At issue here are a pair of cases born out of autocomplete searches that associated individuals with words like “Scientology” and “fraud,” and “prostitute” and “escort.” Google insists it has no control over autocomplete suggestions, which are automatically generated according to the frequency of keyword searches. And while the court agreed, it determined that the company has an obligation to remove defamatory suggestions when they are brought to its attention.

“We are disappointed with the decision from the German Supreme Court,” a Google spokesman said. “We believe that Google should not be held liable for terms that appear in autocomplete as these are predicted by computer algorithms based on searches from previous users, not by Google itself. We are waiting for the written grounds to review the decision in detail.”

In a Tuesday ruling, the Berlin Regional Court declared eight of the 15 clauses in Apple’s data use policy invalid because they don’t comply with German law, and forbade the company from doing things like asking customers for “global consent” to use their data.

Since Apple had already agreed to abandon the other seven clauses earlier this year, the court’s ruling means the company now has to either adjust its privacy policy to accommodate Germany’s requirements, develop an entirely new one specific to the country, or prevail on its likely inevitable appeal of the ruling. Apple declined comment.

Commissioner Johannes Caspar ordered the U.S. Internet company to pay 145,000 euros ($189,000) for collecting data of private Wi-Fi networks when Google’s cars drove through the streets to take pictures from 2008 until 2010.

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Sources familiar with the negotiations tell AllThingsD that HP CEO Meg Whitman wants out of the $47 million, 15-year naming rights deal, which is scheduled to end in 2016. The move is part of a global reevaluation by HP of its marketing efforts and sponsorships. The change could be announced as early as this summer, in time for the 2013-14 hockey season.

Software giant SAP is said to be interested in taking over the naming rights. Its founder, former co-CEO and chairman of its supervisory board, Hasso Plattner, is the majority owner of the Sharks. Plattner, who ranks at No. 122 on the Forbes magazine list of global billionaires, with a net worth of $8.9 billion, recently bought out two other co-owners, the longtime Kleiner Perkins venture capitalist Kevin Compton, and former VeriSign CEO Stratton Sclavos. Following that deal, Plattner’s stake in the team is said to be in the neighborhood of 90 percent.

HP spokesman Michael Thacker declined to comment, as did SAP spokesman James Dever.

A change in the arena’s naming rights would have to be approved by the San Jose city council. Michelle McGurk, a spokeswoman for San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed, had no immediate comment. Update, 4:50 PM PDT: I just received a statement from McGurk. See it below.

Scott Emmert, a spokesman for the San Jose Sharks, didn’t immediately return messages seeking a comment.

According to people familiar with the discussions, Plattner raised the issue of HP’s naming rights with Whitman directly during a routine meeting. HP is a significant SAP customer. Asked if HP intended to hold on to its naming rights through 2016 as the current agreement states, Whitman said, “Frankly, I’d like to get out of it.”

HP inherited the naming rights from Compaq, the computer company it acquired in 2002 for $25 billion. At the time, San Jose’s arena was known as The Compaq Center at San Jose. It has been known as the HP Pavilion at San Jose since late 2002. The rights are said to cost HP about $3.1 million a year.

As annual expenditures go, $3.1 million is pocket change for HP. While it doesn’t disclose marketing expenditures directly, those expenses fall under the “selling, general and administrative” (SG&A) line item on HP’s income statement, which in fiscal 2012 was $13.5 billion.

Still, since Whitman took over as CEO in 2011, marketing functions that had previously been run by HP’s disparate business units — the PC unit, the printer unit and so on — have been centralized under Chief Marketing Officer Marty Homlish.

Over the years, HP has become involved with hundreds, if not thousands, of events and programs that it sponsors as a way of raising the visibility of the HP brand. Those programs and sponsorships are now in the process of being systematically reevaluated, and many are being canceled outright.

The HP Pavilion name was given to the arena to align with the company’s main PC brand, known as Pavilion. But with personal computer sales in rapid decline, attaching the brand name to a sporting facility is no longer seen as an effective use of marketing dollars, people familiar with HP’s thinking say. Money saved from canceled marketing efforts is being redirected into either new marketing efforts or into HP’s research and development budget.

HP will still have access to the arena and to San Jose Sharks games. Sources say the company intends to hold on to a single luxury box it owns to entertain customers. Oddly enough, the naming rights for the luxury suites belong to another tech company: They’re currently known as Citrix Suites.

