Things are beginning to look even dimmer for LightSquared. Just one day after satellite network operator Inmarsat announced that LightSquared had defaulted on a $56 million payment, new reports indicate that the company plans to slash its workforce by 45% in an effort to cut costs and keep fighting.

“This and other cost savings measures will allow LightSquared to continue to navigate the regulatory process as it works with the appropriate government agencies to find solutions to the GPS interference issue,” reads a statement issued to Reuters.

Let’s not forget that LightSquared isn’t that a big a company to start off with — the company only employs around 330 people. With their workforce poised to be cut nearly in half and regulatory woes bogging them down, I can’t imagine the morale in their particular corner of Virginia to be too high. The move also casts their non-payment to Inmarsat in a different light — while LightSquared claimed that they have “raised several matters that require resolution” before they make the payment, it now just looks like they couldn’t scrape the money together.

LightSquared declined to offer any further detail on the situation, and could not be reached for comment at time of writing.

Though things are looking grim for LightSquared right now, it’s unfair to say that the book has closed completely on their ambitious plans. From the sound of their release, LightSquared seems ready to streamline their operations and keep their head down for the time being. Anyone who’s followed the LightSquared situation though knows that keeping their head down is highly uncharacteristic for them. For nearly every drawback LightSquared has faced (and there have been a lot of them so far), the company was quick to respond with a sharp-tongued press release.

This time though, there doesn’t seem to be much more that LightSquared can do. They can’t proceed any further without the FCC’s go-ahead, and they’ll never get that unless they can prove that the interference risk their network poses to GPS is negligible. LightSquared has publicly taken issue with the testing process — they’ve gone as far as to accuse two government committees of wrongdoing — but only further testing can clear their name.

Even then, the ball isn’t in their court. Despite having given LightSquared a conditional approval [PDF] to build out their network in early 2011, the regulatory body changed their minds in a jiffy when NTIA Administrator Lawrence Strickling sent them a letter [PDF] last week stating that an interference-free network rollout wasn’t doable.

LightSquared clearly intends to continue fighting, but their spate of layoffs seems to signal that the company is hunkering down into survival mode. Unless the political or regulatory climates change soon, how long LightSquared can continue to keep at it is anyone’s guess.

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Last week, a Mountain Lion roared “Mac is the next big gaming platform.” Apple is bringing Game Center to Mac, it will support cross-platform iPhone vs. Mac play, and the Mac App Store will likely become more prominent. It’s time for mobile developers to decide if they’ll bring their games to Mac OS, and how they’ll port their controls and levels. Otherwise they risk having to claw their way up much more competitive charts.

Tomorrow, after 100 million downloads across platforms, ZeptoLab will release its hit Cut The Rope for Mac OS. After hooking me up with a pre-release download, the Moscow-based founders gave me the low down on the biggest challenges of porting to Mac OS, and why they think it’s critical that mobile developers don’t get left behind on the small screen.

[Update: Cut The Rope is now available on the Mac OS App Store]

Why Port?

“We see opportunity with the Mac App Store because it’s not as occupied as the mobile App Store. There are several quite nice games, but the competition is not as huge” said ZeptoLab’s twin brother founders Semyon and Efim Voinov. Angry Birds and Plants Vs. Zombies are already available, but other staples like Fruit Ninja, Words With Friends, and Where’s My Water are absent. Without these apps occupying the charts, there are places for other developers to swoop in and get discovered.

As expensive console and PC games like Call Of Duty and Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic appear in the store as well, paid apps ported from mobile may be able to get away with charging higher prices. On a phone $5 may seem steep, but the bigger screen size and history of $50 disc-based games may make $5 appear cheap on the Mac App Store.

“We started quite a while ago doing this in-house. It took a bit longer than we expected, but from a technical standpoint the process of porting to Mac was pretty straightforward. The tools are pretty good. The majority of work was on the design and art side.”

From Touch To Trackpad

In Cut The Rope, users cut ropes attached to pieces of candy, working with gravity, momentum, and other forces to guide the sweets into the mouth of a hungry baby dinosaur named Om Nom.”It was challenging porting to Mac OS, because Cut The Rope was intended for touch controls” the Voinovs admit.

“It’s tricky to move from one point of the screen to another very quickly. It’s pretty natural with fingers, but different with the mouse.” When the game was ported to HTML5, some laptop users reported difficulty holding down the mouse click button while using another finger for precise movements.

To keep the original feel intact but give players an optimized control scheme for the track pad and mouse, the Voinovs added the option to hover near a rope to highlight it and click to cut it, rather than swiping. If it helps, users can leave it on, or disable it if they find it too different from the mobile version. During testing, the team noticed that levels where you had to make several quick cuts could leave users cursing the controls. To compensate, they made the physics of the Mac version work just a little slower.

