaged in Conde Nast content: the company says that only 10 percent of its site traffic is coming from mobile devices.

Twitter, Facebook and other social networks have long counted on the rise in smartphone usage to help fuel their growth: that trend, however, seems to also be taking a toll on mobile carriers — specifically in the form of revenues.

The analyst firm of Ovum, part of the Informa Group, has estimated that operators lost $13.9 billion in SMS revenue in 2011, as a result of their customers using services like Twitter and Facebook to message each other instead of the carriers’ own text messaging services. A separate report from mobile analytics firm Bytemobile has also charted huge growth in the use of social media on mobile — with operators getting virtually no benefit as a result.

Bytemobile, using data it gathers from its tier-one carrier customers, found that the average mobile user spends around nine minutes per day each on Facebook and YouTube on mobile. YouTube, being a video service, generates 300 times more traffic on data networks. In both of those cases, it notes, neither service generates any mobile operator revenue.

There is a caveat, of course: carriers are still making money from people using their phones to use social networks: users are, after all, still buying 3G and 4G data plans; and many (but not all) carriers also roll public WiFi connectivity into those plans.

It’s questionable, though, whether that incremental data revenue for tweets, status updates and check-ins, and the more substantial data usage from services like YouTube, are able to offset the loss from the more lucrative messaging services that operators built up and still count on for revenues.

It appears that the figure is gradually growing: Ovum points out that a $13.9 billion loss works out to some nine percent of messaging revenues for carriers worldwide, a rise from the six percent of revenues lost in messaging revenue to social messaging in 2010, when carriers lost $8.7 billion in SMS revenues to social media messaging.

Ovum’s suggestion? For carriers to work more closely on making their messaging and other services more collaborative — that is, more partnerships with social networks so that they use the carrier infrastructure to underpin their own communication tools.

There is some of that happening already, particularly in developing countries. France Telecom-owned operator Orange last week announced that it would be launching a new way of accessing Facebook in developing markets, using USSD functionality on GSM devices. It is offering this as an extra paid service to users.

But by and large, operators have missed the boat in more developed markets, where smartphones and mobile apps are the order of the day.

There is still an opportunity in those advanced markets. Carriers, if they got the lead out, could act as mobile app developers and make their own clients to access those social networks, which link in better with the services they already have in place — say for messaging or billing services. That’s something that has been relatively untapped so far.

Storify has become one of the best ways to create stories from social media — the startup says it has been used by 22 of the top 25 news sites in the United States, and that its users have curated a total of more than 3 million social objects. Now, you can do that curation from your iPad.

The company was already mobile, in the sense that stories (which are essentially timelines of content from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and more) created with Storify tools could be viewed on smartphones and tablets. But with the new Storify iPad app, you can do more than look at a story — you can create one on an iPad, too. In fact, co-founder and CEO Xavier Damman argues that this may be the first great app for content creation (rather than consumption) on the iPad.

That may be selling (say) some of the drawing apps for the iPad a bit short, but when Damman and his co-founder Burt Herman demonstrated Storify on the iPad a couple of weeks ago, I was impressed by how perfectly suited it seems for the tablet. There’s a responsive, drag-and-drop interface for moving social network updates into the timeline, so it really feels like you’re building something with your fingertips. You can see the interface in action in the video below.

Most of Storify’s traffic comes in the form embedded versions of stories on major media sites, and while the vision isn’t limited to journalists (brands, for example, like to use Storify to illustrate and amplify a particular message), Damman and Herman lay out a plausible scenario where a reporter could use Storify for iPad to file a story.

For example, imagine a reporter at a conference who, instead of lugging their laptop around, just breaks out their iPad to curate the social media version of what’s happening, which in turn is embedded on their website. Damman and Herman are hopeful that the app will see serious usage at the upcoming South by Southwest conference — which is, of course, a hub for social media sharing, if not oversharing. If you’re wandering around eight or 12 hours at a time, it’s easier to share the experience via iPads rather than a laptop with only five hours of battery life.

