Published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Apple’s U.S. Patent No. 8,400,548 for “Synchronized, interactive augmented reality displays for multifunction devices” could add better interactive functions for mapping, enable users to share tours of favorite tourist attractions customized with personal information, or enable art galleries and museums to offer interactive videos about their collections. Mapping features could provide more detailed information about various points of interest.  It would enable users to point an iPhone or iPad at an object or city location and receive information about the object.

“A device can receive live video of a real-world, physical environment on a touch sensitive surface. One or more objects can be identified in the live video,” the patent describes. “An information layer can be generated related to the objects. In some implementations, the information layer can include annotations made by a user through the touch sensitive surface. The information layer and live video can be combined in a display of the device.”

One example the patent lists is a user pointing a camera at a circuit board. The live video feed would display the images of the board overlaid with information about its various parts, provided via a website, database, or online library. The display would also allow users to add their own annotations through writing or drawing them on a portable device, and share them with other users.

Users could also edit the data to personalize or correct inaccuracies. The patent also allows for a split screen that could display the pure video stream in one screen and the information-overlay video in another.

Though the patent has obvious mobile implications, it also mentions such as PCs, gaming systems, and media players.

Apple’s approach to augmented reality is unique in its sharing and collaboration potential, especially as our web use only becomes more social.

The center examined 1,400 apps downloaded from a variety of app markets, and found that 66.9 percent tracked users’ data, while 34.5 percent tracked data that was completely unrelated to the task of the app.

The apps were found to download text message history, address books, call records, and location data. More than half of the apps tracked user’s location, and 13.2 percent tracked location even though location had nothing to do with the functionality of the app. In fact, study and beauty apps tended to track location the most.  About 21 percent checked user’s address books, 18 percent tracked call records, and 12 percent read text history. About 15 percent of the apps also made calls or sent texts without the user’s consent, leaving some users to pay for the unexpected cost.

Users received no notification that such data would be accessed.

Most of the apps have nothing to do with Google. Google Play does not support paid apps in China, in part because of Google’s strained relationship with the Chinese government over censorship, but also out of the concern that Android’s openness would be easy for spammers and cyber criminals to abuse. Most Chinese users turn to unofficial websites for Android apps.

Google’s hands off approach has created a fragmented climate in the Chinese market that has led to a sort of app anarchy .  Non-official Android apps have been dubbed ChinaDroids, or generic apps equipped with modified versions of Android.

Though Google has little control over the Android app market in China, the Chinese government has expressed concerns over Android’s dominance of the app market. China’s Ministry of Information Technology recently accused Google in a white paper that said the Android market gave Google too much control over China’s smartphone industry and discriminated against Chinese companies by making it difficult for Chinese companies to develop their own systems.

Clearly, Google has little control over an app market that doesn’t even take place under its own watch.

“The dynamic is quite straightforward,” says senior analyst Aapo Markkanen. “The larger screen makes apps and content look and feel better, so there are more lucrative opportunities. One might think that the bigger installed base of smartphones would compensate for the disparity, but that notion fails to take into account the arrival of low-cost tablets, which hasn’t even started yet at its earnest. The smartphones paved the way for them, but in the end we believe that it’s the tablets that will prove the more transformative device segment of the two.”

Apple currently dominates the app market at a 65 percent share, compared to 27 percent for Android and 8 percent from other mobile app platforms. Don’t expect that to remain the case, however. Apple’s share of the smartphone market is slipping as cheaper but effective Android phones gain prominence in the market.

Though ABI did not take any sides on Apple or Android beyond those statistics, it has previously predicted that Android will have 800 million smartphones in active use compared to Apple’s 300 million by the end of the year. Plus, Android users consume twice as much data on their phones, according to Forbes.

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.

“Square Register has always made it easy for businesses to begin accepting payments and run their business beautifully. Business in a Box is an initiative to replace hardware on the counter-top,” Jesse Dorogusker, Square’s Vice President of Register, told the Wall St. Journal. “What most businesses already have is a strange collection of dinosaurs and calculators, and this is an easy replacement for all those things.”

