We spend more and more time on social networks, but sometimes it can feel like work. I mean, scrolling through your news feed isn’t work work, but it’s not quite as easy as vegging out on your couch and watching TV.

That’s where a new startup called Stevie comes in, with a website launching today at Disrupt, along with mobile apps that function as remote controls. Stevie looks at content shared in your social network feeds and elsewhere on the Web, and it assembles that content into TV shows that you can watch, shows with names like The Comedy Strip, Music Non-Stop, and Celeb TV. Naturally, the shows incorporate video content that your friends have shared, but they also include things like Facebook status updates, tweets, shared headlines, and birthdays, running mostly as tickers under the video. Essentially, it’s a way to watch Facebook and Twitter on your TV.

Co-founder and Chief Creative Technologist Gil Rimon argues that this is the right way to do “social TV.” Apps like GetGlue, which offer check ins and other social interactions around existing TV content, aren’t a good fit for how people watch TV now, because they ignore its essentially passive nature. Stevie takes the opposite tack — instead of trying to encourage new types of behavior, it’s introducing new content into the traditional couch potato experience.

Rimon compares the app to Pandora. In the same way that Pandora learns your musical tastes and preferences, automatically delivering music that’s tailored to your tastes, Stevie uses something that the team calls “The Stevie Factor” to look at your social data (such as Facebook Likes) and automatically stitch together the videos and other content that you’ll probably enjoy.

When Rimon demonstrated Stevie for me, I was particularly impressed by the look and feel. Granted, I don’t watch much TV aside from Game of Thrones and Doctor Who, but the video content struck me as quite bubbly and polished, especially for something that was being algorithmically assembled on-the-fly. Rimon’s experience in TV writing, editing, and presenting probably helps with that. I expect Stevie will become even more appealing when it’s available on connected TV devices.

The company has raised $300,000 in angel funding from investors including Jeff Pulver and Gigi Levy, and it’s participating in the Microsoft Accelerator for Azure program in Tel Aviv. Oh, and if you’re interested in couples who run startups, here’s another one — Rimon is married to his co-founder and CEO Yael Givon.

You can visit the Stevie website here, download the iPhone app here, and download the Android app here. (Again, the apps aren’t standalone experiences, but remote controls for watching on the browser.)

Q: How do you connect the Internet to the TC?

A: We’re not delivering hardware — it’s a web-based experience, with more devices (starting with iPad) coming soon.

Q: Who is your competition?

A: No direct competition, though of course there are other video discovery companies. But they’re not replicating the TV experience. The real competitor might be old-fashioned TV channels.

Q: Why hasn’t connected TV taken off?

A: That’s changing — see, for example, the growth of Apple TV.

One of my least favorite moments of the day comes when my iPhone rings and the number isn’t in my contact book. Is it an important call from an entrepreneur? A random PR person pitching me? Or just a telemarketer? I won’t know until I pick up.

CallApp, a startup launching today at Disrupt, wants to eliminate those awkward moments, for starters. It’s creating what CEO and co-founder Oded Volovitz calls a “universal social contact book.” It’s drawing data from social networks and other data sources to give users more context about phone calls and other communication. The data also comes from CallApp users — users can edit CallApp listings, and if they choose, they can add their contact book into the company’s general database.

So when you get a phone call, even if it’s from someone who isn’t in your contact list, you should be able to see information about them — say a photo, their most recent update on Facebook, and your most recent email exchange if you’ve corresponded with them.

Of course, if your phone is already ringing, you’ve only got a few seconds before you need to pick up, but at least you can glance at your screen and go into the call with some basic context. CallApp should be even more useful when you’re about to make a call. Then, the social network updates can give you a way to start off the conversation, or tell you when someone has traveled out of the country, so maybe now isn’t the best time to reach them. You can also attach personal reminders to CallApp contacts, share your location with them, or set up a meeting.

In some ways, the concept is pretty similar to an email plugin like Rapportive (recently acquired by LinkedIn) or Xobni. However, Volovitz says that bringing this information to the smartphone puts it in a different context. After all, when he gets a phone call, “I cannot wait until I can go to the Internet to see who is calling me. This is about giving you real-time, immediate, the most relevant information you can get, and the tools to execute on that information.”

