The knives are out in Washington, D.C. for Google. Google has long been under the threat of an antitrust investigation in the U.S., but this time it looks like it is about to happen. According to the Wall Street Journal, the FTC is preparing a major antitrust investigation into Google’s “core search advertising business.” No wonder Larry Page and Eric Schmidt don’t want to appear before a Senate hearing also looking into its market power.

According the the WSJ:

The new FTC investigation . . . will examine fundamental issues relating to Google’s core search advertising business, which still accounts for the overwhelming majority of its revenues. Those will include whether Google—which accounts for around two-thirds of internet searches in the U.S. and more abroad—unfairly channels users to its own growing network of services at the expense of rivals’.

The issue appears to be that Google is using its market power in search to push consumers to its own services. Perhaps the most egregious example of this has been with Google Places, which comes up at the top of search results for pretty much every local search, whether or not it is the best result. The FTC, no doubt, will be asking Yelp about this, which is constantly having run-ins with Google Places. Expedia, TripAdvisor, and Microsoft have also complained about lost clicks.

Are there other examples, and do they rise to the level of antitrust? Most video searches go to YouTube, for example. But is that because Google pushes them there or those are the best results?

It’s going to be hard to prove one way or the other. I’d argue that if a full-blown antitrust investigation does get launched, it may be a signal that Google’s market power has peaked. Remember when Microsoft went through its antitrust ordeal? It’s been downhill for them ever since. And now, just as social (and Facebook) is starting to take over from search as the fundamental way information is shared, discovered, and organized on the Web, the government is focusing on the last decade’s war.

I wouldn’t worry too much about Google’s marjet power. Technology has a way of overthrowing the powers that be more quickly and naturally than the government ever will.

Photo credit: Simon Law

Foursquare is expanding its relationship with American Express to provide local deals to people who sync their cards to their Foursquare accounts. AmEx did a trial at SXSW, and that went well enough that it is rolling out the deals more broadly.

The discounts, such as $20 off a $50 purchase at Sports Authority, are automatically applied to your AmEx account when you check in via Foursquare to a participating merchant before a purchase. Everyone in local commerce is trying to figure out how to close the loop between deals and payments. Google thinks NFC chips in Android phones will be the answer in the form of a Google Wallet. Whereas Groupon is trying out instant mobile deals with Groupon Now. By tying its specials to a credit card, Foursquare is closing the payment loop with something everyone already carries around in their wallets.

Once companies can tie mobile ads or deals to payments, they will be able to measure directly the sales generated by these mobile promotions. And one day that could potentially be a huge new business. But for now, it’s making absolutely zilch for Foursquare, which remains a revenue-free zone. As the New York Times reports:

Foursquare will not be receiving any revenue from the American Express deal

Foursquare wants to make sure it gets the product experience right for both merchants and users before turning on revenue, but it can’t wait too long, especially if it wants to justify that billion-dollar valuation in its next round of funding. The race is on to create as many great local deals as possible to present to mobile consumers. And its biggest competitor is Groupon Now.

While Groupon is already the largest daily deal company in the world, it wants to move from deals people sign up for in advance through massive email marketing campaigns to instant deals they find on their mobile phones. The company is testing its own mobile app called Groupon Now in a few cities like Chicago and New York. Groupon Now deals are different than regular Groupon deals in that consumers don’t have to wait a day to redeem them. They are available instantly and you can find them on your mobile phone when you are nearby a merchant offering one of these deals.

A Groupon Now deal is directly equivalent to a Foursquare special powered by AmEx in that it is instantly redeemable and the payment can be linked to the offer. Closing this loop is the Holy Grail of digital local commerce. But closing that loop is not enough.

The winner of this race will be the one who can bring enough high-quality deals to mobile consumers, and vice versa. You need both incredible deal density and a huge number of users looking for those deals and redeeming them, all pretty much in realtime. Even Groupon doesn’t have enough deals in place yet or people using its app to make Groupon Now compelling. Neither does Foursquare, which up until now has allowed merchants to put up whatever specials they want.

