Consumers may be ready for mobile wallets, but the marketplace is not. Especially if stuff like this keeps happening. Apparently, some two dozen retailers, including big names like Walmart and Target, are working together to create their own mobile payments system, according to sources at the WSJ. That means in addition to mobile wallets provided by banks, mobile operators (Isis), credit card networks, startups (like Square and Dwolla) and tech companies like Google (Google Wallet) and PayPal, consumers will be asked to wrap their heads around yet another mobile payment method: one from the retailers themselves.

That’s bad news for consumers, as an addition like this can create confusion. But it could end up being great news for more disruptive payment systems like Square.

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The Los Angeles Times reports that The Los Angeles Times will be adopting a paywall (they prefer the term “membership program”) starting March 5th, joining the ranks of other large newspapers hoping to replace plummeting subscription revenues. Readers, naturally, are incensed, though the change was inevitable for such a large newspaper.

Although the move to a paid or at least somehow powerfully monetized online model is going to be critical for the LA Times and other major print establishments, it appears that everyone in the industry is still in the “flailing” stage, and hoping that a model rejected and circumvented by readers will somehow work for them as it has (in a way) worked for others.

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Another acquisition for Groupon, and a sign of how the e-commerce company is getting more focused on mobile as a route to future growth: it has picked up Kima Labs, which makes mobile barcode reading app Barcode Hero and mobile payment app TapBuy. The terms of the deal were not disclosed; we’re trying to find out.

The news comes just hours after news broke that Groupon had bought another mobile startup, Hyperpublic, which makes geolocation technology.

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At the Goldman Sachs Internet and Technology Conference in San Francisco Thursday, Groupon Founder and CEO Andrew Mason took to the stage to talk about the daily deal behemoth’s newly-minted position as a public company, its roller coaster ride both leading up to and since its IPO, as well as plans for the future.

There was a lot of pressure bearing down on Groupon in the months leading up to its emergence on NASDAQ, with many grumbling about its overvaluation and undercooked business model, among other things. After listing its initial offering at $26 a share in November, the company’s stock today has dropped to $20 a share, after a series of ups and downs.

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So in the interest of supporting unique publishing methods and ideas, I thought it might be interesting to talk about Verdant Books and something they’re calling an “interactive novel.” Now my idea of an interactive novel is Choose Your Own Adventure, but this is something fairly unique.

Ok. Here’s the premise:

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Some 15 companies, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, PayPal plan to jointly work on a standard for blocking phishing e-mails by verifying that they come from legitimate companies. It seems obvious that trusted, legitimate companies could come together to do this, but it’s only started happening in the last 18 months.

DMARC.org – or the Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance – is a new white-list system will be available for use across the Internet.

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Y Combinator alum Curebit, an online customer referral platform that leverages social media for “word-of-mouth” advertising, has just raised $1.2 million in funding. The investors include 500 Startups, Karl Jacob, Auren Hoffman, Dharmesh Shah, Gordon Tucker, Alex Lloyd of Accelerator Ventures, and others.

The funding will be used for continued product development and a slight expansion to the team involving three new hires (two developers, one designer) to the company’s now five-person outfit.

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Exclusive - E-commerce platform company BigCommerce has set up a $2 million fund for developers. With the launch of the fund, the Sydney, Australia-based company aims to sway third-party developers into submitting their integration and application ideas.

Caveat: investments in successful entries are capped at $20,000 per project.

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@WalmartLabs, the digital technology division of the world’s largest retailer, is launching a contest today which uses crowdsourcing techniques to determine which items the company should stock in its stores and on its website. The contest, called Get on the Shelf, will be heavily promoted by all of Walmart’s social media presences, including Facebook, Google+ and, most importantly, Twitter.

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Thumbtack, which operates an online community marketplace where people can easily list and book local services, has raised $4.5 million in Series A funding, TechCrunch has learned. The round was led by Javelin Venture Partners, with MHS Capital and venture capitalist Tim Draper participating.

Founded in 2009, Thumbtack aims to “make hiring a service professional as easy as it is to buy a book on Amazon.com”. It’s up against startups like Redbeacon and OpenChime, among others.

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The question of how music will be distributed in a year, five years, or ten years, is an open one. The landscape has been altered so drastically over the last ten years that the only thing that seems sure is that major changes will continue to come.

Bandcamp hopes to be part of those changes, and they’re showing healthy growth: the site pulled in a million dollars in sales just in December. Not, of course, much of a challenge to the sudden empire of iTunes and the inverted economics of streaming services of Spotify — but the Bandcamp approach to the distribution question is building legitimacy.

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You want the best price on things you buy second hand, but finding out how much you should pay is a hassle. Removing this friction from a lucrative part of the purchase funnel is the goal of Priceonomics. The first startup out of the winter 2012 Y Combinator batch, Priceonomics has crawled the web to compile its next-generation price guide. It launches today featuring 10 million prices on 50,000 products, and plans to expand across verticals soon.