Volovitz also says CallApp, despite the name, isn’t just about phone calls — he estimates that he only uses it for phone calls 50 percent of the time. The app also lists and connects to other ways for reaching people, like WhatsApp Messenger and Viber. The core of the experience isn’t the phone call but the contact itself, Volovitz says.

Nor is CallApp limited to personal contact listings. It includes businesses too, showing you things like Yelp reviews, Google Street View, or a menu for a restaurant where you’re thinking about making reservations.

Moving forward, Volovitz says the company will be adding features that are more about encouraging “serendipity.”

The app is available on Android phones (you can download it from Google Play here). CallApp is developing a version for iPhones too, though Volovitz estimates that it will have 80 percent of the functionality of the Android version, due to “some technical issues.”

Volovitz says the company isn’t monetizing the app (which is free) yet, but there are a number of possible business models, including affiliate fees. The company has raised $1 million in funding from undisclosed venture capital firms and angel investors.

Q: How does the iOS app differ?

A: There are more limitations than in Android, like you have to use the built-in dialer rather than any dialer you want.

Q: What are the viral hooks?

A: If you use CallApp to share information with someone, they get an SMS message linking to the content and asking them to download the app.

Q: Tell us about the technology.

A: What we do is artificial intelligence, big data. The system knows how to link the right person to the right number, for example using location to narrow the search.

Q: Why do other improved contact books fail, and why will you succeed?

A: It’s all about the execution and the ambition. If you build an app on the client side, you only get a limited amount of information about contacts on your phone, versus CallApp’s crowdsourced, cloud-based approach.

King.com, the European-casual-gaming-company-that-could, is cementing its ascendance on the Facebook platform by poaching one of the key producers responsible for EA’s Sims Social and opening a new game development studio in London. The company just hired Catharina Mallet away from EA to lead the new studio, which should have 40 people by year-end.

King.com, which started in Sweden and hasn’t taken outside funding since raising $43 million seven years ago, is one of two European gaming companies that have made a serious run on the Facebook platform in the last year. While Zynga has seen its revenue growth slow and other longtime Facebook developers like Crowdstar and Funzio have mostly moved onto mobile games, both King.com and Germany’s Wooga have both climbed up the developer leaderboards.

King.com has beat out EA and more recently, Wooga, for the #2 spot among game developers in terms of daily active users on Facebook, according to AppData. The number of game sessions has also blown up by tenfold to 3 billion per month, from 300 million a year ago.

The company has a long, long history. It’s almost a decade old and started out building casual games for a destination site at King.com (naturally). That made for a decent business that’s been profitable for seven years. But King.com got turbo-charged when it started building Facebook games too. The company’s long history of building for an independent destination site has given it a few competitive advantages. Launching games outside of Facebook ensures that only the very best and most viral games make it onto the platform.

“Because we see which games fail outside of Facebook, what we have managed to do is have a hit-proof business on Facebook,” said chief executive officer Riccardo Zacconi. It’s worth noting that Zynga and many other developers like Kixeye are ironically going in the opposite direction by pouring resources into standalone destination sites.

The business now has several legs to stand on. It has a destination site for casual games, Facebook games and then mobile titles. Like Zynga, it makes money through virtual currency sales and advertising. But it also has a third revenue model. The company also recently signed a deal with AOL to provide skilled tournament games. Those are games where players have to pay a very small entry cost (like less than $1) and compete with others. This deal is financially material to King.com, although the company won’t say how much the partnership will bring in.

All this said, King.com is starting to feel the competitive heat on Facebook. Zynga recently launched Bubble Safari, which looks a lot like Bubble Witch Saga, King.com’s top game on Facebook.

“We have the leading bubble shooter on Facebook. While there are a fair number of copycats popping up, we’re pleased with the continued audience engagement that we get with Bubble Witch Saga,” said chief marketing officer Alex Dale. “We think that will improve further when we launch the game on mobile.”

Zacconi adds that King.com’s model is more capital efficient than Zynga’s. “For one of their games, they might need 80 people,” he said. “But Bubble Witch Saga had a team of eight. To launch a new game on the web, we need two people.”

He also says that the company hasn’t been feeling the effects that other game developers have as Facebook clamped down on viral channels, notifications and requests for games. He says King.com’s K-factor or viral coefficient is roughly 0.8. “For every user we get, we get almost another one for free,” Zacconi said. Keep in mind though, that number is still way down from the heights of 2008 and 2009, when apps ran wild on the Facebook platform. Other social gaming companies, which still have the institutional memory of that era, have had a harder time coping with the Facebook platform’s new realities.

