We’ve been hearing a lot lately about consumer cloud services. There’s Apple’s recently-announced iCloud, Amazon’s Cloud Drive, Google’s Music Beta (which is your music in the cloud) and, of course, Microsoft’s SkyDrive. All of these to one extent or another are moving away from simple online lockers, and we see that today with the release of the latest update to SkyDrive.

The navigation is less clunky. Groups are now built in. Docs open up in online versions of Word or Excel, and can also be opened in the traditional desktop Office apps with edits syncing back and forth. But the biggest change is SkyDrive’s transition away from Microsoft Silverlight to HTML5 for all but a few remaining features. Photos and videos are all viewed with HTML5, which brings infinite scrolling of thumbnails and a new slide viewer. Videos now use the H.264 format and the video player is HTML5 instead of Silverlight.

Microsoft has been stepping away from Silverlight for its web products the past few months, opting instead for the cross-platform compatibility of HTML5 and other “modern web” technologies such as CSS3. When you resize your browser, photo thumbnails also resize smoothly thanks to CSS3 transitions. And the original aspect ratios are maintained in the thumbnails, even for panoramic photos.

SkyDrive pulls docs, photos, and other files from other Windows Live services and brings them all together in one central location with a UI that is more front-and-center as opposed to being a background storage service for other products. Groups are now integrated and accesible from the left-hand column. The whole service is faster, taking better advantage of caching and hardware acceleration. A new information pane replaces what used to be an ad spot with hints and suggestions to help you dive deeper into the service.

For all the improvements, SkyDrive still presents everything as though it is still in a traditional file system. You can view all your files, or broken down by type (docs, photos) or by groups. The file system is a relic of the PC and is something that Apple is moving away from with iCloud. On the other hand, at least it is a familiar metaphor most people can easily grasp. And there is no reason, SkyDrive can’t introduce new organizing principles over time (groups is already a first step).

There’s something about Instagram that you can’t quite put your fingers on. It’s just a fantastic, sticky, launch-a-few-times-a-day kind of app. There’s really nothing you can point to that makes it any better than the bazillion other photo sharing apps. In fact, it even under-whelms features-wise. But, but … there’s just something about it. Something in-between the pixels that makes it resonate with users.

And that’s exactly what Mobli has, too.

While we already reviewed the app back in April, it was only a couple of weeks ago that I got around to check out the app for myself.

Its iTunes App Store description reads:

“Have you ever wanted to see what’s going on somewhere you couldn’t be? Have you ever wanted to show your friends what you’re seeing?”

Already I’m rolling my eyes, trying to hold down the rush of vomit determined to spew out.

I install the sucker, do the Facebook Connect bit, and … no vomit. I actually hear myself mumble, “hmmm”.

I play with the app and try as I may, there’s just no special feature I can point to, nor breakthrough UX I can speak of. And yet, and yet … as cynical as I want to be, there’s just something in-between the pixels of Mobli that feels terribly right.

I can go through the motions and describe how Mobli offers three types of channels for people, places and one for topics/events. That the channels create an implicit social graph around say, fashion, or a bar. That users can comment-back with photos, videos and text. That interaction occurs both on the iPhone app and on Mobli.com. I can go through all these features, and still not be able to capture that special something in-between the pixels.

Intrigued, I ask to meet Boaz Hecht, the company’s VP Marketing. Done with my in-between the pixels spiel, he just smiles back and says, “Let me show you something.” He fires-up Google Analytics and shows me a figure that blew me away.

Mobli users have been spending 33 minutes on average, per day, using the app. Thirty-three minutes. Kid you not. And this is while the app is only on iOS (in the coming weeks Mobli will push out cross-platform video and photo sharing across Blackberry, Android and iOS).

I’m of the opinion that the odds are quite slim for photo/video-sharing apps to be formative companies with viable business models. I love Instagram, but don’t see it more than a bright-shiny object that I’ll toss-out for a newer photo-sharing app that will get it right(er).

