Bank holding company MB Financial Inc. declared a dividend of a penny per share late Friday, unchanged from the quarter before.

Should VCs and angels get a small business bailout too? As Obama moves into the small business phase of the stimulus plan, there's been more talk about financial support for early stage venture capitalists and angels.

Last weekend I wrote about how the big social gaming companies are making hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue on Facebook and MySpace through games like Farmville and Mobsters. Major media can’t stop applauding the companies long enough to understand what’s really going on with these games. The real story isn’t the business success of these startups. It’s the completely unethical way that they are going about achieving that success.

In short, these games try to get people to pay cash for in game currency so they can level up faster and have a better overall experience. Which is fine. But for users who won’t pay cash, a wide variety of “offers” are available where they can get in-game currency in exchange for lead gen-type offers. Most of these offers are bad for consumers because it confusingly gets them to pay far more for in-game currency than if they just paid cash (there are notable exceptions, but the scammy stuff tends to crowd out the legitimate offers). And it’s also bad for legitimate advertisers.

The reason why I call this an ecosystem is that it’s a self-reinforcing downward cycle. Users are tricked into these lead gen scams. The games get paid, and they plow that money back into Facebook and MySpace in advertising, getting more users. Who are then monetized via lead gen scams. That money is then plowed back into Facebook and MySpace in advertising to get more users…

Here’s the really insidious part: game developers who monetize the best (and that’s Zynga) make the most money and can spend the most on advertising. Those that won’t touch this stuff (Slide and others) fall further and further behind. Other game developers have to either get in on the monetization or fall behind as well. Companies like Playdom and Playfish seem to be struggling with their conscience and are constantly shifting their policies on lead gen.

The games that scam the most, win.

And some users aren’t dumb, either. For every user who gets tricked into some fake mobile subscription, there’s another who can beat the system. That’s where the legitimate advertisers, like Netflix and Blockbuster, get hit. Users sign up for a free trial with a credit card, get their game currency, then cancel the membership and start over. Netflix has a policy of only paying for a user once. But game developers use a complex set of partner chains to launder these leads and try to get them through for payment. Netflix sees an overall lowering of quality and pays less for leads. Game developers, desperate to monetize, then search for ever more questionable offers to make up the difference. In the end, the decent advertisers are out, and only the worst of the worst remain.

Left alone, the system really will slide into a full blown disaster. The platforms (Facebook and MySpace) are in a position to regulate this, and even have rules prohibiting some scams. But those rules are routinely ignored by developers, and are rarely enforced by Facebook and MySpace.

There can be only one reason Facebook and MySpace turn a blind eye to user protection – they’re getting such a huge cut of revenue back from these developers in advertising. If they turn off the spigot, they hurt themselves.

Zynga may be spending $50 million a year on Facebook advertising alone, fueled partially by lead gen scams. Wonder how Facebook got to profitability way ahead of schedule? It was a surge in this kind of advertising. The money looks clean – it’s from Zynga, Playfish, Playdom and others. But a large portion of it is coming from users who’ve been tricked into one scam or another.

And recent moves by Facebook to shut down application spam only make the problem worse in some way – game developers have to spend more money on advertisers to get users now that the viral channels are shut down. That means the games have to monetize even better. Which means more scams.

It’s time for this to stop. Facebook and MySpace need to create and enforce rules against it so that game developers aren’t tempted to get a competitive edge by scamming users. And if Facebook/MySpace won’t protect users, then the government will have to step in.

There’s an easy way to determine if something is a scam or not. For any particular offer, ask yourself if anyone would buy the product or service if the terms were clearly spelled out for them, and they weren’t being bribed with in-game currency. The answer for many of these is a resounding “no.” A few examples are below.

Examples Of Scams:

A typical scam: users are offered in game currency in exchange for filling out an IQ survey. Four simple questions are asked. The answers are irrelevant. When the user gets to the last question they are told their results will be text messaged to them. They are asked to enter in their mobile phone number, and are texted a pin code to enter on the quiz. Once they’ve done that, they’ve just subscribed to a $9.99/month subscription. Tatto Media is the company at the very end of the line on most mobile scams, and they flow it up through Offerpal, SuperRewards and others to the game developers.