When Mallet comes on-board, she’ll be spearheading the development of casual games. Zacconi stresses that King.com is not going into resource management or sim games. Mallet was of the top producers behind Sims Social and she came to EA through the up to $400 million acquisition of social gaming company Playfish.

Over the last year, EA’s social gaming push has faced several management changes. After Zynga poached John Schappert to be chief operating officer, Barry Cottle followed him over to spearhead mergers and acquisitions. That made room for Playfish co-founder Kristian Segerstrale to move up in the ranks and become EA’s executive vice president of digital. Another key Playfish executive, John Earner, recently left to be an entrepreneur in residence at Accel Partners.

Facebook has just acquired mobile commerce startup Karma, which makes apps for gifting friends and family. The terms of the deal are undisclosed but 16 employees of the startup will be joining Facebook. The purchase will help Facebook build up monetization prowess on mobile platforms — an area that it had said it’s admittedly weak in. The price was not disclosed.

With the deal, Facebook gets two extremely experienced leaders in building and monetizing mobile apps. Karma’s chief executive Lee Linden and its co-founder Ben Lewis were behind Tapjoy, a company that became a huge force in distributing and making money from mobile games. Both he and Lewis were product managers at Google and Microsoft. Linden and Lewis have known each other since they were kids and have been building companies together for a couple years.

Note: This was a real product acquisition, not a lower-priced, talent-based one. Karma had done one venture round with Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers. The sense that we’re hearing from sources is that Karma will get Facebook’s 901 million users at its feet and more power behind building partnerships with other brands.  It’s not clear whether Karma will be left alone to run autonomously like Instagram or whether it will become a Facebook-branded product. Last year, Facebook acquired an early group messaging app called Beluga and turned it into Facebook Messenger.

This acquisition makes sense for a couple of reasons. Facebook needs all the help it can get in making its mobile platform produce revenue. Linden and Lewis built Tapjoy into what became a $100 million annual runrate business for app distribution and monetization. Now they’ve turned their attention toward mobile commerce. Facebook hasn’t figured out how to make money from mobile apps quite yet. It’s starting to show sponsored stories in the mobile news feed, but it doesn’t have that many opportunities to make payments revenue from third-party mobile developers because it’s blocked from taking a revenue share on iOS. Android offers some possibilities but it’s quite complicated to build a rival app ecosystem like Amazon has done over the past few years with the Kindle.

Facebook has tried its hand at gifting before, although it was the virtual kind. It abandoned its gifts store in favor of working on a more broad-based virtual currency offering called Credits that would power purchases of virtual gifts and goods from other developers. It also has tried direct commerce with its Groupon competitor Deals, but obviously that is a very expensive model to operate and scale if you look at Groupon’s margins.

But the physical good gifting that Karma specialized in could be a perfect fit. Facebook already knows who your friends, when they have birthdays, and their interests. It could suggest gifts to give and who to give them too, let users pay with their credit card or credits, and take a healthy cut.

We had heard a few weeks ago that Lewis was considering taking personal time to travel the world and step down from running Karma with Linden, but apparently we were wrong. He is definitely joining Facebook with the rest of the team.

Facebook said in a statement: “We’ve been really impressed with the Karma team and all they accomplished in such a short time. This acquisition combines Karma’s passion and innovative mobile app with Facebook’s platform to help people connect and share in new and meaningful ways.”

Karma also had a post on its own blog:

We founded Karma with the goal of adding the sentiment and meaning back into gift giving. That’s what Karma is all about. That’s what the Karma team set out to achieve.

Over the last year, we’ve built a new e-commerce platform from the ground up. We’ve been honored to partner with amazing brands to create a curated catalog of products. We made those products instantly giftable in a brand new way. And we harnessed the power of Facebook’s social network to ensure you never miss a chance to show someone you care. The phenomenal response and feedback we’ve heard from customers has more than exceeded our expectations. And we’re just getting started — today we take social gifting to the next level.

We’re thrilled to announce that Karma has been acquired by Facebook. The service that Karma provides will continue to operate in full force. By combining the incredible passion of our community with Facebook’s platform we can delight users in new and meaningful ways. As we say … only good things will follow.