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Once upon a time, we bought our concert tickets from a good old-fashioned cashier at the local box office. As time went on, we took some of the work out of the hands of the cashier and started buying our tickets at home — on the Web. (For a fee, mind you.) And if what we’re seeing today is any indication, the next step in the evolution of the box office? Facebook.

Ticketfly’s Facebook ticketing app, which launched last week, aims to boost sales by letting people know when their friends buy a ticket. The big idea is to complete the ticket-buying circle — from finding out about a show to buying a ticket — without ever sending the Facebook faithful outside the confines of their favorite social network.

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Despite its struggles of late, Netflix is still one of the most popular sources when it comes to online streaming of movies and TV shows. (Although things may change if it’s acquired by Verizon.) For many of us, the Netflix queue is our go-to source for bookmarking films that we’d like to watch at a later date.

One new startup, called Plexus Entertainment, wants to take the Netflix formula and apply it to a broader scale. In the big picture, Plexus’ goal is to connect films and filmmakers with their audiences, so to do that, they’ve launched “Watch It” in public beta to allow users to keep track of movies they’re interested in, where those movies are playing, and to be proactively notified of all the different ways to view those films. Huzzah!

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Couponing has been around forever, but the popularity of digital offers, daily deals, and group buying is fairly new. We’ve gone through the honeymoon period, watched the meteoric rise of Groupon, its overvaluation, IPO — and thankfully, through it all, we’ve seen increasing scrutiny on the space, especially over just how profitable daily deals actually are for local businesses.

The debate has raged over the daily deal model’s clever repackaging of old ideas and just how valuable the Groupon model is as an advertising mechanism for local merchants. Rocky was probably a little overzealous in saying that Groupon is poised for collapse, but there is no doubt that there are holes in its business model, just as there is no doubt that there are upsides to the model as a whole, both as an advertising channel and a tool for customer acquisition and retention.

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Following Radiohead into the wild world of micropayments, comedian Louis CK is offering his latest concert film, Live At The Beacon Theatre, as a DRM-free download or stream for $5.

Once payment is tendered, downloaders can both stream and download the movie twice. Once those four chances are used up you have to pay again, although because the MP4 file is DRM-free there is nothing stopping you from watching again and again, projecting it on a building across the street, or making a tiny flip book of Louis CK excerpts. However, Louis does ask that you not “torrent” his film:

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Today, December 10th, Amazon is offering a very special deal you’re going to love and your local brick-and-mortar retailer is going to hate. Use its PriceCheck mobile app and get 5% off your purchase, up to $5 at a time, as many as 3 times. Why the discounts to use PriceCheck? The app is designed to get you to visit local shops, try out a product, submit valuable pricing data to Amazon, leave without buying anything, and make your purchase on Amazon instead.

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On Friday, a little-known Swedish ecommerce payments company called Klarna raised a massive $155 million round from DST and General Atlantic. Its previous round was a scant $9 million in May, 2010 when it was discovered by Sequoia Capital and superstar partner Michael Moritz took a board seat (yes, he actually flies to Sweden for the board meetings). “This is the public financing of twelve years ago,” Moritz tells me, “it is just done privately.”

Klarna’s mega-round fits into a growing trend with successful internet companies that build out a substantial business on a few million dollars, then don’t take on any more money until they do a huge round. Examples include Dropbox, which recently raised $250 million after only raising $7 million before, and Airbnb with its $112 million round (Sequoia was an early investor in both of these as well).

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This week at the Le Web conference in Paris, Foodie.fm will be formally launching its personalized social shopping platform for groceries. The Finnish startup basically aims to better inform shoppers about the food they buy, and help retailers communicate directly about the groceries they sell.

At the core of Foodie.fm is a recommendation system, which the company says relies on patent-pending technology, that learns from a user’s eating and purchasing habits, and suggests recipes and groceries that match his or her ‘taste profile’. The system takes into account personal preferences – think food allergies or intolerance, budgetary restrictions and predilections.

Read more at TechCrunch Europe.

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Amazon this morning announced the fresh availability of an Italian-language Kindle, and the opening of an Italian Kindle Store, offering customers over 16,000 Italian-language Kindle books. The same thing is happening in Spain, obviously with a Spanish…

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According to eGaming Review (note: the story is theirs exclusively but sits behind a paywall), Facebook is engaged in exploratory talks with a number of UK operators to open its platform to real-money online gambling, maybe even as soon as in the first quarter of 2012.

Citing sources familiar with the discussions, eGR reports that the social networking leader is considering offering an initial eight ‘licences’ to as many UK operators looking to roll out such gambling apps on the Facebook platform.

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When the term Cyber Monday was coined in 2005, the Monday after Thanksgiving was the 12^th biggest online shopping day of the year. That year, Facebook had 5.5 million users and Twitter didn’t exist. In 2010, Cyber Monday was the #1 biggest online shopping day of the year, with sales topping $1 billion. I believe the growth of social media and the importance of Cyber Monday are correlated because peer -to-peer sharing of deals and owned marketing channels like Facebook Pages and Twitter accounts are bringing promotions directly to where users spend their time online.

