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Nielsen 2012 Social Media Report

- Truthdive reports that 700,000 Droid smartphones are activated daily; - Mobile searches, according to Google, increased by 400 percent in 2011; - Digital Buzz reports that half of all Internet searches are conducted on mobile devices; - Fifty eight percent of mobile shoppers are between the ages of 18 and 34, according to Millennial Media; and, most amazingly, - Spyder Trap reports that 70 percent of mobile searches result in action within one hour.

Nearly half, 47 percent, of tablet users say they engage with advertisements more than once a week. That's according to a recent report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and its Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence. On the smartphone side, 25 percent of users said they have the same weekly engagement. Following ad engagement, 80 percent of smartphone users and 89 percent of tablet users take action, said the report. The "Mobile's Role in the Consumer's Media Day" report studied behaviors on both types of devices, finding each used devices in different ways.

Barnes & Noble is reportedly releasing a Nook Tablet with less storage space-and, presumably, a lower price-on Wednesday - analysts expect it to be priced at $199 to compete with the Kindle Fire. (The Nook with more storage is currently $249).

"A new report confirms the significant and growing influence of the Internet and social media in the shopping decisions of U.S. moms. In preparing to go shopping, mothers are 43% more likely to go online to gather coupons and 38% more likely to look at store Web sites than food shoppers as a whole, according to Packaged Facts' "Moms as Food Shoppers: Grocery Store and Supercenter Patterns and Trends" report.  Further, moms are nearly twice as likely as food shoppers overall to have used social media to plan their most recent grocery shopping trip (20% versus 11%). And in addition to consulting blogs prior to shopping, they are increasingly using mobile apps to ensure that they're getting the best deals while shopping. "

But you might be surprised by the second-leading source of the expected surge in traffic. It won't come from people, but from machine-to-machine communications, or "M2M." Think of sensors in cars and in appliances, surveillance cameras, smart electric meters, and devices still to come, monitoring the world and reporting to each other and to centralized computers what they're detecting. The chart below, reprinted from the Cisco report, shows just how extreme the jump in machine-to-machine communications could be. It is expected to grow, on average, 86 percent a year, and by 2016 it is expected to reach 508 petabytes a month, or half a billion gigabytes.

"How much time do you spend on Reddit?  If you're anything like the average Redditor, it's quite a bit!  Yesterday Reddit reported, via Twitter, that in August the average time spent per visit was 17:29 minutes.  The month also closed with a shipping 3.4 billion page views and 42.9 million uniques.  Impressive, eh? While the 17:29 minute figure is only a one second increase from 17:28 in July, the page views and uniques saw a significant jump.  In July Reddit reported 3.1 billion page views and 39.5 million users."

"News and magazine apps are a segment where the momentum is likely to shift towards the Web within the next two to three years," noted senior analyst Aapo Markkanen. "Since news and media content already account for a large share of smartphone usage and are likely to play an even bigger role in later adopters' usage, changes in this segment alone will make subscribers on average download fewer native apps." The next wave of smartphone owners in mature markets like the U.S., Western Europe and Asia will download fewer apps than the first one-third of mobile consumers who bought smartphones, according to the report on mobile app storefronts. At the same time, ABI expects that in the games and utilities categories, the mobile Web will probably never catch up with native apps, due to the difficulty in matching the user experience. ABI's outlook on the future of apps appears at odds with a separate report released Tuesday by Strategy Analytics, which maintains that the emergence of HTML5 won't put much of a dent in the app economy. Instead, it predicts the Web programming language will lead to the spread of hybrid apps that combine HTML5 with native APIs (application programming interface) to harness the best of native and open standards.

But it's AOL's own properties the company aims to build up as a go-to premium buy for brand advertisers. Display revenue on AOL properties grew by 2 percent. The company is betting on premium ad formats such as its rich-media laden Project Devil units to entice brands to spend more. AOL reported that more than half of the advertisers who bought the ads in Q1 re-upped this past quarter. Armstrong admitted that last year the company's focus was not data-driven, and stressed the firm's renewed mission to ensure that data - meaning results-related numbers proving the value of buying AOL's ad products - is at the heart of its sales approach. People cannot leave the building without data, said Armstrong. Mobile and video ad revenue are key to future growth for AOL, said Armstrong, who said that last summer 75 percent of insertion orders included both platforms. Today, it's close to 100 percent, he said. The company reported that videos, video views, and video revenue rose at double-digit rates, though it did not break out revenues for video advertising.

Newscast using Foursquare to report news.

Groupon is planning an IPO of around $500 to $700 million in the next two weeks, according to reports in DealBook and the Wall Street Journal, on a valuation of around $12 billion.

"Sources tell The Hollywood Reporter that the NBCUniversal-owned cable network has closed a deal with Esquire parent Hearst Corporation to shift the former gaming network to a destination more in line with the modern male. The effort is designed to capture a growing, upscale demographic that isn't being reached through other male networks, including adrenaline-heavy Spike and History. "

Report on beauty marketing 

On Friday, the company issued an earnings restatement saying they'd actually lost $64.9 million in the fourth quarter of 2011 rather than the $42.7 million they'd originally reported.

Display Business Trends for Publishers

"Disney considered buying viral media website BuzzFeed but did not want to shell out the $1 billion asking price, according to a report."

Nest Labs has released a new report based on data from hundreds of thousands of Nest Protect devices. The anonymous data shows that carbon monoxide leaks are more frequent than many may have expected, and that at least one million households in the US, UK, and Canada are exposed to high levels of carbon monoxide each year. Around 400 people are killed by carbon monoxide poisoning every year in the US, so Nest's data could help safety experts better understand why and when leaks happen