At last year’s Mobile World Congress, everyone wanted Yahoo’s ice cream. You see, no one had legitimate application store yet, the iPhone wasn’t 3G and Android didn’t even exist. Yahoo’s oneConnect was one of the most buzzed about parts of last year’s show — and its booth, with free ice cream, was crowded. What a difference a year makes.

This year at MWC, Yahoo has more announcements, but when you read about what they are, it’s hard to think of anything besides two syllables: Ho-hum. The company is consolidating its mobile experience under the new moniker Yahoo Mobile, something it probably should have been called from the start. The goal is to bring a “highly-personalized” interface to all of Yahoo’s various mobile properties, tailoring them for smartphones. The mobile web version and the iPhone version will roll out in March, with versions specifically built for other platforms coming in late May.

So what exactly are Yahoo’s mobile properties? Well there’s a whole list of things you can find here under various names (now you see why they rebranded and bunched together the whole lot), but the most useful ones are oneSearch and oneConnect, which, bring you Yahoo Search and access to things like your email, address book, calendar and messaging on your mobile devices, respectively.

It’s great that these will now be easier to navigate on your mobile device if you use Yahoo’s products, but increasingly, there are a lot more attractive options available. For example, since Google built the Android platform, its Gmail email service and Google Talk instant messaging service are built in to that operating system, and work seamlessly. Likewise, on the iPhone, with MobileMe, email and calendaring is all synced up by way of Apple’s servers no matter where you are. (And Google is offering some pretty nice sync options if you don’t use MobileMe.) And on Windows Mobile devices (now just called Windows Phones), you can easily use all of Microsoft’s options for the same services.

The problem is that Yahoo has no true mobile platform that is the backbone of these emerging devices in the mobile space. So if you want to use something like Yahoo Mobile, it’s going to be tacked-on. Yahoo is trying to change this a bit by partnering with the Opera Mini 4.2 browser to integrate these services, which is smart, but still, that is also tacked on. And with the improvements that have been made to mobile platforms like Windows Mobile, users may have less of a reason to use those tacked-on elements.

This year, there is no line for Yahoo’s booth at MWC, VentureBeat’s man on the ground, Matthaus Krzykowski, reports. Everyone wants to talk about the sexy platforms and the exciting new phones — neither of which Yahoo is heavily involved in. And no one seems to care about the free ice cream.

Matthaus Krzykowski contributed to this post

Crispy Gamer, a game fan web site that isn’t taking ads from game companies, announced today content syndication partnerships with Tribune Media Services, McClatchy Tribune Information Services and GamerDNA.

That means that Crispy Gamer’s game news, columns and reviews could appear in dozens of publications across the country. Tribune Media Services is a division of Tribune Co., owner of the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, while McClatchy Tribune Information Services is a joint venture of Tribune and the McClatchy chain, which owns newspapers such as the Sacramento Bee. GamerDNA, meanwhile, is a social network for gamers. Tribune reaches over three million readers via a dozen newspapers. McClatchy reaches more than 3.3 million readers at in 29 U.S. markets.

It’s interesting that New York-based Crispy Gamer is able to cut deals like this, since it has taken an approach of being an independent destination for gamers. That starts with a controversial position of refusing to take advertisements from video game companies, to allay concerns about conflict of interest for its content. That kind of policy meets with the ethical standards of established media, and so it’s no surprise that the syndication partners trust Crispy Gamer enough to run its content.

However, everyone knows that newspapers are having a tough time hanging on to readers. Attempts like this to cater to younger demographics are noble, but they haven’t helped forestall the decline of newspaper readership. I would hazard that the GamerDNA deal, which is squarely in Crispy Gamer’s demographic, would generate the most interest and readers.

John Keefer, editor in chief of Crispy Gamer, will moderate a panel at GamesBeat 09 on the future of games. Crispy Gamer raised $8.25 million in funding in October from J.P. Morgan’s Constellation Ventures.

Facebook introduced a new terms of service agreement earlier this month for its 175 million users. But the changes went mostly unnoticed until the Consumerist blog published an article on Sunday sayng the new terms allow the social network to “do anything we want with your content, forever.” As is usually the case with such sensational headlines, the reality of the situation is far more complex. So here’s a quick look at what the issues were, and whether or not you should be concerned.

For starters, Facebook’s terms of service is relatively similar to Google’s — and many other web services — as an actual lawyer (not just an armchair blogger) pointed out yesterday. But the revised terms do go a bit further than those offered by some other major web properties, in that they seemingly give Facebook rights to data you upload from other sites (like your photos, including from other photo sites like Flickr?) as well as rights to data contained on sites that let you share information back to Facebook.

What can Facebook retain? This part was added to the revised version, suggesting you actually are giving Facebook rights to a wide range of your content.

You are solely responsible for the User Content that you Post on or through the Facebook Service. You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof. You represent and warrant that you have all rights and permissions to grant the foregoing licenses.

