The Securities and Exchange Commission requires a company to describe all the risk factors associated with investing in its business before it goes public. One of these issues for Facebook is “significant competition” from companies including Google, Microsoft and Twitter. The social network notes that Google or others could use dominant positions in one market to gain an advantage in one of Facebook’s areas of operation.

With 85 percent of its revenue coming from advertising, Facebook competes with both traditional and online media businesses. Advertisers tend to have fixed budgets, and the social network will have to continue to make a case for its ads and Sponsored Stories. We have seen businesses spent significant amounts to generate Likes for their pages, but it is unclear how much advertisers will devote to Facebook once they have amassed an audience. Facebook did not address this in the document today, but it is a trend to watch.

Also critical to maintaining and expanding its position as a display ad platform is user growth and engagement. If users spend less time on Facebook in favor of other social networks or offerings, the company will be negatively affected. It mentioned Google+, along with regional networks Cyworld (Korea), Mixi (Japan), Orkut (Brazil, India) and vKontakte in Russia. The company also recognizes that other Internet or mobile companies could offer products and services that compete with individual Facebook features. It didn’t name names, but these can include everything from Apple’s iMessenger to startups like Instagram.

Facebook acknowledged that Google in particular could gain a competitive advantage by integrating its social networking platform into its existing search product, web browser or mobile operating system. On these fronts, Facebook might have to spend significantly to acquire or partner with other companies. This will be difficult, though, as many companies in the position to help Facebook fight Google are threatened by other aspects of Facebook’s business.

Apple has spent an estimated $100 million dollars on its so-called “war on Android.” And so far it doesn’t have much to show for it. Even its recent ITC court victory over HTC doesn’t look like it will have much of an impact on anything.

But that could all change thanks to a recent interpretation of Apple’s ’263 patent by a high-ranking US judge. The patent covers realtime API — a key component in Android that would be extremely difficult to work around if a manufacturer was found guilty of infringing on it…(...)
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Besides perhaps Twitter, Google Trends are a good way to gauge what’s hot on the web, and now there’s a pint-sized version for iPhone owners.

GTrends for Notification Center is a jailbreak widget that conveniently places a trending stock ticker into Notification Center.

You can even launch any of the top 20 trending topics directly from the widget, and use your own custom search queries.

GTrends is an interesting tool that allows you to easily keep your fingers on the pulse of the web…(...)
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Facebook COO Shifts Europe focus from privacy to economy

Facebook has a €2.6 billion U.K. impact -  A study from Deloitte found that Facebook’s overall economic impact in the United Kingdom was €2.6 billion, or 35,200 jobs in the U.K. and 32,000 jobs in the European Union and Switzerland.

Facebook ads game categories to News Feed -  Facebook now displays the genre category below game names and stories in News Feed stories. As we reported on Inside Social Games, users might be more likely to click on games when they know more about them.

Facebook engineer creates Google hack -  An project called Focus on the User, created in part by a Facebook engineer, provides a bookmarklet that forces Google Search Plus Your World to display results from social networks besides Google+.

Causes now a standalone website – TechCrunch reported that the charity app Causes has re-launched as a standalone website.

85K Arab Facebook logins hacked – ZDnet reported that Israel and Saudi Arabia are in the midst of a hacking war, and 85,000 Arab Facebook logins are one casualty.

Washington state AG targets clickjackers -  Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna announced suits against two companies thought to encourage clickjacking on Facebook. The suit was announced at Facebook’s Seattle office.

Facebook registers ‘FB Origin’ domain - Facebook registered several domains, .com and .biz for example, for something called FB Origin via the company MarkMonitor.  Fusible speculated that this means the company is set to launch a new product along with Timeline apps.

Reports are coming in that Motorola Mobility has just filed a significant lawsuit against Apple in the US over the illegal use of its intellectual property. Motorola believes that Apple is using its patents in both its iPhone 4S and iCloud products.

