And while Huawei quickly came out to say that Yu was speaking only philosophically and that it had “no plans” for such a move, you can see why the idea stirred some chatter.

Speaking with reporters ahead of the U.K. debut of Huawei’s latest flagship smartphone, the Ascend P6, Yu, chairman of the company’s consumer business group, said Huawei might consider buying Nokia if the situation were right.

“We are considering these sorts of acquisitions; maybe the combination has some synergies, but it depends on the willingness of Nokia,” Yu said, according to the Financial Times. “We are open-minded.”

Nokia later downplayed the significance of the comments, and if the company is considering alternatives to its current strategy, it’s keeping silent about them. If we’re to take CEO Stephen Elop at his word, Nokia isn’t entertaining suitors at this time and is steadfast in its bet on Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform. As he said during the company’s general meeting earlier this summer, “We’ve made a clear decision to focus on Windows Phone with our Lumia product line. And it is with that that we will compete with competitors like Samsung and Android.”

Nokia’s American depository receipts climbed as much as 12 percent to $4.12 in New York after the Financial Times report, but they slipped back to $3.86 by the close after Bloomberg reported Huawei’s position on a potential deal.

One final point worth noting: Yu, in talking about Nokia, was openly dubious of the company’s bet on Windows Phone, an OS that the Chinese telecom group also uses. He criticized its market share as “very small” and seemed to indicate that if Nokia were to someday be acquired by Huawei, the company’s Windows Phone days would be numbered. “[Windows Phones] are weak but still require a license fee,” Yu said. “That’s not good. Android is free.”

On Monday, Microsoft said it would cut the price of the 32 gigabyte Surface RT in half for any school that purchases the tablet between June 17 and Aug. 31, 2013. So, for the next few months, K-12 and higher-education institutions can purchase the $499 Surface RT for just $199, the $599 Surface RT with Touch Cover for $249, and the $629 Surface RT with Type Cover for $289. With no minimum order requirement, that’s a potentially compelling promotion for a tablet that ships with Office — particularly for schools dealing with a death-by-a-thousand-cuts budget crisis.

According to Microsoft, the rationale for the discount is its “long tradition of offering special pricing to education customers,” and a “mission in education … to help schools, students and educators realize their full potential.”

But more practically it’s an easy way to juice sales and whittle down inventory of a tablet that has been slow to gain traction in the consumer market. According to research firm IDC, Microsoft shipped about 900,000 Surface RT and Surface Pro tablets in the first quarter of this year.

That’s a piddling amount. And if Microsoft’s first Surface RT production runs were as large as rumors say — three million to five million in the fourth quarter — then the company may be sitting on some serious inventory. That alone may be enough to justify offering a fire-sale discount like this to the education market, particularly if there are some next-generation Surface tablets in the pipeline.

But there’s likely another rationale at work here, as well. To compete with a product like the iPad, Surface needs evangelists, people who will use it daily. People who will travel with it, take it to cafes and parks. People who will bring it out into the world. And the education market is potentially a wellspring of such users.

If Microsoft’s new education promotion works as intended, we’ll see more Surface units in the wild. And that’s important. Because it’s hard to accept Surface as an alternative to the iPad or Galaxy Tab if you don’t see other people using it. Microsoft’s new Surface ads poking fun at Siri and the iPad are great. But they’re sticks and rags in a world in which you board a flight from San Francisco to New York and there are dozens of passengers with their faces obscured by iPads and Kindles, and nary a Surface in site.

Marketing only goes so far. Microsoft desperately needs to put Surface in more hands. Maybe this new initiative will help it to do that.

Microsoft declined comment on its education market discounts for Surface.

According to numerous sources close to the company, Yahoo is offering to pay $30 million to $40 million for the maker of address book apps and plugins.

That’s below the more than $40 million raised by the San Francisco-based startup from a variety of venture capitalists, including First Round Capital, Baseline Ventures and Khosla Ventures. Launched in 2008, Xobni — which is “inbox” spelled backwards — received its initial round of funding in 2006 from Y Combinator.

