The company managed to increase online marketing revenue by 40 percent to 40 percent to $958.5 million (5.95 billion RMB), and increased active online customers by 28 percent to 410,000 compared to the previous year. Revenue per online customer, however, slipped 6.5 percent from the previous quarter.

Meanwhile, the company’s selling, administrative and general costs rose 77 percent, while R&D jumped 83 percent, stymieing its profit despite the recent growth.

The company’s efforts to buy a stake in online video site iQiyi last November also cut into its profit rate.

“For the quarter, we also recognized a whole quarter consolidation of iQiyi,” said Baidu CFO Jennifer Li.

The company predicted second quarter revenue to be between $1.19 billion and $1.22 billion, which analysts are also expecting.

Though Baidu’s CEO Robin Li admitted the company was rapidly “burning through cash,” he described the overall results for the quarter as “healthy” during an earnings call.

“Continually developing the most advanced search technology remains central to Baidu’s overall strategy, and we’re very excited by the possibilities opened up by innovation in image and voice recognition,” Li said. “Our focus will remain on tightly integrating our leading search core with valuable vertical products in areas such as travel, e-commerce and location-based service to bring users the information they want as quickly as possible on both desktop and mobile devices.”

The video streaming company is defying analyst critiques of unsustainability as it accelerates its user base through original programming. It gained 2 million subscribers this last quarter, beating analysts expectations of 1.7 million. Globally, it gained 3 million streaming subscribers. The company released the original series “House of Clouds” in February to critical acclaim. Its second original release, a horror series from Eli Roth titled “Hemlock Grove,” had more viewers its first weekend than “House of Cards” and is particularly popular with young adults. Netflix plans to release a third series, a revival of the Fox sitcom, “Arrested Development,” this Memorial Day weekend.

“The global viewing and high level of engagement with the show increased our confidence in our ability to pick shows Netflix members will embrace and to pick partners skilled at delivering a great series,” the company explained in a letter to shareholders explaining the quarterly results. “The high level of viewer satisfaction implies we are able to target the right audience without the benefit of existing broadcast or cable viewing data and the strong viewing across all our markets gives us faith in our ability to create global content brands in a cost effective, efficient way.”

Netflix stocked jump 6.73 percent to $174.37 on Monday’s release of the quarterly report, and then surged another 20 percent in afterhours trading.

Netflix’s practice of posting all episodes in an original series online had drawn concerns that consumers would sign up only temporarily to watch their preferred content and then unsubscribe. This does not appear to be the case. Only 8,000 customers accepted Netflix’s free trial to watch “House of Cards” and then canceled their subscriptions.

Netflix also announced a new subscriber option designed for large households and families. Whereas the existing service costs $7.99 per month and allows two devices to stream, the company will soon launch an option to allow four streaming devices for $11.99.

Netflix’s profit for this quarter was actually diluted due to a $16 million loss on “extinguishing of debt” related to a February refinancing. Earnings had expected to be 20 cents per a share, but were actually 5 cents. That’s still much better than the company did a year earlier, when it posted a loss of $5 million, or 8 cents a share, for the same quarter last year.

The company will expand into eight new countries, bringing its total markets to 28. The new locations include Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Mexico, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Iceland.

“Today we’re thrilled to announce that we’re bringing a new world of music to eight new markets

across the globe,” Spotify announced on its blog. “We’re taking our first steps in Latin America with Mexico, and Asia with Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore. Plus we’re thrilled to make new friends in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Iceland. This fantastic step now brings us to 28 markets and closer to our dream of making all the world’s music available instantly to everyone, wherever and whenever they want it.”

Based in Stockholm, the company already serves users in the US, most of Europe, Australia and New Zealand.

Founded in 2008, Spotify offers on-demand music content. The company offers a free service that enables users to listen to an unlimited amount of music on desktops for free with advertising sponsorship. That aspect of the service currently has over 24 million active users, which are defined by anyone who has used it in the last 30 days. Spotify Unlimited lets users listen to advertising free music on desktops for $5 per month. The company also offers a premium edition that is advertising free, enables users to download an unlimited amount of music, and listen to the service on any device, including mobile. The paid service downloads can also be listened to without an Internet connection. It has six million paid subscribers.

