First shoes, now diapers. Amazon is reportedly about to announce on Monday the acquisition of Quidsi, the New Jersey-based ecommerce company behind Diapers.com, Soap.com, and, most recently, BeautyBar.com. Fortune’s Dan Primack, who broke the story from a maternity ward in Boston where his daughter was just born (no joke), puts the price of the all-cash deal at $540 million. A year ago, Amazon bought online shoe retailer Zappos for $1.2 billion.

Founded by Vinit Bharara and Marc Lore, Quidsi has raised a total of $78.5 million. Its most recent funding was a $20 million debt round last April from investors including Accel, Besssemer, MentorTech, and New Enterprise Associates.

Diapers.com is the company’s flagship brand, with an estimated $300-million revenue run rate this year. Soap.com just launched in June, and BeautyBar.com launched last week. So the vast majority of revenues is still coming from Diapers.com, which would value the deal at less than 2X revenues. Feeling threatened, Amazon recently started undercutting Diapers.com on price, a strategy which may have helped convince them to sell.

If the deal goes through, it would just go to show that you can still build an ecommerce startup if you go after the right niche. But it would also prove that if you get big enough, Amazon will notice and either buy you or try to squash you.

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Editor’s note: Guest author Jon Evans is a novelist, journalist, and software engineer.

Oh, Research In Motion. You never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

RIM was born in my home town, at my alma mater, so it’s depressing watching their empire rot and crumble before the Android / iPhone onslaught. I had high hopes for their new tablet, a potential game-changer—but alas, they’ve hamstrung it before it’s even been released. Here’s what they should have done with it:

1) Embrace Android (phones)

RIM proudly announced that while their PlayBook can’t connect to cell networks, it can tether to a compatible BlackBerry via Bluetooth. They might as well have installed a ”For BlackBerry Owners Only” startup screen. Way to pre-alienate most of the market, guys.

Instead they should have stressed that they can also connect via Wi-Fi to Android 2.2 phones, and announced an Android app that syncs data between Androids and PlayBooks. They can’t support the iPhone, Apple would never allow it, but Android’s wide open.

“But Android is the competition!” No, Android tablets are. Tablets and phones are entirely different entities. RIM’s tech people understand that: it’s why the PlayBook runs a brand-new OS built by QNX, a company they bought earlier this year, rather than a new iteration of the archaic BlackBerry OS. Which is no bad thing—QNX is well-regarded, and time-tested. (I fondly remember being reprimanded for hacking into my high school’s QNX system many years ago.)

Until RIM drops that millstone called the BlackBerry OS, or replaces it with a QNX-based version, Android and Apple will eat their phones for lunch. Meanwhile, they need to accept that the PlayBook should complement rather than compete with Android phones.

2) WebWorks or AIR: Pick One.

I’m an app developer. Pity me. I have to know Java, Eclipse, Objective-C, XCode, and both the Android and iOS SDKs.  I could use a cross-compiler like PhoneGap, but they’re clunky and slow to implement new features. If Windows Phone 7 takes off, I need to master another language, environment, and platform—and while BlackBerry apps are written in Java, it’s an older version than Android’s, and the SDK is completely different.

I liked Palm, but I was delighted to see it die, and Nokia’s decay into irrelevance is a relief. Nothing against them; I just don’t want the hassle. App developers don’t want choice, we want consistency.

So what does RIM give us? Choice. First they offer free PlayBooks to developers who build PlayBook apps with Adobe’s AIR. Then they say you can build both PlayBook and BlackBerry 6 apps with BlackBerry WebWorks. Rather than split their development and support resources between two different platforms, they should have chosen one and ran with it. These “choices” will only confuse and irritate the app makers who will determine their fate.

3) Change the name. And the target market.

PlayBook? Really? You’re Research In Motion. You’re business, baby. Your tech level may be a little antiquated, but you’re secure, you get stuff done, and the new tablet brings you back up to speed. You should be targeting corporate videoconferencing and hospital patient data and business travelers. That’s why you’ve got BlackBerry tethering, right?

Instead you called it the PlayBook and can’t stop talking about how it runs Flash, both of which will make CIOs everywhere raise skeptical eyebrows. You’re trying to be all things to all users, including consumers—but Android tablets run Flash too, and they’ll be available for Christmas; the iPad boasts a bigger screen, superior apps, and the Apple halo; and worst of all, the PlayBook will probably launch right in the teeth of the iPad 2 hype machine. RIM should conquer the business-tablet space first. Instead, they already look like also-rans before they even have their running shoes on.

It’s a shame. I wish RIM well, and their new tablet looks like a potentially superb device. But they’re squandering that potential before it even has a chance to succeed.

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About one month into his role as RecycleBank’s new CEO, Jonathan Hsu is rattling off some ambitious numbers: An IPO by 2013, plans to grow his staff from 150 to over a thousand by 2012, and to reach nine-figures in annual revenues in that same year. That’s a herculean task for any company but especially one that plays in the labor and capital intensive world of recycling.

And yet, sitting in his new office in New York’s West Village, Hsu seems utterly confident, framing each prediction with a when-not-if mentality.

The well-funded RecycleBank— which has raised more than $70 million from VC firms like Kleiner Perkins, RRE Ventures and Sigma Partners— is a recycling rewards program that works with municipalities and large corporate sponsors, like P&G and Kashi, to install local programs in US and UK cities.