Sources inside Yahoo said that, as envisioned at the current acquisition offer, Xobni common shareholders might not get any of their investment back over preferred ones, which might hold up or even scotch any deal. Yahoo could certainly offer more, although sources said that seemed unlikely.

As with most of these purchases, any deal might also simply fall apart. But other sources noted that the company has been shopped to several different companies and that Yahoo has offered the best price and is the most natural home for it, given its strong email offerings.

Sources said the deal was of particular interest of Yahoo co-founder David Filo, who still plays a key tech role at Yahoo and has worked previously with Xobni’s CEO Jeff Bonforte. Before he headed Xobni, Bonforte was VP of social search and the real-time communications for Yahoo.

Bonforte would certainly be a nice re-hire for the Silicon Valley Internet giant, which is in need of leadership in the key communications area.

AllThingsD.com had previously reported on Yahoo’s interest in Xobni. It has been mulling the company — as well as a spate of others all over the tech landscape — for a while.

As Liz Gannes noted, Xobni “could be a fit for Yahoo’s mail and productivity tools, as it neatly creates automated profiles for each email contact with correspondence history and social network data.” Its products have expanded from just an Microsoft Outlook plugin to supporting Google’s Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Apple’s iCloud, and it also offers Smartr Contacts apps for Android and iPhone.

If the deal is complete, it continues Yahoo’s buying binge under CEO Marissa Mayer, who appears to be using M&A as a talent recruitment tool — essentially, if you can’t hire them, buy their company.

Among her recent purchases are a spate of mobile app companies, for which she has only spent $16 million in total, with the exception of Summly for a lot more. And, of course, she also bought Tumblr for cool $1.1 billion.

Well, Jay-Z is way too smart for that!

The brand-endorser/value-adder/Beyonce’s husband/musician has a big deal with Samsung to give away free copies of his new album to people who download an app to their Galaxy devices.

So it would totally be embarrassing if he tweeted about that from an iPhone, right?

No problem! As Amanda Lucci notes, sometime between April 3 and today, Mr. Z, or whoever social-messages on his behalf, switched his Twitter account over from iPhone to Android. Disaster averted!

Jay-Z has switched from iPhone to Android since his last tweet, HOW CONVENIENT pic.twitter.com/93ddm7Vos0

– Amanda (@alucci) June 17, 2013

Bonus Jay-Z handset info: As our intrepid Mike “Tats-a-plenty” Isaac notes, Mr. Z, or whoever social-messages for him, wasn’t that attached to iOS, anyway. A little more than a year ago, he (or whoever) was still using a BlackBerry to tweet.

Luckily, because Mr. Z (or whoever) is an infrequent Twitter user, we can see exactly when he switched over: September 2012.

In a live online Q&A at the Guardian today, Edward Snowden, the man who leaked the PRISM documents and much more, called those initial tech denials “misleading.” But he said the leaks were having his desired effect, saying, “We’re finally beginning to see more transparency and better details about these programs for the first time since their inception.”

Snowden added that Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Apple could have used their heft to blow the whistle themselves. “They are legally compelled to comply and maintain their silence in regard to specifics of the program, but that does not comply them from ethical obligation,” he wrote.

In an answer to another question, Snowden said, “More detail on how direct NSA’s accesses are is coming,” perhaps indicating further documents to be published, or his own elaboration.

Here’s Snowden’s comment on the tech denials in full:

Their denials went through several revisions as it become more and more clear they were misleading and included identical, specific language across companies. As a result of these disclosures and the clout of these companies, we’re finally beginning to see more transparency and better details about these programs for the first time since their inception.

They are legally compelled to comply and maintain their silence in regard to specifics of the program, but that does not comply them from ethical obligation. If for example Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple refused to provide this cooperation with the Intelligence Community, what do you think the government would do? Shut them down?

Numbers covering the final six months of 2012, shared in a company blog post, are slightly higher than Facebook’s.

As with Facebook’s disclosure on Friday night, Microsoft’s new figures include the number of requests made by law enforcement and national security agencies under the auspices of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The disclosures were worked out as the result of a deal between the companies and government agencies because under current U.S. law, such disclosures are illegal.

Microsoft said it received between 6,000 and 7,000 requests for information from local, state and federal law enforcement agencies in the United States. The affected number of accounts was between 31,000 and 32,000.