The company pays about 70 percent of its revenue back to copyright owners, sharing royalty revenue with record labels and artists. It claims to be the solution to Internet piracy by offering users cheap access to music that circumvents the need for illegal downloads and file sharing.

Spotify is rivaled by Pandora, another streaming service that acts as a curated Internet radio based on the tastes of the user. Pandora vastly outsizes Spotify in its free service with 69 million users, but has struggled to earn a profit due to the hefty fees it pays in royalties.

The Spotify Unlimited Service will not be offered in Asia, the Next Web pointed out, as that service requires a desktop and the vast number of Asians using the service will likely do so through mobile. Users can choose a free option, which acts as a curated radio station similar to Pandora, or choose a Premium service for SG$9.90/HK$48.00/MYR 14.90 per month.

The expansion is certainly significant, especially considering the size of the Asian market. Facebook’s biggest market is Asia with more than 250 million registered users, so the region offers plenty of room for growth as the company strives to increase its paid user base.

And with 242 million Chinese Internet users purchasing goods last year in a country of more than 1.3 billion people, there is still plenty of room to grow. Despite the high numbers, ecommerce purchases still made up only 6.1 percent of the total retail sales for all consumer goods in China.

The growth was the result of widespread adoption of mobile, which has introduced the Internet to a growing segment of the Chinese population. In the last half of 2012, 40.7 percent of online shoppers used a mobile device to browse ecommerce sites, with 53.6 accessing ecommerce channels via mobile instead of a traditional desktop.

The most common purchases were clothing, at 81.8 percent, daily necessities, at 31.6 percent, and computers and digital electronics, at 29.6 percent.

About 53.3 percent of respondents used their mobile devices to shop while still at home, as many are turning to mobile instead of desktops to research ecommerce options. About 26.2 percent reported browsing on smartphones at work or school, while 10.6 percent research ecommerce options while in commute or using public transport.

Those are some serious numbers, but it’s only the beginning. China’s ecommerce market is set to soon overtake the US. Last November, China’s “Double Eleven,” a Chinese holiday for singles on November 11 similar to Valentine’s Day, helped Chinese ecommerce site Taobao to earn $3 billion in a single day, more than twice the $1.25 billion Cyber Monday earned in the US just before. Continue to expect startling growth rates from China as its sizable population enters the middle class and can afford next generation technologies.

The research was first published on the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Based on public wiki  data.

The Facebook data was compared to online personality tests taken by the volunteers. Compiling the Facebook data into an algorithm, researchers could predict whether someone was white or African American with 95 percent accuracy, whether he or she was gay with 88 percent accuracy, and which political party that individual leaned toward with 85 percent accuracy. Gender could be predicted 93 percent of the time, while age had 75 percent accuracy. People who used drugs could be anticipated with 65 percent accuracy, and identified as drinkers 70 percent of the time.

While some preferences were obvious, such as gay men liking the No H8 Campaign, others were a bit surprising. Gay men also tended to like “Oz the Musical,” but intelligent men tended to like curly fries and love thunderstorms. People who like Austin, Texas, tended to be drug users, as were people who related to the statement “Relationships Should Be Between Two People Not the Whole Universe.” Like sliding on the floor in your socks? You probably don’t own a bong. Straight men tend to be Wu-Tang Clan fans and wake up from naps feeling confused.

Naturally, computers are not prone to stereotypes, yet patterns tend to emerge. How each group relates to each “like” preference, remains to be seen, and could simply be a statistical coincidence.

“Although some of the Likes clearly relate to their predicted attribute, as in the case of No H8 Campaign and homosexuality, other pairs are more elusive; there is no obvious connection between Curly Fries and high intelligence,” the paper said.

Personality could also be predicted, and that could be a problem, though a fixable one. The study found that likes were connected with certain personality aspects in a similar ratio to the results of psychological tests. The study mentions one case where retailers used data to predict pregnancy, and in one instance, a pregnant teen was inundated with ads related to baby products though she had yet to tell her family, putting her in an awkward situation. Michal Kosinski, director of operations of the Psychometrics Centre at Cambridge University and lead author of the study, said that technology should provide some protections against privacy invasion.
“Our results [also] show that these predictions could be potentially very intrusive,” Kosinki stated in the study. “There are technical ways to make sure that individuals have full control over their data, and technology can be designed in such a way that data cannot be abused.”

