The New York times reported Sunday details related to the acquisition of Instagram by Facebook (s fb) that could spell legal concerns for both Instagram and Facebook. The Times reports that even though Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom testified in August that the company “never received any offers,” before the Facebook sale, there were verbal agreements between Twitter and Instagram executives for an acquisition of $525 million in cash and Twitter shares.

The story notes that Systrom’s testimony carries perjury risks or fraud risks if Instagram did indeed recieve offers from Twitter before the sale to Facebook, since if Twitter did not receive a chance to provide a counter-offer, Instagram investors could have lost an opportunity to make more money off the acquisition.

When asked for a response to the Times story, Facebook declined to comment. Twitter has not yet responded for comment.

Any potential legal issues might rest on the notion of…

Twitter released its much-awaited photo filters and editing tools Monday, directly targeting Instagram — and by extension Facebook’s (s fb) — dominance in the photo sphere. It’s unclear whether the new Twitter photo-editing product will catch on with users, or if they’ll continue to head elsewhere for sharing images, but it’s an important move by one of the largest social networks adding a new form of content creation on the platform.

Twitter announced the update in a blog post, and the functionality will be available on the mobile app for Twitter and will allow users to add filters, crop and pinch photos, edit them, and then share share those photos out to followers. And of course, unlike Instagram photos, Twitter-edited photos will easily expand in tweets as they arrive.

From the post:

“Starting today, you’ll be able to edit and refine your photos, right from Twitter. The…

Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom announced at Le Web last week that Instagram would be dropping support for Twitter cards, and now users are finally seeing the full effect of this competitive move. Instagram photos, which previously appeared cropped in a user’s Twitter stream last week are now totally gone from within Twitter, and you’ll have to head to the web version of Instagram to see all your favorite pics, a Facebook spokeswoman confirmed this afternoon.

The disappearance isn’t a complete surprise: Twitter cards give you the ability to tap and expand a tweet to display content (photos, videos, article previews, etc.), so when Instagram turned off this functionality, it seemed likely that photos would eventually stop appearing in-stream.

Update: Twitter has put up a blog post explaining the removal, citing Instagram’s removal of Twitter cards:

“Instagram has disabled photo integration with Twitter. As a result, photos are no…

One of the questions that still nags me is why aren’t more entrepreneurs successful? We have amazing information and resources online, tons of community events, and a wealth of people that truly want to help out. On the surface, it appears that the necessary ingredients are present to have a higher success rate. Now, I don’t know the previous success rates or the current success rates, so this is merely based on my gut.

As I look around the community, I want to see many more startups that are clearly on their way to being a viable, on going concern (my definition of a successful business). The lean startup movement and tools like the business model canvas are great for helping entrepreneurs spend their time more wisely, thus increasing the likelihood of success. I haven’t seen the increased success yet, but I’m hopeful.

Another theory is that you can’t pick…

After the dust of this holiday season settles, it’s very likely we’re going to be looking at yet another quarter for the mobile industry that was dominated by Galaxy and iDevices. In a new report, IDC says Samsung and Apple(s AAPL) will continue to lead the way in smartphone and tablet sales this holiday quarter as part of an estimated 362 million mobile devices shipped worldwide, which will be worth $170 billion, both records for the industry.

The predictions, which also include estimates for PCs, are informed by the expectation that a lot of people are going to unwrap mobile device gifts this month: Tablet shipments are expected to increase 55.8 percent this holiday over last year’s; smartphone shipments are expected to jump 39.5 percent in the same time frame, according to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Smart Connected Device Tracker, published Monday. And yes, this all continues to happen at the expense…

The newest statistics from the Association of American Publishers show that publishers’ ebook revenue is still increasing — but, as has been true for several months now, they are no longer seeing triple-digit growth in adult fiction and nonfiction ebooks.

In its latest “StatShot,” released Monday, the AAP reported 1,186 publishers’ net revenue for August 2012, the latest month for which figures are available, and for the year to date. Here’s a breakdown of publishers’ revenues by category, for the first 8 months of 2012 compared to the first 8 months of 2011:

[dataset id=”723675″]

Revenues from adult ebook sales were up 36.9 percent through August 2012. By comparison, revenues from adult ebook sales increased by 144.4 percent for the first eight months of 2011.

Children’s and YA ebook revenues, starting from a smaller base, grew by 196.4 percent for the first eight months of 2012. Overall, children’s and YA…

Google has remained mostly mum on its plans for a Maps app for Apple’s(s aapl) mobile OS. But the company has been busy with mobile maps for its own platform: On Monday, Google(s GOOG) announced an update to the Android API for Google Maps. With the update will come new, easier-to-display vector-based maps that are tweaked to perform better on Android tablets. There will also be new indoor and 3D maps navigable with tilting and rotating gestures.

