According to a latest report from the Mercury News, Mozilla is planning to launch its own app store, called the Mozilla Marketplace, offering mobile apps that could run on an iPhone, Android phone or a Windows Phone device.

Mozilla is also working to develop a smartphone that would run apps within its browser, and that would not be limited to a specific operating system, such as Google’s Android, Apple’s iOS or Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7.

The phone would run software like JavaScript and HTML5, directly on the device’s hardware, without the need for an intermediate operating system like Android or iOS. Its browser would become the operating system, supporting features like the camera, voice communication and geo-location abilities.

Talking about the company’s interest in entering the mobile web market,  Brendan Eich, chief technology officer for Mozilla, said, “Hang onto your hats; we’re moving fast. A few years down the road, with Web technologies continuing to evolve, you should be able to do all the beautiful games and the presentation and the tools that you see in native mobile apps, but with a Web-powered phone.”

The reports states that Mozilla has been talking to manufacturers and wireless carriers that might be able to build and support a Mozilla phone. The prototype of the software is expected to be unveiled as early as next week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

This infographic from website development firm Wix takes a much closer look at why your business must go social.

“We just signed an exclusive two-year agreement with Detik.com, which is the first in Indonesia for mobile advertising,” Phalgun Raju, InMobi regional director and general manager for Southeast Asia, Hong Kong and Taiwan stated. Phalgun, further added that the partnership with Agranet will focus on enabling rich media mobile ads on Detik.com’s mobile portals running on smartphones and tablets. By featuring moving graphics, videos and games, these media ads would allow for more engagement.

Detik.com Group marketing services head Gerry Leo Nugroho added that that a majority of ad views —still went to the desktop version of the site, and through this deal they can lure more advertisers to the mobile version.

“If we can get this deal going, we could eventually grow the entire [advertising] industry,” Gerry said.

InMobi is the world’s largest independent mobile advertising network, providing advertisers, publishers and developers with a uniquely global solution for advertising. Launched in the U.S. and Europe in early 2010, and backed by SoftBank, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Sherpalo Ventures, InMobi now has offices located in Bangalore, Johannesburg, London, Nairobi, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Seoul, Singapore and Tokyo.

Similar to the Tencent’s QQ Mobile browser, iBrowser includes features like tabbed navigation, search, speed dial, full-screen browsing, download manager, data compression and data tracking services. Users can also download iBrowser from Mobango, Android Marketplace, Getjar, Samsung Appstores, Nokia Ovi & Airtel Appstore.

According to Mobango, ibibo iBrowser was the most downloaded app on its platform in the last 30 days. “iBrowser is an exciting product as it makes browsing internet on a mobile phone really quick and easy. Given that data services in India are still on 2G networks for most of the users and smart phone penetration is less than 3% in India, iBrowser is a product designed for Indian mobile consumers.  We are certain that iBrowser will reach 1m downloads on Mobango in record time,” said Badri Sanjeevi, CEO at Mobango.

iBrowser is currently available for Android, Symbian and Java based phones, which together cover 90% of all mobile handsets in India. The Browser comes preloaded on Huawei, LG, Spice, & Lemon handsets.

To conduct the study, Keith Ross, the Leonard J. Shustek Professor of Computer Science at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University and co-investigators Ratan Dey and Zubin Jelveh — crawled the public profile pages of 1.4 million Facebook users in New York City in March 2010 and June 2011, noting down the aspects of the profiles that were accessible and the ones that were hidden from the public.

In March 2010, 17 percent of users in the sample hid their friend list from their public profile, and 15 months later, 53 percent of users opted to make the list private. Other data on the profile, including age, high school name and graduation year, network, relationship, gender, interests, hometown and current city, were also hidden with greater frequency in the later survey. Women in both samples were found to be more private than men — as of June 2011, 55 percent of women restricted their personal information, versus 49 percent of men. The study also points to a potential correlation between income and privacy. Users in the wealthiest areas of New York,Manhattan specifically, were likely to hide their personal information more than the lower income users.

The major reason behind this shift in privacy preferences could be the changes Facebook introduced recently. “During the time of our research, Facebook implemented a major redesign in its privacy options, partly due to pressure generated by a huge uptick in media stories about the vulnerabilities of revealing personal information online. We believe that greater sensitivity and public awareness of privacy issues, combined with easier privacy options on Facebook, spurred more members to protect their information,” Ross points out.

So, what do you think about this study? Have your Facebook privacy preferences changed over the past few months – after Facebook introduced new privacy settings on the site and after the launch of the new Timeline profiles? Do share your ideas in the comments.

According to the Reuters report, Twitter will give Yandex access to its public tweets, in a deal similar to the one Twitter has with Microsoft’s search engine, Bing.  Yandex users will be able to see the latest tweets on any subject, by using Yandex’s specific ‘Blogs’ search engine. Twitter posts of the users tweeting from Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian or Kazakh, as well as top feeds in any other language, will all be included in Yandex’s Blog Search results.