Last week, just a day before the death of the judge whose congressional nomination inspired the legislation, the Senate voted to relax the Video Privacy Protection Act passed in 1988 that had prohibited video service providers from sharing the viewing history of customers without consent.

Netflix spent $1 million lobbying the legislation in 2012, and about half that the year before. Though that’s an enormous pile of cash, it may very well have been worth every penny. The change clears the way for Netflix to cooperate with Facebook to offer social viewing feeds, creating a social sharing experience that would work similar to Spotify.

Netflix customers now have the ability to connect their Netflix account to Facebook to create a social experience where they can view what their friends have watched, liked and commented about on Netflix. The Netflix Facebook Friends feature includes two main views: favorite content as well as recently watched material. Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg contributed to the design.

“You’ll see what titles your friends have watched in a new ‘Watched by your friends’ row and what they have rated four or five stars in a new ‘Friends’ Favorites’ row,”  Cameron Johnson, Director of Product Innovation at Netflix, explained in the company’s blog. “Your friends will also be able to see what you watch and rate highly.”

Those that opt into Facebook Friends can specify which content doesn’t get shared, so nobody knows you watched “Naked Nuns with Guns” or think you’re a fan of SpongeBob when it’s really your three year old.

Netflix customers voluntarily connect the service through their Facebook accounts, providing consent, so Netflix technically did not need Congress to amend the VPPA to introduce this feature, but likely waited until the political soup cleared as a precaution. If an error had led to one customer’s viewing history being shared without consent, the company would be in fairly hot water in a legal environment that has taken a staunch position on privacy issues in the wake of the tech revolution.

As Slate points out, the VPPA was passed in the wake of Senate Confirmation hearings of Judge Robert Bork. A reporter had interviewed a video store clerk and obtained Bork’s rental history. Though the story did not reveal anything inflammatory beyond the judge’s preference for British whodunit movies, the instance scared enough legislators who likely had rented behind the red curtain and had something to hide.

Whether people want to automatically share everything they watch remains to be seen. The service has been available to about 6 million customers in Canada, Latin America and the U.K., but only about 20 percent of subscribers signed up, Bloomberg reported. That service, however, didn’t let users choose what not to post. Likely the updated version that allows self-censorship will see greater adoption, thanks in part to a paranoid Congress in the late ’80s who didn’t want their constituents to know they rented “Revenge of the Nerds II” more than once.

“Social is going to be everything,” Netflix CEO Reed Hastings told Bloomberg in a January interview. “Our kids are way more social than us; their kids will be way more social than them. You tell your friends about what you watch and they’ll watch much more of what we offer.”

In an SEC filing, the company indicated it would offer about 5.25 million shares in a primary and secondary offering. About 1.75 million of those will come from stockholders, while 3.5 million will come from inside Trulia. The latest reporting price on the company was $30.44 per share on the New York Stock Exchange. The sale could raise as much as $164 million.

The company has been saving its piggy bank. It hasn’t made an acquisition since its purchase of Movity in 2010, biding its time for the right sale. Its team has spent the last year or so evaluating startups but has chosen to build their own solutions rather than acquire technology off the shelf.

Trulia powers the search for a home with a system that makes it easy to search and track properties. The company provides easy to find relevant data about crime. It has more than 5 million homes listed on the site. It recently added a “suggests” feature that works similar to Netflix in suggesting recommendations based on viewing history and personal preferences.
About two thirds of the money raised will go to the company’s cash reserves.

Though the company has been successful in connecting with an online audience, the company still reported a $1.59 million net loss, though down from the loss of $2.5 million the year before.

Users tap an icon in the right hand corner that supports messaging on the iOS app, choose which person to call, and if that person is online, tap the “Free Call” icon to connect. If the person is offline, the button is greyed out.

Facebook first tested the feature with a launch on its standalone messenger app last month. It first launched that option earlier in the year by allowing users to send one minute messages, but then released versions that allowed for actual voice calls. Facebook commonly tests out new features of its service on standalone apps to work out the bugs.

It’s worth pointing out Facebook did not launch the service through its Skype partnership and instead decided to offer the technology itself.

The move puts Facebook in slight competition with phone companies as an alternative to a phone’s default calling application. Facebook may have a small impact on the calls we place through traditional phone networks, but is limited as it relies on both users having the application on iOS and being online. It might make an alternative landline for some users who want to talk for free at home using their WiFi connection, but again that viability depends on the ubiquity of usage. It does provide a nice alternative to cheap calling services like Vonage, Skype, or Viber.