That said, I’m going to keep Instagram on my main iPhone pane. Path will remain there too. Having read this post, you might be surprised that Mobli will not. With all of its undeniable “right stuff”, the app feels more attuned to a younger demographic than my own 35 summers.

Mark my words though … Mobli. Will. Blow. Out.

The Internet carries nearly 160 times more traffic than voice networks in North America, yet many of the regulations and inter-carrier traffic fees are based on the quickly receding era when voice networks ruled. Google calls this the “Tail Wagging The Dog” in a letter to the FCC (embedded below) urging them not to impose antiquated per-minute voice traffic fees on IP networks. This is becoming an issue as IP voice traffic approaches that of traditional circuit-switched voice traffic. Google’s lawyers write in their letter:

Standalone voice traffic already is decreasing markedly relative to other forms of communications traffic; in fact, as depicted in the attached, the majority of voice traffic will be IP-based in just a few years. Accordingly, the FCC should not allow what amounts to the very small tail of legacy voice wireline services to wag the very large dog of all communications traffic exchange. In particular, per-minute voice traffic origination and termination charges are a persistent but unwelcome relic from the circuit-switched telephony era, and not best-suited for modern IP traffic and networks.

Google illustrates the changing nature of the network in a series of dramatic slides. Back in 1997, U.S. Internet traffic was only 3,300 terabytes per month, compared to 54,000 terabytes per month for the voice network. Three years later in 2000, voice traffic peaked at 66,000 terabytes per month, while Internet traffic had grown more than eightfold to 28,000 terabytes oer month.

By 2005, consumer IP traffic had reached 669,000 terabytes per month (with 2 terabytes of that being IP voice traffic), while voice traffic had shrunk to 48,000 terabytes per month.

In 2010, consumer IP traffic in North America completely dwarfed voice traffic with 5.7 terabytes per month versus 36,000 for the aging voice network. What’s more, IP voice traffic (Skype, Google Voice, etc.) accounted for 21,000 terabytes per month, or nearly 60 percent of what was going over the old switched network.

All of these networks, both data and voice, are going to IP networks. By 2015, Google estimates that consumer IP traffic in North America will more than triple again to 19.4 million terabytes per month, whereas the voice network will shrink further to 26,000 terabytes per month. And IP voice traffic will be almost as big at 21,000 terabytes per month (See top slide). The entire letter with all the slides is embedded below.

New York City-based dining deals site VillageVines is now Savored. In addition to the name change, it launched a redesigned site, is doubling its cities to ten, and added Buddy Media CEO Michael Lazerow as an investor and board member. The company raised $3 million last January.

Savored focuses on high-end dining discounts at top-rated Zagat restaurants. But the model is slightly different than your run-of-the-mill daily deals site. Members pay $10 per reservation, and get a flat 30 percent off food and drinks. Unlike Groupon or LivingSocial, merchants get to keep everything after the discount instead of splitting that with Savored. Savored makes money by charging $10 per reservation (so the deals are only appealing at restaurants where it is worth paying $10 to get 30 percent off).

Another difference with the bigger daily deal sites is that Savored is a lot more flexible. “We don’t have sky diving, we don’t have spas and salons,” notes co-founder Daniel Leahy. Restaurants can pick the times that their deals are available, as well as limit the size of the party that can take advantage of the deal. Savored makes it easier for them to drive traffic during slow hours. Members make reservations on the site just like they would with OpenTable (pick a time, restaurant, and how many diners) and 30 percent is automatically taken off the bill.

In addition to New York City, San Francisco, Chicago,LA< and Washington, D.C., Savored is expanding to Boston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Miami, and Denver. Leahy expects that Savored will be able to drive $25 million in incremental revenues to restaurants this year.

Movie trailers are among the most popular videos on YouTube. A typical movie trailer gets millions of views, but how many of those views are natural and who many are pushed as paid-for ads? Yes, movie trailers are all ads in a sense. But people seek them out just like any other 2-minute video. That is not what I am talking about.

