In the US, Facebook will account for 6.5% of all online ad spending. Growth in Facebook ad revenues may be slowing, according to eMarketer estimates, but they will still swell more than 60% this year

WOW

Augmented Reality Glasses that offer a front facing camera, voice input interface and should only cost the same as a smartphone....I'm intrigued

There was a lot of anticipation that Facebook would turn into a new destination, a store, a place where people would shop,” Mulpuru said in a telephone interview. “But it was like trying to sell stuff to people while they’re hanging out with their friends at the bar.

The opportunity is really the product of a collision between Desktop and Mobile worlds: the explosive popularity of apps are reshaping the Web’s link graph around the App Store and Android Market sites.

It comes as no surprise that “Popular Apps” listed in the App Store and Android Market pages are driven by app download volume and rating quality. But these app profile pages and app “directories” (like the App Store’s Lifestyle category page) are also webpages.

As search engines continue to index, display, and rank app pages for search-dominant mobile users, app-mania is simultaneously driving  a geometric expansion of the backlinks and social popularity of these ordinary webpages – giving them extraordinary influence over organic search results.

The net effect, based on our own analysis of top ranking mobile iOS apps, appears to be a powerful feedback loop: App Store popularity gets rewarded by incremental Google visibility.

Android tablets were mounted into the London Eye's capsules adding an interactive experience to the visitors of the iconic ferris wheel

Consumers in Canada prefer information from traditional sources over digital media when researching purchases. According to a September 2011 online survey by the Canadian Council of Public Relations F

Exposure to social media, in combination with other online ad formats, increases average order size. Past research has shown exposure to both earned and paid media can help companies build longer-term

The numbers of users reported by Facebook, Twitter, Google, and many other sites, are closely watched. They reveal trends in adoption and they are one of the few public metrics available to analysts trying to assign value to companies preparing an initial public offering.

But how accurate are these numbers?

In some anecdotal cases, the number of users, active and actual, could be as small as one-third. And nearly one-half of user accounts could be fake or contain no user profiles.

No user profiles means very little usable data for marketing or advertising campaigns. This is a huge hole in social media platforms.

It means corporate marketers and advertisers will not be able to reach and engage with the numbers they expect, resulting in increased costs and a discouraging ROI.

If corporations aren’t able to use social media to reach large numbers of consumers, the value of platforms such as Facebook will be severely diminished.

How large is this problem of fake and empty user profiles?

Here is an analysis performed by Kevin Kelly, a former editor of Wired magazine and a book author, on 560,000 people that have him in their G+ “circles.”