The service also providers Facebook more user data as the social site can better determine which friend connections are the strongest. This can help with its advertising platform as well as add more intelligence to its Graph Search features the company is currently rolling out.

How long before Facebook offers video conferencing? That could bridge a major interaction gap for the social network, as users will be able to have actual conversations that go beyond mere bullet points and adorable cat photos.

So far, the service is only available on iOS, though an eventual Android launch is also expected.

The verbs run in three categories, including fitness activity (run, walk, bike), book related activity (read, rate, quote, want to read), and video activity (rate, want to watch).

The actions make it easy for developers to integrate concrete actions in with Facebook’s graph, and in turn, gain valuable marketing information. There previously were a number of connected apps, like Kobo reader or Nike+, that make it easy for users to share and categorize actions. Previously, developers could have included these actions through Facebook’s Custom Action Tool, but the company made it an official part of its development platform to simplify, encourage and standardize the process.

Apps that have already integrated the feature include Nike, Cyclemeter, Endomondo, Jawbone UP, Log Your Run, MapMyRun, Runkeeper, Runmeter, Runtastic, SPLIT Multisport GPS, Walkmeter in the Fitness category; Bookshout!, GoodReads, Kobo, Random House Inc.’s BookScout in the Books category; and Rotten Tomatoes, Hulu, Flixster, Fandango, Crackle in the Movies and TV category.

Unlike Google which has hard data on users intent through keywords that can then be used to serve up related ads, Facebook typically doesn’t know exactly what users are doing in status updates. Computers are as of yet too stupid to encipher concrete activities from “LOL. Visiting my mother. Cookies up in smoke,” for example. Facebook’s new use of concrete verbs provides it analytic data on user actions, helping it to better categorize data on the Open Graph.

Naturally, there is a marketing edge behind the data. Actions in the Books and Movies and TV categories not only state what the user is reading or watching,  but what they plan to buy and how much they enjoyed it through a quantifiable rating system.

Users, for their own sake, gain a higher rate of engagement with the app.

“For example, the new fitness stories dynamically update when someone finishes their workout, and early data shows that average likes per story have increased by more than 2x,” Facebook explains in its blog post. “As we move more apps to use a common set of actions, we’ll be able to further optimize the performance of these stories and the user experience.”

Facebook will be rolling out a facelift of its News Feed this week, Reuters reported. The changes are the biggest to hit the world’s biggest social network in years. They stand to both increase advertising power as well as user engagement, a conflicting slope Facebook has been struggling to navigate. The new News Feed will have more dominant photos and videos and include a broader range of feeds for music, news and friends for better user engagement Facebook hopes will mean more time spent on the site.

At a press event introducing the changes at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters this week, Mark Zuckerberg described the new revamp as “the best personalized newspaper.”

“It’s easy to think about it as just a single stream of content but our goal is a lot broader,” Zuckerberg said.

Which hopefully will mean more time spent on the site.

“This is just going to provide more opportunity for people to click around and stick around,” Brian Blau, an analyst with industry research firm Gartner, told Reuters. “The newsfeed was kind of outdated. This sort of brings it up to maybe what’s comparable to sort of their competition, and partner sites that are focusing on media and richness.”

The new design will look the same on both mobile and desktops, though it was specifically designed with mobile in mind. Photos will have more prominence, meaning bigger friends photos and larger images in shared articles. This will also enable more compelling ads. Location checkins will feature a new map of destinations, with posts about businesses aligned with pictures of friends that have liked the business.

Facebook has also introduced new feeds to increase user engagement and time spent on the site. An “all friends” feed feature updates from friends, while a “following feed” includes branded content from news outlets and organizations the user is following. A “photos feed” is dedicated to images, while a “music feed” includes any music related activity of friends and people you’re following.

Following the company’s announcement, shares were up 4.4 percent at $28.67, though still a far cry from its opening day price of $38. Facebook has a ways to recover before it can look Wall St. in the eye, though this latest change seems like a step in the right direction. How users react remains to be seen, but in any case, they’ll just have to get used to it as the company learns how to better balance advertising with creating a user experience that keeps people interest.