Under RecycleBank’s program, a household signs up for an account online and receives a special bin or “smart cart” for their recyclable waste that is equipped with a unique RFID-tag. When the hauler arrives to remove the waste, the cart is weighed and the household’s account is credited with points based on that weight. Those points can be redeemed online for rewards or savings with more than 1,000 local and national businesses.

Since its inception in 2005, RecycleBank has installed itself in more than 300 cities in the US and UK, with 3 million-plus households under contract. According to Hsu, revenues have been tripling every year, for the last two years, and the company is very close to profitability.

Hsu, who was formerly the CEO of 24/7 Real Media (an online marketing firm firm acquired by WPP for $649 million in 2007), was brought on to get the firm solidly in the black and to use his marketing background to help the company achieve tremendous— some might say unrealistic— growth offline and online.

“One of the things I will bring to bear in this company is the ability to grow to a mass market scale so that RecycleBank can be the first green mass market brand,” Hsu says. “This company will IPO in the next several years.”

So what is Hsu’s battle plan to get RecycleBank ready for a 2013 IPO— an IPO that he says will value the company in the multi-billion dollar range?

Hsu has three priorities: a new revamped online portal that leverages social tools, increased corporate sponsorships and a major push to get RecycleBank in new cities.

According to the CEO, he wants to work with municipalities to create hundreds of hyperlocal online destinations, to connect the users within RecycleBank communities. These new sites will feature social chat, gaming, a bulletin board for neighborhood announcements and a schedule of local activities. Calling it “Facebook with a purpose,” he says he doesn’t “want to reinvent the wheel of how people communicate but we want to leverage those tools successfully.”

Currently, RecycleBank makes the bulk of its revenues from its deals with municipalities— local governments pay the company a fee for diverting waste from landfills. The company also gets money through corporate sponsorships, but it only has a few dozen of these partnerships today. Over the next few years, RecycleBank plans to dramatically expand its portfolio of lucrative sponsorships, and Hsu predicts, eventually the amount of dollars coming in via sponsorships will significantly outweigh the amount from municipalities.

However, if RecycleBank wants to become a truly, global green, mass market brand, it will need to find a way to crack the markets outside of the US and UK. For example, given China’s rapid urban development and 1.3 billion strong population, it is a rising power player that is creating significant economic growth— and by extension, mountains of waste. It may be relatively easy to deploy millions of “smart cans” to households in highly developed countries, but it will be interesting to see how the RecycleBank program fares in the world’s major developing regions.

Hsu says he wants to tackle the larger international picture but it will be a challenge to do it directly (at least in the near term), because of their ambitions at home and in the UK. At least for the next few years, he wants to stay focused on expansion in these markets, and perhaps, link up with international partners to address other regions. The arms-length approach will likely blunt RecycleBank’s effectiveness in new markets, but it’s a start.

Hsu has a long way to go before he proves himself to his staff and RecycleBank’s investors— and he’s giving himself a short runway to do so— but he says he’s happy to have at least impressed one very important critic: his three-year old daughter.

“I really cherished my time at 24/7 Media…but it was hard for me to describe to my daughters what exactly I did. So I would show them a website, like Weather.com and show them the banner ads that they see on the top and sides and say to them abstractly, “Daddy’s company helps show those ads.” And they would nod to me, and they loved me because they’re my daughters but at the end of the day they didn’t really understand. Today when I tell my daugther…I show her the recycling bin and the trashbag and she can see how my company can move from the waste bucket to the sustainability bucket, she understands. She understands that daddy helps put less garbage on the street.”

See our video with Hsu above.

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Our post earlier tonight about Google shutting down Facebook’s access to Gmail data exports makes me think two things. First, I’m not sure there’s much data that Facebook doesn’t already have with it’s 600 million users (although 1.3 billion people visit Google sites a week, so they’re not exactly slumming). And second, the data protectionist era has now begun in earnest.

Trade restrictions, tariffs, etc., called protectionism, is always a double edged sword. It has the short term benefit of helping domestic companies stay competitive and profitable, and that also protects jobs. On the downside the consumer is hit with higher prices on whatever industry is being protection. And protected industries tend to lag behind competitively, so when/if the restrictions are lifted they are in a very bad situation.

But here’s the very worst part of protectionism. If you start it, you can expect the other side to start it to. That’s when you get what’s called a trade war, and lots of potential economic gain evaporates.

I’m seeing all the signs of a “data war” beginning now. It’s not among nations, though. The players are the big Internet companies who have lots of user data today, and want more (all of it) tomorrow.

For a long while the webmail companies have generally been lenient about exporting user data via an API to other applications. It’s what the user wants, and most everyone is reciprocal. Or, they’re too small to matter yet. This is a “free data trade” type situation with the best economic consequences.

Well, everyone but Facebook. They’ve just pretty much refused to let users export social graph data, even though they import it like crazy from every source they can get their hands on.

This is a game theory situation. One party isn’t playing ball, but’s reaping the benefits of open data policies by all it’s big competitors. That forces competitors to protect their data as well (Google’s done it in a surgical way to avoid fallout with other non-Facebook companies). But once this ball starts rolling, and it has, it’s pretty hard to stop it.

Expect it to get worse from here.

Ultimately that’s very bad for the companies involved, but it’s also bad for consumers who now have fewer choices with what to do with their…err..Google’s data. In other words, we all lose.

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