As you can see in the image below, nothing in the offer says that the user will be billed $10/month forever for a useless service.

Another scam: Video Professor. Users are offered in game currency if they sign up to receive a free learning CD from Video Professor. The user is told they pay nothing except a $10 shipping charge. But the fine print, on a different page from checkout, tells them they are really getting a whole set of CDs and will be billed $189.95 unless they return them. Most users never return them because they don’t know about the extra charge. Woot. Again, sites like Offerpal and SuperRewards flow these offers through to game developers. See here for more on the Video Professor scam.

Of course, there’s no mention of any of these payments in the offer itself:

An Industry In Denial

Yesterday I attended the Virtual Goods Summit in San Francisco. In the Q&A session of one panel I asked Offerpal CEO Anu Shukla to explain the ethics of her business, and outlined my ecosystem of hell argument above. Shukla went on a tirade, calling my points “shit, doubleshit, and bullshit” (yes, really), but never really addressed the points. A video of the exchange is below.

Offerpal now has a blog post up on the exchange, but they still don’t address the issues. They offer misdirection, denials and a shield of rules that are never actually enforced.

Sadly, most of the audience of game developers was on Offerpal’s side. Many of these developers see quick dollars with lead gen scams and they don’t really care about how users are affected.

In one session earlier in the day, IGG Cofounder Kevin Xu recommended that game developers “get users in the door to play free, then monetize the hell out of them once they’re hooked.” Sadly, it’s simply human nature to push the rules until they break. It’s time for Facebook and MySpace to protect their users from this stuff and make sure it stops.

p.s. – An interesting development. Offerpal defended their mobile survey scams on stage and in the blog post referenced above, saying there was no scam involved. But today those offers have quietly been pulled down from all the games I’ve checked. If there’s no scam, why remove them? At least some good is coming from my ongoing rants.

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TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington and Offerpal Media chief executive Anu Shukla got into a brouhaha over special offers, which are used to monetize social apps on social networks, at the close of the Virtual Goods Summit on Friday.

At the close of a panel where Shukla spoke, Arrington asked how Shukla could defend her business of making offers that were leading the social game industry “into hell.” Shukla responded with a long answer about why Arrington’s commentary was “shit, double shit and bullshit.” You can see Alexa Lee’s video on the whole 10-minute exchange below. I also interviewed Shukla about the issue before the panel.

The debate revolves around whether specials offers are unethical and a bad experience for both users and advertisers. Shukla defended the practice of monetizing games and other social apps through offers, which let users pay with their time, participation and attention, rather than actual money.

Users can play games from the likes of Zynga and Playdom for free. But when they want to buy something in the games, such as a better plow to farm the land in Zynga’s FarmVille game, they have to pay. As an alternative to shelling out cash, they can accept an offer from Offerpal, which gets the user to do something like fill out a survey or subscribe to Netflix.

Arrington alleged these offers are so much trash. The offers are “slimy” and users scam the advertisers by making up answers in surveys or signing up for services they plan to cancel. Arrington said that this means that advertisers like Netflix aren’t getting their money’s worth from the ads, but Facebook and others involved aren’t putting a stop to the practice because they all make money from it.

Shukla contended that those objections are “shit” because most of the offers are high-quality and are filtered. She said, as we wrote earlier, that more than 160 million consumers have participated in Offerpal’s offers over the past two years. The total reach of the whole offer industry is still small, with only 5 percent to 30 percent of all gamers participating in offers.

The vast majority of offers are working out well, because the advertisers keep coming back. Most of the business is on Facebook, though it moved to Open Social-based networks for a time and has now returned to Facebook, thanks to that network’s rapid growth to more than 300 million users.

“We see more users turning to offers as a way to pay,” Shukla said in our interview.

Shukla acknowledged there were some offers in the general industry that were “spoiling the experience.” That’s why Facebook issued new policies in July that put restrictions on the offer business, particularly on offers that had to do with the mobile phone business. Shukla said Offerpal spent a lot of time cleaning out marginal offers and had to take a revenue hit as well. All of the social app companies are taking a hit as a result. Shukla said that was good for the industry, since some offer companies were letting bad offers creep in to gain market share.