Simply put, together we can celebrate life’s important moments in ways we could not before. A word of heartfelt thanks to our partners, customers, and our incredible team for helping us share Karma with so many people.

Sincerely,
Karma Co-founders Lee & Ben

Facebook’s $38 share price would make its deal to buy Instagram worth nearly $1.2 billion, up from the roughly $1 billion price the company announced in April.

That’s a nice little bump but the deal hasn’t gone through given regulatory reviews. On top of that, we don’t know the restrictions on the shares like when they vest or if they’re subject to lock-up period. Plus, shares may pop tomorrow and their value will probably fluctuate a lot by the time six-month lock-up date hits. When Facebook agreed to buy Instagram, it said it would pay with $300 million in cash and 22,999,412 shares of stock. That stock is now worth nearly $874 million, creating a $1.17 billion price tag.

Originally, Facebook said the deal was going to close by the end of June, according to its IPO filing. But now it appears that it may take longer because of a more thorough FTC investigation. There’s a requisite investigation if a deal is more than $66 million. But because of the more than $1 billion price that Facebook paid and the reach of both companies, the commission is said to be looking a little bit more closely at the deal, a source with knowledge of the talks tells us. The FTC usually doesn’t publicly confirm investigations until they’re over, and hasn’t publicly confirmed if they’re doing one on this deal.

But there is evidence that it’s taking longer than expected. Facebook changed its IPO filing earlier this month by amending a sentence projecting a second quarter close for the Instagram deal. It now forecasts a close sometime by the end of the year. If the government blocks the deal, Facebook has agreed to pay Instagram a $200 million kill fee, according to its IPO filing.

Because of this, Instagram’s dozen or so employees haven’t even started at Facebook. They’re still in limbo and they’re working from their San Francisco headquarters on the app, instead of Facebook’s Menlo Park office. Meanwhile, Facebook is also trying to improve its own mobile offerings; it recently boosted the size of photographs in the mobile news feed, making the overall experience more Instagram-like.

While the deal is ultimately expected to go through, a Facebook-Instagram acquisition poses several challenges for the FTC. For one, the FTC’s merger guidelines happen to focus a lot on pricing power, and how a merger would affect a company’s ability to raise prices and decrease output. But both Facebook and Instagram give their products away for free.

The other components of the FTC and Department of Justice’s guidelines have to do with market share. They’ll add up the square of different market shares for competing firms, creating a number called the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index. If it’s above 2500, then the market is highly concentrated. If it’s below 1500, then it’s unconcentrated.

But again, it’s not clear how this applies in a market where companies can rise and fall so quickly. Instagram basically appeared out of nowhere. It racked up nearly 40 million users in about 18 months. Plus, the time it takes for any given company to gain millions of daily active users is declining, partly because of the virality of the Facebook platform itself and then because the iOS and Android platforms are finally reaching scale.

So how do you apply a formula like this when changes in market share are so dynamic? The last time the FTC took a close look at a consumer web deal of this size, it was back in 2009 with the $750 million Google-Admob acquisition. The commission unanimously closed it after Apple entered the competitive field with its acquisition of rival mobile ad network Quattro, which became iAd. However, there hasn’t been a smartphone app deal of comparable size to Instagram — yet.

Everyme, the Y Combinator-backed mobile startup that helps users create groups for private sharing, is launching a whole bunch of new stuff today.

For starters, it’s releasing apps for both Android and the Web. Co-founder Vibhu Norby says both products have the same features as the iPhone app. On the Android side, Norby says “worked really hard” to create an app that was designed for the platform, rather than just porting over the iPhone app.

On the Web side, Norby notes that it’s unusual for “mobile-first companies like ours” to build more than a barebones website pointing to the mobile app. But Everyme isn’t a normal mobile company — even though its initial product was a mobiel app, it also allowed users to participate in groups through text messaging and emails. Norby says it was important that someone who got an Everyme email on their desktop or laptop computer could follow the link and join the conversation right now.

