With more people emailing and fewer people sending physical mail in recent years, the U.S. Postal Service is taking steps to move into the digital world–and using a venture-backed company to do so.

Goodmail Systems Inc. has partnered with Epostmarks Inc. to launch a product, Postmarked Email, that has the approval and protection of the U.S. Postal Service.

The deal will essentially make emails handled by this service the legal equivalent of physical mail. That’s important for businesses that are seeking to cut the costs of physical mail while also improving communication with customers and become more environmentally friendly.

Goodmail, which has raised about $45 million from Bessemer Venture Partners, DCM, Emergence Capital Partners, Omidyar Network and Softbank Capital Partners, isn’t the only venture-backed company working with the postal service. Earth Class Mail Corp. covers different terrain–it doesn’t deal with email, but it provides users with access to their physical mail online. Earth Class Mail has raised more than $20 million from Ignition Partners, Alliance of Angels and Keiretsu Forum, according to VentureWire archives.

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With Twitter exploding–and the focus on real time data exploding along with it–there are a number of new companies that are seeking to develop more specific applications of this technology.

Several such companies presented at a conference in San Francisco last week organized by TechCrunch.

Hot Potato organizes real-time content about specific events, which can be big public events such as a conference or sporting event or private events such as a person buying a car. The company is backed by $1 million from First Round Capital and RRE Ventures.

Using the service, people can see a stream of the text updates for the events, as well as photos directly in the stream of news. People can participate in the events whether they are at the event in person or watching remotely.

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Google’s (GOOG) chief executive Eric Schmidt said during a trip to Baghdad this week that Iraq’s stabilization could lead to business opportunities in the country.

Mr. Schmidt was part of a delegation, led by Peter Pace, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to encourage business development in Iraq.

“After this tremendous investment in Iraq, we see business recovery finally happening,” he said in a video interview provided by the U.S. Army. “The creation of a new Iraqi state ultimately means business opportunities for global firms.”

“Google’s interested in making sure that Iraq ends up being an open and transparent democracy–after all, information makes a big difference in everybody’s lives,” Mr. Schmidt added.

The delegation met with both military and civilian leaders in Baghdad, he said. “It’s clear that the government is reaching out now to business, to try to get us to begin our part in the reconstruction of Iraq.”

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Madison Avenue has joined forces with Internet companies in a last-ditch attempt to stop privacy regulations over the $29 billion online-ad industry.

The industry is finalizing an ad campaign to educate consumers about how digital advertising works, creating an icon that would appear on Web pages or ads alerting consumers if their activity is being tracked and deploying new technologies to police the Web for illegal activities. At issue is the practice of tracking consumers’ Web activities–from the searches they make to the sites they visit and the products they buy–for the purpose of targeting ads.

The efforts follow calls from the FTC earlier this year for Web advertisers and Internet companies to do a better job explaining how they track and use information about consumers’ Web activities and creating a simple way consumers can opt out of being tracked.

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Consumers are generally cautious heading into the critical holiday shopping season, with preseason trends suggesting that electronics sales may be solid while sales of apparel, particularly women’s styles, could get pummeled.

Spurred by the release of a hot videogame and earlier-than-usual promotions on televisions, U.S. shoppers spent 6.1 percent more on electronics in the first half of November the month, through Nov. 14, than a year ago, according to a recent analysis from MasterCard SpendingPulse, a unit of MasterCard Advisors.

The new data, based on MasterCard SpendingPulse data, which reflect estimates on all payment forms, including cash and checks, comes days before Thanksgiving, the traditional kickoff to the holiday selling season, when consumers traditionally spend several hundred billion of dollars. Retailers count on holiday sales for as much as 40 percent of their annual sales and half their annual profits.

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The Web consulting firm Blue State Digital helped the Obama campaign raise some $500 million online, catapulting a relative political novice into the Oval Office.

Its next challenge: Help fashion bible Vogue magazine cash in on its far-reaching influence at a time when advertising dollars are bleeding out of print.

Vogue has hired Blue State Digital to help analyze the Conde Nast publication’s audience as part of a broader, revenue-generating push that ultimately will involve implementing paid subscriptions on Vogue.com, said Tom Florio, publishing director for Vogue and several other Conde Nast magazines.

The collaboration between magazine publisher and Web strategist began several months ago when Diego Scotti, Vogue’s executive director of marketing, emailed Blue State Digital co-founder Joe Rospars. Vogue executives, keenly aware that the monthly magazine is just one of many ways people connect with the publication, had been looking for ways to capitalize on its influence.