A Facebook spokesperson has responded to the charges by saying that everything you share is subject to the privacy settings that you manually set within the site (as the clause above seems to indicate). Facebook automatically comes with settings where only people in your “network” (your college, your workplace, your geographic area) and your friends can see your full profile. People who find your profile through search results or through friends-of-friends will see a limited version. You can change this so that only your friends can see your full profile, for example. So that apparently precludes Facebook from using data you upload in a way that you don’t specify in your settings (it wouldn’t be able to use your private photo album of your party for advertisements promoting itself, for example). But it does allow the company to retain information like posts you make on your friends’ walls. Here’s more, per a statement issued by the company:

[I]f you send a message to another user (or post to their wall, etc…), that content might not be removed by Facebook if you delete your account (but can be deleted by your friend). Furthermore, it is important to note that this license is made subject to the user’s privacy settings. So any limitations that a user puts on display of the relevant content (e.g. To specific friends) are respected by Facebook. Also, the license only allows us to use the info “in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.” Users generally expect and understand this behavior as it has been a common practice for web services since the advent of webmail. For example, if you send a message to a friend on a webmail service, that service will not delete that message from your friend’s inbox if you delete your account.

Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg also offered the following clarification in a post yesterday afternoon. “A lot of the language in our terms is overly formal and protective of the rights we need to provide this service to you,” he said. What the terms are really trying to address is the challenge of both maintaining user privacy and allowing third party applications as well as other web sites to access user data, through Facebook’s developer tools. From his post:

People want full ownership and control of their information so they can turn off access to it at any time. At the same time, people also want to be able to bring the information others have shared with them—like email addresses, phone numbers, photos and so on—to other services and grant those services access to those people’s information. These two positions are at odds with each other. There is no system today that enables me to share my email address with you and then simultaneously lets me control who you share it with and also lets you control what services you share it with.

Perhaps there are lines in the new terms that lawyers can somehow take issue with, and possibly take Facebook to court for? For the time being, though, this appears to be an issue that’s been blown out of proportion. If you use Facebook, just make sure you have your own privacy settings set how you want them — as the term “privacy settings” implies.

Given the increasing propensity of the average person to share private, highly personal information on semi-public sites like Facebook, this is a ripe area for more sensational headlines to be written (as was demonstrated by many a shrill post this weekend). The next time Facebook makes significant revisions to its terms, hopefully the company will explain the specifics in plain English — and make clear why bloggers shouldn’t write traffic-grabbing posts at its expense.

[Disclosure: Get Satisfaction was founded by Thor Muller, who is an advisor to VentureBeat.]

Get Satisfaction, a company that aims to improve online customer service by letting the customers take over much of the process, has raised an additional $1.25 million in funding.

The company has also appointed a new chief executive, Wendy Lea, who previously was a senior vice president for Siebel, to help the company market its products to bigger companies. 

The company has seen strong growth in recent months (see Compete chart below). It says more than 12,000 companies have adopted it, including companies like shoe retailer Zappos and telecom company BT. Here’s how it works: If a company, say Comcast, isn’t reacting quickly enough to customer complaints on its own support page or forums, an irate customer can create a page at Get Satisfaction to complain. The page becomes Get Satisfaction’s customer care site for Comcast. Get Satisfaction, in turn, lets Comcast’s officials respond to it, if they want, and it gives their responses high visibility. But it also lets other users answer questions too — in effect, letting customers go around a company that is slow to respond or is otherwise using stalling tactics. In once case, a man was so rotund that every time he got in his Chrysler car, his behind would trigger an electric window roller, and the windows would go down. He used Get Satisfaction to complain about the problem, and Chrysler responded. In another case, Get Satisfaction helped users figure out why Facebook was disabling some user accounts. Get Satisfaction stores the questions and answers in a database so that it knows whether a question or answer has been given before, thus creating more efficiency — compared to standard forums where Q&A threads seem to go on and on. Some companies find Get Satisfaction useful enough so that they adopt it for their main customer service page. 

CEO Lea, who has experience in sales and marketing, takes over from co-founder and CEO Thor Muller, who now becomes chief technology officer. Lea previously also co-founded The Sales Consultancy, which advised large companies on marketing, and was VP of marketing for OnTarget. 

Get Satisfaction, which launched almost two years ago, has been experimenting with other social media techniques to promote its customer service tool. Last year, Get Satisfaction teamed up with Summize, a Twitter message search technology, to launch an “Overheard” feature, letting customers track conversations their service real time, including customers complaints. 

The company says its service is used by 1.5 million consumers a month. I asked Muller about how the company plans to make money. He said part of the reason for hiring Lea is her experience in marketing, and that the company will be selling premium services to enterprise customers. He said the plan is to be profitable this year. He said Get Satisfaction is a service that will appeal to companies in a sluggish economy, because it offers a low-cost way to offer customer care.

The extra funding brings the company’s total backing to $2.5 million. The funding comes from First Round Capital, O’Reilly Alphatech Ventures, Softtech VC and angel investors including Josh Felser and Dave Samuel, founders of Spinner and Grouper; Narendra Rocherolle and Julie Davidson, founders of Webshots and 30 Boxes; and Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus.

