I’m not sure any lasting change will come from our series of Scamville posts. For now the most egregious of the social gaming offers are gone, which is a good thing. But none of the big players seem to have felt much pain. And, importantly, Facebook’s rules still allow most of the really bad stuff (as long as users are being told in the fine print exactly how they’re being screwed). It’s only a matter of time before business as usual kicks in.

Four companies have felt the wrath of Facebook in the wake of Scamville: Tattoo, Gambit, Social Hour and Social Reach. Facebook doesn’t openly talk about the fact that these companies have been “banned,” but they’ve let the app developers know – work with these guys and there will be trouble.

Zynga also got a slap on the wrist with the suspension of Fishville for a few days, but their cash cows, like Farmville, were never touched. And that’s despite the fact that we showed clear violations of Facebook’s rules on Zynga games via DoubleDing, an offer provider that Zynga has some control over.

Ultimately only those four companies took a permanent hit. And we’re still scratching our heads over Gambit.

We all know the Mobile web is exploding in popularity. Opera Mini, Opera’s mobile browser, grew its monthly users by 11 percent to nearly 40 million users in October from 32 million users in August. In terms of page views, Opera Mini delivered 17.2 billion last month, a 238 percent annual increase, indicating that mobile web usage is growing fast. Since September’s report, page-views have gone up by nearly 15 percent.

Only a year ago, the conventional wisdom was that blogs were dead and microblogging would soon replace them. Twitter was supposed to kill blogs because it’s so much simpler to publish one sentence fragment at a time rather than whole thoughts bunched together into what is known in the trade as “paragraphs.”

Today, blogs are doing fine, while Twitter is struggling with flattening growth, at least to its Website Twitter.com (clients like Seesmic and TweetDeck have seen no slowdown). The weakness Twitter has been experiencing in the U.S.

Earlier today GigaOm reported that Dropbox raised a new $7.25 million funding round over the summer (a number they derived from a SEC filing but that CEO Drew Houston wouldn’t confirm). We just spoke to Houston, who says that figure is wrong, and it’s off by nearly a year: Dropbox did close a Series A funding round, but it was for $6 million, and it was back in October 2008. And it was led by Sequoia, not Accel (though Accel did participate in the round).

Previously, Dropbox raised a seed round from Sequoia that was $1.2 million in convertible debt (they also raised money through the Y Combinator program).

There’s a ton of buzz around location right now. Our discussion on it at the RealTime CrunchUp this past Friday easily could have gone on twice as long as it did. There are just so many interesting facets: Business models, privacy, real-life social implications, and so on. Not surprisingly, we’re seeing an explosion of services that are built around it. One such service was a TechCrunch50 demo pit company this year, OnTheRoad.

Started in 2004 in the Czech Republic to connect travelers, newer devices like smartphones with GPS are poised to take the service to the next level. While a lot of location services such Foursquare, Gowalla, and now Loopt are built around the idea of “checking-in” to venues, OnTheRoad takes a different approach. It’s more about creating a geotagged travel diary when you specifically go on a trip somewhere.

Google’s acquisition of display advertising startup Teracent yesterday had significant meaning for rival Tumri; the San Mateo-based advertising platform now counts tech giant Google as a competitor. Tumri, which launched in 2004, provides a similar advertising technology to Teracent. The startup’s product, the AdPod, creates display ads that are customized in realtime to the specific consumer and site.

Tumri’s dynamic ad platform is optimized at the creative level to enable advertisers to change the animation, background template, featured product, headline, image, and more dynamically based on who is viewing the ad and where the individual is viewing the ad from geographically.

This morning we broke the news that Canopy Financial, no. 12 on this year’s Inc. 500 list of fastest growing companies, is a complete sham.

And it’s no surprise that today, everyone is trying to point the finger at everyone else.