“Unfortunately, some of the offers that were considered poor quality actually perform well,” she said. “If we took them out, and our competitors didn’t, they would perform better than us. So I love the fact that Facebook forced everyone to take them out.”

Even so, Shukla struck back hard at Arrington, who promised to expose bad practices. Video and pictures by Alexa Lee.

It’s Halloween,  and nowhere more obviously so than in San Francisco.

This is my first 31st October as a resident of the United States and I have to say, the effort you yanks go to in celebrating the ancient Celts’ holy evening is truly astounding. Every corner store, diner, dry cleaners, police station, library and undertakers has embraced the – uh – spirit, adorning their windows with spray-on cobwebs and pumpkins and sparkly witches hats and coffins. (Although, to be fair to the undertakers, the coffins are sort of a year-round thing.)

We celebrate All Hallows’ Eve in the UK too of course, and like most things on our side of the Atlantic it’s just as commercial, albeit with more irony and a better accent. But the real difference back home is that Halloween is an evening – just one evening, not a whole fucking month – aimed squarely at  kids. Here, by contrast, it seems to be something far more grown-up. Something far more – well – creepy.

For the past two nights, the streets around my hotel have been swarming with drunken adults dressed as hookers. Witchy hookers, ghosty hookers, piratey hookers (Captain Hookers?) and even – I’m pretty sure – hookery hookers. And that’s just the men. My hotel is just a rock’s throw from the Tenderloin and for once it’s the actual working girls who are tutting with disapproval wondering what has happened to the neighbourhood. (I can just imagine the adult revellers leaving home and being given a stern lecture from their kids, reminding mom and dad not to take candy from anyone dressed as a slutty Care Bear, lest they wake up the next morning, hungover and bleeding in the back of a van decorated to look like the Mystery Machine.)

But – hell – when in the bacchanalia, right? For the past couple of weeks my Facebook inbox has been filling up with invitations to some of the four billion Halloween parties taking place in the Bay Area tonight, and it would be churlish of me to boycott them just because they’ll be full of beautiful American women dressed – literally and figuratively – to kill. Like most sensible people, though, I’ve waited until the last minute before deciding which to attend. Really, thanks to tools like Foursquare, Twitter and Facebook, there’s no need to plan ahead at all – I can just wait to see where the heat is, and head there.

Indeed, the party scene in San Francisco, probably more so than in any city on earth – except maybe Tokyo and Circuit City – runs on technology. For people like me who love everything about social media, this is definitely a good thing. But it’s also the reason why I’m genuinely worried that when the dark side of our blithe attitude towards sharing physical location finally reveals itself, it will probably happen here.

And what better night for dark things to reveal themselves, than Halloween?

Social media parties turning bad are old news. Every few months the media gleefully reports on parents who leave their children home alone for the weekend, only to return to a major crime scene when their off-spring’s unsanctioned house-party ends up going viral on Facebook and being crashed by thousands. There are even organised groups – with bizarre names like the ‘Facebook Republican Party‘ – who scour scocial networks for party information in the hope of showing up and causing merry hell.

But when something like that happens, the cause is usually the same – the idiot teenagers who organised the party didn’t think twice before posting their address online; much like they don’t think of the consequences when they create a Facebook group to share their new cellphone number. It’s just a question of educating these ‘digital natives’ on what’s appropriate to share, and what isn’t – as previous generations had to be warned about creepy old men bearing puppies. The innocence and idiocy of youth isn’t what worries me – they’ll grow out of it soon enough.

What worries me is the growing idiocy of otherwise mature adults, particularly when it comes to location.

In the past month or so, I’ve had conversations with two friends who have organised private parties at their homes for small groups of friends. In both cases the hosts created online invitations but sensibly ensured that any date and location information was only visible to invited guests. Yet within minutes of the first guests arriving, they were alarmed to discover that all of their privacy efforts were for nought. Their guests – their friends – had used Foursquare to check in at the party, thus instantly adding their address to the service’s growing database of highly specific locations.

