On your birthday, I find you wherever I turn. I will say that I have loved aspects of you, hated others, and could not understand many more.

– One of three tweets that were the basis for an arrest warrant for Hamza Kashgari, who addressed the Prophet Muhammad on his birthday, and is now charged as apostate and an infidel, both of which are crimes punishable by death

The professional social-networking service said its fourth-quarter net income rose to $6.9 million from $5.3 million a year ago, while revenue hit $167.7 million from $81.7 million a year earlier. Analysts had expected LinkedIn to report adjusted earnings of seven cents a share, and $160 million in revenue, according to Thomson Reuters data.

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The effort marks the Internet company’s first full-fledged effort to design and market consumer electronics devices under the Google brand, and represents a sharp shift in strategy. Google has up to now mainly focused on developing the Android software that powers devices such as smartphones and tablets and allowing other companies to build and brand the hardware that uses it.

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At any given Summit, you might rub elbows with Bill Clinton, Russell Simmons, the president of Georgia, or drummer ?uestlove from The Roots. The event is not lecture-driven; it’s meant to inspire open discussions and connect people through out-of-the-box activities.

The atmosphere at this year’s Summit Basecamp was even more dynamic and powerful than in previous years. It took place in Squaw Valley, Calif., and brought many attendees together on a deeper level. Regardless of the range of business icons, politicians and artists, Rishi Malhotra, President of Bollywood content distributor Saavn notes, “Summit has this unique ability to make everybody equal.”

Unlike other multi-discipline events, Summit Series doesn’t just promote back-patting and lofty ideas, it actually drives action. Connections kindled through the event have led to hundreds of start-up investments, non-profit initiatives and new art programs.

Here are four trends buzzed around the Summit that could spur the next wave of innovation:

1. Technology fuels an education revolution. Catalyzed by cloud computing, online video, and the lower cost of tablet PCs, a crop of new initiatives are set to change the way the world learns. Four notable examples are:

   Free classes: Khan Academy, with its mission to “provide a free world-class education to anyone anywhere,” is leading this entire space. Over 2600 online videos are now free to the world, covering a variety of educational topics.

   The Behaving Game: ClassDojo has built an entirely new model for managing student behavior in real time. The rewards system feels like the future of getting a “gold star” for good behavior. The company came out of the U.K. last summer and is already one of the fastest growing education technology companies, ever. ClassDojo is diving into the realm of behavior management, a completely untapped area of education innovation.

   Extreme PC makeover: Neverware is another awesome company looking to make “old school computers” new again, thanks to one central server installation. The Neverware Juicebox is a server appliance that ends the need to upgrade all desktops in a school. Once installed on the school’s network, all of the PCs run Windows 7 as though they were new, fast computers. So instead of being forced to replace old PCs, schools can use Neverware’s affordable service to keep machines up to date with the newest OS available.

   DIY coding: Thanks to Codecademy, programming is no longer a skill reserved for the Internet elite. With its interactive self-teaching JavaScript course, Codecademy encourages individuals with no coding background to dive in and learn how to build Web sites at their own pace.

   New companies like these, coupled with Apple’s push behind its iBooks textbook store and Pearson Education’s incubation AlleyOop, which gamifies adaptive learning, demonstrates that major corporate support for the sector is also happening. Combined with this group of start-ups and many others, 2012 should be the year of education innovation.

2. Beyond Facebook. Despite Facebook’s pending IPO, this year’s Summit buzzed about a new cadre of social media gathering spots.

   Google+ was a popular topic among many Summit attendees. Discussions revolved around Google’s ability to scale its social network and leverage assets such as Gmail and Android. Some attendees believed that Google’s ability to potentially turn on a requirement that any new Android user sign in via Google+ could be a major game changer, resulting in hundreds of millions — if not a billion — new users.

   Interest-based social networks were a hot topic this year. These services, many of which are primarily accessed via smartphone or tablet, cater to specific passions — with particular buzz around services like Pinterest, Thumb, Foodspotting and Instagram.

3. Go global or risk losing out to your copycat. The old rules of building a start-up in America meant incremental growth: Build a critical mass and then expand, country by country, only making moves when a service or product could meet the needs of a new market and its economics.

   Today’s start-ups are going global at a faster rate than ever before because a good idea spreads faster than ever. The rate of copycat creators in Asia, Europe and Latin America is forcing U.S. start-ups to launch and then expand quickly, before spinoffs of their own products surpass them. A new crop of gatekeepers appeared at this year’s Summit, offering effective ways to take businesses to China, India and the Middle East. Lesson of Summit: Once you create a hit service, you need to rapidly scale it before someone else does.

