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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Several Republican senators, including Orrin Hatch of Utah, John Cornyn of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida, said Wednesday they couldn’t support the legislation in its current form.

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The centerpiece of Ford Motor Co.’s online campaign for the 2012 Focus was a free Facebook page hosted by an orange-colored puppet that in a few weeks won over a new, younger audience for the once-stodgy compact.

Ford spokespuppet “Doug” drew crowds to online conversations and videos that starred him clowning around the new Focus. Doug inspired more than 43,000 Facebook users to click “Like,” the icon that broadcasts to friends a thumbs-up approval of a brand or product.

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Take Google Inc. When the Internet titan came onto the scene in the 1990s, the company first focused on building technologies for searching the Web before considering its advertising prospects, recalls Rishad Tobaccowala, chief strategy and innovation officer at Vivaki, the digital advertising company owned by Publicis Groupe SA.

It wasn’t until a competitor, GoTo.com, created a pay-for-placement search product in 1998 that Google got serious, he says. The way that service worked, a company would make a bid to appear at the top of a search results page then pay if a consumer clicked. Google launched a similar advertising product in 2000. The key difference was that the system took into account the relevance of the ad to decide its placement on the search engine results page, not just the amount that the advertiser paid.

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The funeral is characterized as a small private gathering, this person said.

The event comes two days after Mr. Jobs passed away after battling an undisclosed illness. He previously underwent surgery for pancreatic cancer and had a liver transplant.

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Sitting down to chat last year with Amazon.com Inc.’s Chief Executive Jeff Bezos, television host Charlie Rose announced that the two would discuss “the Kindle,” Amazon’s e-reader. But throughout the interview, Mr. Bezos repeatedly dodged the word “the,” saying how “Kindle is succeeding,” that “Kindle is a companion to tablet computers” and touting how many e-books are “available for Kindle.”

Mr. Bezos is part of a growing cadre of marketers who conscientiously object to using articles — the tiny English words “the,” “a” and “an” that typically precede many nouns.

Nintendo Co.’s website shows gamers “what Wii is all about.” As far back as 1984, Apple Inc. said in a commercial that it would “introduce Macintosh.” Today, an Apple video enthuses: “There’s never been anything like iPad.” Some companies make the drop official. Research In Motion Ltd.’s style guide specifies that “BlackBerry” should be used “as an adjective and not as a noun or verb.” An unacceptable usage, it says: “the BlackBerry.”

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But after spreading its bets to clean technology — and missing out on early-stage investments in some of the hottest new Internet companies — the firm is scrambling to grab a leadership role in the latest Web boom.

That was evident at a June event in San Francisco, where the firm hosted a packed room of entrepreneurs. At the front of the room, Kleiner venture capitalist Bing Gordon spent an hour onstage espousing his theory of “gamification” — that is, how start-ups can benefit from using online gaming techniques — to the gathering.

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Unbeknownst to owner Joe Angelastri, cyber thieves planted a software program on the cash registers at his two Chicago-area magazine shops that sent customer credit-card numbers to Russia. MasterCard Inc. demanded an investigation, at Mr. Angelastri’s expense, and the whole ordeal left him out about $22,000.

His experience highlights a growing threat to small businesses. Hackers are expanding their sites beyond multinationals to include any business that stores data in electronic form. Small companies, which are making the leap to computerized systems and digital records, have now become hackers’ main target.

“Who would want to break into us?” asked Mr. Angelastri, who says the breach cut his annual profit in half. “We’re not running a bank.”

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Then there are the regularly scheduled perks at the 120-person vacation-rental marketplace outfit, including Mustache Mondays (employees wear fake ones), Yoga Tuesdays (before company lunch) and Thursday Recess (company-wide kickball).

Working at Airbnb “is like a really fun school where you get paid,” says Joe Gebbia, the 29-year-old co-founder of the company, whose offices have a two-story indoor tree house and a section of a retired Pan Am plane. “Or maybe it’s more like camp.”

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On Wednesday, U.S. Reps. Edward Markey and Joe Barton sent Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg a two-page letter with questions about a security flaw that gave advertisers a way to access users’ personal information.