Before adding six months’ worth of FISA requests to the overall statistical bucket, Microsoft had previously disclosed in its 2012 Law Enforcement Requests Report that it had received 11,073 requests for information affecting 24,565 accounts from government entities in the U.S. during all 12 months of 2012.

These requests covered the following services: Hotmail ad Outlook.com, SkyDrive, Xbox LIVE, Microsoft Account, Messenger and Office 365. Skype was reported separately in part because, before Microsoft bought it in 2011, it was tracking this data differently.

Assuming a consistent run rate, the difference between FISA-inclusive and the non-FISA numbers would suggest a difference of no more than about 3,000 overall requests per year.

But when taking into account the average number of accounts affected per request, the picture changes. In its FISA-inclusive figures for the second half of the year, Microsoft averaged between four and five accounts affected per request. That’s about double the average of 2.2 accounts per request in the earlier data that didn’t include FISA requests. (Facebook, in its FISA-inclusive disclosure, averaged about 2 accounts per request.)

What this suggests is that requests made to Microsoft by government agencies under FISA tend to cover multiple accounts more often than in non-FISA cases. Why the higher average? It’s unclear.

But here’s another bit of data that may tell part of the story. Remember that Microsoft’s non-FISA disclosures counted Skype, Microsoft’s audio and video calling service, separately. The 2012 report shows that U.S. agencies made 1,154 requests affecting 4,814 for an average of 3.62 accounts per request. This is just a guess from the math, but it may explain — at least in part — why the FISA-inclusive average of affected accounts is higher than the non-FISA one: Maybe it contained more Skype requests.

Also, this may be precisely the kind of analysis that makes the government so ticklish about releasing any of these numbers in the first place.

But what about Best Buy, the retail giant looking hard for a turnaround, as it tries to fend off Amazon and other online-only electronics sellers?

First, from a financial point of view, it seems to be a no-brainer.

“If you offer a retailer some money, they typically will take it,” Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis at The NPD Group, said in an interview.

The two companies did not release any financial details of the deal, but it’s a safe bet that Microsoft is spending handsomely to help redesign Best Buy’s PC departments into Windows Stores and train 1,200 Best Buy employees to man the new outlets.

Second, the appearance of the new stores appears to be fresher, a bit of an upgrade from the current Best Buy experience. The devices sold within them might be the same, but new wrapping won’t hurt.

Third, adding Microsoft to a roster of mini-stores that already includes Apple and Samsung may push other consumer electronics manufacturers to pursue a similar deal with Best Buy. A brand like Sony, for example, has the breadth of devices that could make sense for a mini-store, Baker told me.

Fourth, it’s a vote of confidence — albeit from a company with its own issues — that brick-and-mortar retail still matters. If you want to take a customer away from a competitor, you do it in the real, physical world.

With these moves, Best Buy is starting to look a little bit more like a tech mall within a store — a setup not uncommon overseas in cases where retailers essentially lease out part of the store to a manufacturer. The difference here, according to Baker, is that Best Buy is still maintaining most of the control, such as deciding how their floors are stocked, making it less likely that the new arrangements will hurt the Best Buy brand.

Will the branded stores within Best Buy alone lead to that massive turnaround? Of course not. As it is, we already know the company has work to do when it comes to its digital presence.

But the new look of the mini-stores — the Windows Store being the most recent example — brings some necessary excitement to a company desperately in need of some. And that certainly counts for something.

As a result, tech companies such as Microsoft, Yahoo and others will also be able to disclose numbers of government requests, sources said.

Update 8:22 pm PT: Just a few hours later, Microsoft has also released aggregate numbers of data requests for the six months ending December 31, 2012.

The development comes on the heels of a massive week of privacy and security scandals surrounding former NSA employee Edward Snowden, who has released documents suggesting that the Silicon Valley giants had given the Federal Government access to their large treasure troves of data via a formerly classified NSA program called PRISM.

The levels of access and cooperation between tech giants and the government have been in dispute since the news first broke last week. But companies like Facebook and Google were somewhat hamstrung to defend themselves by existing legislation, which bars companies from even discussing whether or not they have been served with FISA requests in the first place.