The update means that the Google Maps API for Android is now vector-based, which is when mapping data is stored as a series of points and lines as opposed to pixels. That makes for easier and better pinching and zooming to points on a map; the previous version of Android maps had to load a new image every time the user zoomed to a new level, which made them look blurry or…

Ericsson(s eric) isn’t just suing Samsung for patent infringement but is also deploying another common tactic in the patent wars: trying to ban Samsung products from entering U.S. borders. Ericsson on Friday filed a complaint with the International Trade Commission, a U.S. agency that has the power to ban or restrict imports.

After seeking damages and an injunction in Texas federal court, Ericsson is now going the regulatory route with a request to ban pretty much any piece of hardware Samsung sells in the United States. Ericsson’s complaint targets “wireless communication devices, tablet computers, media players, and televisions” and lists products like the Samsung Captivate Glide smartphone and the Galaxy tablet.

As we noted last week, Ericsson is challenging Samsung on radio technology, which spans the entire mobile industry from the lowliest handset to the most powerful cell-site base transceiver station. Though Ericsson is no longer in the handset business, it…

Netflix (s nflx), it seems, is to cloud computing what Google (s goog) and Facebook (s fb) are to distributed systems, generally. Today, Netflix has open sourced its latest technology for keeping its cloud-hosted applications running — a set of libraries, called Hystrix, that is designed to manage interactions between the myriad services that comprise the company’s distributed architecture. If you’re building service-oriented architectures in the Amazon Web Services (s amzn) cloud, it might be worth a look.

Netflix Engineer Ben Christensen explained Hystrix thusly in a blog post on Monday:

Hystrix is a library designed to control the interactions between these distributed services providing greater tolerance of latency and failure. Hystrix does this by isolating points of access between the services, stopping cascading failures across them, and providing fallback options, all of which improve the system’s overall resiliency.

Hystrix actually stems from earlier work to add resilience to…

Android (s goog) has raced ahead of iOS (s aapl) in smartphone share but it continues to fall behind in usage and engagement in the U.S. The latest data from IBM (s ibm) on Black Friday shopping traffic underscores just how much iOS outperforms Android. Asymco has some good charts that highlight the engagement gap.

IBM said that 77 percent of mobile traffic on Black Friday came from iOS devices. This despite the fact that Comscore said that Android has 52.5 percent of smartphone subscribers while iOS has 34.3 percent. Some of it comes down to the iPad, which is still the dominant tablet and produces the most traffic compared to iPhones and Android phones. But like the iPhone, the iPad exhibits outsized usage patterns beyond its actual marketshare. Gartner said in the third quarter, iPad shipments have dropped to 50.4 percent. But IBM said it contributed 88 percent of the…

Anyone watching TV, listening to radio, reading a publication and browsing a site lately can’t have failed to notice that Samsung’s advertising budget is ginormous.

But, when it comes to other companies’ ads run on its mobile devices, Samsung is still lagging behind Apple.

Apple devices consolidated their place at the head of the mobile advertising pack during Q3, when they gained a further three percent of mobile ad impressions, while Samsung gained one percent, according to a quarterly report from mobile ad firm Adfonic.

That gave Apple and Samsung, respectively, 37 percent and 24 percent of all mobile ad impressions tracked by Adfonic. The share they gained was matched by the share lost by RIM devices…

Adfonic CEO Victor Malachard (via release): “It is significant that, even though Samsung is making huge inroads in device ownership and gaining mobile advertising share, it is still losing ground to…

As we saw this spring and summer, with the acquisition of Vitrue by Oracle (s ORCL), Buddy Media by Salesforce (s CRM) and Wildfire by Google (s GOOG), social media marketing is a hot space to be in. On Monday, social media analytics startup Socialbakers announced that it had raised $6 million in Series B funding, indicating yet more interest in the field.

The Prague-based company said its latest round of funding was led by Index Ventures and included participation from existing funder Earlybird Venture Capital. It follows a $2 million Series A round announced last fall.

Launched in 2009, Socialbakers works with brands, such as McDonald’s, Nestle and LVMH to measure the performance of their  social media campaigns (and compare their progress against rivals) on Facebook (s FB), Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Google+. The company says that more than a fifth of all Fortune 500 companies are Socialbakers clients.

Although mobile has been coming on strong as a primary means of computing, it still lags overall desktop internet usage. But for some publishers who started on the web, there are already moments during the week when mobile drives the majority of traffic or sales.

