Since Google first debuted Boutiques.com last November, the search giant claims that hundreds of thousands of boutiques have been created. Powered by visual search and image recognition technology, Boutiques lets literally anyone create a working ecommerce site. Google is also introducing a Designer Analytics feature, which will let boutique owners see which products, designs, and colors are selling. "With easy-to-understand data visualizations, Designer Analytics shows what colors, shapes and patterns are most loved and hated broadly (in categories such as shoes, dresses and handbags) and even down to how specific items are performing," Google explains. According to Softpedia: "The …

Proving that the market has room for more than one location-based service, Gowalla is on the verge of hitting the 1 million-user market. By comparison, location-based service leader Foursquare presently has about 6 million users. All told, Gowalla's growing community has now created and visited over 2.5 million locations -- dubbed "spots" -- around the world. To keep the party going, the start-up is improving its Highlights location review feature, and further integrating them into the Gowalla experience. "When Highlights were introduced to Gowalla back in September 2010, we described them as a useful way of simplifying location reviews," notes …

As rumors circulate about the size of Arianna Huffington's payday post AOL acquisition, some are suggesting that she share it with the thousands of bloggers who've showered HuffPo with free content. As Bloomberg-Businessweek reports, Dan Gillmor, the director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University, wrote that Huffington should cut checks to "the most productive contributors on whose work she's built a significant part of her new fortune." Fat chance, says Roy Sekoff, HuffPo's founding editor. "If people want to express their opinions, they do so on the site for free," he tells Bloomberg. …

Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) plans to introduce an online privacy bill that would authorize the Federal Trade Commission to promulgate do-not-track regulations. The Do Not Track Me Online Act of 2011 would give the FTC the ability to enforce a do-not-track system with monetary penalties, audits and other measures. Additionally, the bill allows the FTC to create exceptions for "commonly accepted commercial practices."

Pushing into the virtual goods space, payments giant Visa has acquired Playspan, which powers e-commerce for hundreds of online games and virtual worlds, for $190 million. The move will give Visa a bigger piece of the digital goods market, which will grow from $1.6 billion in 2010 to $2.1 billion in 2011, according to the Inside Virtual Goods report. Playspan's platform enables developers to offer in-app purchasing on Facebook and other sites using 85 global payment methods in 180 countries. Read more here.

Bubbli, a startup that's trying to change the way we use photos on mobile devices, has raised about $2 million, according to TechCrunch. Led by August Capital, Bubbli plans to use the investment to build out its technology platform before its debut at the famous TED conference in March. "It wants to use camera phones to create a new kind of photograph," according to TechCrunch. The startup says it wants to "bring the real world to the flat web," by capturing places instead of just a rectangular image. "It sounds like it could be a sort of panoramic photo, …

Determined to fend off threats from Google and Apple, eBay is reportedly ready to layout a comprehensive plan for the future of PayPal. On Thursday, "At a meeting with analysts, EBay will unveil its strategy for the mobile version of PayPal, the BillMeLater service and its open-platform effort, which lets outside programmers work with its software," reports Bloomberg Businessweek. EBay CEO John Donahoe is expected to discuss plans for the entire company, but focus mainly on the company's fastest growing business -- PayPal. According to eBay, the popular payment service is on track to eventually generate more revenue than …

For Ace Hardware, customer satisfaction isn't just a nice idea, it's the whole point. The secret, which results in its winning its category again in the 15th annual Brand Keys Loyalty Index, is knowing what makes it different than its competitors. While both Home Depot and Lowe's are much larger players in the DIY category, "we're very clear that our mission is home maintenance and repair, while they're about home improvement," Rich Neal, who is Ace's One-to-One Manager and oversees Ace Rewards (Ace's consumer loyalty program), tells Marketing Daily. "That's the real difference." The Oak Brook, Ill.-company, which …

Macy's says its 2010 Thanks For Sharing and Believe holiday campaigns raised a record $16.25 million for its national and local charities. Thanks For Sharing, now eight years old, charges a $25 one-time enrollment fee, which gives the cardholder the chance to earn up to 10% off purchases, raised $15 million, which it distributed to such groups as the American Heart Association's Go Red For Women movement, the Make-A-Wish Foundation, and The Breast Cancer Research Foundation. And the Christmas-themed Believe effort, now in its third year, collected more than 1 million letters to Santa, raising $1.45 million.

Facebook is now letting self-serve advertisers publish a new sponsored stories ad format. There are two types of sponsored stories for Facebook page administrators: "Like Stories" and "Page Post Stories." "Both are definitely interesting and I'm sure page administrators will be split testing these types of ads for campaigns beginning immediately in an effort to decrease their fan acquisition costs," writes All Facebook's Nick O'Neill. The top social network is also now giving page administrators the ability to select which tab they'd like visitors to land on when they click on the ads. Incredibly, Facebook is charging advertisers to …