“Requests from law enforcement entities investigating national security-related cases are by their nature classified and highly sensitive, and the law traditionally has placed significant constraints on the ability of companies like Facebook to even confirm or acknowledge receipt of these requests — let alone provide details of our responses,” Facebook general counsel Ted Ullyot said in a statement released on Facebook’s site.

As my colleague Kara Swisher reported earlier in the day, Facebook has been in serious talks with the Feds to allow such disclosures, so as to better defend themselves against accusations leveled earlier this week. While Facebook and Google have been in separate discussions with government officials all week, a source familiar with the matter said, Facebook released the information less than one minute after receiving final government approval to do so.

“We’re pleased that as a result of our discussions, we can now include in a transparency report all U.S. national security-related requests (including FISA as well as National Security Letters) — which until now no company has been permitted to do,” Ullyot said.

It’s worth noting that Google has not yet reached an agreement, sources said, but continues to push toward one.

For now, Facebook as well as other digital companies will be able to release their national security information request numbers in aggregate, giving at least some indication as to the size and the scope of governmental requests.

Update 9:02 pm PT: In response to Facebook’s disclosure on Friday evening, a Google spokesperson released a statement to AllThingsD, contending that Facebook’s deal isn’t a net positive: “We have always believed that it’s important to differentiate between different types of government requests. We already publish criminal requests separately from National Security Letters. Lumping the two categories together would be a step back for users. Our request to the government is clear: to be able to publish aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures, separately.” (More on Google’s response in my separate story, here.)

Facebook will continue to fight for more comprehensive data disclosure numbers, sources said.

According to Facebook’s disclosure, agencies ranging from the city and state to the federal and international levels have made somewhere in the range of 9,000 to 10,000 information requests of the social giant, which concerned the profiles of between 18,000 and 19,000 Facebook user accounts.

What remains unclear is how many of these requests Facebook has complied with (The Wall Street Journal reports 79 percent), as well as the amount of information given in each case. And still, it’s unclear how many of these requests were from the NSA — a major point of interest considering the news of the past week.

“We hope this helps put into perspective the numbers involved, and lays to rest some of the hyperbolic and false assertions in some recent press accounts about the frequency and scope of the data requests that we receive,” Ullyot said.

After AllThingsD.com reported earlier today that Facebook had been in advanced discussions with the federal government to allow it to disclose requests under national security laws, including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), to the public, sources said that Google has appeared to be following its lead and is similarly engaged in talks to do the same.

This parallel effort would allow the Internet giants, as well as other digital companies, to disclose aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures, as well as their scope.

This controversial issue has occupied Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C. over the last week, after a series of news reports about the level of U.S. government scrutiny of telephonic and online communications of all kinds.

While sources noted that the discussions might not result in any action, it appears as if they are in advanced stages and could result in more robust disclosures being allowed if agreements can be made.

Pressure to take action has escalated ever since myriad allegations that top Silicon Valley Internet giants had given authorities unprecedented access to their huge stores of information via a National Security Agency program called PRISM. The companies, also including Microsoft and Yahoo, have denied that kind of “direct” access, but cannot escape the spotlight placed on how much information they are all compelled by the government to hand over legally.

That’s why all of them — facing consumer backlash and a big hit to their reputations — have called on the government to allow them to lift restrictions on reporting national security requests for information.

Google has been most vocal in calling for changes, while also taking to government officials behind the scenes, as Facebook had already been doing. The two companies, though, are not working together, and are having these discussions separately.

How much leverage the pair have together or apart is unclear. Collectively, they could threaten to sue the government to allow the disclosures, or be more publicly pugnacious about cooperation, as Twitter has done.

Instead, they are employing both public statements and private outreach to the Justice Department, the NSA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The goal is to be able to release more accurate information, typically via a “transparency report,” which discloses legal queries received.

But strict non-disclosure rules for the most important ones, from FISA, prevent the companies from telling users what is being given to the government.

Earlier this week, Google’s top lawyer David Drummond published an open letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and FBI director Robert Mueller Tuesday asking to be able to publish information on such requests.