The company also made some improvements to the iPhone app too. Groups on Everyme are called Circles, and Norby says the process for creating them was “pretty bad.” Now the process has been streamlined, so you can add or remove people from circles with just a couple of taps. The invite process has been too. Previously, if you added someone to a circle who wasn’t already a member of Everyme, they wouldn’t know about it until they joined the app, or until someone shared a story in the circle. Now if you add a non-member to a circle, you can turn invites on to notify them by email or text.

One of the cooler features is something called Magic Stories, where the app automatically generates Everyme updates based on updates from your other social networks. Today it’s adding Instagram integration, so if you post a popular photo on Instagram, it will be shared in Everyme too.

Last month, Everyme’s team told that there were 200,000 people in Everyme circles. Now Norby tells me there 400,000. You don’t need to be a registered user to be added to a circle, so that doesn’t necessarily reflect the app’s current activity levels. In fact, I was a little skeptical since the circles I’ve created or joined are pretty barren, but Norby says its’ more designed for “non-tech folks” who don’t want to share everything on public social networks. For those users, Everyme seems to take the place of texting or calling. And they’ve shared 100,000 stories and 30,000 photos.

INTRO, the ambient location app whose claim-to-fame is how it’s angling to become the “LinkedIn” of the social/local people-stalking space, is now increasing its business-oriented focus. With the iOS app‘s most recent update, due to roll out any day (minute?) now, INTRO is adding features that will allow members of groups to connect with each other, even going so far as to shut off networking with people outside of their preferred groups.

The company, which was already focused on professional (not social) networking, is integrating Meetup, Eventbrite, and LinkedIn groups for improved matching in the new app, as well as support for private groups, like membership clubs and entrepreneur networks, for example.

Explains INTRO Labs founder Anthony Erwin, “some people - particularly the power players, maybe’s it’s a top VC in New York, for example – still potentially want to network, but don’t want everyone jumping at them,” he says. “When they add themselves to a private network [in INTRO], they can switch off all other types of people connected to them.” In other words, INTRO will now help the big-time players do the networking on their own terms. That’s not a bad idea, actually.

The interesting thing about the introduction of this private networking feature is how it’s being rolled out. Instead of putting the burden on the user to configure this stuff in the settings, INTRO works with the network in question to automatically add INTRO users to the networks they’re a member of. Although seemingly a simple idea, doing so involves matching the user’s name, LinkedIn profile, email and location to the network’s private membership roster. Once a match has been made, a new section appears in the user’s profile section showing the badges of the networks they belong to.

(Note: if you’re interested in having a network set up for your organization, Anthony says he’s taking requests via email here:  ant@introlabs.net.)

Upon its initial launch, there are already 40 private networks available, mainly in New York and Londdon, which have the potential to reach to some 1.5 million members.

Also new with the app’s update is support for Twitter SSO, and, just in case the ambient location crown goes to another app (if such a crown ever exists), the company is working on an API, too. This could give INTRO more room to grow – for example, companies and organizations building their own apps for events or conferences could integrate ambient location features to connect attendees.

The update isn’t live in the App Store at the time of writing, but should be rolling out soon. In the meantime, you can grab  the current version of INTRO here.

With smartphone penetration now at 50 percent in the U.S., the world of apps is seeing a knock-on effect in their popularity: according to a new report from Nielsen, mobile consumers are downloading more apps than ever before, with the average number of apps owned by a smartphone user now at 41 — a rise of 28 percent on the 32 apps owned on average last year.

But at the same time, there are hints of people possibly approaching a limit to how much they might use them: despite the rise in app numbers, the amount of time that people are spending in apps has remained essentially flat: collectively, they are being used for 39 minutes per day today, compared to 37 minutes in 2011.

Nielsen also notes that apps seem to be taking a bit of time away from mobile web usage (perhaps this is where the extra two minutes comes from…): it says that users are using apps 10 percent more than the mobile web, compared to last year.

As for why users are spending no more time on apps than they were before: Nielsen doesn’t really explore that issue, but it does note that privacy has slightly increased as an issue for U.S. consumers: some 73 percent note personal data collection as a concern (compared to 70 percent a year ago), with 55 percent saying they are wary of sharing information. It could be that this privacy concern is actually keeping at least some people away from engaging in apps more.

Going back to the increase in app downloads noted by Nielsen, this is something that has been pointed out by the app store owners in a different way: Google says it has now passed 15 billion downloads announced this month, and Apple noted 25 billion downloads in March 2012.