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Mobile is growing as a medium for ecommerce, with users sourcing deals from their phones and tablets before visiting physical stores according to a new study by Usablenet, The company which powers mobile sites for 100 top U.S. retailers including JCPenney, Aeropostale, and REI tracked 180 million page views and 1 million mobile users over Thanksgiving and Black Friday. It saw mobile traffic to its clients was up 60% from the same period last year, with Thanksgiving sending more traffic than the following day. Usablenet also found that iOS devices accounted for 42% of the traffic, trumping Android, and trouncing the tiny traffic from Windows and Nokia devices.

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Fire sales turned into a firestorm for Walmart this morning as the company’s web servers buckled under Black Friday traffic. Shoppers from around the country waited until the middle of the night for sales only to experience broken checkout pages, emptied shopping carts, and login errors. This caused their desired items to go out of stock before they could buy them, leading to mass frustration and ill will towards the discount store chain. Meanwhile at its physical stores, 20 people were pepper sprayed by a fellow customer, and 2 people were shot outside separate locations. Walmart will need to sort out its servers in preparation for the upcoming Cybermonday blitz or it risks losing customers to Amazon.

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It’s Black Friday in the United States, but Amazon this morning revealed a couple of deals that it will be running from Cyber Monday and/or the next few days (specifically, starting at midnight on Sunday, November 27, through the end of next week).

Just like today, the company will sell a $79 Kindle, a $99 Kindle Touch, a $149 Kindle Touch 3G and a $199 Kindle Fire. It again points out that the latter device is “currently the best-selling item across all of Amazon”.

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Jack Dorsey’s mobile payments startup Square is now processing $11 million a day in mobile payments, it was revealed today at the Techonomy conference in Tucson, Arizona. Host David Kirkpatrick threw the number out there as something Dorsey had told him backstage—the last official number was $10 million a day and Square may not be consistently above $11 million yet. Either way, this is up from $4 million a day just last July.

The key to Square’s rapid growth in Dorsey’s mind is the same thing that propels Twitter: “We haven’t defined a lot of how people are going to use them.” He sees both as utilities which can be adopted to different purposes by their users, and that is what makes them so powerful. “We don’t want to make Square all about taxi cabs,”" he says. “And we don’t want to make Twitter all about celebrities and politicians.”

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Online holiday shopping reached record levels in 2010. And e-commerce spending is up this year. All signs point to consumers spending even more online this holiday season. I sat down with executives from Google, eBay, PayPal and ShopKick to discuss the trends that are expected to emerge in the e-commerce space over the next few months.  They center around mobile, tablets, and deals.

PayPal has more than doubled its mobile payments volume since the 2010 holiday shopping season, and we haven’t even hit the thick of this year’s rush. eBay is projecting $5 billion in mobile payments volume in 2010 and this number could increase in the next few months. And Google projects that 15 percent of total search on Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving and one of the biggest shopping days of the year) will come from mobile devices. Tablet devices are now a part of the online shopping experience and retailers are taking note. Clearly, all signs point to the fact that this could be the breakout year for mobile shopping.

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A year ago, at BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas, PageLines announced the release of Platform, a drag and drop design framework for WordPress. The product offered some cool CMS design options, a drag-and-drop layout editor, and a fully configurable template builder for creating custom websites. PageLines’ Platform has since been downloaded 400,000 times and has become one of the most popular frameworks on WordPress.org over the last year.

Back at BlogWorld Expo today, PageLines announced today that it will launch version 2.0 of its framework on December 8th, which will include a nifty new marketplace: The PageLines Store. For developers, designers, or people who want to build cool websites without worrying about coding, this should be of interest. The store is basically an app store for “drag & drop” sections, plug-ins, sections, and themes — all of which have been built by developers for the PageLines community. Apps in the store will range from drag and drop sections that customize the style of a website to an integrated system for eCommerce or a community forum and other functionality.

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Let’s say you’re a first-time entrepreneur. You’ve got a great idea for a product or business, but you don’t know where to start. You don’t know any VCs or angels, maybe your company isn’t right for an incubator, but you want firsthand advice from experts on how to proceed. While there are tons of amazing online resources for entrepreneurs and there’s some terrific expert advice on Quora on an array of entrepreneurial subjects, little of this information is personalized.

This is one example of the value proposition of Evisors, a startup that is building a marketplace of expert advice. Founded in May 2010 by Harvard Business School grads Fredrik Marø, Marc Weiner, Dan Levy, and Wharton grad Christine Apold, Evisors offers on-demand advice, allowing consumers to go beyond their own personal and professional networks to search its database of experienced experts to directly schedule consultations.

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Ecommerce in China is ready to take off and, more important, it’s ready to reach great heights on its own terms. Lu Dong of La Mui, Haifeng Ye of Mbaobao, and Fangfang Wu of Greenbox are three ecommerce pioneers who are, as we speak, redefining online sales in China.

“China is ready for ecommerce,” said Lu Dong. “People are moving to buying almost anything online.”

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