Developers should determine which controls might be harder with a mouse and consider adding similar options, keyboard shortcuts, or on-screen buttons that make use of the extra real estate. If those aren’t enough, similar tweaks can be made to a game’s physics to reduce player frustration.

High Resolution Landscape Level Design

Meanwhile, many of Cut The Ropes levels were designed for a portrait orientation screen, while most Mac monitors stay fixed in the landscape position. The Voinovs took a methodical approach, playing each level of their mobile game and noting which were too tall and would need lay out adjustments. “We realized it was more half of the levels”, making level redesign a significant time-suck. Other devs should factor this into their decisions to port and release schedules.

Bigger screens also require higher resolution artwork. Rather than seeing this as busy work, ZeptoLab took the chance to differentiate the Mac OS experience. “We made sure it would look great, really crisp and sharp. It makes it special and give people who already played on mobile a reason [to buy the Mac OS version]. You can see all the little details of the graphics in the game.” Now as the team makes new level packs, they’re using the Mac OS resolution standards that are much easier to scale down than scale up.

Diversifying Revenue Streams

“This is our first experience releasing a Mac OS game. We believe it will develop into a bigger thing over time” Semyon told me. ZeptoLab will be closely watching the success of the game, but is simultaneously seeking other revenue sources. Last week it released Cut The Rope for the Barnes & Noble Nook reader. Apple TV and Siri are two other big platforms that developers should have on their radars.

At the New York Toy Fair, ZeptoLab announced licensing deals with Mattel, Hasbro, JAKKS Pacific, and Li & Fung to create Om Nom plush dolls, a board game, and clothing line based on Cut The Rope. “We’re trying to keep the balance. Merchandise is important, but there’s no merchandise without a good product” the brothers say. Merch has been huge for Rovio‘s Angry Birds, and now Zynga has struck licensing deals, legitimizing offline revenue streams.

Finally, while Cut The Rope is in 4th on the all-time App Store paid app chart, ZeptoLab is eager to invent new intellectual property, ”We have this creative urge to do cool new things.”

Developers shouldn’t limit themselves to porting existing games. The Mac OS gaming platform comes with unique characteristics like the trackpad to be designed for, rather than around. “Cut the ropes to your imagination” a some hack writer might say. I’ll just leave you with, “Go make people happy, that’s your art.”

For more game design coverage, check out:

How Evil Monkeys Chased Temple Run To App Store #1 – thoughts on freemium vs premium from the game’s developers

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The addition of the iPad into the point of sale system or cash register isn’t a new trend. Many small businesses are swapping out traditional cash registers for iPads and credit card processors like Square. But large restaurant chains and other establishments still need a complete front-to-back-of-house (i.e. a system that can send receipts to the kitchen) solution. Revel Systems hopes to be the go-to iPad-powered, comprehensive POS platform for restaurants.

Launched in August 2011, Revel Systems’ iPad software, cash register, weighing machine, and receipt printer are all optimized for restaurant and retail establishments. Along with the iPad-friendly cash register, Revel Systems can be completely customized for payroll, inventory tracking, web ordering, email receipts and more.

Lisa Falzone, co-founder and CEO of Revel System, explains that the platform is going after chains and restaurants that have at least $500,000 in yearly revenue. Revel, which resells the hardware and has created its own software for the iPad, charges these customers upwards of $3,000 for the full system plus a software licensing fee. Falzone says this compares to traditional point of sale systems which costs at least $6,000.

Currently Revel is seeing around $80 million in processing business with major brands. Beautiful Brands International has just tapped the startup to power POS systems at its multiple franchised locations nationwide under the Beautiful Brands International umbrella, including Camille’s Sidewalk Café, Dixie Cream, FreshBerry Frozen Yogurt Cafe and Rex’s Chicken.

Revel has raised $3.7 million from DCM.

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Storify has become one of the best ways to create stories from social media — the startup says it has been used by 22 of the top 25 news sites in the United States, and that its users have curated a total of more than 3 million social objects. Now, you can do that curation from your iPad.

The company was already mobile, in the sense that stories (which are essentially timelines of content from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and more) created with Storify tools could be viewed on smartphones and tablets. But with the new Storify iPad app, you can do more than look at a story — you can create one on an iPad, too. In fact, co-founder and CEO Xavier Damman argues that this may be the first great app for content creation (rather than consumption) on the iPad.