This morning, Gartner released some figures that pointed to even more consolidation among the top handset makers and the top platforms — with Samsung and Apple accounting for 49.3 percent of all smartphones sold in Q1 2012 (compared to just under 30 percent a year ago).

Nielsen’s app figures seem to point to a similar trend: Android and iOS owners accounted for 88 percent of all apps that were downloaded in the past 30 days, it says (up from 74 percent last year). That may partly be to do with their own market share size in the U.S., where Android and Apple’s iOS dominate the smartphone landscape with respectively 38 million and 84 million users — but it also seems to imply that those users are also actively engaging with their respective app stores.

The other significant consolidation trend that Nielsen has picked up on is around what apps are actually getting the most traffic: even as app stores have grown, and our own collections of them have grown, we continue to fixate most on the exact same five apps this year as we did last year: they are Facebook, YouTube, Android Market, Google Search, and Gmail.

Yes, that’s right: you can slam Google, Android and Android fragmentation all you want, but four of the five most popular apps today, as they were last year, are owned by the company, and that’s partly thanks to the popularity of three of them on iOS.

Ironically, that concentration at the top is also being met with growth in long-tail consumption: Nielsen notes that the time spent on the top 50 apps is actually down compared to last year: the top 50 apps today get 58 percent of our app time, compared to 74 percent in 2011. As with our own personal app catalogues growing in size, this points to consumers getting more diverse in terms of what apps they are using overall, not a surprise really when you consider that there are around 1.1 billion apps currently between just Google Play and the Apple App Store.

It’s almost here. The big day. Can you feel the excitement? Yes, if all goes according to plan on Friday, Mark Zuckerberg will ring the Nasdaq bell in a hoodie, the big blue social network will go forward with one of the largest IPOs for an internet company in history, the markets will hit a fever pitch, the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse will update their statuses — and the rest of us will just go back to using Twitter.

Nonetheless, Facebook is expected to go public at a valuation between $92 and $103 billion. As such, it’s pretty clear what Facebook is worth to us (really, to the market), but the real question is: How much are you worth to Facebook? Hmm?

Thanks to online privacy company Abine, we now have a simple tool by which we can calculate our monetary value to Facebook. In good old dollars and cents.

To illustrate the potential for Facebook to lose sight of the importance of the individual (and his or her privacy) amidst the pressure to maintain its ridiculously high valuation/metrics, Abine has created a quiz called the “Val-You Calculator,” which, based on your answers to seven questions, determines the dollar value you represent as a user.

These questions ask you where you live (most of Facebook’s ad revenue comes from North American companies), how many friends you have, whether or not you play Zynga games, for example, all in an effort to demonstrate that your personal data comes with an implicit dollar-value.

According to Abine, its Val-You Calculator uses data from Facebook’s S-1 filing, as well as “independent financial and market research analysts, Facebook advertisers, and our own internal modeling and estimates.” A little bit of magic, and presto, you can see how much revenue you generate for Big Blue.

Of course, when it comes to IPOs, with a ton of financial information being disclosed for the first time, naturally the magnifying glasses come out, books are scrutinized, business models molested, etc. For better or for worse. Regardless of the hot air that gusts from pundits, privacy will continue to be a serious concern for Facebook users going forward. In fact, just last week, Facebook launched a major update to its privacy policies in compliance with an audit by the Irish Data Protection Commissioner.

Among those changes, Facebook one-upped Google and created the “Facebook Terms and Policies Hub” to bring its 10 critical privacy policy documents under one roof. As the social network explained in a blog post, the changes are being made in an effort to increase the level of transparency around its handling of users’ personal data. And, as Josh details, for the most part, these changes seem logical, user friendly, and anything but suspicious, as some might have you believe.

That being said, with a scary-big user base creating even scarier amounts of big data, and considering that its model revolves around revenue derived from targeted, personalized ads, privacy advocates believe that the coming pressure to beat projections in the public markets leaves our personal data in a precarious position. The shortest line between A and big quarterly gains is a straight line to selling our private data to marketers.

In a recent survey, Abine found that 75 percent of its users wouldn’t leave Facebook alone in a dark room with their data, a sentiment that was confirmed by an independent AP-ABC poll in which nearly 60 percent of respondents had “little to no trust in Facebook to keep their information private.”

