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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Moments ago on its earnings call, Google took an opportunity to talk about the success of its latest products. The first in line: Google Instant, the totally revamped search interface that Google launched last month, which displays search results as soon as you begin typing (rather than requiring the user to hit ‘enter’ or click the search button).

At the time of the launch, there was much speculation on what impact Instant would have on Google’s bottom line — was it designed to boost the number of ads displayed? Well, now we have an answer: Jonathan Rosenberg , SVP Product Management at Google, said on the call that “from a revenue standpoint impact [of Google Instant] has been minimal.” He added that it’s also expensive from a resource standpoint. They launched it, he says, “because it’s so much better”. As evidence of this, Rosenberg said that according to Google’s data, the more people use Google Instant, the more they like it.

Rosenberg then launched into some stats around AdWords to prove that Google does in fact care about money. But, for now at least, Google says Instant is all about the user experience, and not the bottom line.

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Finding parking in near concerts or sports events can be an incredibly frustrating task. Because of the event, the cost to park in lots near the stadium or venue can be exorbitant. Plus, lots can fill up fast. Enter ParkWhiz, a Chicago-based startup that allows customers to reserve parking on the fly.

Via a web app and a newly launched mobile HTML5 website, ParkWhiz allows you to reserve parking near concert and event venues in the U.S. ParkWhiz partners with parking lot owners, which range from people who own a single space to large parking management companies, across the country to list their inventory on ParkWhiz.

So far, ParkWhiz has partnered with 300 participating parking locations in over 25 cities in the U.S. Currently, ParkWhiz currently offers parking reservations near Fenway Park, Wrigley Field, AT&T Park, Cowboys Stadium, Madison Square Garden, Busch Stadium, US Cellular Field, Orpheum Theatre, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Beacon Theater, plus 17 airports around the country.

For example, ParkWhiz just helped park over 400 cars (who paid on average of $40 per parking spot) for the Paul McCartney concert at AT&T Park last week in San Francisco. ParkWhiz’s CEO and co-founder Aashish Dalal says the startup has also started to serve coupons for restaurants and bars (in neighborhoods nearby the event space) with parking reservations.

In terms of pricing, there is no fee to list a parking space on the site; ParkWhiz collects a fee only if a reservation is made and handles payment processing for the parking vendors. Generally, the user has to pay 10 percent customer convenience fee to ParkWhiz in addition to parking price, and ParkWhiz will also take a 15 percent cut from the base rate from the parking vendors. In a year, the site has already taken 50,000 reservations, with the goal of hittig 100,000 resetvations by the end of the year.

Of course, ParkWhiz isn’t the first company to use technology to try to solve the problem of finding parking. Car Harbor allows you to rent your parking space, and there are a number of iPhone apps to aim to solve the same problem including Spotswitch and Primospot. Even Google is getting into the parking game, recently launching Open Spot, an Android app that shows you a map with nearby open parking spots marked with colored dots.

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OExchange, a simple specification for URL-based content sharing on the Web, was introduced today by a number of online service providers and social networks. The open link-sharing protocol has gained support from Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Digg, Instapaper, StumbleUpon, Clearspring Technologies and a handful more.

So what’s it all about?

OExchange essentially establishes a common way for services like Posterous and Google Buzz to receive content. The protocol defines how third-party tools, e.g. Clearspring’s bookmarking and sharing service AddThis, can dynamically discover and share content to these services, as well as how sharing tools can read and set a user’s sharing preferences.

A number of these services, like Google Buzz and Instapaper, have already implemented the protocol, which together with others such as OpenID and OAuth intends to making sharing content on the Web completely open. OExchange is licensed under the Open Web Foundation Agreement – you can get the specs here.

Chris Messina, Open Web Advocate at Google, has this to say about the new protocol:

“The key to increasing the amount and quality of sharing online is smoothing out the user interaction. By simplifying the underlying mechanism for cross-site sharing with OExchange, people can focus on what they’re sharing, rather than how.”

Do you agree that there’s a need for an open URL sharing protocol (which companies like Twitter and Facebook seem to doubt, since they’re not supporting it)?

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