Drummond noted that the government should be able to “publish in our Transparency Report aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures — in terms of both the number we receive and their scope.”

He added: “Google’s numbers would clearly show that our compliance with these requests falls far short of the claims being made. Google has nothing to hide.”

Maybe we will see soon enough, sources tell me, including the possibility that the numbers could be available within a few days.

But, like it or not, there’s plenty of evidence that consumers’ mobile habits (or obsessions) are causing a shift in the traditional game industry. Last month, U.S. retail sales of videogame hardware, software and accessories fell 10 percent from a year ago, according to the NPD group, extending a slide spurred by gamers moving to mobile gadgets.

With this in mind, we asked executives from the “big three” console makers this week — Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft — for their thoughts on the mobile shift. Here’s the gist of what each had to say:

Sony: Sony president Jack Tretton dismissed the notion that mobile is drawing gamers away from console gaming. In a five-question Q&A with AllThingsD, Tretton said: “The one thing I think our announcement did was quell any notion that the console was on its way out, which is what people who aren’t really into gaming think is happening. Turn to anyone, any of the gamers here in this crowd [at E3], and ask them if they’re turning to smartphones and tablets over consoles. And then run.”

Nintendo: Nintendo president Satoru Iwata was characteristically resistant to the idea that mobile is having an impact on Nintendo’s gaming audience. “I am not of the opinion that the spread of smart devices has been impacting the videogame industry,” Iwata said in a candid interview. He also doesn’t envision Mario, Luigi and the gang ever coming to, say, the iPhone. “Nintendo has no intention to provide smart devices with our games — at all. Our IP is the most important asset with which we can attract people to our own platform.”

Microsoft: Only Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment division, conceded that mobile games have been impacting the core game industry — but he insisted that it’s a positive thing. In an interview with AllThingsD, Mehdi said that, overall, “[Mobile] brings more people to games. Look at how long the tail of the Xbox 360 has been — I think now you have more people identifying themselves as gamers that just wouldn’t call themselves that before.” When asked whether he believes casual games such as Candy Crush, Words With Friends and the like could actually be gateway games to consoles, Mehdi said he believed they could be, and cited the success of Minecraft — which originated as a PC and mobile game — as an example.

And there you have it — straight from the mouths of the guys heavily invested in traditional console gaming.

In truth, core console gamers are still critical to the health of the industry. And they’re still outspending their mobile gaming counterparts, according to NPD’s recent 2013 Gamer Segmentation report (if only for the obvious reason that console games cost a lot more).

But the group that NPD calls “free and mobile gamers” is a rapidly growing segment that’s likely not going anywhere anytime soon.

But what do you think? Are casual, mobile games taking away from core gaming, or enriching the industry?

(Feature photo courtesy of Sofia Samme/Flickr Creative Commons)

Software giant Microsoft released a version of its Office application for Apple’s iPhone today. It has been the subject of a lot of speculation, and apparently there were some contentious issues between Apple and Microsoft regarding the split of revenue.

A few things to know about this app: First, in order to use it, you must have an existing Office 365 subscription — so you can’t just use it as a one-off app — and you can access documents stored in SkyDrive and SharePoint, and you can only save documents to those services. Second, you can create and edit Word and Excel documents, but not PowerPoint decks, including PowerPoint decks, and there is a feature for displaying them and showing them off in “presentation mode.” It also opens Office documents attached to email messages. (Update: Microsoft says you can edit PowerPoint decks. My mistake there.)

Microsoft is positioning this as the optimal way to see and use Office documents on the iPhone; this is, for now, an-iPhone only app. Charts, animations and other elements are supported. There’s no iPad version yet, though obviously it will run on the iPad. Offline editing is supported.

Two features only work if you have Office 365 running on a Windows PC: Recent Documents shows documents you’ve read recently on your computer, and Resume Reading keeps track of where you left off reading a document on your computer, and brings you back to that point.

Here’s the official screenshot from iTunes:

Shutterstock / Innershadows Photography

Apple is adding an “activation lock” option in iOS 7 that would prevent thieves from reactivating a stolen phone, while Samsung has partnered with Absolute Software to add a “kill switch” in the Galaxy S4.