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In the furthest reaches of India’s rural heartland, the cellphone is bringing something that television, radio and even newspapers couldn’t deliver: Instant access to music, information, entertainment, news and even worship.

Despite its rapid modernization, many of India’s 750,000 villages remain isolated except for the cellphone reception that now blankets almost the entire country after a decade of rapid expansion by operators. So in villages that don’t receive any FM radio stations, people have begun calling a number that has a recording of Bollywood tunes and listening to it on their headsets.

This primitive cellular “radio” service was used by close to 20 million Indians last year, phone company executives estimate.

“I call it the poor man’s iTunes,” says Mahesh Prasad, president of Reliance Communications Ltd., one of India’s largest cellular companies. “A villager waiting for a bus has nothing to do. When he wants to kill some time, this is the only entertainment media available.”

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International Business Machines (IBM) and a handful of other major marketers, including casino operator Harrah’s Entertainment and software giant Microsoft (MSFT), are experimenting with developing ad campaigns based in part on what consumers are chatting about on the Web.

For decades, advertisers have relied heavily on sometimes-dated consumer surveys and focus groups to provide grist for their ads. Now, some are using new technologies to scan the Web for key words to find out what consumers are–and aren’t–saying about their brands.

Then, they are incorporating those findings into their more-conventional research and using them not only to choose the overall themes of their marketing campaigns, but also specific text and photos for their ads.

Once the campaigns are up and running, the companies and their ad firms are using the same Web-scanning technologies to gauge consumer reaction to their messages, and to fine-tune them to boost performance.

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Videogames are serious business in China. The country’s online game market will reach 41 billion yuan ($6 billion) by 2010, accounting for half the global market, according to newly released data from Cnzz.com, a Beijing-based data analysis firm.

The Cnzz.com report says that almost two-thirds of China’s 338 million Web users are now online gamers. The online-game industry, which currently accounts for more than half of the total Internet economy, will see strong annual growth at a rate of 20 percent in future years, the report says.

The mainstream remains the awkwardly named sector of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs). In October, six out of the 10 most popular online games in China are MMORPG games, according to the report. World of Warcraft by Activision Blizzard (ATVI) still tops the list with the most registered players and peak simultaneous online users. But the current government regulatory fighting over its Chinese license, held by Netease, may yet have a negative impact on the game, according to the report.

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Wikipedia.org is the fifth-most-popular Web site in the world, with roughly 325 million monthly visitors. But unprecedented numbers of the millions of online volunteers who write, edit and police it are quitting.

That could have significant implications for the brand of democratization that Wikipedia helped to unleash over the Internet–the empowerment of the amateur.

Volunteers have been departing the project that bills itself as “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit” faster than new ones have been joining, and the net losses have accelerated over the past year. In the first three months of 2009, the English-language Wikipedia suffered a net loss of more than 49,000 editors, compared to a net loss of 4,900 during the same period a year earlier, according to Spanish researcher Felipe Ortega, who analyzed Wikipedia’s data on the editing histories of its more than three million active contributors in 10 languages.

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EarthLink (ELNK) email customers experienced outages over much of the weekend, according to numerous online complaints.

Starting Friday, Twitter users began to post updates about service outages. Alex Mendez tweeted “33:40 minutes on the cellphone dealing with TW / earthlink. UGH,” and Diane Fischler wrote, “Not getting email messages again. Woke up to about 60 left over from yesterday’s Earthlink outage, now seems to be down again. Who else?”

On Saturday and Sunday, EarthLink users continued to complain about their lack of service. Jim Rattray wrote: “#Earthlink email has been down for 24+ hours. ‘We’re aware and working on it.’ Not good enough,” while romeneskoblogs said, “I haven’t received Earthlink email since Friday night. Customer service rep (in India) said could be 72 hours b4 restored.”

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The term “3-D” has been largely synonymous with Hollywood blockbusters, buttered popcorn and ill-fitting cardboard glasses since the 1950s, when three-dimensionality was introduced to draw TV owners into theaters.

Over the past 20 years, 3-D-capable devices like set-top boxes as well as 3-D programming have become available at home. A lack of standard broadcasting formats, relatively little content and the need for 3-D glasses, however, have kept it from a broad audience.

Tech companies are betting that will all change, and when it does, you’ll be able to lose the glasses.

