Facebook isn't the only social network getting ready to monetize its mobile app with advertising. During today's analyst call to discuss its fourth quarter earnings, LinkedIn executives said they will be introducing advertising to their mobile apps. There weren't many details offered ? LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner said only that the company has been putting the infrastructure in place, and now it's ready to "start to introduce advertising in our mobile solutions."

You Can Buy Me Love, But Please Don?t Buy Me Gadgets

Valentine's Day is just around the corner, and the majority of us are likely scrambling to find that special gift. (The rest of us, meanwhile, are cursing couples.) A Valentine's Day gift is usually more important than others because it's a one-on-one situation, unlike Christmas or birthdays. Just one gift, to just one person — and it better be good. With that in mind, I'd like to address an article out of AllThingsD this morning that sourced information from PriceGrabber's Valentine's Day Dashboard Report. The report took information from February 4 through February 5, finding that various tablets, TVs and phones are hot items for gift-crazed Valentines. The information itself isn't that intriguing, but it did get me thinking about handing out gadgetry as a gift.

HTC: Ice Cream Sandwich Will Start Hitting Our Handsets In March

At long last, HTC fans can finally stop holding their collective breath. After months of relative quiet, the Taiwanese company has taken to their Facebook page to spread the word: the Ice Cream Sandwich is coming, and it's coming soon. For owners of certain HTC devices, the long-awaited Android 4.0 update will begin hitting handsets next month.

Glancee: A Nice-Guy Ambient Social Location App For Normal People

Some of us can't be bothered to check in, but still want to find interesting people nearby. The challenge for developers is how to do this in a way that is both useful and not creepy. Glancee, available for both iOS and Android, gets closer to solving these problems than most I've seen. The app lets you sign in with Facebook, then it shows you people within 100 yards, or one, two, or ten miles who have things in common. In some ways this sounds similar another app I recently covered, Highlight -- but there are key differences, that will make each app appeal to different sets of users.

Cinemagram Turns iPhone Photos Into Animated Gifs In Seconds

Remember when the iPhone app GLMPS launched last summer, seemingly heralding the start of a new image format that blended static photos and video? No? That's OK. Today, there's a new twist on the idea of reinventing the mobile photo, this time by turning static photos into animated ones. With the newly launched app called Cinemagram, you can turn your iPhone pics into animated gifs in a matter of seconds.

Shopzilla Founder Launches Cheers: The ?Like Button? For The World Around You

The "toast" is an age-old, time-honored tradition, where we raise a glass to pay tribute to -- and express our goodwill towards -- friends, loved ones, and sometimes even our fellow man. They are even known to be meaningfully punctuated with by a good drinking song or two. And now, thanks to BizRate.com and Shopzilla Founder Farhad Mohit, there is, as they say, an app for that expression of goodwill. Yes, "cheers" is no longer simply a word that accompanies toasts -- or the place where everyone knows your name -- it's also the "world's first positivity app," for the iPhone.

Appcelerator Acquires Mobile Cloud Services Startup Cocoafish

Appcelerator, the company behind the popular Titanium app-building platform, is announcing its third acquisition today. The company is buying Cocoafish, a mobile app infrastructure provider that lets developers add various features to apps including messaging capabilities, push notifications, photo uploads, checkins and other social features, storage, discussion forums and more. Although the name implies an iOS affiliation, Cocoafish is actually a cross-platform backend service provider supporting iOS, Android, and even Flash and Ruby.

Waze Lets You Report Traffic With A Wave Of Your Hand

If you're one of the 12 million drivers who use real-time traffic data from Waze, there's a drawback ? the smartphone app depends on users to collect traffic data, but if a driver is stuck in traffic or spots an accident, that's exactly when they shouldn't be fiddling with their phone. That's why the Kleiner Perkins-backed startup developed a new voice interface, which it's launching today. Michal Habdank-Kolaczkowski, the company's director of communications, recently demonstrated the new controls for me. The demo took place in the TechCrunch office, rather than a moving car, but I still think Waze has come up with a pretty elegant solution. Habdank-Kolaczkowski showed off reporting traffic to Waze with just a couple of voice commands ? "report traffic", then, when prompted to choose from different traffic levels, he said, "moderate."

