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they attribute the price rise to two distinct causes: “the price peaks are due to speculators causing price bubbles, and the background increase… is due to corn to ethanol conversion.”

The OECD Trade and Agriculture Directorate cleared speculators of any blame in its own investigation into the 2008 commodities bubbles, without fingering a culprit of its own.

More targeting options should quicken the growth in how much each ad costs, given that typically the more targeted an ad is, the higher its price. In the first quarter, the average price per ad ticked up by 3 percent

. Since last summer Facebook has most notably rolled out Custom Audiences and Partner Categories as ways for advertisers to be able to target users based on marketers’ customer databases and people’s offline purchase behavior. Sandberg said the first quarter saw more than twice as many marketers using Custom Audiences as used it in fourth quarter '12.

The ratio of Facebook’s monthly users that return to the platform daily continued to creep up, hitting 60 percent in the first quarter. While some may scrutinize the one percentage point quarter-over-quarter uptick as indicative of Facebook’s daily user base beginning to stagnate, 360i’s vp of emerging media David Berkowitz said that any publisher that sees more than 50 percent of its monthly user base returning daily is "pretty phenomenal."

A survey by Wakefield Research, commissioned by U.S. cloud-services company Citrix Systems (CTXS.O), last November found 91 percent of respondents were excited about wearables, but 61 percent said they had no plans to purchase one.

Epson (6724.T) unveiled a $700 pair of eyeglasses that allow the user to simultaneously view data about objects they are looking at.

Consumer surveys reveal that television advertising stands above all others in terms of influencing purchase decisions. 

What Facebook can't yet promise, of course, is whether its billion users will actually sit through — or even tolerate — such intrusive ads, even just once.

Facebook will cap the ads so that no user will see an ad more than three times in a day. It is still unclear if advertising executives will want to cut down the typical 30-second television ad to fit Facebook's 15-second guideline, or if they'd create new ads especially for Facebook.

Even amongst college students, for example, who are likely to be very social media savvy, television advertising is clearly the most influential of all.

Nine out of ten smartphone searches results in an action (purchasing, visiting a business, etc.) 24% recommended a brand or product to others as a result of a smartphone search

Local Information Seekers: Looking for local information is done by virtually all smartphone users and consumers are ready to act on the information they find. 95% of smartphone users have looked for local information 88% of these users take action within a day, indicating these are immediate information needs 77% have contacted a business, with 61% calling and 59% visiting the local business

Purchase-driven Shoppers: Smartphones have become an indispensable shopping tool and are used across channels and throughout the research and decision-making process. 79% of smartphone consumers use their phones to help with shopping, from comparing prices, finding more product info to locating a retailer 74% of smartphone shoppers make a purchase, whether online, in-store, or on their phones 70% use their smartphones while in the store, reflecting varied purchase paths that often begin online or on their phones and brings consumers to the store

Reaching Mobile Consumers: Cross-media exposure influences smartphone user behavior and a majority notice mobile ads which leads to taking action on it.71% search on their phones because of an ad exposure, whether from traditional media (68%) to online ads (18%) to mobile ads (27%) 82% notice mobile ads, especially mobile display ads and a third notice mobile search ads Half of those who see a mobile ad take action, with 35% visiting a website and 49% making a purchase

Make sure you can be found via mobile search as consumers regularly use their phones to find and act on information. Incorporate location based products and services and make it easy for mobile customers to reach you because local information seeking is common among smartphone users.  Develop a comprehensive cross-channel strategy as mobile shoppers use their phones in-store, online and via mobile website and apps to research and make purchase decisions.  Last, implement an integrated marketing strategy with mobile advertising that takes advantage of the knowledge that people are using their smartphones while consuming other media and are influenced by it.

And look at Facebook’s desktop ads as a whole, including both Sponsored Stories and the traditional sidebars ads. They’re getting just 0.083% CTR at a $0.88 CPC earning Facebook an eCPM of only $0.74, so mobile Sponsored Stories have 13.7X the CTR and earn Facebook 11.2x as much as its combined desktop ad offering.

Meanwhile, a quick look at a campaign in the tens of thousands of dollars by AdParlor showed that mobile ads have a CTR of 0.821% while traditional Facebook ad campaigns that mostly show up in the web sidebar with some presence in the web and mobile news feed had a CTR of regular ads have a CTR of just 0.032%. That’s a 25x better CTR on mobile. The campaign at gaining new fans for a Facebook page, and while the click-to-fan conversion rate on mobile was slightly worse – 55% on mobile versus 72% across placements – the improved in CTR makes up for it many times over.

Another Ads API giant Spruce Media told MediaPost that its tests with Facebook mobile sponsored stories have seen click-through rates from .8% to 1.7%, the same range as TBG Digital and AdParlor.

This all doesn’t seem like users are just clicking the relatively new, three month old ad units out of curiosity. It looks like users are actually perceiving them as content, and are clicking through to learn more about the Pages and apps their friends interact with.

Attaining such a high click-through rate for mobile Sponsored Stories is game-changing for Facebook, because there’s simply not as much room for it or any service to advertise on mobile. There’s no space for an ads sidebar and if far too many ads are injected into the content feed, users could get angry and stop browsing. But the impressively high CTR and eCPM mean Facebook doesn’t have to show too many Sponsored Stories to make a ton of money off of them.

Other social sites like Google+ and Twitter don’t have the scale, social graph, or on-site activity to serve Sponsored Stories that are as effective as Facebook’s. While Twitter and G+’s interest graph can power accurate ad targeting, only Facebook know who your closest friends are thanks to photo tags, wall posts, messages, and more. Its massive time-on-site also produces lots of interactions with brands and local businesses that can be turned into Sponsored Stories ads.

Facebook is just getting started. Sources say it’s working on a hyper-local mobile ad targeting product that could serve extremely relevant local business ads to users within a few hundred feet of a brick and mortar store. Thanks to the new Facebook Exchange real-time bidding system, Facebook could drive up CPC or CPM prices by getting advertisers to compete to reach specific mobile users, including ones who’ve been retargeted after visiting sites that indicate purchase intent.

High mobile Sponsored Story CTRs indicate at least some users don’t hate the ads, and wouldn’t rebel if they see more.

"Publishers seemed to have this fantasy that iPad would allow them to call time out on the Internet," Gene Liebel, a partner at the interactive agency HUGE, tells Fast Company. The idea is that for 10 years, publishing suffered from the Internet and its indignities, but that all of a sudden, thanks to the benevolent Steve Jobs, "now we're back, now we're gonna call a time out, start over, sell magazines at full price with immersive ads," and so on. But the tablet isn't some new digitally enabled omnibus magazine. "The tablet in the home is really one more Internet device," says Liebel. "Safari is still by far the biggest app. So the idea that everyone would go home and have 20 paid content apps and that's their new lifestyle is not even close to true."