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Google Voice is great, especially if you’re on a mobile platform that offers a native Voice application (namely Android or BlackBerry). But if you’ve been using the service on a regular basis, you may have run into an odd issue: sometimes when you go to actually call someone there’s a lag, as if the phone isn’t altogether sure what it’s supposed to do when you tap on the ‘Call’ button next to a contact’s name. Today, Google is getting rid of that lag in its native applications.

As Google details in its blog post, that pause was due to Google Voice making a small data request to Google’s servers whenever you initiated a call, which would return the number the application was supposed to dial. That works well enough when you have a decent 3G or EDGE connection, but it can also lead to annoying timeouts and pauses when you don’t. The new version of the Voice applications fixes this by assigning a unique phone number to your contacts, bypassing the need to initiate a data connection. In other words, your outbound calls should be faster now.

Disclosure: The Google Voice team has ported my cell number over to the service, as they did with Michael’s number.

Perhaps you recall back in June when Apple CEO Steve Jobs laid the smack down on mobile analytics firm Flurry. He noted they were “pissing us off” because they were collecting device data about Apple’s products. Specifically, Jobs obviously cared because it uncovered some as-yet-unannounced Apple products. A change Apple made to their developer agreements then made this illegal. And that’s where MixPanel saw an opening.

MixPanel has been a popular analytics company for about a year now. In fact, they recently announced they were tracking a billion actions a month across a wide variety of applications on the web. But that was only web applications (including Facebook apps), now they’re going mobile.

The company is launching an iPhone SDK library. By inserting just a few lines of code into their apps, customers will be able to get MixPanel data in realtime. And realtime is the key, while other analytics services say they have realtime data, MixPanel claims their’s is the fastest. “We’ve built better plumbing,” Founder Suhail Doshi says.

They also believe it’s the most comprehensive. While they aren’t tracking device data per Apple’s rules, they are offering “hardcore type analytics” that services have grown accustomed to on platforms like Facebook. For example, in an iPhone game, you could track which users choose which weapon when they play the game on a certain level. Or in an app like Yelp, you could tell which types of pages men keep coming back to.

Doshi compared the current crop of analytics services on the iPhone to Google Analytics — that is, more topical. He says MixPanel offers more “sophisticated tracking.”

The team has already been talking to a number of top app developers about using their service, which launches today. One of those is fellow Y Combinator company Posterous.

MixPanel plans to charge app developers based on the amount of data they’re collecting. This means that more popular apps will be charged more, as it should be. They’ll also offer badges that developers can put on their site to be able to use a certain amount of data for free, if they’re a startup.

Find out more in the video below.

Qualcomm aren’t happy with their Mobile TV unit, FLO TV. The unit has cost them a whole heap of money to set up (in spectrum and hardware costs), and it’s proving difficult to build a brand and get the chipsets into devices. So, during their earnings call today, Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs said that they have begun discussions with other companies regarding “alternatives” for the business.

This likely means that they want to sell the unit off to a company that either a) thinks they can build the brand and get the service running on enough devices to turn a profit, or b) wants the spectrum that would come with the deal for other purposes.

If you have an iPhone 4, you’ve probably had this problem: you really want to use FaceTime, but there are simply not a lot of opportunities to use it. Sure, one problem is that both parties need an iPhone 4 currently. But perhaps even more annoying is that you have no way of knowing which of your friends with iPhone 4s are actually connected to WiFi so they can use FaceTime. That’s where a new app, FacePlant, comes in.

FacePlant is a third-party application that shows you which of your friends is available to have FaceTime calls with you. The app integrates with your contact list on your iPhone so you simply load it up and it will display which of your friends both have iPhone 4 and are connect to WiFi to make FaceTime calls. It’s an idea that’s so obvious that it’s hard to believe Apple didn’t think of this.

Obviously, there’s one big catch to this: both you and your friends have to have FacePlant installed and running. Luckily, FacePlant takes full advantage of iOS 4 to be able to run in the background. So you can open it and forget about it. If a friend wants to FaceTime with you, you’ll simply be pinged just as you normally would for a FaceTime call.

With the app you can also record and leave video messages for other FacePlant users (perfect if they’re not on WiFi, for example). Given that the team behind this app is also the team behind the short video messaging service, 12seconds, this functionality shouldn’t be too surprising.

And yes, there’s a privacy mode which you can enter if you don’t want to be bothered at certain times with FaceTime requests.

Again, this idea seems so obvious that it’s a little hard to fathom that Apple didn’t think of this. And I wouldn’t be surprised if they do eventually do some kind of status indicator along these lines. But for now, FacePlant is the way to go — assuming Apple approves it, of course.

Founder Sol Lipman says the app is currently in the review process, but doesn’t expect any issues to get in the way of its approval. If it does get approved, you can be sure Apple is going to want to promote this one to tout FaceTime even more than they already have.

The app will be a free download in the App Store. Lipman says the plan to make money will come farther down the road with some premium features that users will be able to purchase.

Below, watch a video I shot with Lipman talking about the app.