But more needs to be done, say San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón and New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who convened a meeting with those companies, along with Google and Microsoft.

“The smartphone industry has a responsibility to take action to end the rising and increasingly dangerous epidemic of smartphone theft,” the two officials said in a statement. “Apple and Samsung have taken steps in the right direction, but it is clear to us that the industry as a whole has more work to do to protect consumers from violent street crimes.”

Schneiderman and Gascon want all the manufacturers to have “kill switch” options or other means to combat theft over the next 12 months.

“At today’s meeting we asked the companies to commit to develop effective solutions to this national crime wave and install them on all new products within one year,” they said.

Apple says hundreds of millions of people already use its Find My iPhone feature and noted it is taking things further by preventing unauthorized reactivation for customers that opt to do so.

“Apple has led the industry in helping customers protect their lost or stolen devices since the launch of Find My iPhone in 2009 by allowing customers to remotely set a passcode or erase all their personal data,” Apple said in a statement to AllThingsD. “With Activation Lock, Find My iPhone gives customers even more control over their devices and serves as a theft deterrent by requiring an Apple ID and password to turn off Find My iPhone, erase data or re-activate a device.”

Samsung and Motorola representatives declined to comment on the meeting. A Microsoft representative was not immediately available for comment.

Absolute, whose technology is embedded into a device’s firmware and prevents unauthorized use, praised the move by the prosecutors.

“The outcome of today’s summit made it clear that a persistent theft deterrent is needed, and that solution already exists with our technology,” Absolute CEO John Livingston said in a statement to AllThingsD. “Absolute is actively speaking with the AG and DA’s offices, working with its law enforcement partners, and smartphone manufacturers like our partner Samsung to mitigate the risk associated with mobile device theft and the associated crimes.”

Mobile security software specialist Lookout, which also took part in Thursday’s meeting, said that better protections will not only secure protected devices but also deter overall theft of mobile devices.

“To protect consumers from phone theft, we need to make it harder for the bad guys to profit from stealing phones,” Lookout founder and CTO Kevin Mahaffey said in a statement. “As soon as you take the market incentive away, you’ll see a drop off in device theft.”

Image: Shutterstock / Innershadows Photography

Google finalized its acquisition of Waze earlier this week in a $1 billion-plus cash deal. It ended months of speculation on which big Silicon Valley player would snap up the innovative social mapping startup.

But the outcome of the mega deal begs a question about Waze’s other most ardent suitor: Did Facebook brilliantly avoid future headaches by not overpaying for a pricey app, or did the social giant just make a huge mistake by letting an important mapping asset fall into a major competitor’s hands?

Or, as many sources close to the situation assert, perhaps it was never meant to be at all.

Up until the talks fell apart weeks ago, a Facebook-Waze pairing made a good deal of sense. For one, it fit Facebook’s overall philosophy: Like the social networking giant, Waze is “social from the ground up,” and traffic data on Waze is only as strong as the community that feeds it.

Ostensibly, then, the DNA of the services could have been a match.

But, after a series of talks, according to sources, both companies ended up walking away from the possibility of a deal thanks to a variety of issues, including a growing wariness between the pair and an essential lack of chemistry and trust.

But one thing that was reported early on (and repeated incorrectly on AllThingsD) that seemed to indicate that fissure was wrong: The assertion that Facebook wouldn’t accept Waze’s insistence that the majority of its team remain based in Israel, where the company was founded, preferring that it be located at its Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters.

While this has been Facebook’s style with many company acquisitions, sources on both sides said this was untrue and that the social networking giant was willing to give Waze a lot of independence, including keeping its staffers in Israel.

Sources said that the idea that Facebook would try to move one of that tech-savvy country’s most prominent players out was not in keeping with the interests of the U.S. giant to have a good reputation among entrepreneurs there.

“There was always recognition in both companies that Waze was a company in both Israel and Silicon Valley and that they would be allowed to operate with a large amount of independence,” said one source.

More importantly, from the start, neither company jibed with the other. One source said after Facebook did its “due diligence” on Waze, the social giant became less enamored with acquiring it, a feeling that was further reinforced by the sudden entrance of Google interest in the middle of a no-shop period.

