Foursquare is expanding its relationship with American Express to provide local deals to people who sync their cards to their Foursquare accounts. AmEx did a trial at SXSW, and that went well enough that it is rolling out the deals more broadly.

The discounts, such as $20 off a $50 purchase at Sports Authority, are automatically applied to your AmEx account when you check in via Foursquare to a participating merchant before a purchase. Everyone in local commerce is trying to figure out how to close the loop between deals and payments. Once companies can tie mobile ads or deals to payments, they will be able to measure directly the sales generated by these mobile promotions. And one day that could potentially be a huge new business. But for now, it’s making absolutely zilch for Foursquare, which remains a revenue-free zone.

Pulse is not just for news feeds and Facebook links. Now you can also get nearby daily deals. With the latest update to both the iPhone and Android apps, when you enable location sharing, Pulse will pull nearby Groupon deals.

Pulse lets you subscribe to different deals by city. You can see them as a stream in your Pulse reader, along with deals from nearby cities. If you click through to purchase one, Pulse will get an affiliate fee. It’s certainly a better way to peruse the deals than the daily email. You can also save a deal for later purchase.

For all the talk of cord-cutting, the cable/satellite/fiber optic TV companies are not going anywhere anytime soon. I put Verizon FIOS in that camp. With 3.7 million subscribers, it is already one of the largest video service providers in the country. But it is pushing hard to get on all screens and keep Netflix, Hulu, and Apple TV at bay.

Or is it? Verizon FIOS also provides broadband Internet and home phone services. (I am a Verizon FIOS subscriber myself and get all three—Internet, TV, and phone). Last time I checked, Netflix streams over the Internet. I recently got a chance to ask Eric Bruno, the senior VP in charge of Verizon FIOS, about its relationship with the Internet video alternatives, his mobile product plans, and Verizon’s new home automation product in these two video segments.

Daily deals are growing like crazy, and it’s not just Groupon and LivingSocial. Daily deal aggregator Yipit just raised $6 million in a series B led by Highland Capital Partners. Existing investors RRE, DFJ Gotham and IA Ventures also participated.

I caught up with co-founders Vin Vacanti and Jim Moran (pictured) today in New York City. Saved from Wall Street jobs a few years ago, they now work out of General Assembly with 7 people total, but are looking to ramp up to 30 (mostly engineers, Web designers, product managers, and mobile developers). They’ll have to move out of General Assembly and are already looking for their own space.

Seesmic might have the sweetest Twitter app for Blackberry, but the Blackberry’s appeal isn’t sweet enough. Seesmic is discontinuing support for its Blackberry app on June 30.

Research in Motion, the company that makes the Blackberry, is going through a rough spot right now. But things must be pretty bad if Seesmic bailing. This is Seesmic, folks! They’ll build an app for any platform, even Windows Phone 7.

We’ve been hearing a lot lately about consumer cloud services. There’s Apple’s recently-announced iCloud, Amazon’s Cloud Drive, Google’s Music Beta (which is your music in the cloud) and, of course, Microsoft’s SkyDrive. All of these to one extent or another are moving away from simple online lockers, and we see that today with the release of the latest update to SkyDrive.

The navigation is less clunky. Groups are now built in. Docs open up in online versions of Word or Excel, and can also be opened in the traditional desktop Office apps with edits syncing back and forth. But the biggest change is SkyDrive’s transition away from Microsoft Silverlight to HTML5 for all but a few remaining features. Photos and videos are all viewed with HTML5, which brings infinite scrolling of thumbnails and a new slide viewer. Videos now use the H.264 format and the video player is HTML5 instead of Silverlight.

The Internet carries nearly 160 times more traffic than voice networks in North America, yet many of the regulations and inter-carrier traffic fees are based on the quickly receding era when voice networks ruled. Google calls this the “Tail Wagging The Dog” in a letter to the FCC (embedded below) urging them not to impose antiquated per-minute voice traffic fees on IP networks. This is becoming an issue as IP voice traffic approaches that of traditional circuit-switched voice traffic.

Google illustrates the changing nature of the network in a series of dramatic slides.

New York City-based dining deals site VillageVines is now Savored. In addition to the name change, it launched a redesigned site, is doubling its cities to ten, and added Buddy Media CEO Michael Lazerow as an investor and board member. The company raised $3 million last January.

Savored focuses on high-end dining discounts at top-rated Zagat restaurants. But the model is slightly different than your run-of-the-mill daily deals site.

Movie trailers are among the most popular videos on YouTube. A typical movie trailer gets millions of views, but how many of those views are natural and who many are pushed as paid-for ads? Yes, movie trailers are all ads in a sense. But people seek them out just like any other 2-minute video. That is not what I am talking about.

The same movie trailers are also promoted through various means and shown as prerolls before other videos or via paid links and those views can also count towards the total. For instance, this trailer for the new Conan The Barbarian movie has been watched nearly 5.5 million times. If you click on the statistics right next to that number, you will see that 4.98 million of those views come from ads (see also below).

Editor’s note: Aaron Crayford is the CEO of Mighty whose main product is a smart real-time communication framework. While in high school was prosecuted by the US government for what the DoD called “The most organized systematic attack the Pentagon has seen” and was banned from touching a computer or talking about the story for a decade. You can follow him @aaroncray.

It’s all over the news Lulzsec thumbs nose at CIA, Member of Anonymous captured in Spain.

Heroes, hackers or douchebags? I’ve seen many takes. Mine goes something like:

FBI agent: “Tell us how you got into the satellite control systems at Lawrence Livermore.”