4. Self-Measurement. The past two Summits have spread a powerful message of self-measurement. Based on the nearly full sessions ranging from breathing to yoga to self-confidence, tomorrow’s leaders are more in tune with their spiritual, physical and mental health.
   As Tim Chang, Managing Director of Mayfield Fund summed up nicely, “Summit was a great checkup and check in on the power of self-evaluation and the potential for innovation in every aspect of our lives.”

   Additionally, technology and self-measurement are aligning with each other. From blood-pressure-monitoring iPhone apps to memory-strengthening online videos, there was an emphasis on ways to improve one’s daily routine, focusing on a true work/life balance. Expect technology and self-measurement to continue to grow in sync and produce amazing new services.

Let’s see how these trends play out in 2012.

As Chief Talker of VSCpr, Chattha’s agency has led strategy and public relations efforts for over sixty technology brands representing a combined $20bn in public market capitalization and disruptive start-ups that have successfully exited for a combined $4.7bn to the likes of Google, Visa, Nokia, AOL and Omnicom Group. Chattha received the gold star award for Publicist of the Year and Digital Communications Professional of the Year as judged by reporters at the New York Times and Washington Post in the 2011 Bulldog Reporter Stars of PR Awards. Follow him on Twitter at @vijaychattha.

Like Dropbox, Google’s storage service, called Drive, is a response to the growth of Internet-connected mobile devices like smartphones and tablets and the rise of “cloud computing,” or storing files online so that they can be retrieved from multiple devices, these people said.

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The 54-year-old executive, who was hired last month, hasn’t mentioned specifics during meetings with employees and business associates.

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But when it comes to the verdict, surely the reporter should rush to the live microphone or camera first — even if that means being beaten by a rival tweeter?

– BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones on the BBC’s new guidelines that prohibit its reporters from breaking news on Twitter

Yahoo owns 40% of Alibaba Group.

The six banks — Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Ltd., Credit Suisse Group AG, DBS Bank Ltd., Deutsche Bank AG, HSBC Holdings PLC and Mizuho Financial Group — are in the process of getting internal credit approval to underwrite the loan, which is said to have a tenor of three years with a yield of around 4%.

The loan is expected to be finalized this month, the people said.

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However, antitrust enforcers in the U.S. and Europe remain concerned about Google’s commitment to license key Motorola patents to competitors on fair terms, those people said, and are likely to closely monitor Google’s use of the patents. The European Commission has set a deadline of Monday to decide whether to approve the acquisition.

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But maybe not. Michael Crichton, for instance, had insisted in 1993 that “what we now understand as the mass media will be gone within ten years. Vanished, without a trace.” Crichton, of course, wrote “Jurassic Park,” so we must defer to him on dinosaur expertise. But he was far wide of the mark on the extinction of mass media, so perhaps his vision about newspapers in particular was also flawed.

A hint of where Crichton’s vision went wrong can likely be found in the same speech, where he said this:

“More and more, people understand that they pay for information. Online databases charge by the minute. As the link between payment and information becomes more explicit, consumers will naturally want better information. They’ll demand it, and they’ll be willing to pay for it. There is going to be — I would argue there already is — a market for extremely high-quality information. …”

But that’s not what happened, at least outside of trade publishing (industry newspapers, magazines, and newsletters). The closed online services of the 1980s (CompuServe had started its service in 1979) and early 1990s, with their usage fees, gave way in the mid and late 1990s to the open Web. Prodigy, which already in 1991 boasted a million members, was sold at a billion-dollar loss in May 1996, just 18 months after the release of the test version of the Netscape Navigator browser.

And notions of what consumers would pay for — and what they should even be asked to pay for — were turned on their heads. By early 1996 the media theorist (and former Grateful Dead lyricist) John Perry Barlow was writing in Wired that the optimal price for information in many cases was … free. “Most soft goods,” Barlow declared, “increase in value as they become more common. Familiarity is an important asset in the world of information. It may often be true that the best way to raise demand for your product is to give it away.”

And that is precisely what newspaper publishers and others fairly quickly sought to do.

The rest of this e-essay is available on iTunes.

Richard Tofel is general manager of ProPublica, the Pulitzer Prize-winning nonprofit investigative journalism newsroom. At ProPublica, he has responsibility for all of its non-journalism operations, including communications, legal, development, finance and budgeting, and human resources. He was formerly the assistant publisher of The Wall Street Journal and, earlier, an assistant managing editor of the paper; vice president, corporate communications for Dow Jones & Company; and an assistant general counsel of Dow Jones.

In a letter to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, Apple said the telecommunications industry lacks consistent licensing schemes for the many patents necessary to make mobile devices, and offered suggestions for setting appropriate royalty rates that all members would follow.

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When people talk to one another long enough, they want to meet, and when they’ve been in one another’s presence, they want to keep in touch.