That may be selling other apps short, but maybe not — while there are (say) blogging or drawing apps that work adequately on the iPad, those aren’t really the ideal tools for creating content. (Put another way: There’s a reason I’m writing this post on my laptop.) Yet when Damman and his co-founder Burt Herman demonstrated Storify on the iPad earlier this month, I was impressed by how it seemed perfectly suited for the tablet. There’s a responsive, drag-and-drop interface for moving social network updates into the timeline, so it really feels like you’re building something with your fingertips. You can see the interface in action in the video below.

Most of Storify’s traffic comes in the form embedded versions of stories on major media sites, and Damman and Herman lay out a plausible scenario where a reporter could use Storify for iPad to file their report. For example, imagine a reporter at a conference who, instead of lugging their laptop around, just breaks out their iPad to curate the social media version of what’s happening, which in turn is embedded on their website.

Damman and Herman are hopeful that the app will see serious usage at the upcoming South by Southwest conference — which is, of course, a hub for social media sharing and oversharing. If you’re wandering around eight or 12 hours at a time, it’s easier to share the experience via iPad rather than a laptop with only a few hours of battery life.

At the same time, the vision isn’t limited to journalists. The pair says Storify has also gotten a strong response from brands, and they see it as a “social typewriter” that can allow anyone to tell a story.

“We always talk about how social media empowered people to create content,” says Herman (a former journalist himself). “It’s getting simpler and simpler, from 300 words to 140 characters. Now we’re overwhelmed by all this media, so this is the next big step — the curation of all that media that’s out there, extracting the meaning in the noise to tell stories.”

Damman says his team has been focused for the past seven months on creating a great experience for the iPad, though he isn’t ruling out expanding to other platforms like Android in the future.

Storify’s investors include Khosla Ventures.

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Twitter, Facebook and other social networks have long counted on the rise in smartphone usage to help fuel their growth: that trend, however, seems to also be taking a toll on mobile carriers — specifically in the form of revenues.

The analyst firm of Ovum, part of the Informa Group, has estimated that operators lost $13.9 billion in SMS revenue in 2011, as a result of their customers using services like Twitter and Facebook to message each other instead of the carriers’ own text messaging services. A separate report from mobile analytics firm Bytemobile has also charted huge growth in the use of social media on mobile — with operators getting virtually no benefit as a result.

Bytemobile, using data it gathers from its tier-one carrier customers, found that the average mobile user spends around nine minutes per day each on Facebook and YouTube on mobile. YouTube, being a video service, generates 300 times more traffic on data networks. In both of those cases, it notes, neither service generates any mobile operator revenue.

There is a caveat, of course: carriers are still making money from people using their phones to use social networks: users are, after all, still buying 3G and 4G data plans; and many (but not all) carriers also roll public Wi-Fi connectivity into those plans.

It’s questionable, though, whether in the short term that incremental data revenues for tweets, status updates and check-ins, and the more substantial data usage from services like YouTube, are able to offset the loss from the more lucrative messaging services that operators built up and still count on for revenues.

Longer term, Ovum predicts that by 2016 mobile data will bring in $419 billion in revenues for operators, out of a total service revenues of $1,047 billion.

Putting aside forecasts, today, the amount of revenue lost from messaging to social media appears that the figure is growing: Ovum points out that a $13.9 billion loss works out to some nine percent of messaging revenues for carriers worldwide, a rise from the six percent of revenues lost in messaging revenue to social messaging in 2010, when carriers lost $8.7 billion in SMS revenues to social media messaging.

Ovum’s suggestion? For carriers to work more closely on making their messaging and other services more collaborative — that is, more partnerships with social networks so that they use the carrier infrastructure to underpin their own communication tools.

There is some of that happening already, particularly in developing countries. France Telecom-owned operator Orange last week announced that it would be launching a new way of accessing Facebook in developing markets, using USSD functionality on GSM devices. It is offering this as an extra paid service to users.

But by and large, operators have missed the boat in more developed markets, where smartphones and mobile apps are the order of the day.

There is still an opportunity in those advanced markets. Carriers, if they got the lead out, could act as mobile app developers and make their own clients to access those social networks, which link in better with the services they already have in place — say for messaging or billing services. That’s something that has been relatively untapped so far.

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The landgrab for music streaming customers is on, and Rdio — the U.S.-based startup from Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis — is joining that race in earnest.

The company today announced that it is now live in Spain and Portugal, just one month after it launched its first European service, in Germany. The total number of countries where Rdio now works is up to eight, including the U.S., Canada, Brazil, Germany, Australia and New Zealand — and hints that there will be more to come.