On Tuesday, security firm Symantec reported that it found some Facebook apps shared with unauthorized advertisers and other third parties access tokens that could be used to read or post information on a user’s account. On Tuesday, Facebook said it fixed the problem, and that accessing such information would violate its policies. Its own investigation found no evidence of the issue resulting in private information being leaked.

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One of these people said the company is on track to exceed $2 billion in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, or Ebitda, in 2011. That is above the numbers from Facebook that circulated several months ago when Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies invested in the closely held Internet company. This person wouldn’t say by how much Facebook might beat that earnings guidance.

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But Facebook is still trying to find a path to Washington, where the company has only a fledgling lobbying operation, even though it finds its privacy policies under increasing scrutiny and is trying to navigate a politically sensitive expansion into China.

In seven years, Facebook has risen from a tiny start-up to an Internet power with a potential market value estimated at more than $50 billion. Now an online forum with more than 600 million users, Facebook faces growing pressure from lawmakers and regulators concerned about the way it uses personal information shared by its users.

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As the seven-year-old company ramps up its hiring and adds new features to its social network, it is disrupting the businesses of established companies like Yahoo Inc. and Google Inc. and putting even more Internet firms on notice.

Facebook, which has more than 600 million users and was valued at $50 billion in a recent funding round, is grabbing online-advertising from Yahoo, Myspace and others. The social network is a potential rival in electronic payments to eBay Inc.’s PayPal, while partnerships Facebook is cementing with smartphone makers set the stage for competition with Apple Inc. and Google in mobile services.

Meanwhile, Facebook is tussling with Google and Microsoft Corp. for top engineers.

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[Read an earlier, related story by BoomTown's Kara Swisher: Even If It Had 500 Shareholders Today, Facebook Doesn’t Have to Disclose Financials Until Spring of 2012]

The popular social-networking company said in the document that it intends to breach a critical 500-shareholder limit this year. Crossing the limit triggers a Securities and Exchange Commission rule that requires that companies file financial information—even if their shares don’t trade publicly.

Facebook’s intentions have been under heavy debate since the company launched a private share offering through Goldman Sachs Group Inc. this week. Some investors have wondered whether the arrangement with Goldman was designed to avoid such disclosures. The document makes clear that isn’t the case, and that Facebook will likely be a publicly traded company in 2012.

A Facebook spokesman declined to comment. Goldman Sachs declined to comment.

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Such steep discounts are a cornerstone of Amazon’s strategy to gain traction in a market in which iTunes remains the dominant player. At the same time, a debate has arisen among music labels about whether such discounts risk undermining the value of their products.

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Mark Zuckerberg has signed onto the “Giving Pledge,” which asks its signatories to commit publicly to give away the majority of their wealth.

The 26-year-old is one of 16 billionaires new to the pledge, which now totals more than 50 donors. New names include AOL co-founder Steve Case, investor Carl Icahn and former junk-bond king Michael Milken.

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This Cyber Monday isn’t likely to be either the beginning or the biggest day for holiday shopping – but that’s likely all good news for online retail.

Early data from the extended holiday weekend show that few people were waiting until they returned to work to do their online shopping. Instead, they started right after eating Thanksgiving dinner.

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Facebook said the issue only affected a “fraction of a percentage” of the social network’s users, and they fixed it within hours. The company also deleted all the ID information that some people sent in.

But the incident raised an interesting question: Why was Facebook asking for real-world IDs in the first place?

Unlike some other social networks, Facebook takes pride (and pitches advertisers) on the idea that its users present their real-world selves. But the ID request isn’t part of a broader effort to verify users’ identities–something that sites in countries such as China sometimes do.

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The idea behind the day is to encourage people to take stock of their ballooning Facebook friend lists and to cull the marginal folks. Kimmel has been pushing the idea on his ABC show “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” this month, including even a theme song from country singers Brad Paisley and Darius Rucker. The idea seems to have some resonance with people, with “unfriend” turning into a trending topic on Twitter earlier on Wednesday.

