The number of subscribers using mobile Internet services will rise from 577 million currently, to top 1.7bn by 2013, spurred by demand for collaborative applications known collectively as ‘Web 2.0‘, and greater 2.5/3G penetration. Established mobile players face increasing competition from web-based brands and will have to adapt their commercial strategies to accommodate greater collaboration with other members of the value chain, if future revenue growth in the mobile Web 2.0 space is to be achieved.

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Multiply, a social network that has done a fine job of flying under the radar since its 2005 launch, has announced a new paid-account program that focuses on media storage. Called a “digital scrapbook,” this premium feature will cost $19.95 annually.

Members who opt in to the “digital scrapbook” program will be able to store high-resolution photos, as well as videos up to 20 minutes long. They will also be able to surf the site without ads.

Multiply has also launched a tool that automatically uploads photos and videos to a private “locker,” from users can choose content to share with friends. All Multiply profiles are friends-only, as the site promotes an aim of friends-and-family communication and media sharing.

The site also has a more “adult” focus than many social networks; the average age of active users ranges from the upper 20s to mid-30s. “We’ve never tried to be the hip, cool nightclub,” Vice President Michael Gersh said to CNET News.com.

Multiply hit the 9 million member mark recently and will likely hit 10 million in July, still paltry compared to the likes of Facebook and MySpace. But executives say touting huge growth numbers would be contrary to the site’s aim of connections between family and close friends, not random strangers or even acquaintances. Its members, according to Multiply numbers, post 2 million photos, 19,000 videos, and 55,000 blog entries every day.

“It’s much more organized and meaningful than some explosive megasite,” Gersh said. “People are sticking around.”

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Buzzd, a mobile service focused on “real-time” reviews of bars and restaurants, says it’s making some inroads in the tough, crowded location-based networking market.

The New York-based start-up is set to release numbers on Thursday announcing that 1.2 million venues are now listed in its directory, 10 percent of which were added by users. As for demographics, about 80 percent of Buzzd’s users (it doesn’t provide specifics on active users) are in the U.S., concentrated around cities like New York and Los Angeles, with another 10 percent in Europe and 10 percent in India.

Like many “geo” services, Buzzd lets members tell their friends where they are; rival Brightkite also lets members post “notes” on those venues, but doesn’t turn them into a real-time lookup service. Buzzd has partnered with event and venue listing services like Time Out, Flavorpill, MyOpenBar, and Zagat. You can also use Facebook’s newly extended API to hook it up with your profile credentials.

While it’s a mobile Web site that doesn’t require a download or subscription service, Buzzd has nevertheless worked on forming carrier deals–and says that more are on the way–to improve visibility in exchange for ad revenue sharing.

So what’s next? Founder Nihal Mehta told CNET News.com that the all-important iPhone application is on the way, as well as a “strategic investment” on behalf of a major player in the mobile market. He’s not saying who that is, but one can guess it’s likely a handset manufacturer (though probably not Nokia, because it just bought competitor Plazes) or a carrier.

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Parker Harris (center) of Salesforce.com, gets grilled by Om Malik (left) and Michael Copeland.

(Credit: Rafe Needleman/CNET Networks)

SAN FRANCISCO–In consecutive talks here at Structure 08, we just heard from big brains at Salesforce.com and Microsoft on the topic of software vs. services. Surprisingly, these companies, which historically have espoused very different philosophies, are converging on a similar pitch: you can’t build one with the other.

In Salesforce’s case, co-founder and EVP Parker Harris said that early on, Salesforce’s architects wanted to build a platform service for consumers, not just an application. But business logic prevailed: customers needed an application, not a platform.

“As a technologist, you want to build a platform, but you risk losing touch with what you’re building it for,” Harris said. “So when we started, we said we’re going to build a service that’s fast, simple, and right the first time.”

And once Salesforce did expose its platform to developers, it found it couldn’t think about its main app separately from this underlying architecture. “Software and infrastructure are not separate things. They’re one thing.”

Microsoft's Debra Chrapaty illustrates the point that Microsoft is a software-as-a-service company, too.

(Credit: Rafe Needleman/CNET Networks)

For its part, Microsoft is no longer thinking only about applications. It continues to build apps with varying degrees of local and Web-based functionality, and because of that, Debra Chrapaty, vice president of global foundation services, keeps a close eye on the efficiency of apps. Because when scaled up into a data center, computational-efficiency matters.

The company needs to “make every kilowatt count,” she said. Chrapaty also said that at least one of Microsoft’s Virtual Earth servers, in Colorado, runs on wind power.

I find it curious that the two companies, Microsoft historically a pure software play, and Salesforce, a poster child for software as a service, are needing to solve the same problems today: building online applications and platforms that are reliable and open to their customers. And I especially liked that Microsoft is taking responsibility for the energy its apps use. I’d love to see that mindset spread through the industry.

Click here to see more stories from the Structure 08 conference and on cloud computing generally.

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SAN FRANCISCO–Here at the Structure conference, everything is cloud, cloud, cloud. No one wants to own their own Web hardware anymore, it seems, and the company representatives speaking here are happy to provide the software and virtual services to replace the hardware.

One of those is GoGrid, which is shooting for the same cloud-computing market that Amazon.com is making a run at with its EC2, or Elastic Compute Cloud, service and related Web services.

The GoGrid pitch: We’re cheaper. And easier.

GoGrid CEO John Keagy told me that, at volume, his services undercut Amazon’s. He charges 8 cents a gigabyte-hour for compute services, compared to EC2’s 10 cents. Also, data storage is associated with compute servers, and if a server goes offline, when it comes back, the storage will still be there.

At Structure on Wednesday, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels pitched “persistent storage” as a new offering from Amazon.

Keagy also said GoGrid has a graphical user interface-based control panel for its customers, allowing them to quickly set up their compute environment in a simpler manner than Amazon’s service allows.

I can’t do a hands-on with these two cloud services, but there are a few other points that I found interesting. First, GoGrid offers virtual Windows services, as well as Linux, and about 50 percent of its installations are for Windows processes. Some popular Web 2.0 services, like CommunityServer, are still Windows-only.

Also, GoGrid has never had a system-wide outage, as Amazon has. Keagy is realistic, though: “We’re in beta. It will happen to us too.” But, he says, with well-designed systems, recovery can be swift.

One thing GoGrid certainly doesn’t have is Amazon’s scale. Although the company is a division of the well-established ServePath, its single 20,000 square-foot facility can’t hold a generator to Amazon’s massive distributed infrastructure. Keagy did say he is building out distribution for GoGrid, using more of ServePath’s locations.

Like the new Mosso cloud-based storage service, GoGrid is accessible through REST (representational state transfer) application programming interfaces.

Click here to see more stories from the Structure 08 conference and on cloud computing generally.

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Salesforce.com, which has already linked its CRM software to Google Apps and integrated AdWords tracking into its platform, is deploying a free new Force.com Toolkit for Google Data APIs so third-party developers can interact with data in Google services. The toolkit is supposed to bring together data and content in Google Apps with the database, logic and workflow capabilities in Salesforce.com?s Force.com development platform. Salesforce claims the move creates a -multi-cloud computing platform? that will accelerate the creation of newfangled web-based applications.

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