Informally known as the Shark Tank, the arena seats 17,562 for hockey games, and more than 19,000 for concerts. It hosts as many as 190 events a year, including the SAP Open, a men’s tennis tournament. It was briefly the home court of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors during a period when the Oakland Coliseum was under reconstruction.

Update: Here’s the statement I just got from Michelle McGurk, a spokeswoman for San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed:

“We’ve enjoyed a long and productive partnership with both the Sharks and HP, and we greatly appreciate their long-standing and valuable commitment to our community.

“The current agreement is scheduled to end in 2016, so we would be starting a process in the coming year or so to explore contract alternatives in the normal course of business.

“Because the Arena is an outstanding facility and Silicon Valley a unique location, we’re optimistic that we will be able to end up in position of mutual benefit for everyone, without speculating on any specific outcome.”

Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) this week approved a deal under which the country’s government will purchase 5,000 BlackBerry Z10s for employee use. The devices are all to be outfitted with Secusmart technology, which will bring to them additional security measures like data encryption and secure voice and text messaging.

The deal is a nice win for BlackBerry, which over the past few years has lost its footing in the enterprise market it long dominated. Now, with its new BlackBerry 10 operating system and devices like the Z10, the company is doing all it can to retain those bread-and-butter enterprise customers. This contract with the German government is an encouraging sign that some of those efforts are paying off.

But it’s a tough battle. As I’ve written here before, BlackBerry’s fight for the enterprise space is beginning to look a lot like the one already lost in the consumer space.

With the consumerization of IT in full swing, and more companies offering “Bring Your Own Device” plans to their employees, BlackBerry is losing its grip on enterprise. By losing the smartphone battle in the consumer market, the company has put its position in the enterprise market at risk. Now it must struggle for relevance in a broader market in which the lines between consumer and enterprise are blurring. And that’s a tough place to be for a company that has only recently fielded a competitive smartphone OS.

Outside the U.S., iMac shipping windows remain at a week or more. In France and the U.K., they’re five to seven business days for the 21.5-inch models and one to two weeks for the 27-inch models. In Germany, the window is two weeks for both models. And in Japan, the 21.5-inch models ship in two to three weeks, and the 27-inch models in three to four weeks. So, overseas, iMac availability clearly remains somewhat constrained.

Why the intercontinental disparity in shipping windows? Simple: Apple has amassed enough North American inventory to meet expected demand. But this is true only of the iMac’s four standard models. The addition of any customization, even if it’s simply swapping in a trackpad for a mouse, pushes the device’s ship time back out to two to three weeks. Outside the U.S., the story is the same as it has been to date. IMac supplies still aren’t at the level Apple wants. As CEO Tim Cook noted on the company’s last earnings call, “We left the quarter with significant constraints on the iMac. … We are confident that we are going to significantly increase the supply. But the demand here is very strong, and we are not certain that we will achieve a supply-demand balance during the quarter.”

That remains the case today, as these varied shipping windows demonstrate. Which is not to say that Apple isn’t making headway. It is. As I noted here recently, Mac sales rose 31 percent year over year for the month of January, according to NPD, and the reason was likely improved iMac availability. But again, that was in the U.S. To reach supply-demand equilibrium overseas, Apple has to ramp up iMac production even more.

A Mannheim Regional Court on Friday ordered a stay of a Samsung suit against Apple that alleges the iPhone maker’s VoiceOver screen-access technology violated its patent on display into speech data.

The mechanics of this particular spat and the court’s ruling on it are a bit too byzantine to dive into here, but it’s worth a look in broad strokes simply as an example of just how low players are willing to stoop in IP battles like the one between Apple and Samsung. So, in short: Samsung holds a patent on a feature that allows devices to read text aloud to their users with the press of a button. The company asserted that patent against Apple’s accessibility features, specifically VoiceOver which is specifically designed for anyone with impaired vision. Caught in the middle: The blind, low-vision users, folks with dyslexia and anyone else who might benefit from having what appears on their computer screen described to them out loud.

Yes, this move by Samsung against Apple was a tactical one in a nasty battle in which billions of dollars are at stake. Yes, it’s just business. But it’s ill-conceived. Even leaving aside the ethics of asserting a patent against a feature designed to help the blind, this is unwise. It’s the PR equivalent of punching yourself in the face. Samsung has now identified itself as a company willing to accept the loss of accessibility for the vision-impaired as collateral damage in its battle with Apple. It has made a big public move to make it more difficult for the blind to use computers. That’s just foolish — more so, now that the judge presiding over the case has stayed the suit. Again, this is just business and battle, but there’s a PR war being fought here, as well. And Samsung is not doing itself any favors with poorly thought-out assaults like this one.