While Google had previously been in talks with Waze, sources said the idea of getting into an auction and price war was anathema to Facebook.

It also helped drop the level of trust between the two sides. These kinds of “social” issues are often key to creating an atmosphere of comfort, and many deals founder when they take too long and the companies devolve into disagreements over seemingly minor issues.

That’s a stark contrast to Facebook’s whirlwind $1 billion acquisition of Instagram, which practically occurred over the course of a bromance-tastic weekend at Mark Zuckerberg’s house with Instagram founder and CEO Kevin Systrom.

In that case, the pair already knew each other and had a long-developing personal and professional relationship over a series of dinners and other events in closely knit Silicon Valley.

That was a different situation with Waze and its outspoken and aggressive CEO Noam Bardin, who has struck a more swaggering posture throughout many months of negotiations with much bigger companies.

“There was an idea that he might not be the best team player,” said one person close to the situation. “While the interest was definitely there, given all the growing tensions, there was not enough to keep it going.”

An investor in Waze agreed: “Facebook could have done this if they really wanted to do it, despite the issues, which means they decided they really did not want it at all costs.”

Speaking of costs, there’s the money issue, too. While the billion in cash Waze sold for may not be much to a company like Google — which has plenty in the bank — that’s 10 percent of Facebook’s cash on hand.

Indeed, Facebook was willing and able to shell out that same amount on Instagram, but the photo-sharing service’s user growth numbers were on a far more drastic curve than Waze; just two-and-a-half years after launch, Instagram boasts more than 100 million active users, and shows little signs of slowing. Waze, on the other hand, hosts around half that number of registered (though not necessarily active) users, despite being around since 2010. Fifty million is no doubt still impressive, though not as compelling.

Also an issue, Facebook’s tense relationship with investors. If Waze turned out to be a dud, Facebook would hardly hear the end of it from the many disgruntled shareholders whose confidence has already been shaken since the company’s botched IPO. It’s possible that by letting Waze go, Facebook saved itself a potential headache if the app went south.

“I think the question of whether it was really worth it and what is being bought got a lot louder and louder,” said another person with knowledge of the situation. “The addition of Google to the equation just sent it over the top.”

But there’s a flip side to all of this: Facebook could have also let slip a major chance to move toward truly owning its mobile experience.

Consider Facebook’s lofty ambitions here. The company is hard at work trying to make Facebook Home — the Facebook-ified version of the Google Android mobile operating system — the go-to choice for consumers. And, as we’ve seen with Android, Apple’s iOS and even Nokia’s devices, if you want to be a major player in mobile, you’ve got to own the maps.

Google now owns two mapping apps, solidifying with Waze a more potent stranglehold on mapping in general. Facebook still has zero. And without any mapping service to speak of, any Facebook mobile play remains forced into defaulting to Google’s services. Apple knew this, yet endured massive public backlash to move its mobile platform off of reliance on Google Maps and transition iOS users over to its own proprietary maps app.

Of course, it’ll be some time before we know if Facebook ended up making a good call. Waze could flounder, Facebook may come out looking smart, and Google could chalk it up to the cost of doing business by keeping potential threats out of competitors’ hands. Or Waze could flourish under Google, and Facebook may end up looking the fool for missing out on its second Instagram.

We’ll see — but not for a little while down the road.

The two companies on Thursday announced a strategic partnership that will see Microsoft creating Windows Stores inside more than 600 Best Buy locations in North America.

These stores-within-a-store will occupy between 1,500 square feet and 2,200 square feet of floor space inside the Best Buy locations in which they’re built, and will showcase a broad range of Microsoft products — software like Windows and Office, and hardware like Surface, Xbox and the Windows Phone portfolio. Essentially, these Windows Stores are replacing the retailer’s existing PC departments. To support them, Best Buy is staffing some 1,200 Microsoft-trained sales associates, and it’s adding an online version of the Windows store-within-a-store to its website. The new stores will begin opening this month.

Microsoft is touting these new Windows Stores as massive “department-level takeovers,” and says they’re key to its retail efforts.