The same movie trailers are also promoted through various means and shown as prerolls before other videos or via paid links and those views can also count towards the total. For instance, this trailer for the new Conan The Barbarian movie has been watched nearly 5.5 million times. If you click on the statistics right next to that number, you will see that 4.98 million of those views come from ads (see also below).

This is not an isolated incident. The trailer for Rise of the Planet of The Apes shows 7 million views, but nearly 5.8 million of those ad views. In this case, the statistics are hidden, but I got my hands on them (see second image below). Same for this X-Men trailer: 2 million out of 2.4 million views are ads (although this one is literally a 15-second teaser, not a full two-minute trailer like the other ones I’ve cited).

Not all ads count towards a view, but many do: Promoted Videos, skippable TrueView ads, homepage ads or search ads that drive traffic to the video page.

I find this practice to be surprising, so I asked YouTube for an explanation. A spokesperson wrote me the following in an email:

When it comes to paid advertising, view count of a video increases only when it’s clear that a viewer has made a choice to watch a video. For example, a viewer might make that intention known by clicking to watch a Promoted Video, opting-in to watch a TrueView in-stream ad, or playing a YouTube video embedded in a homepage ad.

To be clear, with standard in-stream ads where a viewer has no choice in its selection, we do not increase the videos view count.

Not every pre-roll ad counts towards a view, but all of those skippable, opt-in TrueView ads do count, and from the looks of things people are watching a lot of those. Some YouTube purists are up in arms about this practice. One commenter asks, “Remember when you could watch a video without having to sit through a commercial?”

There is nothing wrong with movie studios using their trailers as ads. After all, they are trailers (i.e., ads for movies). But when people search for videos, they tend to click on the ones with the most views. Apparently, those views can be bought.

Editor’s note: Aaron Crayford is the CEO of Mighty whose main product is a smart real-time communication framework. While in high school was prosecuted by the US government for what the DoD called “The most organized systematic attack the Pentagon has seen” and was banned from touching a computer or talking about the story for a decade. You can follow him @aaroncray.

It’s all over the news Lulzsec thumbs nose at CIA, Member of Anonymous captured in Spain.

Heroes, hackers or douchebags? I’ve seen many takes. Mine goes something like:

FBI agent: “Tell us how you got into the satellite control systems at Lawrence Livermore.”

Kid: “You wanna know, (whisper) you really want to know?”

FBI agent: “yeah tell me”

Kid: “magic”

FBI agent: “this isn’t a fucking game kid!”

Game on! It was 1998 when 20 FBI agents raided my house. The awkward fat kid with working class folks in the corner of your physics class . . . that was me. But what about the LulzSec guys and these Anonymous members?  Who are these guys? What the hell are they doing screwing with the cia…THE CIA!? They are revolutionary’s friends. The Washingtons of our times. Their guns are botnets 500gigabit/s strong, and their spies are automated entry system worms and rootkits. They’re taking out injustice one root at a time . . . right?

I knew I wasn’t going to jail and I knew that I had a great excuse for not handing in my chem homework.

Kid: “I was being interrogated by the FBI all night, I didn’t have time”

Teach: “Aaron go back to your seat.  That’s the stupidest excuse I’ve ever heard”

(Did I just say I knew I wasn’t going to jail?) That’s the mind frame folks. Criminals never see themselves as criminals simply because of how subjective that word is. Even to this day if you were to ask me what I was doing, I’d focus on the fact that we took down pedophile porn ISP’s, patched thousands of compromised government systems and turned hate monger websites into Happy Hanukkah pages . . . for the lulz. Noob, leet, lulz we used those terms before square bears on Facebook and game networks did and they were just as funny then as they are now.

