Movl, a tv app maker, received $500,000 from billionaire entrepreneur and investor Mark Cuban, to help fund business development as the company launches three new features. Movl designs multiscreen, multidevice apps to enhance the connected-TV viewing experience.

Now Movl is working on a program called Direct Connect, which adds to the existing Connect service and is designed to work with both the Wi-Fi and 3G capabilities of mobile devices. Movl explained the program would have the capability to tap into a smartphone’s built-in accelerometer to use the phone as a game controller. The business model is ad-supported or paid ($30/month) for Direct Connect with a free trial available for developers.

The app maker is also experimenting with a multiscreen, interactive ad platform and Kontrol TV, which will offer shortcuts for users to find multiple TV apps from the same app— including channel apps, trends, tweets, and other social media references related to TV shows. The company projects a May launch of Kontrol TV.

Last month, Movl announced a new app called SwipeIt, which works on Android phones and Samsung TVs (and is technically owned by Samsung), allowing users to “swipe” content from their phones and have it appear on their TV screens. Early last year, Movl’s WeDraw app won $200,000 as part of Samsung’s Smart TV apps competition.

Following in the footsteps of major brands such as Apple, Nike, Harley Davidson and ESPN, LivingSocial is now seeking to enhance its core brand via a retail “experience” center where book clubs, cooking classes, painting classes and performances can all take place.

The effort follows a trial of a LivingSocial membership program with built-in discounts and perks, a la Amazon Prime. Amazon, which owns 31 percent of LivingSocial, has been developing drop-off sites and is rumored to be contemplating its own stores.

As reported in The Washington Post, LivingSocial has paid $3 million to renovate 918 F Street, a six-story building near the hot new retail area of the Verizon Center and a few blocks from its headquarters. As the article recounts, “There’s an industrial-grade kitchen for temporary ‘pop-up’ restaurants. In a cooking classroom, high-definition, flat-screen monitors connected to motion-sensor cameras give an over-the-shoulder view of a chef at work. Another area could host intimate music sessions, and ‘flex’ rooms will host everything from yoga classes to book lectures.”

To us, the center is a natural extension of Living Social Adventures, in which Living Social acts as the host and promoter for experiences that can combine an outing, a meal and entertainment. One question is whether the cost can be paid back — $3 million appears to be the cost of the building. The extensive renovations may bring the cost higher. A second question is whether the experience center can be replicated in other markets.

The center opens Feb. 16 with a $119 Mexican dinner — not cheap — by celebrity chef Mike Isabella. The meal is a warm-up for a new D.C. restaurant Isabella is launching in the spring. LivingSocial told The Post that the idea is to extend its focus on lifestyle branding and move away from being known as a coupon company. The term it uses is “scarce experiential.”

Given the focus on classes, LivingSocial’s tie-in with Amazon, and Amazon’s purchase of TeachStreet, it’s surprising that Amazon isn’t leveraging TeachStreet’s relationships with independent teachers. Instead, it has closed down the service.

On Thursday’s Q4 and full-year 2011 earnings call, Eniro announced that it will phase out its print Gula Sider (Yellow Pages) directory in Norway, leaving only local directories as a print product choice in the Nordic country with a population of 4 million.

The move is yet another sign that the core Yellow Pages directory is nearing the end of its natural life in some of Europe’s more densely populated and digitally advanced markets. In December, European Directories shuttered the print operations of its Gule Sider (Yellow Pages) operation in Denmark and sold its online assets to Eniro.

This move shouldn’t come as a huge surprise given the rapid migration of directory revenues from print to digital, particularly in large markets like Stockholm, Oslo and Copenhagen, where declines in usage and revenues have been steep in recent years.

BIA/Kelsey forecasts that print will account for just 40 percent of Nordic revenues in 2011, and barely 20 percent in 2015.