The package includes two Square readers, a swiveling iPad holder that’s secure and counter friendly, and a cash drawer. A Star Micronics TSP143L Receipt Printer is available for an additional $300, but as PC World points out, the same printer is available through Newegg for $260. Aside from the Square reader, the components are sold by third party merchants but are wirelessly connected and compatible with Square Register.

An iPad app that complements the Square Reader, Square Register is a photo-powered registry that inventories products for easier checkout. The app also enables merchants to track customer loyalty, which items sell the best, and which hours the store is the busiest.

The package makes it easy for merchants to establish a point of sale system quickly and easily. Previously, merchants using Square had to figure out how to prop up their iPad as well as secure it, and had to provide their own cash drawer.

And businesses save money over traditional commerce systems. Square charges one fee of 2.75 percent per transaction, or a flat $275 monthly fee for large vendors. Unlike a traditional cash register, a merchant using Square just needs to take the iPad home to tally sales metrics in the comforts of their own living room. Plus, most cash register systems are also not compatible with Evernote, Documents To Go, or TableTop Translator, which makes Square’s approach all the more tempting.

Processing payments over a $10 billion annual run rate, Square serves over 3 million businesses and people.

So far, the Business in a Box package only works with the iPad, though it may be open to Android platforms in the future.

“We’re huge Android fans, we have a killer Android team, it’s a first-class citizen with awesome technology,” Dorogusker told the Wall St. Journal. “But there isn’t a single Android tablet you can name like the iPad, and that says something about distribution. But we have no religion when it comes to that.”

Merchants can sign up for the point of sale package here.

Flurry tracked more than 2.4 billion application sessions across more than 275,000 applications around the world. The firm estimates it can reliably track data across more than 90 percent of the world’s devices. It estimated that the US and China were neck and neck in January, with 222 million in the US versus 221 million in China. Based on historical trends, Flurry estimates that by the end of this month, China will have 246 million devices compared to 230 million in the U.S.

The news comes less than a year after Flurry reported China had become the world’s fastest smart device market. Flurry credits China’s rapidly growing middle class with closing the gap.

The firm doesn’t expect the US to ever catch up to China, based on China’s population of 1.3 billion compared to the US’s 310 million.

“Considering that the U.S. has the world’s 3rd largest population, the only other country that could feasibly overtake China sometime in the future is India, with a population of just over 1.2 billion,” Flurry stated in its blog. “However, with only 19 million active smart devices in India, China will not likely see competition from India for many years.”

However, the US naturally maintains a good chunk of the global smartphone market. The US and China each have about five times the number of smartphone users as the UK, the third largest smartphone market in the world. The US and China continue to have strong adoption rates, though the US added only 55 million devices in 2012, compared to China’s impressive 150 million devices. Considering that fast growth rate, Flurry had expected China to surpass the American market much earlier, but Christmas and other holidays in the US managed to boost sales to delay China taking the lead until now.

China, however, no longer leads the world for smartphone growth, despite its impressive 209 percent rate of growth on top of a base of 71 million devices from January 2012. Countries that managed faster growth than China this year include Columbia, Vietnam, Turkey, Ukraine and Egypt.

China’s rapid smartphone adoption will naturally change the game of the global mobile industry. Already, Apple has targeted China as its number one market, despite the fact that the market is dominated by Android devices. Apple’s revenues for China were  $6.8 million last quarter. Android has had nearly three-quarters of the market by smartphone sales, 23 percent of which can be attributed to Samsung.

“Apple and Google have helped create the fastest adopted technology revolution in history, 10X faster than that of the PC Revolution and 3X that of the Internet Boom,” Flurry stated on its blog. “And now, as the largest and fastest modernizing country in the world, Chinese consumers lead that revolution.”