The market for music streaming services is getting increasingly crowded – we highlighted one of the more recent, from the music magazine Spin, just yesterday – and while some of these do not directly compete against each other for straight subscriptions, they are competing against each other for attention from consumers. And it’s not just limited to what is happening in the U.S., either. Rhapsody last month expanded its hitherto U.S.-only service to Europe.

For now it appears that Spotify is the one to beat. Last month, the company revealed that it has now racked up 3 million subscribers, up from 2.5 million in November 2011, and its conversion rates, taking free/trial users to paid services, is also on the rise.

Rdio has not released an updated subscriber figure — although we have reached out to the company to try to pin one down.

Unlike Spotify — which offers different service tiers including an ad-funded, free listening option in some markets — Rdio has taken a different approach, offering only paid services but guaranteeing no ads in the process.

(That might also have stemmed from a lesson learned by Zennström and Friis from their Skype days: that service, which is now getting acquired by Microsoft, to this day has not managed to convert most of its free users to enhanced, paying options.)

Here, users get access to 12 million songs, either for €4.99 for web-only access or €9.99 for web, mobile and other platform access. The latter can be used on iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7 devices, as well as through the Sonos wireless audio system.

In addition to straight song search-and-play options, Rdio also offers users an offline listening mode, recommendations, and various of social features such as playlist sharing and collaboration.

While music streaming has had a lot of buzz in markets like the U.S. – due in part to the growth of services like Pandora and Rhapsody, but also because of the delayed and much-anticipated entry of Spotify last year – it will be interesting to see how services like Rdio gain traction in markets like Spain and Portugal. There could be a greenfield opportunity in any case: as TNW points out, Spotify only has a limited service in both markets at the moment.

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Nokia isn’t all that great with teasers. In August the company posted a teaser for the newest version of Symbian which just so happened to include the release date in it. Today, the teaser (at least) doesn’t give away the name of the product or anything huge like that, but it’s pretty clear what Nokia is hyping right here.

Obviously the big news here is some form of camera technology. We’re promised pure detail, pure depth, and pure definition — all in all, a pure view.

Nokia is clearly trying to play this up with the snowy magic and barely visible (but also totally visible) white text. The Finnish phone maker must have an imaging flagship ready to roll at MWC. Of course, we’ll be there with eyes peeled so stay tuned on what exactly Nokia has to offer that will give us a “pure view.”

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Well, you have to hand it to the strategy team over at Zipcar. Arguably the largest on-demand car-sharing network, Zipcar went public last year and not long after saw its market cap cross $1 billion. It’s since fallen back, and with collaborative consumption and the market for car-sharing heating up, the big players have to make moves. Zipcar has since forged a partnership with Ford, making it the largest provider of cars for Zipcar’s University program, and, in December, the company took a controlling stake in Spain’s largest car-sharing network, Avancar.

Today finds Zipcar making another strategic move to get its mitts in fellow car-sharing companies, again with a focus on universities, whose students are among the most eager adopters of car-sharing models. What do I mean? The company today announced that it is a lead investor in the $13.7 million Series A financing of Wheelz, a junior, university-focused version of itself.

The Detroit-based Fontinalis Partners, a transportation technology investment firm, also participated in the round. As a result, Mark Schulz, the former President of International Operations at Ford and a founding Partner at Fontinalis, will join Zipcar CEO Scott Griffith on the startup’s Board of Directors. (Former Vice-chairman of Ernst & Young Jim Freer also joins the board.)

This adds to the $2 million in seed funding Wheelz raised pre-launch last summer, which was led by former Facebook VP and creator of the Social+Capital Partnership venture fund Chamath Palihaptiya, and included contributions from Felicis Ventures, Red Swan Ventures, and an impressive list of angel investors, including Freer and Sebastien De Halleax, the founder of Playfish. Wheelz’s total funding now sits just under $16 million.

For those unfamiliar with Wheelz, you can check out our coverage of their launch back in September. But, essentially, Wheelz aims to bring P2P car-sharing to campuses with a platform that enables students to connect safely and swiftly through Facebook integration, mobile apps, and its proprietary in-car hardware system called DriveBox. The startup initially launched at Stanford and has since popped up at UC Berkeley, USC and UCLA.

Among other things recommending it, Wheelz offers a wide selection of cars (sedans, hybrids, luxury cars, convertibles, vans, SUVs, and trucks), free, 24/7 customer support and roadside assistance, and users are protected by Wheelz’s million-dollar insurance policy, without affecting the individual’s own auto insurance.