Reached for comment, Samsung offered a boilerplate statement on the larger IP battle. “For decades, we have heavily invested in pioneering the development of technological innovations in the mobile industry, which have been constantly reflected in our products,” a company spokesman told AllThingsD. “We continue to believe that Apple has infringed our patented mobile technologies, and we will continue to take the measures necessary to protect our intellectual property rights.”

Hubert Burda Media/DLD Alec Ross (left) in conversation with Nick Bilton at DLD Germany.

For as stodgy and out-of-touch as the cogs of U.S. government seem at times, it’s not all paper-pushers working behind the scenes. Some are more in touch with what’s going on in the digital world than you’d think.

Case-in-point: Alec Ross, a senior adviser for innovation to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (and soon Sen. John Kerry, who will succeed Clinton), who spoke at the DLD Conference in Munich, Germany, on Sunday evening.

Indeed, being tech savvy is built into Ross’ job description; along with the 155 other digitally focused employees at the State Department, he’s charged with finding technological solutions to the world problems, ranging from ending world hunger to dealing with violations of human rights. To the latter point, for instance, his office has helped smuggle fiber-optic cable into countries where the Internet has been restricted.

As for the coolest things he’s worked on (at least of the declassified projects he’s allowed to talk about), Ross spoke a little about two in particular, both of which I’d love to see in the field.

First, say you were a protester in Tunisia back when the Arab Spring was happening. If caught by the state, the police would almost automatically go for the cell phone you were carrying. “It’s essentially a guidebook to the resistance,” Ross noted, as the police can search through your address book, calls and emails to find the names and information on others involved in a resistance movement.

The “panic button,” a U.S. State Department creation already in the field right now, is tailor-made for those activists who live under oppressive, dictator-driven regimes. One flick of this “button” wipes your device of information completely, while storing all your emails and contact information to the cloud, so police can’t get to it.

The “commotion project,” another innovation the State Department is working on, stems from an initiative out of the New America Foundation, a non-profit public policy think tank in D.C. It’s essentially the Internet in a suitcase, giving the user the ability to set up an ad-hoc network without the need for an existing infrastructure.

It’s a key technology for activists in countries with dictators willing to shut down the Internet internally, because a) it doesn’t rely on either commercial or government-owned networks, and b) peer-to-peer networks make it more difficult for the oppressive state to snoop on protest communications.

As Secretary Clinton prepares to leave office in the coming weeks, we’ll see how much longer Ross sticks around the State Department. He didn’t say either way what his next steps would be, but I’d keep an eye on him if he decides to go back into the private sector.

Overall, it was a very appy holiday season for the mobile industry, according to Flurry, which is known for producing reports based on the information it gathers through the thousands of developers who use its analytics tools.

In its report today, Flurry said that more than 50 million iOS and Android tablets and smartphones were activated from Christmas to New Year’s Eve, and 1.76 billion applications were downloaded worldwide during that period. That’s a huge jump from last year’s figures.

In comparison, Flurry estimated last year that 1.2 billion apps were downloaded worldwide across both Android and iOS.

Here is a chart comparing the holiday week to the same number of days earlier in December:

The year-over-year progress shows just how commonplace app downloading is around the globe.

In fact, this year Flurry said that a number of weeks since late November delivered more than a billion downloads, which just last year was considered record-shattering. This year, it is forecasting that a billion weekly downloads could become a regular occurrence.

“Looking forward to 2013, Flurry expects the trend of one-billion-download weeks to become the norm, and that the industry will surpass the two-billion download week during Q4,” wrote Flurry marketing VP Peter Farago in a blog post.

Most of these downloads are still occurring in the U.S., where there is widespread adoption of smartphones and tablets. During the week, the U.S. downloaded 604 million applications, or 34.3 percent of the total. China is not exactly a close second with 183 million downloads, and the U.K., Germany and France are much further behind.

Based on Flurry’s previous reports, one of the most popular app categories is games. And based on evidence from at least two game companies, that continued to be the case this holiday season, as people picked up their phones and tablets for entertainment during their time off.

