Research in Motion is planning to show off its own rival to the Apple App Store today at the CTIA trade show in Las Vegas today.

The new BlackBerry App World, which has been touted for some time, is one of many copycats that hope to steal Apple’s sizzle. Co-chief executive Mike Lazaridis will unveil the store at his keynote speech. Other rivals unveiling stores soon: Nokia, Google, Microsoft and Palm.

You need to have a PayPal account, a trackball, the 4.2 version of the operating system or higher, or SurePress touch screen (available on models such as the BlackBerry Storm). To get to the store, you need to download the storefront to your phone.

The store’s home page has featured items which you can navigate by scrolling sideways. You can click on tabs that allow you to search by types of apps such as games, music, video, and health. You can also download apps based on their popularity rankings. When you buy something, you activate the PayPal payment system to close the purchase.

Featured apps include Yahoo Messenger, Bloomberg, Facebook, MySpace, AOL Instant Messenger, and Google Talk. All of those apps are free. Scores of apps are already available. CrunchGear has a full list.

InXpo hopes to draw big brands to its virtual trade shows by hooking up with a well-known experience-marketing firm, George P. Johnson. Experience marketing involves staging live events for clients who want to make a big impression.

The alliance could lead to more virtual trade-show events, since GPJ works with a number of global brands. Under the deal, GPJ will use InXpo as the preferred provider of virtual trade shows for GPJ’s clients.

Chris Meyer, senior vice president of client services and general manager of GPJ, said that virtual events are an extension of the company’s overall events strategy. The goal is to cost-effectively blend physical and virtual brand experiences for customers. We wrote about how Sony Electronics used InXpo to stage a virtual event to sell its broadcast equipment in lieu of traveling around the country.

Chicago-based InXpo doesn’t disclose how many employees it has, but it plans to double the number this year. It is privately funded and was founded in 2005. GPJ’s clients include a number of Fortune 1000 companies.

Rivals include Forterra Systems, Unisfair, On24, and even virtual world Second Life. The latter is favored by IBM and involves attendees creating their own avatars. With InXpo, attendees simply upload their photos and do not create avatars.

Bebo caught in Irish conflict — The video sharing site has become an unexpected platform for both Irish Catholics and Protestants to hurl insults and violent threats at each other. The BBC has the story.

Downturn puts drag on angels — The Center for Venture Research reports that angel investors put less money into each of their startups in 2008 than in years previous, noting a drop of 26 percent from 2007.

Encarta buckles under Wikipedia’s weight — Microsoft will pull its Encarta encyclopedia software from store shelves in June after it failed to compete with its more pliable rival.

Cloud computing coalition discloses members – Those that signed the so-called “cloud manifesto” supporting cloud computing principles, have officially been identified. This group includes Cisco Systems, IBM and Sun Microsystems, but lacks some bigger predicted names, reports the Wall Street Journal.

Entellium execs put behind bars — The two former top executives from customer relations software maker Entellium have been sentenced to three years in prison and heavy fines for fraudulently inflating revenue reports by more than 400 percent.

YouTube, the newest Mouseketeer – The web’s most popular video site has struck a content distribution deal with Walt Disney’s television branch. The New York Times has the details.

Patent auction gets classy — The RPX Corporation, a company devoted solely to buying and aggregating as any pantents as possible, cleaned up at last week’s patent auction hosted at the Ritz Carlton hotel in San Francisco.

Asian virtual goods companies score big — Three Japanese and Korean-made virtual worlds brought in $510 million in 2008 alone. Virtual Goods News has more.

Spam rebounds from cutbacks — Despite multiple efforts to curtail the amount of junk mail finding its way into people’s inboxes, spam still accounts for 94 percent of all email received.

China sets up Nasdaq copycat — China released a set of rules governing initial public offering procedures for its new stock market modeled after the American Nasdaq.

Intel teams with GroovyChannel to build multi-core databases — Fox Business has more.

One of the best things about the iPhone 3.0 software is it will finally make instant messaging viable on the platform. That’s because with Push Notifications finally working, you no longer will have to have an instant messaging app open all the time to receive messages from it.

Of the instant messaging platforms, Yahoo Messenger is one of the largest, with millions of users. So far, it hasn’t been represented at all on the iPhone, while rivals like AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) have. But tonight the company announced an iPhone app at the CTIA Wireless conference in Las Vegas. It has also posted a demonstration video on its blog, which I have embedded below.

It looks pretty slick, but I have to wonder if users won’t opt for one of the IM apps that supports connecting to all of the various IM networks, like Meebo’s app will. Yahoo smartly touts its app’s ability to bypass the ridiculously priced text messages on the device, something which all of these IM services with Push Notification enabled could help change.