“We always talk about how social media empowered people to create content,”  says Herman (a former journalist himself). “It’s getting simpler and simpler, from 300 words to 140 characters. Now we’re overwhelmed by all this media, so this is the next big step — the curation of all that media that’s out there, extracting the meaning in the noise to tell stories.”

Damman says his team has been focused for the past seven months on creating a great experience for the iPad, though he isn’t ruling out expanding to other platforms like Android in the future.

Storify’s investors include Khosla Ventures.

Though it may not always seem like it, big wireless carriers are still stuck on the concept of push-to-talk communication. It’s easy to see why — instantaneous communication between multiple people can be a huge benefit in certain lines of work, and and catering to those groups often leads to some hefty service contracts. To that end, AT&T has announced that they have launched a new charter program geared toward getting push-to-talk smartphones in front of business customers.

Now the idea of implementing push-to-talk on smartphones isn’t exactly new — there are a whole host of apps available for the major mobile platforms that allow users to send voice notes, messages and media over their data connections. The immensely popular Voxer app comes to mind — it boasts a pretty robust feature set, not to mention about 200,000 average daily downloads. So what’s different about AT&T’s approach?

Their ace in the hole here seems to be their use of partner Kodiak Networks’ InstaPoC technology. While the name may conjure images of a real stinker, InstaPoC reportedly allows for sub-second voice connections between compatible devices, as well as better voice quality than a standard phone call.

InstaPoC was created in compliance with the imaginatively-named PoC (Push to Talk over Cellular) 2.0 standard, which lays out in excruciating detail the criteria necessary for a reliable, business-grade push-to-talk system. Throw in the ability for developers to fold PTT support into other applications via an API, and all of a sudden we’re looking at a potential ecosystem centered around instant communication.

AT&T promises that entrants into their charter program will be able to test the PTT service on “powerful, state of the art smartphones,” though they don’t offer any specifics. Considering the types of phones that tend to get saddled with PTT functionality, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see users testing the service given something like the forthcoming Rugby Smart to mess around with.

Software and SaaS security company Cenzic is today launching a new security product for mobile application developers which will allow for the testing of mobile apps on any platform – iOS, Android, J2ME, and more. The product will be the first that can test products without requiring developers to submit the source code, as all the testing is done through the cloud, while the app is up-and-running.

The service will then be able to tell what sorts of security vulnerabilities an app has, what sensitive data it could leak, what other sorts of security threats it may be vulnerable to, and what to do about it.

The security risk inherent in using mobile applications was recently in the spotlight, when it was discovered that many of users’ favorite apps were uploading their address books to developers’ servers. But that kind of risk, while important, is not the sort of thing that Cenzic’s solution is interested in addressing.

Explains John Weinschenk, CEO of Cenzic, “there’s been a lot hype and a lot of focus on the device itself, but the device itself is not the risk. If I hack into your mobile device, I get your information. That’s not that interesting. But as a hacker, if I hack into the server itself, I can get millions of accounts, and millions of pieces of information,” he explains.

The problem Cenzic wants to help fix has to do with the fact that many companies’ backend systems were designed to be accessed by web applications, but are now being accessed by mobile apps.

With the new solution, the company looks at a mobile app’s backend and use of web services, and analyzes those for vulnerabilities. This is especially important for enterprise app makers, who need to ensure that their apps’ are protected against all the latest threats to protect sensitive customer data.

But how prevalent are these sorts of vulnerabilities? Weinschenk says that prior to today’s launch, the company tested over 30 applications for four (unnamed) beta customers, which included companies that have over a billion dollars in sales operating in the financial services space, in e-commerce and in manufacturing. During the testing period, Cenzic found that 60% of the vulnerabilities were input validation issues, while 40% were authentication issues. “What this means,” explains Weinschenk, “is that programmers writing mobile applications don’t really understand how to manage the authentication of that device communicating up to the server.”

In Cenzic’s solution, the platform will provide info on how to fix the vulnerability and how to make code changes, but, as it doesn’t have access to the source code itself, will not make the changes, only point to the affected part of the code. In addition, the library of vulnerabilities is updated every week, similar to anti-virus systems, so developers can continually test for new threats to their mobile apps’ backends.