MM recently won an injunction against Apple late last year in a German court. And although the decision has yet to make an impact on Apple’s sales in the country, it could certainly play a major part in Motorola’s new lawsuit here in the States…(...)
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Reports are coming in that Motorola Mobility has just filed a significant lawsuit against Apple in the US over the illegal use of its intellectual property. Motorola believes that Apple is using its patents in both its iPhone 4S and iCloud products.

MM recently won an injunction against Apple late last year in a German court. And although the decision has yet to make an impact on Apple’s sales in the country, it could certainly play a major part in Motorola’s new lawsuit here in the States…(...)
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The social network’s outreach among public figures and the prominence it gives subscribe suggestions on the site show a level of commitment to taking away some of Twitter’s power and preventing Google+ from gaining traction as a source for news.

Journalists like Ann Curry, Nicholas Kristof, Katie Couric and Don Lemon have converted to Timeline and enabled subscribe. Some of these figures have hundreds of thousands of subscribers. More than 90 journalists from the Washington Post and more than 50 from The New York Times have made their profiles available to public subscribers, according to the Journalists + Facebook note. The Washington Post recently published a list of all its staff members who are accessible on Facebook.

Many users have been able to accumulate Facebook subscribers at a much faster rate than they gained Twitter followers. A sample of 25 journalists showed the average journalist had a 320 percent increase in subscribers since November 2011. This is largely due to the “People To Subscribe To” sidebar that shows up on several pages prompting users to follow updates from journalists, celebrities and other public figures. Of course, when one user subscribes to another, it generates a story in friends’ News Feeds in a way that Twitter hasn’t taken advantage of. (Twitter added an activity feed in August 2011, but users have to visit a separate tab to view it.) Facebook has also offered a subscribe button plugin for third-party sites and added a subscribe call to action within its comments plugin and the “page owners” section of pages.

Notably, Facebook has employees dedicated to outreach, not only to bring the right personalities to the platform but also to provide best practices. Journalist Program Manager Vadim Lavrusik has been extremely active in sharing examples of how reporters can use the social network and producing resources like the Facebook + Journalists note today, which included recommendations such as “reader shoutouts can increase feedback by as much as 4x.”

Twitter might have to start implementing changes or better courting public figures to convince them not to neglect Twitter in favor of Facebook. Google+ has an advantage with the way Google Search now displays results from its social network, which could help keep it in the race for public attention. But for Facebook, a key point will be letting users choose whether to post to subscribers or friends. Because posts have to be public for subscribers to see them, a user is forced to also share that content with friends. Unlike Twitter, users can only have one profile so they have to mix business and personal. Another issue is that Facebook does not have a way to designate a profile as “official,” which has long been a problem for pages. And because many people who have subscribers also have pages, the social network will need to determine how to balance these in search.

A new report form the boys and girls of Google has revealed a couple of interesting facts about mobile phone usage across five key markets.

Looking at the five countries that are leading the charge towards a connected life – United States, UK, Japan, France and Germany – the search and mobile giant has come to a couple of interesting conclusions.

Firstly, and perhaps not such a surprise, it appears that Smartphones are rapidly eating into the remaining feature phone share, with the proliferation of iPhones, Android phones and the like causing users to upgrade to more powerful handsets.

More interestingly however, it appears there are now more people connected with a smartphone than people connected with a computer…(...)
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Apple yesterday announced its sales numbers for the latest quarter, and what results they were. 37 million iPhones sold is not a number to be sniffed at, and it’s one that was enough to see Apple overtake Samsung once more as the top dog in smartphone sales.

The huge number of iPhones sold has also seen Apple’s smartphone overtake Android handsets, with the competition – HTC, Motorola – reporting less than stellar figures themselves…(...)
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One of the biggest benefits of using Apple’s Safari web browser on your computer to compliment Mobile Safari on your iOS device is sync-ability. Safari will sync your bookmarks and history, and even has that cool new Reading List feature.

So what about the folks that use Google Chrome? We get the benefit of a much better browser, but get gypped on device-syncing. Well now we can have our cake, and eat it too, with VoyagerApps.com’s Chrome Sync Pro…(...)
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