For now, it looks like the app will work even without Push Notification, by keeping you signed in to the network even when you exit the app. Then when you come back, you can see your messages. This is similar to what AIM and other apps of this nature do, but Push Notification will be much more powerful.

Yahoo didn’t give a date for when the app would launch, but the iPhone 3.0 software will be available this summer.

Yahoo! Messenger for the iPhone demo video from Yahoo! Messenger on Vimeo.

Concord-based software maker SpaceClaim Corp. has pulled in $7 million in financing to apply to the company's research and development, sales and marketing, engineering analysis and simulated design.

Facebook sacked its chief financial officer today, as the company stares down rumors about difficulties getting financing and high growth-driven costs — now it is defending itself to the press by saying it is on track to beat revenue projections and make 70 percent more than in 2008. Facebook brought in revenues of nearly $300 million in 2008, I’ve previously confirmed, so could that mean around $500 million in 2009? This number is substantially higher than what we’ve heard its internal revenue projections to be (between somewhere under $400 million to possibly as high as $430 million). So what’s going on?

The company has been running banner ads through a deal with Microsoft for years, but a source close to the company says that its revenues have become “less and less dependent” on them as a way of making money. Instead, Facebook seems to be making more money on anything from its own banner ad sales to its experimental advertising efforts. The latter includes include ways for advertisers to pay for Facebook features like a company’s public page to show up within the site’s homepage “highlights” section. It also offers a range of self-serve advertising on other parts of the site, including ways to target ads to particular demographic groups on the site — these ads have been  been a big contributor to revenue, TechCrunch recently heard.

Facebook has doubled in size to 200 million users since last August alone. Advertisers want to understand how to reach its users (at least users who advertisers deem able to buy their products, namely those in wealthier countries, more on that in a moment). Maybe advertisers are putting more money into Facebook versus other web ads to see if or how they might work better. Facebook is constantly tuning where its ads appear, along with the rest of its redesigns, so creatively advertising to its users is an at least — how does one say — evolving process. Or, maybe those experimental ads are actually working and that’s why advertisers are apparently spending more on it.

Wait. Ad revenue is growing for a social network?

If advertising is where Facebook is making its money, it’s going against the other main trend in trying to monetize social networks. Tencent, a Chinese web portal, IM client, social network and more, made over a billion in revenue last year — mostly from virtual goods. Other social networks are headed in that direction. Most prominently, hi5 — a social network with 62 million monthly active users around the world, but not so much in advertising-rich countries — cut half its staff today because it couldn’t raise funding. It is apparently refocusing its resources on virtual currency, doing things like selling virtual goods within games.

Facebook doesn’t know how long its growth trajectory might hold up, and maybe it will begin to look closer into virtual currency. The company says it’s still thinking about some sort of universal payment service for third party developers and their games, but so far we haven’t seen more than its own years-old virtual gifts feature.

So far, MySpace is the other U.S.-origin social network that is making serious ad money — that I know of. It has more users in the U.S. than Facebook, and may have made up to $800 million last year off a range of ad products, including lots of banner ads as well as self-serve and demographic-targeted ads. Third party estimates suggest that MySpace made less than it thought it was going to.

What we still don’t know is if Facebook has figured out a way to get long-term growth — especially beyond banner ads — or if the new money is of a more fleeting kind. At least the company appears to be able to pay for its growth, as I wrote yesterday. Today, it says it expects to be cash-flow positive by 2010.

Debates about how to make money and cover costs appear to have led to Facebook CFO Gideon Yu’s departure today. Note: He’s already been replaced by an interim chief financial officer, Silicon Valley veteran Peter Currie. Yu left because of conflict with company founder Mark Zuckerberg, according to AllThingsD, over issues ranging from “increasing advertising revenue to fund-raising discussions with investors.”

Flypaper Studio, which offers an easy-to-use editor to create presentations in the Flash format, is adding to its options for salespeople with the release of a simple web editor.

At first, I thought this would be an online equivalent of Flypaper’s desktop application, but it turns out the web editor is much more limited, because it was built for a very specific purpose. Customers of the Phoenix, Ariz. startup will still use the standard Flypaper editor to create presentations, but when those presentations get sent along for a big sales team to use, those salespeople can then customize the presentation for their needs using the web editor — for example, swapping out some image or text, or changing some of the numbers in a presentation at a customer’s request. The initial presentation creator can decide what parts can be altered in the web editor, and which parts are locked down.

This makes a Flypaper presentation a much more customizable document, rather than something static that one person creates and everyone else consumes or shares. Since the web editor costs extra, it’s also another way for Flypaper to make money. Lastly, the web editor is another step in the company’s efforts to hone its focus on sales and marketing teams. Since launching as a general purpose Flash editor at the DEMO conference last year, Flypaper has moved away from consumers and towards making presentations for a professional audience. (Competitors include Sprout, which focuses on marketing widgets.)