Eniro will continue to publish its local directories product in Norway, called Ditt Distrikt, in 74 smaller communities around Norway. There was no word given on the fate of the Gula Sidorna (Yellow Pages) directory in Sweden, Eniro’s largest market.

For the full year 2011, Eniro reported group revenues of SEK4.3 billlion, a decline of nearly 19 percent, though the organic decline was a more manageable 11 percent. Adjusted EBITDA was SEK1.1 billion.

Poland, once one of Eniro’s more stable markets, experienced a dramatic 44 percent revenue decline in 2011. Another troubling sign for Eniro was very modest 1 percent organic-only growth in its core Scandinavian markets. However, the company is maintaining its guidance to return to growth in 2012.

BIA/Kelsey will have a more complete rundown of full-year 2011 results in an upcoming Advisory.

Here’s a look at the contests:

1. Staples’ “Give Your Small Business the Push it Needs.” To enter, contestants must submit a 15-second video about their business on Staples’ Facebook page. In order to win, each business must get the most votes for their video. Staples offers the winning five businesses up to $50,000 in free television advertising in a Staples ad or $40,000 in free advertising and $10,000 in cash each. Winners also get $500 in Staples merchandise and services. Deadline is March 14.

2. Wal-Mart’s “Get on the Shelf.” The world’s largest retailer is offering the winner of this contest an opportunity to have its product sold in Wal-Mart stores and Walmart.com. In addition, the winner will receive marketing help and assistance in scaling production to meet the retail giant’s demand. To enter, contestants must submit a video via YouTube. Deadline is Feb. 22.

3. Facebook’s “Small Business Boost.” While some companies are using Facebook as a contest platform, the social media network itself is offering tiered prizes in its SMB contest. The 10 U.S.-based businesses that can drive the most “likes” to their Facebook business pages by April 1 will receive up to $10,000 in free advertising. Smaller prizes include receiving $50 in free Facebook advertising for attracting 50 Facebook “likes” before the April 1 deadline. Winners with 100 “likes” on their business pages will receive a $100 ad credit.

By now, much of the connected universe, and certainly all of technolphilia, is aware of Facebook’s IPO, which seeks to raise up to $5 billion (and perhaps eventually $10 billion) when its shares go public this spring. The net effect is a valuation of $75 billion to $100 billion for the 8-year-old social network.

Mining the 150-page S-1 for gold can be something of a scavenger hunt. Of course, Facebook’s user reach and engagement metrics explode off the document: 845 million monthly active users (MAUs) as of December 2011, 483 million daily active users (DAUs), 425 million mobile MAUs (as detailed by MLM’s Mike Boland), 2.7 billion likes and comments per day, and the list goes on. Facebook’s engagement stats — and the data that those enable it to collect about its audience and on behalf of its advertisers — is the envy of companies everywhere.

Also, its $1 billion in net income was a conveniently round and easily discoverable number. But probing deeper, the data told other narratives as well: some promising, others alarming and several yet to be determined.

The Good

Facebook’s top-line revenues continue to grow, as one would expect with a maturing network whose domestic and global reach is ubiquitous. Revenues eclipsed $3.7 billion in 2011, an 88 percent increase year over year. Advertising jumped 69 percent from 2010, with 56 percent of that U.S.-based. Perhaps more encouraging was its deepening payments business, which now accounts for 15 percent of Facebook’s total revenues, skyrocketing from $106 million to $557 million in just 12 months.

Facebook also already boasts $3.8 billion in cash on hand, and that number is about to multiply.

The Bad

Although $3.7 billion in revenues seems like a handsome haul, the top-line number actually came in lighter than many analysts expected. The 69 percent increase in ad revenues looks modest when noted that this stream boomed by 145 percent from 2009 to 2010. And that was even as Facebook boosted its total ads delivered by 42 percent and average price per ad by 18 percent.