The company’s investment bank, Financial Technology Partners, which has represented Canopy Financial through at least two separate rounds of fraudulent fundraising, emailed to say:

The site will feature daily editorial picks on clothing, accessories, and beauty products. Users can then click to purchase the picks on various retail sites. You can filter results by category, designer, price range and store. Users can share products to Facebook, Twitter and save any items to an Amazon Wish List. The site also serves as a comparison shopping site between merchants, and features nearly 100,000 various fashion items from more than 450 brands.

Ah, the curse of the groggy morning. You may have followed all the rules: no caffeine before bed, an early bedtime, and all the rest. But your best efforts are oftentimes for naught, foiled by the mysterious ways of sleep cycles. There may be an answer: WakeMate, a Y Combinator-funded startup that’s launching today, is looking to help you catch that ever-elusive good night’s sleep (and maybe even the perfect nap, too).

WakeMate is one of the few startups we’ve see that actually involves its own physical product (another that comes to mind is FitBit). To use the service, you first order the WakeMate wristband from the website, which costs $50. Then, you download an application for your Bluetooth-enabled smartphone (WakeMate is launching with support for iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Windows Mobile, and a standard Java app for non-smart phones; support for Palm’s WebOS is on the way).

Mike Clark and Geoffrey Arone are preparing to roll out a new startup – SafetyWeb – we’ve confirmed. The company has raised a small angel round from Battery Ventures.

Clarke was an early executive and SVP of Engineering at Photobucket and was there from the start and for two years following the $300 million acquisition from FIM/MySpace. Arone, a cofounder of Flock, recently sold his startup DanceJam to SportsNet. Both are now full time on SafetyWeb.

For now the two aren’t saying much about the product. Except for this: SafetyWeb will target parents who want to know what their kids are up to online. This isn’t about filtering and key logging the home computers, but rather a service that will monitor publicly available information on the Internet and report back to parents. The key goals are to understand how to interpret real v. perceived threats to children/teens, and also report back any anomalies that the parents should be aware of. For example, if they friend someone who is a known sex offender, etc.

Microsoft is losing its chief financial officer, Chris Liddell (pictured left), who will be departing the company at the end of the year. Liddell will be replaced by Peter Klein (below), the current CFO of Microsoft’s Business Division.

Lidell joined in May, 2005 from International Paper. The stock is at about the same place as when he joined. Liddell has overseen a period of cost-cutting and stock buybacks at Microsoft.

Klein heads up finance for Microsoft’s largest division, which includes the Office business. Last quarter, the Business Division brought in $4.4 billion in revenues and $2.9 billion in operating income, which was nearly twice as much profits as Microsoft’s Windows business. Microsoft is handing over the corporate CFO spot to theman with the most individual financial responsibility in the company.

Yesterday, Facebook’s Dave Recordon commented that he just finished a marathon session of The West Wing, a great show about the inner-workings of a fictional White House that ended its run on NBC in 2006. I agreed with Recordon, it was a great show. You know who else agreed? Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

So why is this interesting? Well, the creator of The West Wing was Aaron Sorkin. He was also the executive producer and primary writer through the first four seasons. If you’ve heard Sorkin’s name in the tech sphere recently, it’s because he’s also the writer of the new Facebook movie, The Social Network, currently filming under the direction of David Fincher.

The holiday season is approaching fast, and that means one thing here at TechCrunch: more giveaways! Sure, we’ve given away Twitter gadgets and wireless music systems, but this is definitely the best giveaway yet by a mountain peak. In fact, the winner will be climbing a mountain in Peru to the fabled Inca city of Machu Picchu. Well, you and a guest will actually be on horseback most of the way, and staying in WiFi-equipped luxury eco-lodges. But you can walk part of the way just to say you hiked the Inca trail.

This 7-day adventure for two, which is worth about $7,000, is being donated by the tour operator Mountain Lodges of Peru in conjunction with ekoVenture, a marketplace for “experience travel” (read our recent post on them). You can enter the contest here to win the trip by using the secret code “ilovetc” (and if you want to retweet this contest or share it on Facebook use the buttons above). Airfare is not included, but everything else is. Mountain Lodges of Peru is a past recipient of National Geographic’s “50 Tours of a Lifetime” award so you’ll be in good hands.