In an interview Wednesday with the WSJ’s Video Network’s Simon Constable (see below), Kimmel said, “it just seemed to me that people are wasting a lot of time on Facebook talking to people or catching up with people they don’t want to catch up with.”

He said he actually has just 10 to 12 real friends. Most people on Facebook are “annoying,” he said. “No one needs to know what television show you’re watching or what you just ate, or if you’re feeling hungy, or tired or anything. … Share a little bit less, I think is the message here. For those who have Facebook, whittle it down to the people you really talk to.”

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In a new report out on Tuesday, analyst Sucharita Mulpuru forecasts online sales in the U.S. in November and December will increase 16 percent over last year, reaching $52 billion. Retail sales as a whole are likely to increase just 2.3 percent, according to the National Retail Federation.

Last month, eMarketer analyst Jeffrey Grau similarly forecast that holiday sales would increase 14 percent.

Why is e-commerce continuing to chip away at old-fashioned retail? Online shopping is still winning a few new converts, but those are few and far between, says Mulpuru. Rather, online retailers like Amazon.com are convincing existing customers to try out buying new things online–so people who might have started out just buying books online 10 years ago today have since also become ok with the idea of buying shoes or diapers online, too. “People become evangelized to the channel when they start shopping in a couple of categories,” says Mulpuru.

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Participation in the program is free and voluntary for companies, which would need to set up company profile pages and add products to be reviewed before users could leave a recommendation. The program has some 30 participating companies at launch, including JetBlue, Liberty Mutual Insurance, Microsoft Corp. and Harvard Business School Executive Education.

Participating companies will be able to review the recommendations, respond to them, and possibly delete frivolous ones, LinkedIn said.

The closely held company has in recent months been adding new functionality to its website to become a hub for the information that professionals need to do their jobs. “A big part of what we’re working to do is becoming the essential source of information for our membership,” said LinkedIn Chief Executive Officer Jeff Weiner.

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Some “apps,” the small programs that let users play games or share information with each other on the social-networking site, were sending users’ Facebook ID numbers to third-party marketing or data firms, in violation of Facebook’s privacy policies. An ID can be used to look up a user’s name and other publicly available information on the social network and link it to their use of the app. Such information can be used by companies that build profiles of Internet users by tracking their online activities.

Facebook didn’t identify the data broker that was buying user IDs. But it said it had reached an agreement with RapLeaf Inc., which it described as “the data broker who came forward to work with us on this situation.” It’s unclear whether Facebook is implicating RapLeaf and neither company responded to questions.

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The data were primarily sent by MySpace when users clicked on ads on the website. MySpace had pledged to discontinue the practice of sending personal data when users click on ads after the Journal reported it in May.

A MySpace spokesman said the data identify the user profile being viewed but not necessarily the person who clicked on the ad. MySpace is owned by News Corp., which also owns The Wall Street Journal.

MySpace, which had 58 million visitors in the U.S. in September, has been struggling to turn its business around in the face of tough competition from Facebook Inc., which had 148 million U.S. visitors last month, according to comScore Inc.

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The issue affects tens of millions of Facebook app users, including people who set their profiles to Facebook’s strictest privacy settings. The practice breaks Facebook’s rules, and renews questions about its ability to keep identifiable information about its users’ activities secure.

The problem has ties to the growing field of companies that build detailed databases on people in order to track them online—a practice the Journal has been examining in its What They Know series. It’s unclear how long the breach was in place. On Sunday, a Facebook spokesman said it is taking steps to “dramatically limit” the exposure of users’ personal information.

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Chris Cox, Facebook’s 28-year-old vice president of product, manages the teams of programmers and designers behind last week’s unveiling of the social network’s newest feature–the ability to sort small groups of friends–as well as other recent additions like check-ins at real-world places.

In a company filled with often reclusive programmers, Mr. Cox is an extrovert who plays in a reggae band. His top job is deepening Facebook’s role in the lives of its users while toeing the line on privacy concerns by making the site hew to real-world social norms.
A Stanford-trained software engineer who joined Facebook in 2005 after dropping out of a graduate-degree program, he takes a social approach to designing products. Humans, not computer formulas, Mr. Cox insists, can make Facebook and the Internet more useful.

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