Unified, a company offering tools to help agencies and brands manage their social advertising campaigns, has lured someone from Google to run it sales team.

Specifically, it’s announcing the hiring of Brian Murphy as its new vice president of sales. His past experience includes leading Google’s ad sales to the financial industry, overseeing AdMob’s East Coast advertising team, and managing international sales at DoubleClick.

When I met with co-founder and CEO Sheldon Owen a couple of months ago, one of his points of pride was the fact that Unified executives come from the enterprise technology industry, not just from the ad world — but hiring Murphy should help build the company’s connections on the ad side.

In its announcement blog post, Unified says Murphy “will help top brands and their agencies change the way they use social media advertising.” (Beyond selling its own social advertising products, the company tries to train its customers on best practices through a program called Unified University.)

While it seems like mobile gaming companies are getting acquired left and right this spring, there are still plenty that are staying independent and doing just fine.

Storm8, which is totally bootstrapped and was founded by Facebook alums, is one of them. The Redwood Shores-based company is saying that it has passed 300 million downloads and that its network of games reaches 100 million devices. CEO Perry Tam believes this means they reach 1 out of every 5 iOS and Android users (assuming 500 million devices sold or activated to date, which is pretty consistent with the numbers Google and Apple have shared so far). Storm8 declined to share anything about its daily active usage numbers.

“The company is profitable and we can stand on our own feet and sustain growth,” said chief executive Perry Tam in an interview. He plans to double Storm8′s headcount to 240 people by year-end.

Storm8 was one of the very earliest movers in mobile gaming. Chief executive Perry Tam used to work at Facebook on the Credits team and saw the rise of social gaming giants like Zynga. He bet that there might be a similar opportunity on mobile phones and left Facebook to start Storm8. They first became known for menu-based, role-playing games like iMobsters and World War, but they also built out a casual label called TeamLava that launched Bakery Story, Restaurant Story and Fashion Story.

Being first to market meant the Storm8 was able to take advantage of cheap distribution when the iOS platform was less competitive (not unlike what Zynga did in the land grab era of the Facebook platform). The company had 10 of the top-100 grossing apps on iOS last year, according to Apple’s iTunes Rewind. Storm8 then moved onto Android and repeated the formula. Earlier this year, they were one of the first gaming companies to test Amazon’s in-app purchasing system and made $700,000 in the first month.

Last fall, Jason Kincaid said that the company might be raising $300 million at a $1 billion valuation, which I reported was unlikely. It didn’t end up happening.

The reality — at least so far — is that mobile platforms have turned out to be very different from Facebook. There is no single company that has Zynga-like market share on iOS and Android. That’s a blessing and a curse. One the one hand, it means that there can be several successful and profitable mobile gaming companies. But on the other hand, it means that it’s hard for any single company to justify a valuation with a generous revenue multiple (since their fortunes are that much more dependent on whether they can sustain hits or not).

So the valuations in recent acquisitions, like $180 million for Zynga’s deal to buy OMGPOP and $210 million for GREE’s deal to buy Funzio, are much more moderate than the numbers that were talked about last summer. As a sidenote, Funzio’s founding team actually came from Storm8. They split over control of the company and then left to found a competing mobile gaming company.

Tam declined to share his thoughts on the recent deals. ”We’re definitely aware of those transactions,” he said “It’s very interesting and we certainly don’t know the details or internal numbers so we cannot really comment on specifics.”

Even with these deals, there are plenty of companies that seem to be doing just fine without any buyers. Rovio this morning said it had $106 million in revenue for last year and Glu Mobile posted 73 percent quarter-over-quarter revenue growth last week, with smartphone revenues reaching $17.4 million up from $10.1 million in the holiday quarter. Outfit7, another totally bootstrapped mobile gaming company, also recently passed 360 million downloads and signed a deal with Disney to have its characters appear in an animated web series.