As to how it works, once a student installs DriveBox in their car (for free), and has listed their car on Wheelz, other users can rent it, unlocking the car using the company’s iPhone app or Wheelz card. What’s cool is that the owner doesn’t have to be there to hand off the keys once they’ve agreed to sharing their car, as the company provides a “Key Box,” in which owners can leave their keys. The key box also comes with a gas card, so that when gas falls below a quarter of a tank, renters fill ‘er up using the card. The owner of the car decides how much the renter pays, setting hourly, daily, and weekly prices.

It’s a cool model, and one that looks to capitalize on the fact that on campus, P2P car sharing is on the rise. In a statement today, Zipcar CEO Scott Griffith said that he thinks P2P will have a big effect on the car-sharing market going forward: “We chose to make this investment because we believe that Wheelz has the right leadership, technology and business model to succeed in the emerging P2P space,” he said in a statement.

Wheelz does indeed have an experienced leadership team, as CEO Jeff Miller is a veteran of building sustainable transportation solutions, having worked for electric vehicle network provider Better Place. And co-founder and CTO Akhtar Jameel (also the architect of Wheelz’s technology platform) was formerly the CEO of Mercedes-Benz R&D and has held senior product and technology positions at Daimler, Better Place and Xerox PARC. (He was also awarded a Smithsonian Computer World Innovations gold medal for developing the world’s first Internet-connected car back in 1997.)

But what the Zipcar CEO didn’t mention was that there’s a lot of interest in the space, and competition is heating up. General Motors funded RelayRides in a very similar move and is offering its cars to the Google Ventures-backed startup to help it expand its reach, and, of course, there’s TechCrunch Disrupt winner GetAround, which has been getting a lot of buzz and has raised $5 million from a number of high-profile investors.

Again, it’s no surprise that Zipcar wants to tap into startups focusing on colleges and universities, something it’s done itself through its universities program. Campuses are early adopters and since a lot of students don’t own (or can’t afford) cars, they get used a lot more than they do in other places. Wheelz has a good-looking platform, some great technology, so the move makes a lot of sense. It will be interesting to see how the car-sharing tug-of-war plays out in 2012.

For more on Wheelz, check ‘em out at home here.

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While Apple is busy fighting Proview over the iPad trademark in China, it has lost a separate trademark battle in Europe: Wapple, the mobile web developers, have won a suit filed by Apple over its name.

The suit, originally filed in 2007, claimed that Wapple was trading on Apple’s brand association and name, although Wapple had filed for a trademark on “Wapple” in 2006.

Wapple, which has been around since 2003, and incorporated in 2004 – well before the smartphone explosion – has long said that its name was wordplay on the WAP protocol, which was the main format for delivering mobile content before the rise of 3G networks and other protocols like HTML5.

The case went right up to the Intellectual Property Office in the UK, which today made the ruling in Wapple’s favor in three separate filings, numbers 95786, 95787 and 95890.

Wapple’s words on the decision are ironic, going as they do against as iconic and groundbreaking a company as Apple:

“The case is a victory for truth over tactics. Self-belief is always critical when establishing and growing any technology business and even more so when you are early to market as we were,” noted Anne Thomas, co-founder and COO of Wapple. “The action taken by Apple Inc. to oppose our trade mark [sic] has tested our resolve and we are delighted with this outcome.”

Wapple works with a number of third parties on mobile web services and its customers include two of Apple’s big competitors, Microsoft and Google. No one in Wapple’s experience, the company notes, has ever confused the two companies.

Although Apple has asserted intellectual property rights over some of the industry’s biggest players — including numerous lawsuits against Android-based developers Samsung, HTC and Motorola — it has also gone after much smaller companies, but not always with a successful effect. One case in Spain last year saw Apple losing a design patent suit against NT-K, a small Android tablet maker.

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The WinZip iOS app, which lets you crack open .zip files from your iDevice, has only spent a short time on the App Store (and by short, I mean, like, a week). But there’s already plenty to brag about.

The app saw over 30,000 downloads on Day One, and nearly 150,000 on Day Two. As of last night, WinZip has blown by the 500,000 download hurdle with approximately 512,000 installs.

Let’s put this into some perspective, yes?

Social to-do app Any.DO saw over 500,000 downloads in its first thirty days of availability on the Android Market. Meanwhile, Kevin Rose’s micro-recommendation app Oink clocked in at 100k downloads in its first three weeks or so on iOS.

Who knew Apple loyalists needed a way to open .zip files so desperately? (Other than WinZip, of course.)

I spoke with WinZip president Patrick Nichols to see just how these crazy numbers came to be, and surprisingly there wasn’t much to it.

“It was really organic,” said Nichols. “The reality is that we just wanted to build a good application and get the word out.”

And apparently it worked: 500,000-strong on the download front, and more to come. Nichols said that an Android version of the app will be available around spring.

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