Disney Mobile said game downloads jumped 98 percent year over year to more than 15 million in 2012, from Dec. 22 to Dec. 28. It benefited from new titles such as Where’s My Holiday? and Nemo’s Reef and Monsters climbing the charts. Separately, Storm8, which publishes such titles as Dragon Story, City Story and Jewel Mania, reported that it had two million game downloads on Christmas Day, an increase of four times compared to an average Tuesday.

Tonight, new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer gave her first public interview since becoming the leader of the troubled Silicon Valley Internet giant.

Not to cranky me, of course, but to the much more amenable Fortune magazine writer and editor Pattie Sellers, who hosted the former Google exec at a dinner in Palo Alto, Calif., as part of the magazine’s Most Powerful Women franchise.

Fortune recently put a glamour shot of Mayer on the cover, and Sellers also did a profile. Now, Mayer was ready to sit down to talk about Yahoo and more.

(I wish I could have reported from the event, and almost did. I had initially been invited to the dinner at the Garden Court Hotel for about 100 guests, mostly women. But I was then waitlisted, and then told by Sellers directly that I could not attend, as the editors had decided to close out outside media and only have Fortune staffers covering it.)

Whatever! I have my ways to liveblog it and do it faster than any magazine writer can — and none involve disguising myself as a cater-waiter or solely using the Twitter feed from Fortune. As if!

Here goes:

7:50 pm: After some lovely cocktails, the audience sits down at about 10 tables of nine people and starts in on the salad course.

Soon enough, the night starts off with a speech by a McKinsey partner (and presumable sponsor of the dinner), delivering some stats as part of a study of some sort about how businesses are using — or should be using — social tools.

More than 60 percent of knowledge workers spend time exchanging information … Social can deliver an estimated $1 trillion in value.

Big news! Not! Even! Slightly! Oh dear, please get to the opening act!

Finally, Sellers gives her intro of Mayer.

8:04 pm: Sellers notes that her conference had hosted Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz in 2010 (she was ousted in 2011), and in 2011 had Mayer when she was an exec at Google (she became Yahoo CEO this year).

Now, in 2012, Mayer is top dog at Yahoo, and the youngest CEO in the Fortune 500.

“Why don’t we just call this ‘the most powerful Yahoo dinner,’” jokes Sellers.

Why not!

Mayer — for those who care, and forgive me, since I am fashion-stupid — is wearing a black frock and some heeled Mary Janes. She gets big applause when Sellers notes that Yahoo stock is up 18 percent since Mayer became CEO.

Note: It did go down when she made a shareholder misstep early in her tenure, but has gone up since she repeated mobilemobilemobile with confidence on a recent earnings call that got investors excited about her tenure.

8:08 pm: By the way, Mayer put in a call for people to vote for her as Time magazine’s Person of the Year (she is on the list of nominees — more kudos from a Time Inc. property).

Mayer starts off with basic PR messaging that she trotted out previously on the recent earnings call, around how she wants Yahoo to be focused on “delighting and engaging users” and how it is a brand that touches people every day.

Therefore, its products need to be inspiring and delightful.

Daily delight! This is the buzzword.

Also, she notes, Yahoo should be the bestest place to work.

As apparent proof of that, Mayer says that all Research In Motion BlackBerry smartphones have been banished, and that Yahoos will be using Apple’s iPhones, Google’s Android phones and Microsoft’s Windows phones.

This has been endlessly reported, even though most other Internet companies do this, but it’s a good line, anyway.

8:12 pm: By the way, iPhones are the most popular with Yahoo employees.

News at 11! (I will add that iPhones are the most popular with the Swisher boys, too, and — irony alert — one of their moms works at Google.)

Sellers then asks about what makes a good product, which is precisely why the product-savvy Mayer was brought in to fix Yahoo.

Says Mayer: “Acute user need.”

I acutely need doughnuts. Does this count?

Also, says Mayer, products have to be created in a way that is “frictionless and beautiful,” and that the offering cannot get in the consumer’s way.

Sellers asks her to name a great product. Mayer notes that she was not talking acquisitions, but quickly namechecks the iPhone and Google.

Since those companies’ market caps are a billionty times bigger than Yahoo’s, she def cannot acquire anything there.

8:17 pm: Mayer also apparently likes some kind of luxury paper made in Germany that looks like velvet. It’s Gmund, by the way.