Amazon announced some major changes to their Kindle e-book reader today. Specifically, it stated that they’ve worked out a way to increase battery life by 85%. That means that the new firmware update will allow you to leave your Kindle on (with the wifi active) for about 7 days before you need to recharge. Additionally, the Kindle will now support Adobe’s PDF format natively. Previously, you had to convert PDFs in order to view them on the Kindle.

Businesses using Twitter; there’s something to this idea. Even Twitter itself realizes it, as it’s expected to be a part of its own business model launching soon. In the meantime, other companies continue to jump into the ring. The lastest is American Express, which today unveiled Pulse, a Twitter stream focused on small businesses.

Pulse, which is a part of American Express’ Open Forum site, uses Twitter’s API to display the public tweets from small business owners. This stream can also be broken up into different small business industries, such as auto dealers, cleaning services, restaurants, and many others.

Gmail is furthering its offline strategy today with the announcement of the ability to include attachments in composed emails when offline. Google says this was one of the most requested features for Offline Gmail and starting today, you be able to attach files in offline mode the way you would in online Gmail.

You’ll be able to attach all types of files except inline images, which are images in the body of the email. When you have Offline Gmail enabled, Google says that mail now goes through the outbox when you’re online or offline, allowing Gmail to capture all attachments regardless of internet connections.

While they’ve been selectively displaying them for a little while now, Google today took the time to talk about and show off its new search ads. The general gist? Bigger, bigger, click me, bigger. Or, in Google’s own words, “Text is often useful, but sometimes videos and pictures are a more effective way to receive information.”

That can be true, I suppose, but each of these additions also make the ads units significantly bigger, and as such, much more in-your-face. More often than not, that doesn’t equal a better experience for the user. Of course, Google’s unstated hope is that you’ll be more likely to click on these bigger ads, especially now that many contain visuals.

Distinguishing feeds on Google Reader can be a little hard. Since every feed has the same default blue RSS icon, it requires reading on your part to tell them apart. Reading is hard. Pictures are easier. Today, Google Reader takes a step in that direction by finally adding favicon support to feeds.

The new feature certainly livens up Google Reader quite a bit. The only problem now is that you have a lot of feeds, like I do, it’s not exactly easy on the eyes with zillions of colors bombarding your peripheral vision. But hey, no doubt some people will like this, and most importantly, it’s opt-in.

Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz is starting a new startup called Asana to solve enterprise collaboration, and he just closed a $9 million series A round from Benchmark Capital and Andreessen-Horowitz. this follows $1.2 million angel round last spring from investors including Ron Conway, Peter Thiel, Mitch Kapor, MySpace CEO Owen van Natta, Sean Parker, and former Facebook Director of Mobile Jed Stremel.

Moskovitz, who was Facebook’s first CTO, founded Asana with another former Facebook (and before that, Google) engineer, Justin Rosenstein. Matt Cohler, also a former Facebook executive who is now a partner at Benchmark, will be taking a seat on Asana’s board. And two of its investors, Marc Andreesen and Peter Thiel, currently sit on Facebook’s board.

AOL may be brushing up its brand image in preparation for its spin-off IPO in December, but brushing up its underlying business will take a little longer. Barclays analyst Douglas Anmuth released a report on AOL today complete with an earnings and revenue model going out to 2014 (see below). He projects absolutely no growth in revenues over the next five years, and only a one-time bump in profits in 2011, due to cutting one third of its current labor costs, before declines set in again.

In other words, investors who buy AOL stock will do so because it is a cost-cutting and turnaround story not a growth story, and that will determine what kinds of investors will buy the stock. Anmuth outlines some of the key factors which investors should be paying attention to.