Sometimes you get an idea for a really great post to share on Google+ and it’s the middle of the night. There’s nobody up that you know of, but not writing the post isn’t an option. Twitter has a draft functionality and there are services that let you schedule tweets for later.

Thanks to a new Chrome extension, you can now save your Google+ posts as drafts as well as schedule them to post at the day and time of your choosing.

The extension is called Do Share and it’s extremely straight forward. The only catch is that you have to have Chrome open and logged into Google+ for scheduled posts to head into the wild. This is because Google+ doesn’t have a full-on API as of yet, which is unfortunate.

Until the API arrives, Do Share is a perfect tool for those of you who simply want to share things at specific times and create a queue of awesome ideas to put on Google+. The extension was created by Tzafrir Rehan and designed by Joel Califa.

Once you install the extension and open it up in Chrome, you’re presented with the same type of share box as you’d find Google+ itself. You can add a subject line and body to your post, as well as add the specific people or circles that you’d like to share it with:

You can save as many drafts as you like or schedule as many posts as you like and you’ll find that it works pretty seamlessly. Even though you must have Chrome open and logged into Google+, your browser won’t miss a beat and Do Share works entirely in the background:

If you’re looking to schedule posts or just write a massive thesis that requires you to go back and forth between tabs or leave entirely for a day or two, Do Share is a great way to do it on Google+.

➤ Do Share

Online and mobile research company comScore just released its newly rebooted and retooled Mobile Metrix report this morning, which examines mobile media usage across both apps and mobile web browsing. According to the new data, Google sites led as the top property on iOS, Android and RIM devices, reaching 96.9% of the U.S. mobile audience, followed by Facebook, Yahoo sites and Amazon sites. But apps dominated in terms of usage, says comScore, with 4 out of every 5 mobile media minutes spent in apps.

As far as which apps led the way, not surprisingly, built-in system apps came out on top, as did Facebook. But Facebook isn’t #1 – depending on the platform, the App Store or the Android Market holds the top spot, followed by either Google Search or Maps.

On the iPhone, iTunes was the top app, with 99.9% reach (what, did someone figure out how to delete iTunes off of their iPhone?), and was followed by Google Maps, at 91.2% reach. Facebook, meanwhile, was in the #3 spot, with an 80% reach. On Android, the rankings were a bit different – the Android Market…excuse me, Google Play store…was #1 (93.2% reach), followed by the Google Search app (84.1%), Maps (74.5%), Gmail (71.4%), and then Facebook (68.9%). Clearly, the numbers show that Android users gravitate towards Google’s own branded apps.

ComScore also looked at social networking properties by audience size, a measurement determined by both app usage and mobile site visitors. In this case, Facebook was an easy winner, with the average Facebook mobile user engaging for over 7 hours via browser or app in March. Twitter saw 25.6 million mobile users, engaging for nearly 2 hours during the month, but this statistic didn’t include usage by third-party apps (of which there are many), so may not be as accurate. People visiting Twitter on their computers spent only 20.4 minutes on Twitter.com, which comScore says highlights the importance of mobile engagement for brands. However, again, Twitter.com metrics are not the only way to account for Twitter users who engage on a Mac or PC – there are dozens of client applications, available both as desktop applications and those which run in the browser, neither of which were counted here.

The newly hot image pinboarding site Pinterest reached 7.5 million smartphone visitors who engaged with the brand for nearly an hour. (And this despite a number of anecdotal and app store review complaints of app bugginess, some of which were only recently addressed by the company through a mobile app update – Imagine what Pinterest could do with a killer app!).

Foursquare trailed Pinterest, with 5.5 million mobile visitors engaging at an average of nearly 2.5 hours. And Tumblr reached an audience of nearly 4.5 million who engaged for 68 minutes during the same time.

As with anything, methodology is an important consideration here. With the new comScore Mobile Metrix 2.0 reports, the company is bringing its Unified Digital Measurement to smartphone devices, which combines both sever-side and panel data to provide a snapshot of mobile web and app usage on smartphone devices. This is combined with census data to determine that the above metrics apply only to U.S. adults, age 18 and up.