The topic moves on to Flickr, the once hip photo-sharing service that Yahoo bought and proceeded to ignore. Meanwhile, Instagram.

Mayer says that Yahoo needs to focus on the “global suite” services that are excellent, and on executing them well.

She points out Yahoo’s fantasy football service, mentioning its recent breakdown on game day that sent fans into a tizzy.

It’s a they-love-us-so-much-they-hate-us point.

Yahoo will not do things like online maps, though, Mayer says, noting that where Yahoo cannot compete, it should partner.

Sellers asked about acquisitions.

Mayer: Mobilemobilemobile! (It worked before!)

8:22 pm: Mayer then mentions the importance of small teams that work together, such as its recent Stamped purchase.

She notes that the bigger and more strategic opportunities are around advertising technology. Calling the Rubicon Project!

Mayer veers away from a question about layoffs, a sad Yahoo tradition. I have reported previously that she will make cuts via performance reviews.

At Yahoo, she says, it’s now about performance, not potential: “No offense to potential, but what we really care about now is performance.”

No offense taken!

Also, everyone’s goals will be posted on the Yahoo Web site for everyone to see.

Oh, wait, there will surely be offense taken by those lazy potential people at Yahoo.

Mayer does add that Yahoo should be a “growth company,” and not one defined by cuts.

8:28 pm: “The consumer Internet is growing, and we need to invest,” she says.

To achieve this will be a hard job, and will take multiple years, she adds.

Sellers asks about the Disney turnaround, which Mayer is apparently fascinated with. Mayer does indeed love Disney.

Who doesn’t? (Well, me, but I am an outlier.)

Speaking of Disney, one of its directors, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, sent regrets, but has emailed a question from its board meeting in New York.

Sandberg once worked at Google with Mayer, though the pair is still not working on a search engine together.

Sandberg asks what was most surprising to Mayer about taking over at Yahoo.

Mayer says she thought the job would be hard, and her new baby would be fun. Mayer had her first child at the end of September.

“The job is fun, and the baby is easy,” says Mayer.

Sellers wants to know how Mayer gets it all done. The answer: “Ruthlessly prioritize.”

She notes that that’s why she has not talked to the media at all, and why she will not be talking after this event.

(Well, I guess I will go back to not waiting by the phone for Yahoo PR to call back. Hi Anne! — also looking forward to not getting the holiday media party invite, which is no prob as the Googlers are throwing one the same night and they usually have organic arugula picked by elves they employ that’s acutely delicious.)

Then, as a Wisconsin Green Bay Packers fan, Mayer does her version of the famous Vince Lombardi quote: “God. Family. Yahoo.”

Cheesehead moment! And Mayer and I have so much in common! Mine is: Dog. Family. Yahoo.

8:33 pm: Sellers throws in one more question from famed investor Warren Buffett, who apparently wants to know what, if Mayer was not CEO of Yahoo, would she want to run?

Not Berkshire Hathaway! Mayer says she would build something herself.

It seems as if that is what she is doing at Yahoo, so we await the result.

Until then, Mayer’s mum. So to speak.

Early indications are that the 920 is selling well. It has already cracked Amazon’s list of the Top 10 best-selling cellphones with service plans; it’s ranked ninth as I write this, but on Monday morning it occupied the No. 2 spot. Some models are also back-ordered for one to two weeks. Meanwhile, reports coming out of Europe suggest that the Lumia 920 is also selling quite well abroad — particularly in Germany, where it’s very tough to come by.

According to a statement posted to Facebook by Nokia Deutschland, a number of the company’s German retail partners have experienced Lumia 920 stock-outs since the device first became available earlier this month.

“Because of the high demand, we are aware of the reports the Lumia 920 is sold out in many shops,” Nokia explained. “Please be assured that we are working hard on having all models and all colors available in Germany for you.”

Reached for comment, a Nokia representative said that the company is seeing “a lot of interest” in its new Lumia phones, but declined to provide any details on sales.

Assuming the situation in Germany is strictly a case of strong demand and not one of average demand aided and abetted by modest supply, this is encouraging news for Nokia, which is looking to the Lumia to revive its otherwise moribund smartphone sales. Certainly, investors are viewing it that way. Nokia shares closed up more than 6 percent Monday, the biggest gain they’ve seen in weeks.

The German company gave an optimistic outlook, saying it expects to reach the upper end of its forecast if the economic environment doesn’t deteriorate.