Foursquare simply doesn’t have the salesforce to craft the same kind of deals that Groupon can. Groupon’s deals tend to be more alluring with deeper discounts. AmEx is helping Foursquare here by sourcing many of these deals itself through its own salesforce and existing relationships with local and national merchants, but it also gets to keep all the revenue. At least for now.

Foursquare is bringing the users (and some of the deals), and is betting that eventually that will be worth something. It’s all about who can create a market of users and deals faster. Foursquare’s approach is to build up its users first—now it’s got 10 million—and then hope the deals trickle up organically or through partnerships. Groupon is almost taking the opposite approach, trying to build up an inventory of great mobile deals first and then hoping that the consumers will come. The thing is that it takes both sides to make a market.

Photo credit: Dan Moyle

Pulse is not just for news feeds and Facebook links. Now you can also get nearby daily deals. With the latest update to both the iPhone and Android apps, when you enable location sharing, Pulse will pull nearby Groupon deals.

Pulse lets you subscribe to different deals by city. You can see them as a stream in your Pulse reader, along with deals from nearby cities. If you click through to purchase one, Pulse will get an affiliate fee. It’s certainly a better way to peruse the deals than the daily email. You can also save a deal for later purchase.

These are regular Groupon deals, not the instant Groupon Now deals that pop up in Loopt, but as Groupon Now expands to more cities, Pulse may add those in the future.

For all the talk of cord-cutting, the cable/satellite/fiber optic TV companies are not going anywhere anytime soon. I put Verizon FIOS in that camp. With 3.7 million subscribers, it is already one of the largest video service providers in the country. But it is pushing hard to get on all screens and keep Netflix, Hulu, and Apple TV at bay.

Or is it? Verizon FIOS also provides broadband Internet and home phone services. (I am a Verizon FIOS subscriber myself and get all three—Internet, TV, and phone). Last time I checked, Netflix streams over the Internet. I recently got a chance to ask Eric Bruno, the senior VP in charge of Verizon FIOS, about its relationship with the Internet video alternatives, his mobile product plans, and Verizon’s new home automation product in these two video segments.

In the video above, Bruno gives me some stats on how many people use Verizon FIOS, its rollout strategy (it is focusing on penetrating the homes it’s already passed for right now), and how many customers buy the triple play like me (90 percent—yup, bundling works). He also talks (below) about the new Home Control product Verizon FIOS customers will be able to add to control thermostats, lighting and even set up Web cams over a wireless network.

I give Bruno a little grief about the UI of FIOS Mobile Remote app (which we reviewed on Fly or Die), and he tells me that app (which is a program guide along with a WiFi linked software remote) will eventually be combined with Verizon’s Flex View app (which allows for on-demand rentals or purchases of movies). You can also expect more TV shows in Flex View, and eventually TV channels participating in the TV Everywhere project will be viewable right on your iPad (which is already the case with Comcast’s Xfinity app).

All of this sort of suggests that Verizon FIOS will compete directly with Netflix for streaming shows and digital downloads to any screen. But I want my Netflix on my big-screen TV and Verizon could make that easy by simply letting Netflix create a widget for FIOS viewers. Then I wouldn’t need to pull out the HDMI cable and string it to my laptop every time I want to stream on the big screen.

Would Verizon ever allow Netflix prime real estate on its service? “The answer is definitely not no,” Bruno hedges in the video below. “People are going there anyway. If they are going there anyway I would rather have them go to Verizon.”

Hear that Reed Hastings? Give Bruno a call. “If Reed picked up the phone, we’d definitely talk about it. Same offer to Google.” A Youtube widget or channel would be sweet. Leanback, baby.

You can watch the entire unedited interview here.

Mobile social network Loopt is turning on the revenue streams by going after the daily deal space. It already partnered with Groupon to show users nearby Groupon Now deals via notifications, but today it is launching its own twist on daily deals. Loopt is calling them U-Deals.