“2013 is poised to be digital’s most exciting year yet as the growing ubiquity of digital platforms presents marketers with nearly endless opportunities to connect and engage with consumers,” said Linda Abraham, comScore CMO and EVP of Global Product Development. “It’s clear that the dynamics of the marketplace have fundamentally evolved through the adoption of smartphones and tablets and the increasingly ‘digital’ nature of all media. Navigating this changing landscape requires a holistic understanding of the key trends, underlying drivers and new opportunities that the digital ecosystem will bring in the year ahead.”

And while Google continues to lead online search, Bing has gained ground, pushing out Yahoo for the number 2 position in terms of search engine popularity. Now that Facebook’s search is powered by Bing, this trend will only continue to escalate, at least until Facebook’s new Graph Search grows large enough that it doesn’t need to rely on Bing so heavily.

Of those 6 trillion ads, about 1.4 trillion were served in the fourth quarter, a 6 percent increase over the previous year. About one in eight ads are socially enabled, encouraging the consumer to follow the ad through “like” or “follow” buttons.

Strong marketing ROI metrics have led to a healthy digital ad market, but the report noted that an average of 3 out of 10 ads fail to deliver correctly to be viewable, meaning ad companies paid for an ad spot that failed to load. The report predicts that the industry will respond, anticipating that advertisers will “demand more accountability and publishers to reconfigure their site design and ad inventory to improve performance in the coming year.”

Programmatic buying has led to smarter advertising, which has caused the industry to focus its targeting rather than expand its efforts. About 144 advertisers delivered 1 billion ad impressions in the fourth quarter of 2012, fairly comparable to the 145 that delivered advertising in 2011.

Advertisers are putting greater efforts into private exchanges where they can use analytics to prove the effectiveness of  the ads.

AT&T took the lion’s share of the advertising at an impressive 1.04 tillion, more than double Microsoft’s 50 billion, which took second place.

Facebook was the most popular smartphone app in America, present on 76 percent of phones. Google, however, owned five of the six most popular apps Maps, Google Play, Google Search, Gmail, and YouTube take positions two through six.

This is the largest fund yet for the company that was founded in 2006. It has been keeping a low profile since the last time it raised money in 2008. The firm previously raised $57.1 million from Straub Ventures, Burda Digital Ventures, Eden Ventures, Independent News & Media, and Wellington Partners.

Truphone offers international mobile users an alternative to international long distance calling fees. It provides users a local number in all Truphone countries with a single device and SIM card so that users can enjoy services at local rates. The company has iOS and Android apps to enable the same technology on smartphones, with a Blackberry app soon to be released. People calling Truphone customers can do so with a local call to avoid international charges. The company also enables mobile recording that seamlessly records and stores mobile communications in a secure way for regulatory purposes. The service is available in 220 countries and is available as a local service in the UK, USA and Australia.

“Our business is based on a global model, unique in mobile telecoms,” said Steve Robertson, CEO of Truphone. “Staying connected is crucial to the way we live our lives – and the demand for connectivity is growing. This funding round will enable us to continue to bring the promise of a mobile phone service without international borders into new markets across the world.”

The British company will use the financing to launch in the Netherlands, Hong Kong, Poland, Germany and Spain this year, more than doubling its international footprint. It will also increase its staff by adding 500 more employees over the next 18 months.

The company was founded by James Tagg, who developed the touch screens used in ticket machines on London’s tube network. Tagg found a way of making mobile phone calls over the Internet to alleviate poor mobile signals at his home in Kent. Tagg continues to serve as the company’s CTO.

The company has about 400 business customers, including FTSE 100 and Fortune 500 companies in the banking, technology and energy sectors that are seeing ever increasing roaming voice and data costs. In five years time, the company hopes to have a million users.

“I have been a Chelsea supporter since I moved to London in 1981,” Robertson told the Guardian. “If we can make Truphone as successful as Chelsea I will be a very happy guy.”

Though plenty of Q&A service sites sleep contentedly in the graveyard, ChaCha is thriving alive and strong. The company recently raised a new round of $14 million. The company will use the new funding to expand its mobile and online experience as well as enhance its advertising potential.