The new mobile solution will also be wrapped into Cenzic’s other products, in the form of software, managed services and cloud offerings. Pricing starts at $7,000 per app per year.

The company today secures more than 500,000 online applications for Fortune 1000 companies, government agencies, universities, security companies, SMB’s and others. More information about the mobile product is now available on the Cenzic homepage here.

Canonical’s Ubuntu TV, unveiled earlier this year, was the first in a series of announcements about “Ubuntu on devices”. The next device in Canonical’s multi-screen strategy for world domination is being unveiled next week at Mobile World Congress 2012, and it’s an Android-powered smartphone. It’s not entirely what you might think, though.

This is not an Ubuntu app running atop Android. Nor is it an all-Ubuntu device running an Android emulator. Rather, Ubuntu for Android it the full Ubuntu desktop running side-by-side with Android on a shared kernel that provides context appropriate access to all your content. When out and about, the phone operates as any other Android-powered phone; but when you slip the device into a dock connected to a monitor, keyboard and mouse you get the familiar Ubuntu desktop experience.

I admit that I think this is pretty novel. It’s not an Asus Transformer trying to play both sides of the smartphone / laptop experience with a single OS. Instead, it’s something completely new that’s trying to leverage the right interface and experience for the right context. It’s a phone in most senses, but only activates the Ubuntu desktop when connected to peripherals that benefit from them.

What’s this good for? I asked Jane Silber, Canonical’s CEO, that question. The most immediate use case is enterprise users: people who carry a smartphone and a laptop. Ubuntu for Android would allow many mobile professionals to reduce to a single device. Average users would benefit from this convergence, too. According to Silber this allows “the right experience on the right form factor.”

What are the benefits of this Android/Ubuntu hybrid? Data consolidation, for one. You don’t need to duplicate your address book, or even synchronize it: whether you’re looking for a number to call from the Android phone app, or looking for an email from the Ubuntu email app, both programs are interrogating the same single address book. The same holds true for documents, media, and any other content stored on the device.

Another neat trick: if you connect your Ubuntu for Android device to a television via HDMI you don’t get the Ubuntu desktop: you get the Ubuntu TV interface. You can browse media on your phone or access online content as you would with any Ubuntu TV appliance.

Ultimately, says Silber, this hybrid approach reduces the mental “context shifts” required by using multiple independent devices. When your Ubuntu for Android device is docked and you’re composing emails, you can still send and receive texts and phone calls — and, indeed, access and launch all the Android apps on your phone — meaning that you don’t need to move away from your laptop to pick up and use your phone. You simply mouse over to the incoming call indicator and select the action you desire: take the call, hang up, whatever. Efficiency, for the win!

When I asked Silber how long it would be until they kick Android to the curb and release an all-Ubuntu phone, she simply said “We’re not going to be announcing that at MWC 2012.”

As with the Ubuntu TV, Canonical won’t be unveiling a completed product ready for purchase next week. They’re showcasing the technology they’ve developed and are looking for hardware partners.

In the latest monthly report from app analytics firm Distimo, the company delved into the revenue generating possibilites for apps sold through both Google’s Android Market and the Amazon Appstore. Looking at the top 110 apps available in both marketplaces, Distimo found some surprising data: 42 of those top apps made more money on Amazon’s store than in the more widely available Android Market.

That the Android Market has its challenges when it comes to paid applications, is widely known. In fact, just the other day a friend was telling me how when she went to buy her first new smartphone, the Verizon rep was pushing Android devices because they “have more free apps” than the iPhone. Great story, right developers? Now the Android Market’s inability to make you money is a selling point for Android phones. Excellent news.

So maybe it’s not so surprising that Amazon’s Appstore is beginning to prove itself as a better revenue generating platform for some mobile application developers than the official Android Market. After all, Amazon’s store is a “curated” collection of apps. The apps are tested, reviewed and made sure to be malware-free and stable before being listed on Amazon’s store. (Hmm. Does that process sound familiar?)