We’ve already come across a way to transform your Facebook feed to make it look like Pinterest, and it was only a matter of time before someone came up with something similar for Google+.

Using the aptly named Greasemonkey userscript Google+ Pinterest, you can instantly transform your Google+ feed into a Pinterest-like grid of posts and photos.

To install a userscript on Firefox, make sure you have the Greasemonkey add-on installed, while Safari users can opt for GreaseKit. Chrome users can simply install the userscript directly from the site.

With Google+ recently introducing a revamped design, the look hasn’t gone down well among all of its users. If you’ve been particularly annoyed by that great big chunk of white space glaring back at you, and aren’t sure what to do with it, this is a great way to get rid of it.

Once you’ve installed the userscript, your Google+ newsfeed will be transformed into three columns, and photos, of course, really come to life with the new layout.

The same goes for profile pages, and Google+ pages, with all the content displayed in a grid. The changes are of course only skin-deep, allowing you to interact with Google+ as you normally would – leaving comments, sharing content and more.

Aside from giving your Google+ feed the ultimate Pinterest feel, the script also puts the focus on the content you’re viewing, hiding the menu and chat window out of sight. The menu slides into sight when you hover over the left hand side of the screen, with the same effect used to slide the chat window into sight on the right hand side.

If you follow a lot of photographers on Google+, this userscript offers a pretty visually appealing way to keep up with their latest images.

Unlike its Facebook counterpart, there is no real Pinterest integration here, and the process of pinning or repinning content is nowhere to be found. It’s simply a cool way to reinvent your Google+ experience.

What do you think of bringing some of the Pinterest feel to Google+? Let us know in the comments.

➤ Google+ Pinterest

Way to blow your own horn, Google. Yesterday a newspaper in the UK, the Independent, ran a short item about how Google was about to reach an app milestone — 15 billion apps downloaded. So we reached out to Google to ask about this… and guess what? It already happened.

A Google spokesperson tells us the milestone was passed “a few weeks ago.”

The last number that Google released with more public declaration was 11 billion downloads, when the store was still called the Android Market, which it announced during its Q4 2011 earnings in January. In April, when Google reported its Q1 2012 earnings, it didn’t mention downloads on Google Play, the newly-rebranded store.

Apple reached 15 billion app downloads in July 2011, and the most recent number for Apple is 25 billion downloads in March 2012.

Doing the basic math, that roughly means that Google is seeing about 1 billion downloads of Android apps per month, while Apple is seeing about 1.25 billion app downloads per month.

So there is still a gap in aggregated downloads between the two platforms, despite that fact that Google has nearly caught up with Apple in terms of total number of apps: Currently Google Play has some 500,000 apps, while Apple has 600,000 apps in its app store.

There are other areas of disparity, it seems: Up to the end of January 2012, analyst Horace Dediu notes, Google has paid developers $320 million compared to $4 billion from Apple.

On the other hand, there seems to be other evidence pointing to the fact that Apple’s download rate is slowing down: Fiksu, for example claims that Apple’s app download rate fell by 30 percent in March.

For Google, the drive to have high volumes of app downloads is two-fold: it demonstrates to developers that this is an active and used platform, so that they continue developing for it. And it gives Google a bigger inventory from which it can potentially make more from advertising, which is the company’s real money spinner.

Data revealed in the Oracle v. Google trial over Java patents last week pointed to how Google’s Android effort was money-losing throughout 2010. Documents in the same case also showed that Google projected that it would make a profit on its mobile effort in 2011 and beyond — although we don’t have updated figures from Google that testify to whether that has been the case or not.

But those records also indicated that the vast majority of that revenue will be coming from advertising, with small but growing percentages also coming from app sales. In 2011, Google projected it would make $492.5 million in ads on Android with $14.5 million in app sales. For 2012, Google projected $804.3 million in ad sales with $35.9 million from app revenue.