Instead of going out and getting a large inventory of deals at local merchants, U-Deals lets users request their own deals. And they try to rally their friends and other people to support the deal as well through Facebook, Twitter, email, and whatnot. Once a deal hits a tipping point, then Loopt will contact the business and request the deal. This will require a sales force, but not one as big as a traditional daily deal provider. “One of the things we like about this is that it’s neither self-serve nor a pure sales force model,” says Loopt CEO Sam Altman. “In our beta testings, businesses respond well to a phone call like ‘we have a check for $2000 and 100 new customers for you if you agree to this deal.’”

Loopt is working in partnership with ChompOn, a white-label daily deals platform that launched at TechCrunch Disrupt last year. A New York City-based startup called Ringleadr that is about to launch is also targeting the reverse-deals concept.

In order for this to work, Loopt needs to get enough deals requested and then turned on. “Liquidity is certainly the key issue,” admits Altman. Also, local commerce is a hard nut to crack. U-Deals has the advantage of being an easy sell, as Altman says. Loopt is basically coming these small businesses with pre-qualified sales. But many of them have probably never heard of Loopt. (“Is that like Groupon?”) My guess is he will need a larger salesforce than he expects, and that’s if he’s successful. Are people even looking for deals inside Loopt?

Here is the big issue with this model. The people who say they want a deal at a restaurant or store are probably already customers of that merchant. The appeal of daily deals for local merchants is to get new customers in the door. It’s customer acquisition. Where Loopt can make this work is if the people who initially request the deals can convince other people who aren’t already existing customers to buy in.

Daily deals are growing like crazy, and it’s not just Groupon and LivingSocial. Daily deal aggregator Yipit just raised $6 million in a series B led by Highland Capital Partners. Existing investors RRE, DFJ Gotham and IA Ventures also participated.

I caught up with co-founders Vin Vacanti and Jim Moran (pictured) today in New York City. Saved from Wall Street jobs a few years ago, they now work out of General Assembly with 7 people total, but are looking to ramp up to 30 (mostly engineers, Web designers, product managers, and mobile developers). They’ll have to move out of General Assembly and are already looking for their own space.

Yipit tracks 335 active deal services in 32 cities in North America. In New York City alone it lists 161 active deals. People are starting to suffer from daily deal overload. There are only so many daily deal emails that even the most die-hard deal seeker can look at every day. There’s Groupon and LivingSocial, but also Gilt City, Yelp, and newspapers like the New York Times are getting in on the deal-a-thons. And then there’s Yipit, which brings all of the deals together in one place, lets you search and filter them, and sends you one email with deals from all the sites operating in your area.

“Instead of getting 70 emails in New York,” explains Vacanti, “you can tell us your preferences—only restaurants or skydiving—also zip codes or addresses. The idea being going forward you get one email.”

With no marketing, 250,000 people have signed up for Yipit emails, and it is adding 1,000 sign-ups a day. A year ago it had 25,000 names. “Every day we send 20,000 people a day to third party sites,” says Moran. “We estimate between 5% and 10% purchase a deal.”

Vacanti and Moran compare Yipit to a Kayak for daily deals. It is daily deal search. You can filter out all the deals you don’t care about (no more spa deals, please) and not have to go to each individual deal site. Then those daily deal search results are sent to you all together in one regular email.

Yipit normalizes data for every deal and puts it into its own database. Every deal has an address and lat-long coordinates attached to the venue, which could come in handy for a future deal-finding mobile app.

Yipit also has a lot of great data on the daily deals industry, which it sells to hedge funds and daily deals sites for competitive intelligence. The reports are currently half its revenues, which is at a run-rate of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and growing quickly.

The company was already close to break-even and had 15 months of cash left when they decided to raise the new money, which will be invested primarily in hiring and growth to new cities.

In retail, businesses that speed up the check-out process get more business. With Foursquare, it is speeding up the check-in process, which should get people to use it even more. A new release of its iPhone app puts a new check-in button smack in the middle bottom of the app, removing at least one step to check-in bliss.