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Ruling on another of Microsoft’s many claims against Google, a regional court of Mannheim found that Motorola’s Android-based smartphones do not violate a Microsoft patent that allows apps to work on different handsets, a boon for developers who don’t want to write code for multiple devices. In doing so, the court rejected Microsoft’s request for a sales ban on infringing devices in Germany.

So, a rare loss for Microsoft, which has so far won three injunctions against Motorola hardware in Germany as part of its efforts to force the company to pay the same licensing fees on its smartphones as other Android device makers.

“This decision does not impact multiple injunctions Microsoft has already been awarded and has enforced against Motorola products in Germany,” Microsoft said in statement. “It remains that Motorola is broadly infringing Microsoft’s intellectual property, and we hope it will join the vast majority of Android device makers by licensing Microsoft’s patents.”

In a filing this week with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California, Motorola said it had agreed to license to Apple its cellular standards-essential patents in Germany, following court approval of a FRAND (Fair, Reasonable, and Non-Discriminatory) licensing offer Apple made to it earlier in the year (and the threat of antitrust litigation if Motorola refused).

The agreed-upon royalty rate? There isn’t one. And unless the companies are able to hammer one out in the days ahead, it will be determined by the German courts.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has been trying to recruit Katie Jacobs Stanton, Twitter’s head of international markets, to take a major job on the media side of the Silicon Valley Internet giant, according to multiple sources close to the situation.

While she holds that globally-focused role at the social communications service, Stanton is an obvious choice for Mayer, who actually was once her boss at Google, including when Stanton was the product management leader in the launch of Google Finance.

More importantly for Mayer, Stanton was the key driving force in creating Yahoo Finance, perhaps its most powerful content site, when she worked there from 1999 to 2002.

In other words, she knows media.

It does not seem likely Stanton will leave Twitter, but it makes a lot of sense that Mayer would try to get her.

It’s not clear what job Mayer is offering Stanton, but it is presumably a big one. One source said it could involve running Yahoo’s powerful home page, while another said it might be an even larger role.

Ross Levinsohn, the top Yahoo exec who left recently, had been overall head of media and sales for the Americas at the company. When he was named interim CEO of Yahoo earlier this year, he had elevated Mickie Rosen as SVP of media and commerce.

Rosen is still in that role now, where she has purview over all Yahoo media and commerce efforts worldwide.

But many expect Mayer to soon begin to replace Yahoo’s top exec team with choices of her own. She has already started an overhaul of its communications team, and has been recently focusing on human resources and its product leads, too.

But media is a critical unit at Yahoo, and Stanton would easily be on any short list of candidates to fill key jobs there.

At the San Francisco-based Twitter, her focus has been on raising its profile abroad, where it has been growing by leaps and bounds. That has often been in high-profile ways, such as its use in the Arab Spring protest and after Japan’s earthquake and tsunami.

Stanton came to Twitter from a stint in Washington, D.C., including at the State Department, where she did the laudable mobile donation campaign for Haiti that raised $32 million for victims of the devastating earthquake there. She was also the White House’s first director of citizen participation, and got the Obama administration tweeting via @whitehouse.

At Google, she also worked on its Open Social efforts, as well as on launching its interactive discussion tool, Google Moderator.

But Yahoo Finance is probably still her biggest hit, and one of the few properties on the site that has remain a huge success, despite the company’s many troubles.

Stanton graduated from Rhodes College, and later got a master degree from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

I have an email into the apparently silent new PR spokeswoman at Yahoo, as well as the much more communicative spokesman at Twitter, and will update if I get a response.

We’ll see if Mayer can land Stanton, but if you want to get a good idea of the always affable and charming exec, here is a video of her in action — love her “can we go boy, girl, boy, girl” in the Q&A part at the end — at a recent event in Germany, when Twitter was opening its office in Berlin:

In related news, after picking up a midlevel Google product PR person last week to work closely with her on corporate communications, Mayer seems to have grabbed another exec from the search giant. She’s hired a policy manager named Patricia Moll Kriese to become Yahoo’s senior director for corporate projects (whatever that means!).

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Image by Joy of Tech

The Dusseldorf Higher Regional Court ruled today that the company’s Galaxy 10.1N tablet does not infringe upon Apple’s patents, and can remain on sale in Germany. But the same court also ordered an existing sales ban on Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 7.7 in the country should be extended across the entire European Union, ruling that the device imitated Apple’s designs in an “unacceptable manner.”