By updating its privacy policies, Facebook is working to allay those concerns, and its made progress. Yet, as Josh points out, privacy policy won’t be its only concern. Beyond making moves to stay on the right side of the law, down the road Facebook may face government regulation in regard to privacy. If a governing body were to place restrictions on how the company launches products, or displays features, for example, it could become increasingly vulnerable to the competition.

As it feels the pressure to drive big returns, Facebook may be forced to devise more clever ways to utilize data. It can think bigger, and will, but then it has to worry about mobile. As it has itself admitted, mobile is a big threat, and the company’s growth may be impeded as it works to keep up adequate transparency and has to show fewer ads per user as a result.

Whether or not this will significantly affect revenue in the long-term remains to be seen, however, thanks to Abine and Val-You, at the very least, Facebook will know exactly how much ad revenue each of its users represent. And that, my friends, is priceless.

Sadly, I was only worth a little over $50 to Facebook. Clearly, I’m not a good customer. What about you?

For more on Abine, find them here, or get your own Val-You appraisal here.

With Square yet to reveal when or where it might offer its mobile payment service in Europe, and PayPal apparently still only talking with would-be partners, the door is wide open for more local players to jump in and pick up some market share. Sweden’s iZettle, which often gets compared to Square, is now doing just that: today it is launching its iOS, dongle-based mobile payment service to the UK, four months after its pan-nordic live launch, and as it is preparing to launch an Android version of its product later this year.

iZettle kicking off its service by giving away 3,000 card readers to small businesses and sole traders in the country as part of its invitation-only beta, which it is running in cooperation with MasterCard, American Express and Diners Club. In its still brief life, it has seen some decent traction in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland, where it now has 50,000 active merchants on its network.

iZettle is filling a practical need in the current market. The initial aim of the service, according to Jacob de Geer, the founder and CEO, is to target not those merchants that already take card payments, but those who have never signed on to using anything other than checks, cash and invoices to accept payments. There are roughly 20 million small businesses in Europe that fall into this category, he says, with the “uncarded” ranging from sole traders like carpenters to small independent cafes. “We’re not trying to go after those with existing infrastructure because switching costs are too high,” he says.

De Geer will not yet reveal the total number or value of transactions or how many consumers that have used the service to date, except to say that the company is building out its infrastructure to keep up with the demand and has grown by 10 percent in recent months. What’s interesting is that, for now at least, the service seems to be attracting high-value transactions: De Geer says the average value of a transaction is €60 ($76), compared to between €10 and €15 for the average NFC transaction in the Nordic region. (In comparison, he notes that Square transacts between $8-10 per day on any given reader, but that’s an average number and it has picked up a huge number of merchants now.)

The iZettle service works similar to PayPal’s Here and Square, in that a merchant plugs a card-reading dongle into an iOS device to process a card payment using an app downloaded to the device. Instead of reading the magnetic strip on the back of the card, iZettle reads the chip — these are now near-ubiquitous in Europe and tend to be more secure. Like other card payment services, you sign on the device screen to complete a payment, and the funds are deposited in a merchant account the next day.

Similar to other payment services iZettle works on a commission basis — in its case a percentage on each transaction, with that percentage varying by country. It actually dropped a transaction fee it used to take only days ago — perhaps a sign of how the area is heating up and so offering more competitive offerings is essential.

For now, the service is only on iOS but De Geer says that Android is coming soon, “this year for sure.” He says that the delay was due to (surprise!) fragmentation across too many versions of the platform, and too many devices. But the evolution to Ice Cream Sandwich — the latest OS — is definitely making things more standardized, he notes.

One expansion that is not coming soon is to the U.S. Not only do companies like Square and Here have a lot of early business sewn up, but he also notes that “The U.S. is not too interesting for us given that they use the mag stripe and we focus on chip-and-PIN services.”

More interesting, he says, are markets like Asia and Latin America, where there is good chip-card penetration but card payment facilities are still relatively low among smaller businesses. Still, the next launches are likely to be in Europe, with Germany, France, Italy and Spain all on De Geer’s roadmap, with “one or two of those” expected to come online this summer. To date, iZettle has received venture funding of $16.4 million from Index, Creandum and others to fund that expansion.

Interested companies can either register a request through iZettle’s web site, or via its iTunes app, and the first 3,000 will get a free card reader to get started.