Figures from those documents also showed that Google expected a loss of $113 million in 2010 from Android and that it expected to have profits of $64 million in 2011; $248 million in 2012; and $548 in 2013.

Editor’s note: Alexander Haislip is a marketing executive with cloud-based server automation startup ScaleXtreme and the author of Essentials of Venture Capital. Follow him on Twitter @ahaislip.

Congratulations. You’re the CEO of a startup. You’re doing the hardest job in business. You’ve raised money from venture capitalists and turned down better-paying jobs elsewhere. You’ve mastered complicated things such as capitalization tables and common things, such as payroll. You’ve fought with competitors, coworkers, friends and even yourself without losing your way or your wits. You’ve inspired others to work beside you each day to make your dream a reality. I salute you.

Now, everybody else calling himself or herself a CEO—listen up, this is for you: stop it. Just stop calling yourself a CEO.

Stop putting “CEO” on the business cards you printed last week at Moo.com for YourLastName Consulting LLC. Take it off your LinkedIn page. Remove it from the résumé you’re passing around in hopes of getting hired. Self-titling as CEO is an atonal homage to structurally mandated social hierarchies, not a statement of your iconoclastic self-determination.

Maybe it’s generational. Steve Jobs’ early business card read: “Vice President, New Product Development,” in part because he recognized he didn’t have the skills to run the company he wanted to build. At least not yet. Bill Gates went with the classic and somewhat understated “President.” But today’s tech titans have opted for something much more conspicuous. If you were one of the folks to get an early Mark Zuckerberg card, you may remember the supercilious line: “I’m CEO, Bitch.” Way to stay classy, Zuck.

Facebook aside, title inflation is bad for business. Calling yourself the CEO will label you as either an egoist or someone with confidence compensation issues. That will make people less willing to work with you or help you. Taking the top title in a company also suggests a limited vision of what your company can become. Ask yourself: would you still be CEO if it were a $100 billion business or would you require what’s euphemistically called “adult supervision?”

So stop pretending to have attained a title you didn’t earn and start doing what you need to do to get to where you want to be. Here’s how:

Attract Awesome People

Jobs had Wozniak and later, Markkula. Clark had Andreessen. McNeally had Bechtolsheim, Joy and Khosla. A remarkable CEO should be like the moon, illuminated by the reflected light of all the stars he or she has brought into orbit. Awesome people act as accelerants to whatever you’re doing. They push ideas forward, execute with aplomb and challenge you to new heights.

If you can hire, hire. If you can’t hire, bring them into your orbit as advisors, friends and fellow travelers. Get them to invest their creativity and energy.

To get the true benefits of awesome people, focus on diversity. You want to have as many different perspectives on a problem as you possibly can, so bring on the best people from as wide array of backgrounds and from different generations. They’ll learn from each other and the confluence of their experiences will be the basis of company creativity for years to come.

Most importantly, attracting awesome people to your company precludes retreat. You carry too valuable a cargo of energy and confidence invested by others to turn back.

Build an Experience, Not a Product

Eric Ries has put the concept of the minimally viable product (MVP) front and center in the minds of Silicon Valley startups. But this focus is somewhat misguided. Products give you utility and then may be discarded. Products are the one-night stands of business. Experiences give you memories and good experiences will bring you back for more, it engenders a long-term relationship. The best CEOs know this instinctively and do all that they can to create and cultivate an attractive experience for their customers.

Once you’ve got a good experience, cement it with the bond of buying. A funny thing happens when people buy your product: they invest their energy into the choice and will find reasons to justify their action. In the early days of Apple, customers loved their computers because they had to pay a boatload of money for them. They found aspects of the experience they could rave about just to justify their purchase to others.

That price tag is valuable to you too. It focuses the mind tremendously and forces you to deliver a unique and memorable experience of real value. When you offer a product for free, you aren’t forced to justify your existence to customers or show a useful benefit. That’s why we see half a dozen Instagram clones.