– Clay Shirky, talking to David Carr about the “ingredients of communication” in the digital world

The company’s revenue missed analysts’ expectations amid a decline in film revenue and essentially flat advertising revenue at ESPN.

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In a letter addressed to Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday, California State Teachers’ Retirement System Director of Corporate Governance Anne Sheehan wrote that, “We are disappointed that the Facebook board will not have any woman members.”

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While most gadget lovers hunt for empty wall sockets to charge their devices, Kevin Bartholomew just plugs his cellphone into his hip. That is where he keeps a nine-inch device looped around his belt that converts the kinetic energy of his motion into enough power to keep his devices running.

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As the world has realigned from being about portals and then search and now social, how do you build a media company for a social world? And a big part of that is scoops and exclusives and original content, and it’s also about cute kittens in an entertaining cultural context.

– Jonah Peretti, CEO of BuzzFeed, in conversation with David Carr of the New York Times

In a letter filed in a California court last month, a lawyer said Motorola, which is being acquired by Google Inc., had “demanded” the royalty for a license of its patents.

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A person familiar with the matter said Google removed content from its search service, YouTube video site and Blogger after receiving an order to do so from Judge Mukesh Kumar of a New Delhi district court.

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As long as the newspaper was a bundle, no one ever had to care that people were buying it for radically different reasons. But once you go online, and people can unbundle things, where you can traffic directly to a story without going through the home page or any of the rest of it, suddenly what it — the individual choices made by individual readers come to matter a lot.

– Clay Shirky, on NPR’s Talk of the Nation with Neal Conan

The company released a statement saying: “Steve’s passion and energy left an indelible mark on Micron, the Idaho community and the technology industry at large.”

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At one point, our conversation turned to the idea of a Social Operating System, something that becomes an underlying platform for all things we do online, that creates continual connectivity between you and and all your friends. As I look back over Facebook’s history and excitedly toward its future, I think we can all say that Facebook has essentially captured that vision. It has presented to us a world where applications run on top of a social infrastructure and where our identities travel throughout our digital experience with us through Facebook Connect. I could not be more impressed.

The way the principles of the social operating system continue to evolve will have a tremendous impact on our society.

First, marketing will change. Friend-to-friend marketing has already shown its strength as the driving force of growth for companies like Gilt Groupe, Uncovet.com and Fab.com, whereby you earn credits with the site by referring your friends to sign up. The idea of shifting traditional marketing spend to continually incentivizing your customers to market on your behalf is changing the way I look at developing systems. The idea, though it sounds simple, has many ramifications. For example, it requires new software to be built with a new set of metrics in order to understand how friend-to-friend marketing is working. It would also lower the cost per acquisition compared to traditional marketing spends.

Second, it’s the influencers who will have most of the power. As we become more and more reliant on our social graph for discovery, the less and less dependent we will become on traditional media. This is one of the principles that drives Twitter, Pinterist and YouTube adoption. We can see how effective is it with companies like ShoeDazzle and BeachMint, which build product lines around celebrities and influencers online. By doing this, they immediately drive higher sales. I theorize these influencer networks will be the next ad networks, having the sway to move audiences to new services and drive sales.

Lastly, these new principles of social software design will prevail. Built on top of platforms like Facebook, they will quickly replace older systems. In the last big wave of acquisitions, we saw media companies and portals buying start-ups to bring innovation inside. I believe the next set of acquirers will be from a wider, more distributed set of buyers — ranging from consumer product brands to financial companies — who are looking for innovators building the next generation of solutions on top of the social operating system. (Looking at the staggering growth rate of the socially-minded site Fab.com quickly reminds us that products built with social grow faster than those without.)

With Facebook’s IPO, the general public will be even more vested in its success and thus help to further boost Facebook’s exponential growth. Facebook’s investors will, in essence, collectively help to drive forward the innovation of social operating system platforms. In addition, any companies that rely on Facebook’s technology or its platform — such as Zynga, Renen and Snap Interactive — should also see a lift in value. This wave of new technology companies will reinvent, once again, the way we live online.

Now that Facebook has gone public, I think we can call the era of Web 2.0 over. The social web is taking its rightful place as the new king.

Michael Jones is the founder and CEO of technology studio Science. The former CEO of Myspace, Jones is a long-time entrepreneur, building and selling numerous successful online and mobile businesses. He is also an individual investor in numerous private start-ups, and, in full disclosure, holds stock in some of the companies listed above.

If the company’s revised net-loss forecast of ¥780 billion — its previous projection, in October, was ¥420 billion — proves accurate, it would be the second-largest ever for a Japanese manufacturing company. Hitachi Ltd. lost ¥787.34 billion in the fiscal year ended March 2009, as the financial crisis struck.

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