According to new data from Thomson Reuters, 3-D-related patents have risen sharply in recent years, led by companies such as Samsung, Panasonic and Toshiba. “It will only be a matter of time before 3-D televisions start showing up in the home,” the report says.

Patent activity in the 3-D television space grew 69 percent over a five-year period, with more than 1,000 unique invention patents filed last year alone. This year is on par, with 486 filed in the first half of 2009.

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A new feature wherein All Things Digital looks at up-and-coming and innovative start-ups you should know about.

This week: We caught up with Sam Blackman, CEO of Elemental Technologies at the San Francisco NewTeeVee Live conference.

Elemental Technologies hopes to become a major player in the future of online and over-the-air video through its high-performance encoding technology.

Who: Sam Blackman

What: CEO and Chairman of Elemental Technologies.

Why: People want to watch live video on all their devices. Making a new version of a given video for every device is time- and processor-intensive. Elemental says it can replace up to five existing dedicated servers with one of its own, based on its proprietary software.

Where: @elementaltech (Twitter); company blog; Portland (analog place).

Who else: Sam says, “We’re the first-ever company to take advantage of GPUs for video processing,” but Nvidia (NVDA) is the key hardware player.

Five Stats You Won’t Find in His Facebook Profile

Worst Job: Barista. Late for the Trolley coffee. It had this really abusive owner. He’d yell at us if we gave a half-pump too much flavoring.

Gadget of the Moment: Lenovo X301. It’s all about the keyboard.

Early Geek Influence: Jack Dudman. He was a neighbor growing up and was Steve Jobs’s math teacher at Reed College.

Wishes There Was an App for That: A really smart public transit app. Like one that knows where I am and can tell me which of the options near me I can go to, to get to my destination fastest.

Sport You Can’t Live Without: Ultimate Frisbee

Bio in 140 Characters

Raised in Oregon. EE at Brown. Time at Intel, then Pixelworks. Left to start Elemental Technologies. Loves work, kids and Ultimate Frisbee.

The Five Questions

Elemental’s products seem pretty hardcore geeky. Break it down for me.

The man on the street today wants to view video on any device at any time. The content owners of that video need to be able to format the video differently for each type of device ["transcoding"]. We make that process much cheaper. At the beginning, we saw that there was going to be a huge increase in the amount of video produced out there, but that it was hard to distribute.

Right now it’s really hard [lots of equipment and time] to create, say, 240 versions of every video [so that they can be viewed quickly on an iPhone and in HD on a laptop, for instance]. Four to five regular CPU [central processing unit] servers can be replaced by one of our servers with a GPU [graphical processing unit] and our software. That means far less cost for businesses and many more video options for the consumer.

Device variations are just exploding. How do you see the changing landscape moving your business?

I don’t see the number of video formats decreasing at all. Every company that [produces] a device wants to control delivery to it. No one is going to dominate the cellphone market. It’s just too big. You can get three percent and have a nice business. As long as that is the way the game is played, our products will be very desirable.

Why are you going to be the first software company to acquire an auto body shop?

That’s my dream. The way our product works is, when we take an order, we just submit the hardware request to Dell (DELL). They plug in a GPU. We take the box and add our software.

The funny story is that we wanted a more custom look, so we found this auto body shop in Portland that takes the bezels [rack server face plates], sands them, cleans them, repaints them and sends them back. They look beautiful, like tons of engineering went into it. Dell will do that for you, but its 20 grand, and we’re a start-up. That’s my dream, a company that doesn’t have any employees who drive to work but owns an auto body shop.

Every geek has a memory where they saw something new and had to say to themselves, “Dang, I love living in the future.” What’s yours?

I know exactly what that was. Turtle graphics. My mother put me in a programming class in kindergarten, and there was this thing called LOGO [where you could use computer instructions to make an onscreen turtle draw something]. I had an hour class where I figured out how to draw a square. I went home that night and wrote down on paper a program that would draw the American flag.

My neighbor had an Apple (AAPL) IIc that I used to input that first program. I probably stayed up all night as a six-year-old doing that and that was it for me. What a genius idea. I mean, kids love seeing results, and there were no visual results [from programming] for a long time. LOGO was the first thing where you could spend about an hour and get visual results.

What tech war are you watching most closely?

There’s a battle looming between Intel (INTC) and Nvidia, as Intel releases their own GPU architecture. We’re trying to be really well-positioned to benefit from that arms race of the FLOPS [the processing performance unit].

The In Living Color Interview