A CEO doesn’t market a product to users. A CEO sells an experience to customers.

Learn Finance

If you wanted to be a rock star, you’d have to learn to read music and if you wanted to be an award-winning novelist, you’d have to learn basic grammar. It should not come as a surprise that if you want to be the CEO of a business you should learn finance. Yet we regularly see founders blowing off finance or outsourcing major financial decisions to hired guns.

There’s no secret to learning finance. There are plenty of good books that can take you through the basics of accounting up to the execution of liquidity preferences under preferred stock agreements. Interview friends that have run their own companies, worked in banking or had P&L experience for a division in a larger company. Start using QuickBooks. Today it’s easy to find help online from corporate finance communities such as Proformative.

For startups, there’s one important financial metric that matters more than any other: months left to live given your current burn rate. Real CEOs know this number and manage it religiously.

Define a Big Goal and Take Small Steps

Plenty of wannabe Silicon Valley CEOs have read Jim Collins and will tell you about their BHAG (That’s their Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal). They’ll tell you that they want to revolutionize the datacenter, or change the face of mobile payments, or create a new paradigm for social sharing, or something equally nebulous. That’s great. But it’s the ability to both set that goal and show how you’re going to achieve it that marks a real CEO.

Successful CEOs balance aspirations with operations. They focus on things that can be done today to secure customers and growth over time—not on the title they put on their business cards.

HTC won over some hearts a while back when it released its bootloader unlock tool for a good number of devices. It basically allows owners of Android phones to load custom ROMs onto their phones in exchange for any warranty rights they may have been enjoying.

It’s a fair trade considering a solid percentage of Android power users prefer Android based mostly on the fact that they have this option, but without solid hardware the ability to load different versions of Androids becomes less and less appealing.

And so is the case with the HTC One X. It’s an excellent handset, and possibly the best HTC has ever made. But unfortunately, the company won’t be offering the bootloader unlock tool for this particular handset.

Here’s the official word from HTC, according to MoDaCo:

HTC is committed to listening to users and delivering customer satisfaction. Since announcing our commitment to unlockable bootloaders, HTC has worked to enable our customers to unlock the bootloader on more than 45 devices over the past six months. In some cases, however, restrictions prevent certain devices from participating in our bootloader unlocking program. Rest assured, HTC is committed to assisting developers in unlocking bootloaders for HTC devices and we’ll continue to unlock additional devices in the future.

HTC is right to point out the number of handsets it has offered this functionality with, and it certainly seems a bit odd that its current flagship device wouldn’t receive the same treatment. MobileBurn suspects that AT&T may have something to do with this restriction, and I’m inclined to agree.

After all, it wouldn’t be the first time that we’ve seen carriers tamper with a handset’s functionality for their own, sometimes unexplained, reasons. Remember when Verizon blocked Google Wallet on the GalNex based on what was most certainly the carrier’s support for a rival NFC payment system called ISIS?

We’ve reached out to AT&T to figure out whether or not the big blue carrier is, in fact, responsible for this unfortunate turn of events. We’ll keep you posted once we know more.

Poor old Android is having a bad year. (Especially compared to last year.) Apple’s iPhone is soaring in China, and apparently overtaking Android in the crucial American market. Oracle’s lawsuit against Google has led to several rather awkward claims, eg that the word ‘license’ in the phrase “we need to negotiate a license for Java under the terms we need” referred to “not a license from anybody”, a kind of license with which I was previously entirely unfamiliar. CEO Larry Page’s own testimony was labelled as evasive: “His denial of knowledge and recollection contrasts with evidence,” wrote Florian Mueller of FOSS Patents.

What a headache. Way back in 2005, Android head honcho Andy Rubin wrote in a prescient email:

“If Sun doesn’t want to work with us, we have two options: 1) Abandon our work and adopt MSFT CLR VM and C# language – or – 2) Do Java anyway and defend our decision, perhaps making enemies along the way.”