Samsung was understandably dismayed. “Samsung is disappointed with the court’s ruling,” the company said in a statement. “We will continue to take all available measures, including legal action, to protect our intellectual property rights and defend against Apple’s claims to ensure our products remain available to consumers throughout the European Union.”

Photo Credit: Michael Wagner/(c) FocusOnWagner.de

“Let me be one of the first industry executives to hold up my hand and say the industry has really missed the (boat) and missed an opportunity to be a champion for the consumer,” Schuster said during an onstage interview with AllThingsD’s Ina Fried at the DLDWomen conference in Munich, Germany.

Roaming charges may have made sense at one point, Schuster said, but he added that “it is not justifiable going forward, and the industry will change.”

Schuster said his company has stopped some charges for its customers who roam onto rival’s networks, and also applauded European regulations that are forcing the issue.

“I think by 2014 and 2015, basically, roaming (charges) will be abolished in Europe,” Schuster said. “I think that’s good for everybody.”

Asked about the biggest changes on the horizon, Schuster pointed to the emergence of the smartphone as digital wallet.

“You are probably gong to see the death of the credit card in the next three to four years,” Schuster said. “A lot of purchasing will be done on mobile phones.”

it’s already happening, Schuster said, noting there are already some three million to four million people buying products and services with their phones today.

As for the potential of a comeback for RIM or Nokia, Schuster isn’t holding out much hope.

“Ooof,” Schuster said. “I think they are going to have it very difficult in the future.”

Although the circumstances of his death — considered a suicide, due to persecution over his being gay, although that conclusion has recently been disputed — were tragic, there is no question that computing owes a great deal to Alan Turing.

Britain’s math whiz and famed codebreaker would have celebrated his 100 birthday today. His theories that helped crack Nazi Germany’s Enigma code in World War II might be enough, but Turing pushed the boundaries on machine intelligence and algorithms to levels that changed technology.

The development of the modern computer — including work on the stored program concept — was born from many of his key insights.

No surprise, the doodle today on Google — a company that knows a thing or two about algorithms — today is in tribute to him, a version of Turing’s hypothetical computing machine.

Here it is:

And, if you want to learn more about this tech legend, visit the Web site of Bletchley Park, the location of the secret British codebreaking activities during WWII. Turing worked there, along with 10,000 others — including 5,000 women.

The acquisition being announced today on the company’s blog is Llustre, a U.K. copycat of Fab that is identically focused on selling home decor, apparel and other items from independent designers. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Fab previously purchased Casacanda in Germany and FashionStake in the U.S. to launch a clothing vertical.

Given that Fab has only been around for a year and has seen such significant growth, it appears to have identified just what consumers want: Hard-to-find, quirky and stylish products, gadgets and clothing that are not easily found in Target, Walmart or even on Amazon.com.

The inventory may be shallow, but the product types are vast. Yesterday, the site was selling earphones shaped like bullets, vintage-looking vases, toilet seats that function as bidets and motion-activated cameras for the outdoors. In other words, it’s a hipster’s paradise.

It took Fab four months to hit one million subscribers, six months to hit 1.5 million and 12 months to hit 4.75 million. Fab has not been shy about its successes over the past year, and has raised lots of capital along the way, including a $40 million round in December from Andreessen Horowitz and others.

Now, Fab is claiming it is entering Europe in a serious way, and expects the region to contribute about 20 percent of the New York-based company’s sales this year. Fab is now shipping to 20 countries; it has 360 employees in five offices, including New York, Berlin and London.

Llustre has also moved quickly since launching only two months ago. Founded by Tracy Doree and Vivienne Bearman, it has 25 employees, works with more than 500 designers; membership and orders have tripled in the past five weeks to some unknown quantity.

Starting today, Llustre will become Fab UK. Doree and Bearman will remain on board, heading merchandising and product and operations, respectively.

New investor Jafco Ventures joined the round, with existing investors including Spark Capital and Carmel Ventures also participating.

As part of the news, Group Commerce said it had acquired the U.K. operations of Dealised in April, and has plans to expand to other countries, including Germany.

To date, the New York-based company has raised more than $40 million; it has 125 employees worldwide.

Despite steep competition in the daily deals space, the company has benefited by partnering with publishers, which already have a way to reach millions of potential consumers, and by doing so, eliminating huge marketing costs that other daily deals companies have experienced.