The company’s competitors include RightNow, a public company founded more than a decade ago, boasting 1,900 customers, and offering a more traditional Web knowledge base and customer tools build around that base; and Lithium, an Emeryville, Calif., another company that has offered more traditional services, such as online forums. Another player is Jive, which offers enterprise collaboration, but which is less focused on customer collaboration.

Exalt Communications, a company that transmits wireless data through microwave radio systems to relieve congestion on regular networks, announced today that it brought in $15 million in third-round funding to expand its “backhauling” systems globally. The Campbell, Calif. company claims that demand for its products is on the rise as mobile users increasingly swap high-bandwidth data, including text messages, photos and video.

Its licensed and license-exempt microwave radios cover from 2 to 40 GHz, allowing for scalability, low latency and native Ethernet support, Exalt says. And because they carry data directly between mobile base stations and end users, they can circumvent the regular networks — keeping their traffic at a reasonable, well-working level. Exalt’s customer base of 500 includes major carriers, mobile operators and even government agencies.

Exalt has competition in Telecom Transport Management, E-Band Communications, mesh-wireless company Strix Systems, Radwin and Siklu, all of which have their own unique backhaul offerings. Right now, there appears to be enough demand to go around, which could continue for a while if the space doesn’t become more crowded.

The recent investment round was provided by existing backer InterWest Partners, as well as Velocity Interactive Group and Trinity Ventures. In mid-January, Exalt was one of five companies that split a $21 million investment from Interwest.

Sega hasn’t had the easiest time lately. Its parent company, Sega Sammy Holdings, is laying off 560 people — 18 percent of its work force — and is closing 110 arcades in Japan. But the company says it has a strategy to distinguish itself as a smaller publisher among the industry’s giants.

One of the main pillars of this plan is Mad World, a comic-style black-and-white game with lots of red blood. Rated M for mature (17 and up), the title is slated to debut for the Nintendo Wii next month. And it certainly has a unique look and feel. The only time you see color during game play is when you’re cutting a bad guy in half with a chainsaw or crushing someone under an iron plate. This seems like an odd mismatch for the child-oriented Wii and already has some anti-violence groups upset.

But Simon Jeffery, president of Sega of America, says that’s a misreading of the market. The Wii has become so popular that all age groups have embraced it — and those adults who own the Wii are craving something meaty to play after the kids have gone to bed. To ban mature games from the Wii is akin to banning violent TV shows because kids may have access to them. At least that’s Jeffery’s argument.

“The Wii has become this generation’s version of the PlayStation 2, reaching all parts of the market and selling tens of millions of units,” he says.

The over-the-top humor in the game lands it in the “mature light” category, rather than “mature dark,” he explains. This reminds me of the line Electronic Arts used to draw between the games it would produce and those it wouldn’t. (The company has historically refrained from making games like Grand Theft Auto, where cop-killing is an integral part of the storyline.) But Jeffery compares the bloody Mad World to Monty Python and the Holy Grain when it comes to tone.

Still, I doubt parents will laugh it off when a character shouts “F@*$ing-A” during a successful beheading. This is a game where you can rack up “style points” for finishing off your enemies as brutally as possible, or choose to play against your friends in a “blood bath” match.

But Sega is on a roll with the blood and guts. Just last week, it published mature-rated zombie title House of the Dead: Overkill for the Wii. The game takes advantage of the Wii’s controller to keep players on the edge of their seats swatting and shooting zombies. Another Sega mature game coming to the Wii is The Conduit. This is all part of the broader strategy to create adult games tailored specifically to the Wii platform.

With these titles, and the upcoming Mario and Sonic at the Winter Olympic Games, Sega hopes to have a good year and break away from the middle-tier publishers. The previous Olympic game sold more than 10 million copies last year, thanks to the tie-up between Sega’s lead mascot character and Nintendo’s. The joint venture continues this year, with Sega developing the game and Nintendo’s top game designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, overseeing it.

Sega is investing a lot of time and energy in this new Olympic package, which will offer events that could be full games in their own right, like skiing and speed skating. The goal is to create a deeper experience that appeals to hardcore gamers, hopefully earning it and Sega better reviews that the first version.

The plan to focus on these Wii-centric gamesis expected to bolster Sega’s unique content (read: Sonic), and earn it traction in the underserved mature Wii marketplace. The company is approaching 2009 very seriously — and cautiously due to the tough economy. It reportedly just killed a game dubbed Aliens.

While Jeffery declined to comment fully on the situation, he said that Sega has had a tough time competing in the first-person shooter market for the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360, where there are strong independent developers (Epic, id Software, etc.) and established brand names that are hard to beat.

After four to five years of experimentation, Sega is committed to exploring its new genre. Rather than trying a wide variety of titles, it will only pursue what works, Jeffery says. At the moment, there are no plans to make Mad World available on other consoles. So, the Wii it is.

If you’re interested in games, check out our GamesBeat 09 conference coming March 24.