The Guardian’s Anthony Sullivan, group product manager for Guardian Core products at Guardian News & Media, said Monday that mobile — both smartphones and tablets — now contributes about 35 percent of traffic overall. That’s up from 10 percent at the start of 2011, when it was primarily smartphone traffic. (See disclosure below)

But at 6 a.m. to 7 a.m. in the morning local time, the Guardian gets more traffic from mobile devices. It also sees more mobile visitors than desktop visitors on Saturdays at 3 p.m. when the Premier League is under way.

Meanwhile, online design store Fab.com said late last month that on Saturdays…

There’s been a lot written about how the Israeli army has been using social media to broadcast the details of its latest military campaign against Hamas — live-tweeting rocket attacks, uploading YouTube videos of hits on specific victims, aggregating Instagram photos from the battlefield, and even posting infographics to a Tumblr blog. This obviously has marketing and propaganda value, but that isn’t the only way this modern media campaign is changing the nature of military strategy: since social-media tools are inherently difficult to regulate and are multi-directional in nature, they can be a very dangerous double-edged sword, and we are only beginning to see the full repercussions of that.

One concrete example of this emerged within days of the Israel Defense Forces launching what they called Operation Pillar of Defense (which came complete with its own Twitter hashtag). According to several reports, the Israeli army asked citizens…

YouTube (s GOOG) has long talked about wanting to be the future of TV, with millions of channels at your disposal. Turns out, some aspects of that future look very much like today’s television landscape: This weekend, news broke that YouTube is putting millions of additional dollars towards original content. But only 30 to 40 percent of the channels that received advances a year ago will get additional funding. That is very much in line with the success rate of new network television shows.

YouTube invested some $100 million late last year into high-quality original programming from Hollywood celebrities and YouTube talent alike. Some of these shows have been runaway hits, while others have tanked. But the overall success rate is very much like on TV, according to data recently published by Screenrant. The TV blog did the math on the number of new network shows canceled after…

In the third quarter, U.S. mobile operators added a net total of only 2.4 million subscribers, the lowest growth quarter since the cellular industry took off in the 1990s, according to a new mobile data market report from Chetan Sharma Consulting. The high mobile penetration levels that have left many western European and east Asian wireless markets in states of stagnation are now making their way to the U.S.

While 2.4 million new customers does constitute growth, Sharma pointed out that 2 million of those new accounts were prepaid, which typically bring in a third to half the revenues of a contract customer. What’s more, most of the growth in contract customers came from a single provider, Verizon Wireless (s vz)(s vod), which accounted for 2.4 million new postpaid customers. AT&T(s t) added only 400,000(s s) while Sprint(s s) and T-Mobile lost a 1 million each. So while…

This is a shocker. Steven Sinofsky, the prickly but super-efficient executive famous for delivering big products on time for a company not known for meeting production schedules, is leaving Microsoft (s msft). Now. His departure comes just a few weeks after the debut of Windows 8, the massive project he led.

The news was reported by AllThingsD‘s Ina Fried. Sinofsky’s role will be taken over by — get this — two women. Tami Reller who will take on the business side of Windows and Julie Larson-Green will direct Windows software and hardware engineering, according to a Microsoft statement. Larson-Green had worked with Sinofsky for some time.

For years Sinofsky headed development of Office, Microsoft’s juggernaut desktop productivity suite. His success there led to him taking over Windows after the Vista debacle.

Jeff Raikes, then the Office guy at Microsoft, has lauded Sinofsky to me repeatedly over the years. Sinofsky…

Talk about your time savers. New research from Microsoft(s msft) and the University of Toronto may make it possible for non-Chinese speakers to “speak” the language in their own voices without having to learn the language. Given the trade relationships between the US and China, this could be a really big deal if it works as advertised.

While great strides have been made in speech recognition over the past decades, the current systems still carry word error rates of 20 percent to 25 percent when handling “arbitrary speech,” Microsoft’s Richard Rashid wrote in a blog post.  (Do you hear that Siri(s aapl)?)

But now, new technology called Deep Neural Networks, which mimics the way the human brain operates, enables much more discriminating speech recognition, according to Rashid, Microsoft’s chief research officer.

Rashid, who demonstrated the technology at a Microsoft conference in Tianjin, China in late October said the process takes…

Apple CEO Tim Cook said at the company’s most recent earnings call that the iPhone 5 would arrive in China before the end of this year. But on Friday, China Telecom’s chairman gave a little more information to the Wall Street Journal, and the device might even be ready for sale in the country by the end of this month.

China Telecom Chairman Wang Xiaochu said “the phone should be by early December if not sooner,” according to the WSJ. The uncertainty is due to the device winning regulatory approval in China. When it will pass inspection is still up in the air. Chairman Chang Xiaobing, of competing carrier China Unicom, wasn’t as assured his carrier would be selling the device in 2012. He told the Journal, “We hope to offer it this year, but what I say doesn’t matter.”

The iPhone 5 debuted in late September and is…