Still, the Amazon Appstore is only a small piece of the overall revenue pie for now, delivering just 28% of the top 110 apps’ revenue. But then again, Amazon’s Appstore is barely a year old, and is rapidly gaining strength. For example, the total number of downloads generated by the top 100 apps in the Amazon Appstore increased 14-fold in December 2011, compared with just 2 months earlier, Distimo found.

Today, Amazon hosts 28,826 mobile applications, compared with about fourteen times more apps on the Google Android Market. (It’s now pushing 400K+). Half of all Amazon’s apps are also available on the Google Android Market. But the Amazon market is catching up in terms of size. In December and January, the number of new apps in the Android Market was only 5x the number new apps in the Amazon Appstore, as compared with 22x in September 2011.

The Amazon Appstore is also more likely to favor paid applications than the Android Market, as 65% of all its apps are paid apps, a figure that has remained stable for the past 7 months. Meanwhile, Google’s Android Market sees 32% of all apps as paid apps, and that figure has dropped from 38% during the same time frame.

In addition, the average price for the top 100 paid applications is 40% lower on the Amazon Appstore ($2.89) than on the Android Market ($3.47) for the top 100 paid apps. That’s because Amazon, not developers, controls the apps’ prices. That means some of the discounted top apps could be bringing down the average, of course.

This pricing strategy appears, at least in some cases, to be working in developers’ favor. Users think they can find cheap apps on Android’s store, and aren’t disappointed. But while there, they download other apps, too.

Download volumes on Amazon’s store during November (when the Kindle Fire launched) quadrupled from the previous month. In December, downloads increased even further to more than 14 times October’s volume, then stabilized once again in January. During this time, 42 of the top 110 revenue-generating apps made more money on Amazon’s store than on the Android Market. It’s not a majority, obviously, and information about what types of apps, or what these apps may have shared in common, are details that are unfortunately lacking in Distimo’s analysis.

But this is the real gem in Distimo’s data: for some developers, Amazon’s Appstore is working. It’s too soon to call the success a fluke or a trend, especially with the Kindle Fire’s new(ish) arrival on the scene. But if Amazon is helping some developers make more money, it’s probably not due to a single, easily pinpointed reason. It’s more likely to be a combination of all factors: app curation, discounts, catalog size, promotions, user interface, brand recognition, price setting, and more.

Social game-maker OMGPOP says it has another mobile hit — its app Draw Something has been downloaded more than 1 million times in 10 days.

Draw Something is based on OMGPOP’s online game Draw My Thing. Described by CEO Dan Porter as a turn-based version of Pictionary, players are assigned things to draw, which can be simple (like a smile) or complicated (like a zombie), then their friends are supposed to guess what it is.

Players have already created more than 20 million drawings, Porter says. The game’s average load is now 50 drawings per second, and where the company took nine days to reach its first 10 million drawings, it’s now seeing 10 million new drawings every 24 hours. The main driver of that growth? Porter says it’s Twitter and Instagram, where users post their drawings and look for other people to play.

And he says the game is already seeing five figures in revenue per day. OMGPOP runs ads in the free version of the game, and Porter says the biggest source of revenue is actually users upgrading from free to the ad-free, paid version. The game also makes money through virtual goods, like bombs, which help with guesses and also give players better words to draw.

The game is available on both on iOS and Android, but iOS supposedly accounts for 85 percent of installs and 90 percent of revenue.

There have been some mistakes too. Porter says OMGPOP had to remove its original cap of 100 turns per game, when it realized that games were going for longer than that. It’s also a challenge to store the rapidly growing number of drawings, he says.

The success of Draw Something also confirms a broader shift in OMGPOP’s strategy. We covered the company’s first mobile game Puppy World in August 2011, and now Porter says he’s fully committed to mobile.

“When we started in 2008, we focused on socializing traditional arcade style games on the web,” he says. “As Facebook grew as a game platform we moved to Facebook and we did OK. Now though that we have reoriented to creating truly social game experiences on mobile – iOS and Android – we have locked down our strategy, socializing mobile games, and we are having monster success with it. We want to be the #1 competitor to Zynga with Friends and eventually pass them.”