FBI agent:”Look asshole, you guys leveled Sweden with your bullshit”

Happens sometimes. One group comes to test another group…war…WAR! Right? It’s more like scrabble than devastating economies; barely mentionable in passing the next day. You rooted your friends system, you laugh, and that’s it. It’s hard to understand the impact of what taking down a site like Ebay, Facebook or Sony does. Lulz thinks it’s funny; hell it is pretty funny but the unfortunate fact is at the end of the day workers are hurt and the CEO of Sony still gets in a Maybach and is driven to his mansion. They even call him Sir. Knighthood for someone who strikes at the heart of innovation, at the guy in the garage.

So what is it? What makes these guys do this stuff? They must be evil, they must be huge assholes, they must be geniuses? Maybe. One thing is for certain they understand how to bypass systems of control much better than the techs at Sony. Think of it like this: imagine if, given enough time, you could break into anything or type a command and stop any website in the world from working. What would you do? The hard part of this isn’t figuring out what you would do (in case that’s what you were just doing). I’m not talking about a Harvard dropout patting you on the back and telling you you’re a hard worker because you wrote some php script or you’re in “The Harvard of Silicon Valley” (careful fackers bunnies bite). I’m talking about writing down a piece of code, an exploit no one’s ever seen, on a bar napkin while you’re intoxicated; when you try it later, it compiles and executes perfectly, proving you understand an extremely complicated system better than its creator. The hard part is obtaining that kind of skill and the guys that do never do it with the intention of breaking into places. The application of what you can do with that kind of skill is an after thought. So once you have the skill you hear a story about some innovative smart guy . . .

The guy in the garage. A guy like you;

who reversed engineered a game console . . .

because he bought and owned the game console . . .

and thought he should be able to do with it what he wants . . .

like most normal people would think.

There you go. The company that tries to tear that man down and the ideal of innovation just volunteered for your hell, your wrath. The bully is going down! That’s how they see it. Even though the reality is the FBI or CIA agent that will be tracking you down over the next few months/years doesn’t get paid squat and what drives him is the same thing that drives you; they think what they are doing is justice. The workers that get laid off from the game network because it went down are just 0.1% of the company (up to 10% is acceptable to the guys on Wall Street without much concern . . . considered “leaning out”) and Sir Howard won’t lose a minute of sleep in his big comfortable king sized bed in his mansion on the hill.

What Lulzsec and Anonymous don’t realize is these companies aren’t their enemies. Their exploits are shockingly funny and probably karma but there is a much more difficult system to hack . . . becoming the guy at the head of the board. So when you’re the 40-something-year-old CEO who hears that some kid, some guy in his garage, is tearing your product apart and doing amazing things with it that is hitting your top line revenue, and the VP of Operations is getting the legal team together to discuss your options; you stop the meeting and say “Go find that guy, pay him and lets see what he can do.” That’s a real hack worth touting and it ends with you sleeping in a king-sized bed in a mansion on the hill and few can claim it’s been done before.

Not many, if any, of the people I know from back then made it big in tech. The ones that stayed in security disappeared, working for people I’m too scared to ask about.

So happy hacking.  I hope you leverage your skill to your advantage.  Stay safe and don’t get caught. If you do and they ask how you did it simply reply, “magic.”

Photo credit: Anonymous9000

Editor’s note: Carey Friedman is the proud owner of Grandpa Eddie’s BBQ in Richmond, VA. This post is in response to a guest series on TechCrunch taking a critical look at Groupon’s business model.

I’ve been reading a lot of stories on TechCrunch lately coming down hard on Groupon and, like other happy Groupon merchants, wasn’t going to comment because I thought it was a single story with one author’s thoughts. However, after seeing story after story trying to pick apart every single piece of Groupon, I felt it necessary to write about my experience. I’m also hoping that I’m the first BBQ restaurant owner who to write for TechCrunch.

I had tried almost every other form of advertising in the past with varying degrees of success. Then our Groupon sales rep contacted me.  I had heard about similar deals before and had turned down the offers.  However, Groupon offered me something different.  At the time, there were 86,000 people signed up for Richmond’s Groupon list (many more now).  After she explained the details, how everything worked and what to expect, I ran the numbers on the discount and wanted to give it a try. There is no better way to get almost 90,000 unique impressions for so little cost.  We ran our first deal in December of 2010 and sold 1,184 Groupons.