Just imagine if they’d taken the first road. It’s not widely understood in the industry that Microsoft’s .NET infrastructure is more open than Java in many ways; it and its flagship language C# are ISO and ECMA standards, available to anyone and everyone, legally bulletproofed by the Microsoft Community Promise. Imagine if the Android OS ran on an entirely different technical architecture.

Wait, no. Don’t imagine it: examine it. Like a vision from a parallel universe, it now exists.

Way back in 2001, Miguel de Icaza realized that if he ported .NET to Linux, he would open Linux up to a huge new developer community — and vice versa. The Mono Project was born. it wound up in Novell’s hands, where it continued to mature. Last year much of the Mono team founded a company called Xamarin, whose MonoTouch software lets developers write native Android/iOS apps using .NET technologies.

Android apps run on Google’s Dalvik virtual machine. “Dalvik’s fairly immature, and Mono vastly outperforms it,” says Xamarin’s CEO Nat Friedman. “So we started thinking: hey, what if we translated the entire Android OS to C#? It would run faster, and it wouldn’t have any legal problems.”

First it was just a thought experiment. Then it became more of a science project. And then the Xamarin team actually did it, by adopting and improving a tool named Sharpen that translates Java to C#, and using it to translate the entire Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) codebase. They did get a few side benefits — that improved tool, and better graphics handling — but mostly they did it for fun, aka the love of making something better. Oh, and they’ve now open-sourced the whole thing, under the name of XobotOS.

What does this mean? Good question. Maybe it’s an impressive technical achievement that’s ultimately inconsequential except as a bright feather in Xamarin’s cap. (If the idea was to get developers’ attention, they’ve certainly succeeded.) Maybe it’s Plan B for Google, in case there is some (unlikely) legal catastrophe.

And maybe the next company that thinks about forking Android for their own use — as Amazon did with the Kindle Fire, and as RIM had to have at least considered last year — will decide to go the Xobot route, for better performance, for legal cover, as a major differentiator, and to appeal to the huge and thriving .NET developer community. On the other hand, existing apps would either have to run on the IKVM virtual machine atop Mono (after tweaking it to handle Dalvik .dex files) which would mean a performance hit, or be Sharpened to C# and recompiled.

Still, at the very least, it’s a technically impressive and interesting feat. And who knows? Watch this space. It just might turn out to be a genuinely disruptive one as well.

Previously we’ve covered Dropbox Automator, a sort of IFTTT for Dropbox. (IFTTT, if you haven’t heard, automates tasks to trigger when a particular action has occurred, e.g. if a Facebook profile picture changes, then update a Twitter profile, etc). Like IFTTT, Dropbox Automator is capable of triggering a similar series of actions, based on what kind of files have been added to your Dropbox folders. Now, the startup that makes Dropbox Automator, Wappwolf, has produced Google Drive Automator.

This connects to your Google Drive account and monitors folders of your choice, performing
automated actions you define when new files are dropped in by a user or directly stored by an app. This could be converting a document to PDF, resizing images and uploading them to
Facebook, plus a bunch more actions.

There are a few programs that do syncing between Docs/Drive and other services. The Docs API hasn’t changed, so whoever is doing this for Docs can easily do it for Drive as well. Handily, Wappwolf supports quite a lot more services. (Wappwolf is backed with $1 million by private investors with offices in the SanFrancisco and Vienna).

Wappwolf says Automator has processed 1 million files since it started connecting clouds, like Dropbox, Evernote and Attachments.me. Last month over 170,000 photos were automatically synced between Dropbox and Picasa accounts. That’s over 5,500 photos in one day.

With all of these cloud solutions, Dropbox, Box, GDrive, Evernote etc it’s interesting to see that companies are building additional functionality on top of these and allowing you to share across and sync files across. It’s clear from the numbers that plenty of people are using it, and actually do want something to sit above all these cloud storage solutions.

That’s probably going to create exit opportunities for startups playing in this space.