It also recently released version 2.0 of its desktop editor, adding a collaboration feature, an online repository for projects and media, and a software development kit that allows developers to create and convert Flash files into the Flypaper format.

Flypaper has raised a total of $6.5 million in venture backing. And here’s a demonstration showing how to create presentations in Flypaper — it is, naturally, a Flypaper presentation itself.

Twitter became famous by posing the question, “What are you doing?” Gawkk, a short-form video sharing site, mimics that meme with a similar query: “What are you watching?”

Although the New York-based site gave the world a peek back in December, the company has announced a site revamp and relaunch as part of this week’s Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.

Since Gawkk is a video sharing site (and not a hosting hub like YouTube), it automatically scours thousands of outlets across the web for embeddable video. Gawkk then separates this content into a number of categories and individual channels using basic themes like business, commercials, and music. Users are free to subscribe to these channels, or use Gawkk’s basic search tools to look for additional video content.

Along with Gawkk’s video search functions comes a slew of social features. If a video catches a user’s eye then they can post it to their activity stream and then attach comments. Once a user has either posted or commented on a video, they can invite friends to join in the conversation on Gawkk, or cross-post their activity to Twitter.

And, much like the microblogging site it admires, Gawkk lets users follow one another so that they can track each others’ updates in a centralized feed. In short, the ultimate goal remains the same — the more users promote utility by discovering and discussing interesting content, the more likely they are to build a following and have the favor returned.

Still, it seems unlikely that Gawkk will steal a lot of Twitter’s thunder.  As it stands, Twitter users are already comfortable linking to and discussing their favorite videos. Also, since a lot of Gawkk’s individual elements can be found elsewhere (YouTube comments, Facebook news feed, etc.), the site will really have to leverage the strength of its users’ conversations to stand out.

Sites like YouTube and Digg have done well by relying on the activity of their users, but time has shown that that’s not always the safest bet.

When work began today, social network hi5 had over 100 employees. Right now, that’s closer to 50, a source tells me, confirming TechCrunch’s earlier story. But why did a site with 62 million unique monthly visitors have to lay off 50 percent of its employees today? Because a round of funding it was seeking recently collapsed, I’m told.

The blow is especially painful because the funding was nearing completion, with the investors doing due diligence, says my source. And it would have been a large round, something in the neighborhood of $30 million, which would have nearly doubled its previously raised $35 million in funds.

In October of last year, hi5 laid off approximately 10 to 15 percent of its staff. But whereas that was more of a “trimming the fat” move, today was something of an entirely different variety. Hi5, as we know it, “kind of died” today, is how my source put it. They went on to note that basically only one group is left intact, which is working on some of the entertainment, gaming and micropayment elements of the company that still can probably be monetized. To that point, hi5 told Forbes earlier this month that it hopes to make up to $25 million this coming year, split evenly between advertising and virtual goods — a shift from “90 percent” advertising last year.

I’m told that five weeks ago, the company had a meeting to announce it was closing in on the new round of funding. The next meeting would have presumably announced the success of the funding, but that kept getting postponed. Until eventually, it was postponed indefinitely, leading up to today’s meeting of a much different nature.

We’ve checked in with the company for comment but haven’t heard back.

Update: A second source confirms that hi5 had been raising money, and that there was a term sheet. First, the company had went to late stage PE firms, but that didn’t work out, so it then went to VCs knowing that any funding would be a down round, says the source.

The company is now re-pivoting to make itself games-focused, the source also confirms, rather than trying to be a traditional social network (it has been the one of the largest in terms of worldwide audience, behind only Facebook and MySpace — and a Chinese social network or two).

IBM is making a big move into the online collaboration market with a new product called LotusLive Engage, which it will be demonstrating tomorrow at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.

Engage appears to be the most comprehensive service yet offered under IBM’s LotusLive umbrella of web-based businesses services. The heart of the product appears to be a web meeting service, but just as Cisco says it wants to build a collaboration suite around its WebEx meeting service, IBM says Engage is “not a new meeting service, just a smarter one,” and that it “extends your online meeting experience by bringing together the essential collaboration tools you need before, during and after your meeting” — basically, it adds things like business social networking and project management on top of the meeting service.

You can read more details at the Engage site, but here’s a quick breakdown of features:

• A standard web meeting service, complete with desktop sharing, recording, and security
• A professional network of contacts with whom you can collaborate using the other Engage features
• Online file storage and sharing
• Project tracking, to-do lists, and brainstorming
• Form and chart creation tools
• Instant messaging, including photo- and file-sharing

None of this sounds particularly groundbreaking, but putting all of these features together in one place could be pretty compelling. Oh, and there are already 30,000 users in Engage’s beta testing program. The product will be available for everyone on April 7, with pricing from $10 to $45 per user per month.