“We’ve heard a lot from customers over the last year,” Microsoft CMO Chris Capossela explained. “They’re buying tablets and other devices to complement their PCs. They’re using technology both at work and at play, and it’s blurring how they think of using tech in their lives. At the same time, they’ve asked us to showcase touch-first devices in a compelling retail environment. We’ve listened, and the story of the Windows Store is that we’ve delivered what customers want: More touch, more hands-on experiences and more opportunities to see Microsoft technologies and how they work together.”

Hardly an original idea; Apple and Samsung both have mini-stores in Best Buy locations. And Best Buy’s big-box-store business isn’t in the greatest shape these days.

But for Microsoft, which has been struggling in its standalone store efforts, this is a savvy move — an easy way to dramatically increase its retail footprint via an established big-box player. Through its partnership with Best Buy, Microsoft gets a significantly larger, more meaningful retail presence without having to roll out hundreds of standalone locations that would have been infinitely more costly.

Promo video below:

Do you still want your MTV? And, if so, do you want it on your iPhone or iPad?

Then here you go. This is the second “TV Everywhere” app from corporate owner Viacom, following on the heels of a Nickelodeon app it launched this spring.

Like the Nick app, the free MTV app will let some pay TV subscribers watch some of the channel’s shows for free. And, like the Nick app, there are extra goodies, too.

In MTV’s case, there is a set of “second screen” features, like Twitter filters, that you’re supposed to use while watching MTV broadcasts on your TV. And a bunch of non-TV content, produced by something MTV is calling its “connected content lab.”

On deck: Versions that will work on Android, and later Xbox 360, as well as more apps for other MTV/Viacom channels, like VH1 and CMT.

The most important thing to note is that this is another small step from promise to reality in the evolution of “TV Everywhere.” The promise, recall, is that people who pay for cable TV (or satellite TV, or telco TV) should be able to watch TV shows on any device they want, whenever they want.

We’re still a long way from that because of a mix of contractual, business and tech issues. And even moves like this are only partial steps. MTV/Viacom says that about 50 million pay TV customers will have access to the programming on its apps. But subscribers to at least three different major pay services — Comcast, Dish and Charter — won’t be able to watch the shows (for now).

And even if you have a pay channel that does have a deal with Viacom, you won’t be able to see everything the channel has put out. Remember that it has different “windows” of content with other distributors — like Amazon — which means that different outlets will have different catalogs at different times.

Meanwhile! The extra video goodies that MTV has added in here are kinda fun. MTV is branding a group of them as “MTV Other,” which in my mind reads as “You think ‘Vice’ is cool? Well look at this raunchy stuff we would totally put on TV if the TV guys weren’t such squares.”

Here’s a sample, which you won’t want to look at if you don’t like swearing, or unpleasant use cases for hot dogs. (On the other hand, if you’re a fan of Minnesota’s own Har Mar Superstar, you should definitely watch.)

The Web TV startup would like to raise a big investment round, or find a buyer. It has been looking for cash or an exit since February, when it hired media banker Allen & Co., according to people familiar with the company.

Boxee has raised around $30 million since 2008. Its most recent funding round was more than two years ago, when it picked up $16.5 million.

When the company first hired Allen, it was looking for another $30 million, hopefully from a strategic investor. Alternately, the company has been pitching itself as a software/hardware solution to potential buyers like cable and satellite TV providers.

You can make a case for a deal like that in broad terms: Lots of pay-TV companies are looking at new ways of getting their programming on TV sets, and some have started to do it. Comcast subscribers, for instance, can now get their TV via an app on Microsoft’s Xbox 360; earlier this year, Time Warner Cable and Roku announced a distribution deal.

And Boxee’s most recent product, a “cloud DVR” box, works along those same lines. When the company rolled it out last fall, it positioned the device as a way to store and play broadcast TV, which users could get for free with an antenna. But sales have been tepid, and the company has concluded that its only real chance for success would be via partnerships with pay TV providers, who could offer users a full compliment of programming.

Any kind of link-up with a traditional TV provider would make for an awkward press release from Boxee, since the startup, based in New York and Israel, has spent years positioning itself as a tool for cord-cutters and cord-nevers. But if you can’t beat ’em …