Let me say this loud and clear—for my business Groupon has worked incredibly well. The first deal I ran was $10 for $20 worth of food and drink. I was told to expect nearly a thousand deals sold and was pleasantly surprised that we sold nearly 1,200. Of those 1,200 customers, we found that 70% of them were new customers, a great average right off the bat. Of those 800+ new customers, we have seen more than half of them return. Also, let’s not forget all the people who came into my restaurant in the weeks following the Groupon deal and told me that they saw my business on Groupon, missed the deal, but still came anyway because they wanted to try out a new restaurant. That kind of exposure for a small business is invaluable! We were seen by tens of thousands of potential customers in our area and that didn’t cost a dime!

Now, back to the Groupon customers. We tracked every Groupon redemption on our point of sale (POS) system and found that only a handful (literally five or six), had a ticket total that was under the price of the Groupon ($20). We found that customers, on average, spent at least $12 on top of the price of the Groupon, and that was before they came back and paid full price (most more than once). And this is at a BBQ restaurant!  One consistent factor has been that Groupon customers are much more likely to add an appetizer or dessert to their check, since they know the first $20 only cost them $10.  This has been a wonderful way to not only up the ticket average on the redemption, but also has given the customers a broader taste of our menu.  When they come back without the Groupon, they are more likely to order that extra item again.  Also, I found Groupon customers to be better than the average “coupon” customer. These are people that were interested in trying a new restaurant and open to the idea of coming back. There was only a small percentage of guests who were just looking for a bargain.

Another number that I track, which many other restaurants do not, is what my employees claimed on tips. It gives me a good idea of the overall traffic in my restaurant and how confident my customers are with the economy. From my experiences over the past 29 years in the industry, when the economy is rough, tips are one of the first things to take a hit. During the first quarter of 2011 my employees claimed over $4,000 more in tips than the same period in 2010. This was during the first three months of our redemption period and was by far the highest volume of Groupons.  It is indisputable that Groupon brought the vast majority of these customers to our door.  Groupon customers were some of our best tippers and nearly always, almost without fault, tipped on the total bill, not the discounted check.

One of the best reasons I found to use Groupon is that it’s trackable. Buying a newspaper ad doesn’t allow you to see who’s coming in as a result. With Groupon, you can see your marketing dollars at work and have the chance to convert Groupon customers to regulars, something we’ve done a lot. My employees were thrilled when we ran the deal because we were always busy and that’s a good thing. Our bottom line has been raised significantly and I owe a lot of that to Groupon.

Please don’t dismiss this story as an anomaly. I have recommended Groupon to other small business owners, some of whom have run deals with Groupon and done very well (Havana Connections in Richmond for one). The positive stories are out there in abundance, even though we may not yell as loud or as frequently as others.

Will everyone succeed using Groupon? Probably not. As a business owner, I feel like it’s my responsibility to look at this marketing tool and see if it works for my business. There is no question that it has paid for itself better than any other advertising medium we have ever used.  The Groupon sales reps have been extremely helpful in telling me what to expect and how to prepare as well. For me, and, I suspect many other small business owners, this is a no brainer.  For the money I spent on the discount, not only was I able to get my message out to almost 90,000 separate individuals, but I was easily able to capitalize on this and turn many of the guests into regular customers. Where else can a small business get that kind of marketing access?  The simple answer is nowhere.

I am now running my second Groupon deal, and launched it on the exact day that the first offer expired.  We sold over 2400 Groupons, even more than the first time.

Editor’s note: James Altucher is an investor, programmer, author, and entrepreneur. He is Managing Director of Formula Capital and has written 6 books on investing. His latest book he’s giving away free. He built and sold Reset, Inc in 1998 and Stockpickr.com in 2007, among others. You can follow him @jaltucher.