The round was led by VantagePoint Capital Partners and Rho Ventures, and brings the company’s total venture funding to $82 million.

The company certainly isn’t the only entity in the Q&A business; it just seems to be the one that is pulling it off effectively. It does so with a crowd sourced human approach, as all answers are provided in real time directly from ChaCha contractors who look up the information on the Internet.

Most questions posed on ChaCha’s web page or mobile app receive instant answers, pulled from a database of over 100 million questions and answers previously asked. If a query stumps the database, it is put to ChaCha community of experts, which return about three to six answers, where one of the company’s 60,000 paid guides check the answers for accuracy, and then provide the most relevant answer to the user. Most questions posed to the community are answered in a matter of minutes.

“This funding enables us to build what we call the ‘Go Big’ experience for Q&A, which is an immersive, real-time Q&A experience that allows users to get relevant, accurate, speedy answers to all of their daily wonderings,” said Scott Jones, CEO of ChaCha. “We think that this idea of providing fast, accurate, helpful answers is a ‘bigger than Google’ concept and somebody will solve it. While that could be Google, it could just as easily be somebody else such as ChaCha. Whoever does will be valued at more than Google today.”

Speed and dependability are ChaCha’s calling cards. MsearchGroove’s report rates ChaCha’s answers with an 80 to 90 percent accuracy rate, the highest in the industry. If judged according to accurate answers provided within minutes of asking, services like Ask, Google, and Siri reach accuracies that are less than 50 percent.

The free service has answered over 2 billion questions for over 45 million people.

Comparatively, Google acquired crowdsourced Q&A startup Aardvark in 2010, and shut the service down after only one year. Quora, whose co-founders include a former Facebook executive, recently managed a mere 1.9 million visitors, though that is double the traffic it got a year ago, Bloomberg points out.

ChaCha relies on advertising for monetization. Receiving over 8 million page views per day, the company delivers three ads per view on its website, adding up to 24 million viewed ads every day. The company’s next plans are to get brands more involved in the conversation. It will deliver social advertising that better relates to the content of each question, so asking for the best restaurants in the Bay might deliver special coupons, suggest a cab service, or suggest a great place for cocktails afterward, for example.

“We have gotten feedback from brand advertisers that they would love to be offering sponsored questions and/or sponsored answers in the normal flow of our user experience, instead of being relegated to banner or text ads,” Jones said. “Brand advertisers are all about true engagement, especially through social experiences, such as the very social and highly contextual Q&A experience that we’re creating.”

Jones expects if ChaCha can become that “’smart friend’ that can make life just that much easier” the company could potentially become “a multi-billion dollar project.”

Founded in 2005, ChaCha is headquartered in Carmel, Ind., but has offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City. It has 52 employees.

“China is currently our second largest market. I believe it will become our first. I believe strongly that it will,” Cook told the Chinese news agency.

Cook also met with heads of China Mobile to “discuss matters of cooperation,” Reuters reported, a sign that Apple may be working towards a deal with the world’s largest carrier with over 700 million subscribers that would vastly open up the company’s presence in the country. Apple China already has deals Unicom and China Telecom to sell its iPhones in China, but have yet to forge an agreement with China Mobile due to disagreements on revenue sharing terms. Talks have gone on for years. China Mobile also uses a different 3G network from the rest of the globe, and Apple may need to wait until a new network usable by the mobile carrier is available before it could launch the iPhone on that network. China Mobile has indicated it would not release an iPhone until it had a working 4G network.

Cook also met with government officials in Beijing, including China’s minister for industry and information technology. He also met with high level executives from China Unicom.

Due to the lack of agreement with China Mobile, Apple has lost much in the China market to competition from other smartphone brand such as Samsung Electronics and Lenovo.

Cook did not indicate a timeline for making China its number one market, but indicated the company’s presence in the country would steadily grow. Apple currently has only 11 stores in China and Hong Kong, and plans to increase that number to 25.

Apple earned $5.7 billion in sales from China in the quarter through December, about 16 percent of its global efforts.