From that point on, a simple search on the Foursquare site for the hosts’ name provides their full home address, along with a handy map for anyone who feels like breaking in and murdering them in their sleep. To make matters even worse, as more partygoesrs checked in – all caught up in the game element of this thing, and hoping to become mayor of someone else’s living room – the information was repeatedly pushed out via Twitter. If Foursquare had a ‘Breathtakingly Irresponsible’ badge, there would have been a whole lot of recipients at those parties.

And if there’s one night when you don’t want your address pushed out to the world, it’s Halloween. I remember one year – when I was maybe fourteen – a rumour went around my school that someone had found our much-hated maths teacher’s address in the local phone book. A plan was hatched to show up there on the pretense of trick or treating, but really just to throw eggs at their house, car and – hopefully – head. Of course the plan came to nothing; teachers are rightfully careful about putting their address in the phonebook. Tonight, if I were a teacher who has ever invited a tech-savvy friend to my home, I’d be shitting myself. They might have taken every logical step to stay safe but – like the rest of us – they’re still at the mercy of the most idiotic common denominator amongst their friends.

Over the next few hours, particularly in San Francisco, thousands of people will be checking in at hundreds of house parties. It’s not a huge leap to assume that  a decent number of hosts are going to wake up in the morning to discover that their their home addresses have been gleefully, and probably innocently, shared online by their friends.

So what can be done? Obviously a constitutional right to privacy – and statutory equivalent in other countries – would be nice, but it might be a struggle to get the necessary votes before midnight. Also, good luck in enforcing it in any meaningful way when most of the people sharing the information do so innocently, and the damage can be done so quickly.

A more practical solution would be for all sites and services that accept location-based data to copy Facebook’s lead by toughening up privacy options. Location-based sites owe a particular duty of care to their users – and yet currently the only option available to those who find their home address on Foursquare is to flag the venue as ‘closed’ – which deletes it from search results, but keeps it in the database, still visible to users who know where to look.

It would be almost zero work for the company to add a second flag – perhaps titled “this is my freaking HOUSE”  – which immediately deletes an address and prevents it from being re-added without proper verification. Also, given that the problem is usually one of carelessness rather than malice, it wouldn’t hurt to display a warning to those logging in at new venues, reminding them not to list private homes. The fact that Foursquare hasn’t already implemented these basic measures is irresponsible, bordering on shameful.

Really, though, the real answer to retaking control of our own privacy won’t be found in statutory law or in terms of service. In fact, it already exists – tucked away in the small print of the social contract.

Just because you’re addicted to Foursquare, or Twitter, or any other location-driven service, doesn’t mean you have the right to impose your addiction on others. If the party is in a bar, check in to your hearts content – hell, win yourself a badge – but if it’s in someone’s home, put your fucking phone away. You just look like a dork anyway.  If we all started thinking a bit more like friends, and a bit less like attention whores, the privacy problem would be solved at a stroke.

Judging by the gang of Harry Potter-themed hookers who just walked past my window, my attempts to convince America that Halloween is a night for children is too little, too late. But let’s at least leave the boneheaded location oversharing to those who aren’t old enough to know better.

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In case you didn’t yet realize it, tonight is Halloween. And if you didn’t yet realize it, maybe you don’t have plans yet. If not, as usual, the Internet comes to your rescue. If you’re stuck at home tonight for whatever reason, you’ll be able to load up Facebook and watch Heidi Klum’s Halloween party, streaming live.

Sure, it’s not as good as being there, but it beats doing nothing. And it’s being done with the help of Modelinia, a site devoted to capturing the lives of super models. Enticed yet?

You can find the live stream on Modelinia’s Facebook page starting at 9 PM PT tonight. The streaming itself is being handled by Livestream, who will run it through 11:30 PM, we’re told. Klum’s Facebook fan page along with Modelinia’s page have nearly 700,000 fans, so if you do watch this, you definitely won’t be alone. And there’s a chat widget running next to the stream to talk with others watching it.