Meanwhile, it is not realizing meaningful money from its 425 million mobile users. Facebook is in the strange position of both attacking and defending on mobile platforms. While it continues to enhance its apps suite and build new mobile products, and will soon place Sponsored Stories ads within mobile news feeds, it also wants to refrain from cannibalizing the ads business it has amassed on the desktop. As a result, substitutive mobile growth is listed as a risk factor.

The (Unknown) Future

Facebook’s future appears as uncertain as it is promising (and vice versa). Naturally the company must continually calibrate its monetization engine, and quickly unpack new revenue sources (as it has with Facebook Credits over the past two years). Here are three domains that we feel Facebook may address with its newfound cash and investor pressure:

- Ad Network: Facebook’s reach is undeniable. Its user data trove is deep, perhaps unparalleled. And thousands of third-party sites have linked to Facebook’s platform through Connect, a single sign-on conduit that can socialize a website experience based on the user’s Facebook social graph. Mash it all together, and an ad network — both desktop and mobile — seems irresistible and inevitable. For now, we’ll call it “Facebook AdSense.”

- Payments Expansion: Facebook has already ported its Credits currency beyond gaming and virtual goods to digital products such as movies and music. Now, will the network usher Credits into real-world goods and services, making it a full-service social commerce portal? It toyed with the idea during its short-lived deals trial last summer, in which Credits were a payment option (though not the only one). Expect many experiments to come.

- Local: Facebook has never shown the propensity to build a sales force of the mass and scope necessary to exhaustively address local markets and SMBs (as opposed to say Groupon). Even its deals play was an aggregated approach through partners. However, it does collect much of its advertising revenues from small and mid-market businesses that self-serve on the platform. Now it has opened up its Ads API to all qualified developers, enabling more partners with local audiences (agencies, media, etc.) to manage scaled ads campaigns on behalf of a fleet of clients. As just one example, French directory publisher PagesJaunes recently joined the API program.

A more enterprising probe of the S-1 will publish to Social Local Media clients in the coming days.

According to additional data from Compete and Google, we’ll continue to see B2B companies duke it out in paid search. Their report cites 73 percent of U.S. B2B execs used an online search engine last June to conduct purchase research.

In addition, the study also revealed more reliance on video. Google and Compete polled more than 1,600 U.S. execs and tracked the online activity of U.S. Web users both to and from selected B2B websites. Between February 2010 and March 2011, B2B-branded YouTube searches doubled.

Recently, Yelp posted a video on its business blog of SMB advertising success stories. Time will tell if we’ll see more brands using video content to share product-specific information, demos and testimonials.

On yesterday’s AT&T earnings call, CEO Randall Stephenson opened the door to the possibility that the telecom giant would sell off its directories business.

Here is what Stephenson said on yesterday’s earnings call: “That’s one area that we’re going to obviously take a very hard look at, and while I don’t want to give any indication on M&A activity, it’s one of these areas that we’re going to have to decide, do we keep it, do we restructure it, as we move forward.” The quote is from an article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

In our annual Picks and Predictions Advisory released earlier this month, The Kelsey Report predicted that at least one of the few remaining telecoms owning a directories business would divest it this year.

Here is what we said: “2012 could end with zero publishers of any significant size under telecom ownership. The most likely scenario is that one of the two biggest operators still under telecom control, AT&T or Sensis, will be sold. AT&T seems to be the most likely candidate.”

AT&T Advertising Solutions, the Yellow Pages operation, ended the year down 16.3 percent, to $3.6 billion. BIA/Kelsey estimates the company had print revenues totaling $2.3 billion, down almost 23 percent over 2010. Online revenue growth was just 3.3 percent, to 997 million. Online growth declined throughout 2011, from 6.8 percent growth in Q1 to a 1.2 percent decline in Q4. Since 2006, BIA/Kelsey estimates the Advertising Solutions business has lost about US$2.6 billion in top-line revenues.