” We are currently concentrating on social networking search. This partnership with Twitter reinforces our effort in this area. People share news, exchange opinions and discuss all sorts of matters in real time all the time. This kind of information will help us enhance our search results,” said April Underwood, Twitter’s director of business development.

“People share news, exchange opinions and discuss all sorts of matters in real-time all the time. This kind of information will help us enhance our search results,” added Anton Pavlov, Yandex’s blog search manager.

Yandex has about 60 percent market share in Russia and is the search engine of choice for the majority of Russian web users, ahead of Google. Last July, Twitter ended its partnership with Google, that allowed the search engine users to view real-time results alongside usual web search results. Yandex and Twitter have not given out any information on the duration of this partnership.

Chinese Electronics firm Proview Technology Shenzhen filed a trademark infringement case against Apple stating that it owns the Chinese rights to the “iPad”, blocking the sales of Apple’s tablet computer in several retails stores in China, including the as well as the imports and exports of the device. Apple had applied for the transfer of the trademark from Proview Shenzhen, but the application was turned down by China’s trademark administrative authorities.

A hearing is scheduled in a Shanghai court on Wednesday, and in the Guangdong High Court on 29 February.

“We are now preparing for negotiations. The court cases will continue until we reach an agreement,” said Proview’s lawyer, Xie Xianghui, adding that Apple had told Proview it had “peaceful intentions”.

The two firms are expected to settle the issue peacefully, instead of continuing with their fights in the court, considering the huge demand for Apple products in China, and the fact that most of the Apple devices are manufactured in the country.

According to a research done by NPD, a leading market research company, more than 40 percent of iPad owners have a household income of $100 thousand or more compared to 26 percent of non-iPad owners.

With more and more tablets entering the market, the ownership of the device is growing rapidly. Even those who couldn’t earlier afford to buy a tablet, can now opt for one of the low-cost ranges. The study found that the new tablet owners make less money and are younger than the early adopters, with buyers at the end of 2011 being 50 percent more likely to have an income under $45 thousand, and 33 percent more likely to be under 34 years of age.

“As the demographic of the tablet owner continues to change the tablet market is beginning to take on a new role. We are seeing some of the tasks traditionally performed on devices, such as PCs, now being performed on the tablet. In fact, all five of the top activities shifted towards the tablet between early and late 2011,”said Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis at NPD.

However, the flourishing tablet market is not going to wipe out the market of other devices.  In the study, only 10 percent of tablet owners stated that they don’t need a PC notebook that they were once considering. The same trend is  reflected among non-tablet owners, 26 percent of whom say they are likely to buy a notebook in the next year, while just 18 percent say they will purchase a tablet.

“Even as consumers increasingly use tablets for tasks that were once exclusively done on their PC, they continue to plan new PC purchases. Usage is still evolving and most people, being inherently conservative in their device outlook, continue to hedge their bets on their device preference by planning to maintain an array of products to afford them maximum flexibility,” Baker adds.

Clicking on the Gaana.com app on Facebook will take the user to the music site, where they can choose the music they want to listen to. When a user listens to a song, a message is posted on his/her Facebook profile, indicating the song they are listening to and encouraging their friends to join in .

“We have always believed music is discovered via common tastes and peer to peer recommendation. With gaana.com’s integration on Facebook’s Timeline, we expect to see strong traction of our content and an increased user base via Facebook. The app has already got some 0.14 million ‘Likes’ on Facebook,” said CEO Rishi Khiani of Times Internet.

Saavn, another Indian music portal which launched its Facebook Timeline app last month, increased its monthly active users from 35,000 to 785,000 within four weeks of the launch of the application. Saavn was also approached by Facebook recently for a joint collaboration towards global distribution of music.

From next month, China Telecom users who commit to a two-year contract can get a free 16-gigabyte handset with a service plan costing 389 yuan ($62) a month, while a three-year plan cuts the monthly minimum to 289 yuan.

China Mobile Ltd, the world’s largest carrier by customers, has also been negotiating a deal with Apple to sell the iPhone, but the operator uses a home-grown proprietary 3G technology called TD-SCDMA that Apple doesn’t support. It is, however, expected to launch its 4G TD-LTE network, late this year or early in 2013, which would help it work out a deal with Apple.

“iPhone 4S has been an incredible hit with customers around the world. The company can’t wait to get it into the hands of even more customers in China,” said Carolyn Wu, a Beijing-based spokeswoman for Apple.

Apple was the fifth-largest smartphone maker in China in the fourth quarter, with shipments of 2.08 million handsets, according to Gartner data. The technology giant ‘s iPhone market share in China is expected to be quite steady after its deal with China Telecom, which has more than 38.7 million 3G subscribers.