Modelinia’s goal with this wasn’t solely to stream beautiful people at parties, they also ran a costume contest with Klum to allow the best costume designers to win tickets to the actual event. Modelinia’s founder and CEO is Desiree Gruber, a producer to the Emmy-winning show Project Runway.

I’ll go ahead and embed the live stream of Klum’s party here as well. Don’t say we never give you anything.

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Impax Laboratories Inc. confirmed Friday it is challenging the patents on Abbott Laboratories' cholesterol drug TriCor, and that Abbott is suing Impax for patent infringement.

Our favorite jingle guy is at it again. Jonathan Mann, who TechCrunch readers will best know as the guy behind the awful Bing jingle, has released another new video (as he does every day), this time to serenade the children of Keith Valley Middle School who recently performed his Bing jingle. “It’s kind of creepy,” Mann admitted at the time, but he was happy to see his work live on, so he came up with this gem.

But this latest video almost had a very different tone. “I thought about writing them an anti-corporate anthem, something they could raise their tiny, furious fists to, but ultimately decided on this,” Mann tells us. Too bad, because that would be been awesome. It could have been “Another Brick In The Wall [Part 2]” for the 21st Century.

Representatives for Bing also wrote us after our “torture” post to point out the backstory about the students singing the Bing jingle. Apparently, they decided to do it on their own — or rather, their teachers decided to make them do it. Still, it’s very creepy. And as a number of readers pointed out, a little bit too much like Jesus Camp (trailer below Mann’s new video and the students singing his song).

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OK, who dressed as Mark Zuckerberg for Halloween? Click it for full size. That’s the real Zuckerberg at left in this photo being sent around the Internets, taking an important meeting at Facebook with an employee whose passion for Linux led him to dress as Tux the penguin on the day before Halloween.

But no worries about the costume. It’s 100% certain that our lonely, lonely all-male readership will take one look at this photo and see only: Girls!

Sony posted its fourth consecutive loss, but consumer electronics in general is turning around – Sony lost $289 million last quarter, compared to almost the same amount in profits last year. The company has already eliminated 16,000 jobs and closed eight factories, but the deep cuts weren’t enough. It reminded me ironically of the company’s 2005 “Welcome Change” campaign, pictured here. To welcome change, you need to get in there and love those layoffs.

Yet investors feel the sector’s results are overall good. Samsung tripled its profits to a record $3.14 billion, while much smaller Panasonic reported $67 million in net profit. The New York Times says Samsung utilized new display panel technologies and better marketing to grab market share away from Sony.

Google introduces AdWords Comparison Ads – It looks like Google is trying to steal Reply.com’s business by letting users of its search engine qualify themselves to realtors and car sellers right in the middle of an ad. Google is currently testing Comparison Advertising in a few U.S. states with a limited set of mortgage and refinancing advertisers.

Reply says these sort of self-qualifying ads can fetch one, three, even five dollars apiece, as opposed to the pennies that most AdSense text  banners sell for. Inserting yourself between advertisers and Google is a popular startup model, because there’s money to be wrung from qualified campaigns where potential buyers for homes, cars, insurance, etc gladly provide info about their location and budget to interactive ad banners.

Google also spotted removing buttons from homepage – They’re always testing stuff over there, which would explain the brief appearance today of a Google page with no “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. Valleywag editor Ryan Tate was offended by the “Press enter to search” text that appeared in place of the buttons. He felt Google should know he knows that. But I’ll bet the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button confused users outside of goofy Silicon Valley. I’m also curious whether or not the Search button is considered expendable in VP of Actually Making Money Marissa Mayer’s ruthless regime of stripping down pages to load faster, which gives Google more traffic and bigger market share.

Kids forced to love Bing, sing about it — Microsoft took over a middle school in Pennsylvania and arranged to have the students sing Jonathan Mann’s “Bing goes the Internet” song in the video below, which mostly consists of the words “Bing goes the Internet.” The Internet does not actually go Bing, but they’ll figure that out.

California’s stem cell agency hands out $230M of its $3B fund in grants – Stanford scored big, landing $52 million in grants for research that might cure leukemia, stroke and deadly skin disease epidermolysis bullosa. The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine and its $3 billion warchest were created by California voters in 2004 via Prop 71, in response to the Bush administration’s ban on embryonic stem-cell research done on cells harvested from human fetuses.