AT&T’s directories operation is a two-headed monster that comprises the St. Louis-based Advertising Solutions business, which includes print directories and the sales force, and California-based AT&T Interactive, which operates the YP.com platform and develops digital products. Advertising Solutions is led by Jose Gutierrez, and the interactive business is led by David Krantz. Both units report to Ray Wilkins, who is CEO of AT&T Diversified Businesses.

Wilkins and Forrest Miller, who runs strategy and M&A activity for AT&T Diversified Businesses, have recently announced their retirements from AT&T. These departures will leave the organization short two senior leaders with ties to AT&T’s directories business. Miller led the directories business when it was under the SBC corporate brand.

U.S. directory and local search player The Berry Co. has scooped up defunct search marketing firm WebVisible’s Geneva platform from a liquidator in the wake of that company’s collapse.

“This acquisition will dramatically enhance our presence and capabilities in the digital local search space,” said John Fischer, interim president and CEO of TBC Holdings and Berry. “We plan to take the best of the Geneva technology and create a new platform and leads optimization engine that meets the ever-changing needs of advertisers across a range of digital products. We are delighted with the exceptional range of software development and product management talent represented by the employees of the new company.”

Berry has set up a separate business, based in Playa Vista, California, to operate the platform. One of the main reasons for the arm’s-length relationship is that the WebVisible business was based on reseller relationships, some of which Berry will maintain, while longer term Berry has ambitions to develop the technology further and possibly seek additional customers for the platform. This would be difficult if the operation were nested within the Berry organization. Essentially, Berry will become a customer of the new entity.

In addition to the technology, Berry has taken on 14 engineers and a few product specialists to help operate the platform.

Eric Owen, Berry’s VP of digital strategy and partnerships, told BIA/Kelsey that the WebVisible platform had several attributes that Berry found compelling, among them its dashboard capability, call tracking network and an order entry and ad insertion system with billing functionality. That latter is critical to helping Berry provision more digital products.

And moving more digital products through the pipeline is key to Berry’s longer term strategy, which involves provisioning multiple lead generating products and tracking the performance for the customer.

Shopkick, the location-based shopping app, announced today that it has more than 3 million active users since it launched over a year ago and that more than a billion of its in-app deals and offers have been viewed. Shopkick’s app communicates with a patent-pending device in stores, letting customers earn rewards just by strolling into a store with the app open and looking at products.

Shopkick’s new location technology, “shopkick Signal,” enables the app to verify location within feet. Since detection occurs on the user’s mobile device, privacy of presence information remains in the users’ control. As we noted in our cross media predictions, check-ins are becoming more automatic and algorithmic.

Notable stats:

– More than 4000 individual stores across multiple retailers and 250 malls have deployed Shopkick’s technology
– Five million users walked in to Shopkick partner stores in December 2011, twice the amount of walk-ins from four months prior
– 64 percent of all Shopkick users are women, more than half have children
– Over 150 million interactions with retailers since it added Old Navy as a new partner in November.

Palo Alto, California-based Shopkick has raised a total of $20 million from Kleiner, Greylock, Hoffman (investing as an individual before he became a partner at Greylock), Citi Growth Ventures & Innovation Group, and Ron Conway’s SV Angel. The free Shopkick app is available on iPhone and Android.

Verizon, the global broadband and telecommunications company, invested $370 million to develop a streaming video content delivery system and video ad platform designed to reach Web and mobile users. Verizon Unicast Content Delivery Services will use a variety of content suppliers to pair video streams with advertising via the Internet. It’s a Verizon-powered content delivery network aimed at its enterprise customer base.

Features for Unicast Content Delivery Services include:

• High-capacity, high-quality, real-time individualized video streaming
• Intelligent edge asset management
• Contextual ad and content insertion
• Virtually any network, any device, any time delivery
• Managed quality of service from content to consumer
• Robust and agnostic digital rights management

Verizon Digital Media Services has 30 data centers and an internal backbone that operates on multiple connections at 40 to 100 Gbps. The offering is scheduled for availability this spring.