Earlier this month, investor Jeff Clavier told us on TechCrunch TV that he had just invested in a promising startup that was related to the geo-location space. Without giving us too many clues, he said it was not a primary check-in player like Foursquare, but a service that aggregates geo-location data from several sources and uses it for a very targeted, specific application. Well, we didn’t have to go very far to unveil the identity of Clavier’s mystery startup. Less than two weeks later, Geoff Lewis, the founder of Topguest knocked on our door.

New York based Topguest is a travel rewards service based on the geo-location game. The service helps you easily aggregate points for travel rewards programs, by synching up with many of the major check-in apps, including Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Google’s Latitude, Yelp and Twitter. Therefore, regardless of whether you check-in to a hotel partner on Gowalla or Foursquare for example, all the points are stored in one location.

The startup, which launched in June, plans to partner with several travel rewards programs, including hotels, airlines, car services and other businesses related to travel. On Thursday, Topguest unveiled its latest partnership with the InterContinental Priority Club. That’s a fairly large coup for the young startup, given InterContinental’s reach of 4,400 properties (the hotel group’s lineup includes the Holiday Inn, Crowne Plaza and Hotel Indigo). Prior to the Intercontinental, the service had just two partners, the Standard and the Soho & Tribeca Grand hotels.

The points awarded per check-in and the awards available vary by program. However, a common transaction Lewis says is 50 points per check-in for a hotel activity (i.e. a stay, a spa treatment, a conference  or a drink at the restaurant), a free night’s stay could be awarded after accumulating 1700 points (or roughly 34 check-ins). Some programs also offer discounts, for example, at the Standard you can get 25% off your next stay after 10 check-ins at their hotel, bar or restaurant. For someone who travels a lot or lives in a major city, that’s a pretty compelling offer. Although their sample size is small, Lewis claims his service is driving significant check-ins at their partner locations.

“What we’re doing is accretive to the ecosystem, it’s driving more people to check-in and it’s creating a real incentive layer, a real value…for a mainstream user,” he says. “The number of check-ins happening at our partner properties is dramatically higher versus before Topguest existed, I think we’ve seen something like a 400% increase of geo-location check-ins at Standard Hotels since our program launched about four weeks ago versus the previous four weeks… Users are inviting like two friends on average to join Topguest, something like 70% of the people who visit the site join.”

While there does seem to be a tight correlation between a Topguest partnership and increased check-ins, the site will need to expand rapidly in the coming months in order to add significant value for their hotel partners. Currently, there are 10,000 members.

In addition, there is always the concern that a primary check-in service, like Foursquare, or another player like Facebook will try to enter their market and directly compete with Topguest for those lucrative travel rewards partnerships. While Lewis has not ruled out the possibility, he believes Topguest is more of an ally to check-in services because it encourages consumer usage. Topguest, he says, also has an advantage because it is a neutral party and can accept check-ins from so many different platforms.

That may sound like PR fluff but there’s some evidence that he’s not alone in his thinking. In June, they raised a seed round of $350,000 with Conway, Founders Fund, Keith Rabois, Jeff Clavier, Kal Vepuri and Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir. Thus, Topguest shares an investor with Foursquare, SV Angel’s Ron Conway, and an investor with Gowalla, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. Topguest is not profitable yet, but it’s on the brink of raising another round. According to reports, Topguest is currently on track to raise over one million with their Series A round, which will reportedly include many of the same investors (and will close by the end of this summer).

Big news for AOL’s mobile strategy today. The company has launched a new smartphone-friendly mobile website, as well as two new Android apps today.

Specifically designed to be able to deliver content on iPhone and Android browsers, the new site delivers location-based content related to local weather, movie, traffic and other updates; and an application directory. The site specifically is optimized for phones that support HTML5.

In addition to the new smartphone optimized site, AOL has also released a new AOL app that allows access to content from AOL’s content sites, including PopEater, Engadget and FanHouse. Users can also access AOL’s other portals such as MapQuest and AOL Mail as well as hit the AOL app list to find links to all available AOL apps for Android.

And AOL has rolled out a DailyFinance mobile app for Android devices. The DailyFinance app allows users to receive real-time stock quotes and financial news and allows users to track up to 25 different portfolios.

Says David Temkin, the company’s new Vice President of Mobile, in a release:

“Android has emerged as a top-tier smartphone platform…So, while we’ll continue to focus on development for multiple mobile platforms…Today’s smartphones offer a completely different experience from the previous generation of WAP-based sites, and AOL will be taking full advantage of the possibilities these new devices can offer, both on the mobile Web and in apps.”

You know how every month you see stories like “Red Dead Redemption sells X copies, Super Mario Galaxy 2 sells Y copies,” etc? All of that data comes from the NPD Group, which tracks retail sales. What NPD never used to track was digital download sales—Steam and the like. That’s why’d you see doom-and-gloom stories like, “PC game sales fall 50 percent last month.” Yeah, because NPD was never keeping tabs on the digital sales! That’s like saying Apple is in trouble because nobody is buying iTunes music at Best Buy. Rubbish, exactly.