Fun fact: Most of the research funded in this round doesn’t actually involve embryonic stem cells, because not much research in general involves embryonic stem cells. SFGate runs down the long, long list of recipients.

iPhone 3GS will be super-expensive for Chinese buyers – The average amount of a smartphone in China is $350. Apple’s 32 GB iPhone 3G S will go for more than three times that at $1,171. Moreover, the minimum two-year service subscription from China Unicom will cost Chinese buyers $3,120 over two years, more than the $2,600 American buyers pay for the same period.

Will it sell? The Wall Street Journal reports that China has an estimated 710 million mobile-phone subscribers, according to government figures. But the average customer pays less than $15 for monthly service and only 7.5% of the handsets sold in the country last year were smart phones like the iPhone. Analysts told the Journal that China Unicom, which will carry the iPhone exclusively at first, is a less savvy marketer than most wireless carriers.

David Pogue reviews three new smartphones at once — Motorola, BlackBerry and HTC. All three phones that Pogue runs through his non-engineeringly hands — he really is a sort of anti-Mossberg — are comeback attempts by makers whose previous top models didn’t soar. All have Bluetooth plus Wi-Fi, five or six hours of talk time, plus standardized headphone jacks so you have more choice in buying a custom headset for yourself.

Here’s the 100-word version of each review:

“Don’t rush a product to market just because it’s the holiday season. That’s what R.I.M. did last year, and the Storm was a mess. You’d tap one menu item, and a different one would highlight. The Storm 2 fixes all of that.”

“Motorola has built an ingenious, if initially overwhelming, archipelago of social-networking  widgets. the address book fills itself with information and headshots from those online worlds. When someone calls — your brother, say — you see not only his photo, but also his latest status broadcasts from Twitter and Facebook.”

“HTC must have gotten sick of hearing how homely and bulky its first Google Android phone was. The HTC Hero is thin, sleek and a pleasure to hold. Far narrower than the Storm 2 and far thinner than the Motorola Cliq.” (It conspicuously matches iPhone dimensions.)

[Illustration: Stuart Goldenberg/The New York  Times]

Personalized shopping shouldn’t get too person, says Zappos — The New York Times reports on Zappos’ hiring of ChoiceStream, a Cambridge, Massachusetts company that helps e-commerce sites set up customization. The results so far: A 3 percent increase in sales, and customers who are clearly more interactive in their visits, looking at an average 20 percent more pages in the store than before. Zappos’ director of user experience and Web strategy says the company has been careful about not rushing into sending customers lots of mail and giving them too much personal advice while they’re on the site. He wants to avoid “overmarketing” to them, a word that should be in more common use.

Kodak reports fourth straight quarterly loss on sales — The company is a lesson:  The once premier film brand has been left behind by Americans’ faster-than-expected switch to digital cameras and Internet content. “They don’t have a significant recurring revenue base,” one analyst said, “so they’re very transaction-oriented and transactions just aren’t happening as much right now.” Sales fell all around, to a net loss of $111 million compared to last year’s $96 million in profit. Kodak won’t give out the numbers for its new inkjet printer and ink business, but they claim sales more than doubled in the quarter.

Nokia used to be a manufacturer of auto tires and rubber boots. So there’s hope for Kodak yet.

Apple TV 3.0 is out. They fixed the menus — I’ve been surprised at the lack of buzz for Apple TV. Everyone seems to be watching either iTunes, Hulu or BitTorrent. But there’s a new rev of the gadget’s software out. Here’s your cocktail-party briefing: The upgrade is free. A new Apple TV is $229.

The big design change in Apple TV 3.0 software is a new main menu borne of customer feedback: “Recently rented or purchased movies, as well as other content including TV shows, music, podcasts, photos and YouTube, are accessible directly from the new main menu,” Apple wrote in a press release. I spend way too much time clicking through my iTunes library while trying to relax with some TV after work. So I grok how these changes will make watching Apple TV more of a joy and less of a brand loyalty test.