Last year, Group Commerce announced a deal with Hearst; more recently, it launched with CBS. Because of that, it says, revenues have been growing 30 percent every month for the past year.

A Microsoft spokesperson, however, said Motorola is prohibited from acting on the court’s decision because a U.S. court granted Microsoft a restraining order on April 11 to prevent Motorola Mobility from taking action based on the Mannheim court’s ruling.

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“We see strong momentum for our flagship in-memory platform SAP HANA, our cloud and mobile solutions, and our core applications and analytics products,” SAP Co-Chief Executives Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe said.

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Facebook filed an updated version of its S-1 public offering document today, which included somewhat disappointing first-quarter financials.

In the new filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, its fourth update for its upcoming public offering, the social networking giant’s revenue was $1.058 billion, up 46 percent for the year, but down six percent from the previous quarter.

In the first quarter of 2012, Facebook’s net income was $205 million, which was down from $233 million a year ago. The company attributed the decline to rising costs, including in marketing and in research.

Facebook also said its current share price was $30.89 each, which values the entire company at about $77 billion.

Some investors might worry about the latest results, which show a slowing in Facebook’s torrid growth. But Facebook said the quarterly decline was due to seasonality — it was flat in the same period a year ago.

As it noted in the document:

“We believe that our rates of user and revenue growth will decline over time. For example, our revenue grew 154% from 2009 to 2010, 88% from 2010 to 2011, and 45% from the first quarter of 2011 to the same period in 2012. Historically, our user growth has been a primary driver of growth in our revenue. We expect that our user growth and revenue growth rates will decline as the size of our active user base increases and as we achieve higher market penetration rates.”

Its audience, though, was still growing strongly: Facebook also said it had 532 million daily active users, up from 372 million a year ago and 483 million in December. Its monthly active users were up from 680 million last year to just over 900 million and up from 845 million from December.

Facebook also added an explicit figure for average revenue per user, which was $1.21, up six percent year over year. It also said the number of full-time employees grew 46 percent from last year to 3,539 at the end of March.

The last update to Facebook’s regulatory filing for its mid-May IPO was in late March. That one gave investors more information about a patent infringement lawsuit waged by Yahoo — Facebook noted its counter claim in the newest filing — and also its motion to dismiss Paul Ceglia’s legal attempt to garner half of the company. It then included more information about growing engagement by users of the social networking site.

Along with some other minor changes in the new document, Facebook noted, in news that was already known, that it would trade its stock on the Nasdaq market under the ticker symbol “FB.” It also said it had bought photo-sharing start-up Instagram, another piece of old news, and noted its just-struck patent deal with Microsoft.

One new detail about Instagram: Facebook forked over “approximately 23 million shares of our common stock and $300 million in cash” to buy it.

Also, said Facebook, in an interesting new section on its global business:

“In the first quarter of 2012, 50% of our revenue was generated by users in the United States and Canada, a decrease from 54% of our revenue for the first quarter of 2011, and in 2011, 52% of our revenue was generated by users in the United States and Canada, as compared to 58% in 2010, as we experienced more rapid revenue growth in markets such as Germany, Brazil, Australia, and India.”

Here is the whole updated file, if you want to peruse yourself:

4thfbs1update

Too bad it’s essentially the same injunction.

The Mannheim regional court today ruled against Apple in another case brought against it by Motorola, banning push email notifications from the company’s email services in Germany, something it already did back in February against another Apple entity.

It also ordered the company to pay Motorola Mobility damages for violating its patents, though an amount hasn’t yet been specified (as far as I can tell).

Apple, of course, contends that the ruling is invalid. In a statement given to AllThingsD it said:

“This is the same case Motorola already brought against another Apple entity and the court’s decision does not impact product availability. Our customers in Germany should have no problem finding the iPad or iPhone they want. However, we disagree with the court’s decision and plan to appeal the ruling.”

And there’s really not much else for it to do. Apple already implemented the changes to iCloud and MobileMe to comply with the earlier ruling, so it’s de facto in compliance with this one. Now, it can only wait to see how the standard-essential patent side of this argument plays out. But on that front, Apple has an advantage, as a German court has already said MoMo should accept its licensing offer. “Motorola would breach its obligations under antitrust law if it continued to demand that Apple cease and desist from the sale of the iPhone and the iPad,” the court said.