The fewer steps an app requires of users, the more they will tend to use it. Remove barriers and people will flock to your product. At least that’s the theory. Hey, it works in retail.

Another new feature is a “Specials” button in the Explore tab. Now you can Explore by nearby specials. Now that specials are easier to find maybe more people will take advantage of them, and more merchants will offer them.

New York City likes to put out its BigApps challenge to get developers to come up with apps that make living in the city better. (Recent winners include parking finder and pick-up game organizing apps). But the city is now trying something different with its BigApps Ideas Challenge.

Instead of asking developers for apps, the challenge is asking for problems that can be solved with apps. Anyone can submit a problem they want solved, and the best ones will get voted up. The challenge is hosted on ChallengePost, and there are cash prizes of $100 for each of the top 50 ideas, and $250 for each of the top 10.

Here are a few good ones already:

I want a NYC app that shows me the nearest apartments for rent by my GPS location and other apartment rental preferences.

I want a NYC app that has a visual, color coded map of all street parking rules, regulations and street cleaning schedules.

I want a NYC app that shows me the location of famous films sets.

Now somebody just has to go build these.

The real estate bust wasn’t kind to Roost, which started out as a real estate search engine. But CEO Alex Chang took the $8 million he raised in late 2008 and convinced his investors to back him down a completely different path: a service for creating and managing social media marketing campaigns for local businesses.

Roost relaunched in the middle of last year, first going after the 25,000 real estate agents who used the original Roost. Then last March, Chang opened up Roost to other local businesses. Roost taps into Facebook and Twitter, and helps restaurants, auto dealers, non-profits and others create social media campaigns in 20 minutes on a Sunday night.

Merchants tell Roost what industry they are in, and Roost gives them suggested RSS feeds and other relevant content they can share with their fans, followers and customers. “These small business don’t have time, they don’t know what to post and they don’t have a big network,” says Chang. “You do all this work and you don’t get that much reach.” He is trying to solve these three problems by making Roost a low-touch product that does most of the work for the merchants. It creates an automated social media campaign that sends out status updates or Tweets periodically with links, photos, questions, and quotes. Roost also offers the ability for businesses to band together in Circles, in order to cross-promote offers, links, and other content.

Today, Roost is launching another new feature, the Roost Local Scorecard. It looks at how many fans and likes a business has on Facebook, and how many of those are coming from people who live in the same city to give business owners a sense of how they are penetrating their local market with their social media messages. “Not all fans are created equal,” says Chang. The score is an indexed number from 1 to 100, with businesses moving up the ranks from Rising Star to Hotspot to Local Legend.

Roost is free for now, but Chang plans to add premium features for which he plans to charge a monthly fee. Helping small businesses run social media campaigns is fine, but if Roost can get to the point where it is helping them track and reward customer loyalty beyond likes that is where all of this starts to get interesting.

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Loic Le Meur

anyone wants to buy a Blackberry Twitter client? Let me know http://ping.fm/OWHzp

about 17 hours ago via Ping.fmReplyRetweetFavorite

Seesmic might have the sweetest Twitter app for Blackberry, but the Blackberry’s appeal isn’t sweet enough. Seesmic is discontinuing support for its Blackberry app on June 30.

Research in Motion, the company that makes the Blackberry, is going through a rough spot right now. But things must be pretty bad if Seesmic bailing. This is Seesmic, folks! They’ll build an app for any platform, even Windows Phone 7.

The truth is that startups can only support so many mobile platforms. Other mobile developers might be feeling the same pressure to drop Blackberry or never create an app for it in the first place. Seesmic is definitely not alone in its assessment of the platform. Mobile Roadie recently concluded the same thing: the Blackberry is too hard to develop for and engagement is low.

What are Seesmic Blackberry users to do? On its blog, the company encourages “those effected by this change to try out Seesmic for Android, iOS and Windows Phone 7.” In other words, get a new phone.

That actually might not be such bad advice.