I know through hard experience that I’m one of the dumbest investors I know. Here are two examples: the time I cost Yasser Arafat $2 million (and lost investors another $100 million in the process) and the worst VC decision ever made (of course, it was made by me). Both happened around the same time period (2000-2001) and solidified my reputation in history as possibly the worst investor ever.

However, I learn from my experiences. After a few successful startups following that period (Stockpickr.com notably, which sold to thestreet.com in 2007) I’ve started to do more angel investing and, in doing so, have figured out a check list to help me avoid my prior mistakes. If you follow this checklist I think you can do well as an angel investor.

Everyone trashes angel investors but angels have one critical edge over VC investors: we don’t have to do anything. I don’t have to put any money to work ever if I don’t want to. I can pass on deals all day long. VCs, because its their job, often have a strong financial incentive to eventually (say, over a 5-year period) put money to work since they take fees on the money that’s out there. VCs also have a psychological reason to put money to work. It’s their job. So if they are doing a good job they often feel the need (for better or worse) to put money to work.

The Angel Checklist

1. Invest with co-investors smarter than you. I don’t invest now unless there is a co-investor going in at the same terms as me who has significantly more experience in the field as well as experience with the entrepreneurs we are investing in. I can’t give examples in each case here but with Buddy Media, for example, I went in with many successful co-investors.
2. Invest in CEOs who have done it before. Buddy Media is another great example. I knew Michael Lazerow because after I started Stockpickr he met with me with the possible idea to become CEO. His lock-up after selling Golf.com to Time Warner was coming to an end and he wanted something new to do. Rather than let him be CEO, I blatantly stole all his ideas and then was lucky enough to back him in the venture he shortly thereafter started, Buddy Media. He had already done at least two successful startups so I was confident he knew what he was doing. Another example is Ticketfly where Andrew Dreskin had basically built and sold the same idea before, improved on it, and started again, and had great co-investors. BAM! I couldn’t ask for anything better.
3. Invest in strong demographic trends. 76 million baby boomers are retiring in the next few years. Other than the Internet (and subsidiary to that, Facebook alone) there’s no bigger demographic tidal wave happening in the United States. Personalized medicine is quickly becoming a standard technique for diagnosing and treating the elderly on illnesses ranging from cancer to depression. I look for companies tapping into this demographic trend and co-invest with several biotech investors who have done it successfully dozens of times over. The only thing I make sure is that I get in at their terms. Else, I get back to my mantra: “I’m too stupid to determine if this is a good value for me to get into.”
4. Get in at a low valuation. 1-3 are often good enough. But I like the added flourish of getting a good deal. I pass on about 19 out of every 20 deals I see. Maybe I pass on more. I should keep track of the statistics, but I don’t. There’s no one way to determine if a valuation was low. Clearly Twitter was low at its first round valuation of $20 million. That didn’t seem low to me and would probably have passed if I had the opportunity. Everything depends on the size of the market, what revenues one gets, etc. Again, though, this is related to (1) above. If I can get in where the best investors are getting in, along with other favorable terms (warrant coverage, full ratchet, favorable comps compared with other valuations in the space) then I feel like I have an edge. These deals are out there. The critical thing is sitting on your hands. Again, being an angel, I don’t have to do anything.

If you have 1-4 you almost don’t have to do anything else. If I’m co-investing with Kleiner Perkins I can usually assume their team of MBAs is hard at work doing all the due diligence for me. But often, to provide an extra layer of safety, I do my own work. And here’s the due-diligence checklist. To be honest, this checklist is often more about giving me comfort that I did something intelligent since I don’t really expect to uncover anything new, but every now and then something pops up.

Due diligence checklist

• Talk to CEO
• Talk to heads of sales in each region
• Talk to customers
• Talk to end users (since sometimes the customers are resellers)
• Do background checks on CEO, CFO, heads of sales
• Talk to all of the other investors

Although my general rule of thumb is, I don’t want to have any meetings. You know the secret to a quick meeting? No chairs and no donuts. Even quicker? Just use the phone and stay at home. That’s my meeting of preference.

