On the heels of announcing a payments partnership with Facebook, PlaySpan is making another announcement regarding the startup’s UltimatePay payments product. PlaySpan is launching UltimatePay Mobile, a virtual currency and micropayments monetization widget for smartphone platforms. The initial private beta launch will support Android phones and Nokia phones with WebRuntime installed.

UltimatePay is a ‘Monetization as a Service’ platform for apps, games, videos and digital goods. Based on the user’s location, the payments platform draws from over 85 different payment options. Because of its vast variety of payment options (which include PayPal, pre-paid cards, and a number of credit cards), UltimatePay is designed for a global audience.

UltimatePay Mobile gives smartphone developers a way to deliver a one-click payment experience to mobile gamers, and provide a comprehensive payments offering. The platform allows players to view their balance and transaction history, while allowing them to purchase items in-app without ever having to leave the game.

Of course, PlaySpan isn’t the first startup or company to bring in-app payments to Android phones; PayPal, Boku and Zong all offer in-app payments libraries to developers.

PlaySpan, which recently raised $18 million in new funding, already has a number of partnerships with a number of gaming and media companies, including Ubisoft, Sanrio and others. Perhaps the company can leverage some of these relationships to offer UltimatePay in publisher’s mobile games.

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After a Summer spent in “Lockdown”, Facebook apparently got quite a bit of work done. They’ve already had a number of events just in the past few weeks. And now they’re having another one.

We’ve just been alerted about an invite-only press event taking place next Monday, November 15 at 9:30 AM in San Francisco. At the bottom of the invite, it notes that “This special event is in advance of Mark Zuckerberg’s conversation on 11/16 at Web 2.0 Summit.”

So what will Facebook be talking about? Who knows. The invite has chat bubbles on it, but as we’ve learned in the past, these often have nothing to do with the event.

After Facebook’s last event, in which they unveiled some big updates to their Places product including Deals, we asked Zuckerberg if the company had any other big things to launch this year. He indicated that more was on the way, but at least one more big thing was coming soon.

Is this the big thing or a smaller thing? Tune in Monday to find out.

Update: Actually, looking at their icon again, you’ll notice it is their Inbox icon (at least on the iPhone) and not their chat icon. Could this be the unveiling of the new Facebook mail product — Project Titan? Let the speculation begin!

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Yesterday Facebook released a clever way to continue to download Google user data, despite Google banning Facebook from using their APIs. It looks to me like they aren’t going to try to stop Facebook from using this more manual approach. Instead, for now, it’s being escalated only via words:

We’re disappointed that Facebook didn’t invest their time in making it possible for their users to get their contacts out of Facebook. As passionate believers that people should be able to control the data they create, we will continue to allow our users to export their Google contacts.

That’s a nice swipe there in the beginning, about how they wish Facebook had spent time giving people a way to liberate their own Facebook data rather than building tools to end run around Google. That last bit though, about “people should be able to control the data they create” doesn’t quite hit the mark though in my opinion.

We’re talking about your Facebook friends list and their email addresses. You create your list of friends, of course, but you generally aren’t uploading email addresses to Facebook, your friends do. Still, I think there are excellent logic arguments for allowing users to download friends’ email addresses, too. More on that later.

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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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