With the above checklist I actually think angel investors have a strong edge over “professional” venture capital investors. They have a strong network but good angels have a strong network too (particularly with the rise of companies like AngelList). And if you follow rule No. 1 and piggyback with the best venture capitalists, then it’s the best of every world.

And look, the more VCs who make money, the more I will. On top of that, I hope to God we have a pretty strong bubble. Go Groupon!

Photo credit: Alan Cleaver.

Recently I sat down with a well-connected Silicon Valley CEO who just raised a ton of money, and who knew of other startups raising even more. There is a new startup club of younger companies raising money right now at $1 billion valuations. I already knew a couple of them, but I started asking a few venture capitalists and now I have a pretty good list of who is in that club and who is trying to get in (see below).

As we all watch the established Web companies go public (LinkedIn, Pandora) or prepare for an IPO (Groupon, Zynga, Facebook), there is this new class of younger, but fast-growing, startups rising up right behind them. A lot of them are out raising money right now at $1 billion valuations. These are $50 to $100 million rounds, and they are generally going to companies showing incredible growth rates in both users and revenues, at least according to investors who have looked at these deals.

So who is in the new billion dollar valuation club?

Airbnb is definitely in the club. The crowdsourced marketplace for turning your apartment into a hotel for a night grew 800 percent last year in nights booked to 800,000. There are currently 60,000 listings, and bookings keep growing by 40 to 50 percent a month. Sublets are next. This is going to be one of the biggest companies to come out of Y Combinator.

Square is also in the club. It is raising at least $50 million. Square passed 500,000 card readers and 1 million transactions in May, and is processing more than $3 million a day in mobile payments. COO Keith Rabois told us at Disrupt NYC that Square will do $1 billion in transactions this year, and he thinks it could ultimately do better financially than Paypal (where he was an early executive). Vinod Khosla recently joined the board.

Spotify is finally closing its $1 billion round that’s been in the works since at least February, with DST, Kleiner, and Accel participating. The $100 million or so it is expected to raise will help the music streaming service enter the U.S. market. Finally. Maybe. We’ve been waiting for you.

Dropbox, the Y Combinator file-sharing startup that only ever raised $7.2 million might end up with the largest valuation in the club, perhaps as high as $1.5 billion or $2 billion. It’s just growing like crazy, with 25 million users saving 200 million files daily. That’s up from 4 million users 18 months ago. But this deal is the one that keeps getting pushed out (it is growing so fast that the longer it waits to take money, the higher the valuation).

Gilt Groupe is already in the club. It closed a $138 million round at about a $1 billion valuation last May. One of the first companies to introduce online flash sales in the U.S., Gilt is on track to do $500 million in revenues this year and has expanded from fashion to food, travel, local deals, and more.

FourSquare is also rumored to be out raising another round, but it might not quite make it into the $1 billion club because its revenues don’t justify that kind of valuation. Unless, that is, it pulls a Twitter.

Just above this group, is Pandora (which just went public with a $2 billion market cap), LivingSocial (with a $3 billion valuation), LinkedIn (already public, with a $6.3 billion market cap), Twitter (which is worth anywhere from $3.7 billion to $10 billion), Zynga (which will be worth north of $10 billion when it goes public), Groupon (which could be worth more than $25 billion) and Facebook (which is already worth $50 billion and could go as high as $100 billion by the time it IPOs).

Image credit: John Talbot

You don’t hear news like this too often these days, but according to Japanese business daily The Nikkei, HP is planning to shift part of its notebook production from China to Japan in the next few months. The Californian company plans to eventually manufacture all computers for sale in Japan in factories in Akishima near Tokyo.

For that, HP plans to hire 50% more workers in Akishima, boosting the number of employees there to 450. According to the Nikkei, labor costs in Japan are about four times higher than in China. But with this move, HP apparently wants to increase efficiency, be closer to the market, stand out with a “made-in-Japan” moniker, and push down delivery times especially to Japanese business customers.

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