Modo Labs Brings A New Mobile Platform To College Campuses

I remember my freshman year of college. It was a tiny campus, but I still found myself looking for classes and wandering through a maze-like library for most of the first year I was there. At the time, my phone wasn't much help to me, but now that smartphones are taking over the market, Modo Labs is ready to help college students spend even more time on fiddling around on their phones. The company today made the latest version of its Mobile Campus Solution available, which is meant to give Universities the ability to create a mobile platform for their students. The platform will work on mobile web, iOS, and Android, just to make sure no one's left out.

DeNA Has Big Quarter, Acquiree Ngmoco:( Has Layoffs

Japanese mobile gaming giant DeNA bought mobile app developer Ngmoco last year for $400 million. Since then, the company has acquired a range of other outfits and worked to tie the San Francisco startup in with everything else it does. In general, things seem to be going well. The conglomerate just posted a strong third quarter, with net sales up 16%, which in turn boosted the stock price by more than 8% for a valuation of $4.8 billion. However, net income declined versus the same period the previous year, from $106 million to $79.2 million.

Addressgate: After The Path Fallout, Whose Address Book Is It Anyway?

Addressgate seems like an appropriate name for what is dominating Silicon Valley headlines: Path's mobile app uploading all of your contacts. Today Michael Arrington suggested that Path delete the data gathered and start over, and now Path CEO and founder Dave Morin has decided to do just that, and apologized. The past 24 hours of discussion has mainly been characterized by shock, horror or forgiveness. Although all well-intentioned none of these get to the heart of a very significant issue that will only get more important as the mobile and cloud architecture of consumer apps replaces the desktop and cloud combination that has characterized the past 10 years of web services. Beneath the drama there are some big issues. Here I want to try and surface them.

Facebook As A Mobile Platform: 60 Million Mobile Users Visit Third-Party Apps Each Month

Facebook is huge on mobile -- as an application developer. But questions have circled for years around how it can be a real mobile platform on top of operating systems controlled by Apple and Google. But we got a little more data on what it's already accomplishing on the platform front, today at the Inside Social Apps conference here in San Francisco.

Nokia Cuts 4000 Jobs; Last European Phone Assembly Work Goes To Asia

It's a sign of the times, though not a particularly surprising one: Nokia has finally eliminated its European phone assembly infrastructure and will be moving those 4000 jobs to Asia, according to a Reuters report. The factories are not being shuttered altogether, and localizing and finishing work will still be done there, but the primary assembly work is being relocated. The news and layoffs were expected, as the company has slashed many more thousands of jobs over the last year, but this particular cut is symbolic: the intensely European company has been battered into submission, and will join the others in the now-standard configuration of "design here, build there."

Study: iPhone Resale Value 63% After One Year, Android 46%

All smartphones do not depreciate equally. 18 months after purchase, iPhones can be sold for 53% of their original price, while Androids can only be sold for 42% and BlackBerries for 41% on average according to a study by Y Combinator second-hand price guide startup Priceonomics. The study also offered tips on memory upgrades and models for maximizing your phone's resale value.

Thismoment Acquires Position2, Becomes Full Service Promotion Engine

You'd be excused for not paying much attention to Thismoment or Position2. They do the dirty work a lot of entrepreneurs don't want to do, namely run marketing promotions and, in their wake, figuring out how many people actually paid attention to those things. In a world of "organic eyeballs" and viral va-va-voom, there's little place for Mad Men style commercial promotion... or is there? Thismoment just paid an undisclosed sum for Position2 and will begin folding Position2's technology into its offerings. Thismoment began life as a photo-sharing site ("It was Facebook Timeline before Facebook timeline," said founder Vince Broady) and pivoted do supply content management tools for major brands.

Path: We?ve Deleted All Address Book Data

It looks like Path has heeded the words of investor Michael Arrington. Yesterday, the startup faced a major privacy backlash when it was revealed that the social app was uploading user's address book data without actually telling the user. Co-founder and CEO Dave Morin was apologetic, and there was a lot of argument about how big a deal this was (especially since the practice was in-line with Apple's policies), but Arrington had a simpler suggestion: "Just nuke all the data."

Sprint Lost A Lot Of Money Selling Lots Of iPhones

Call it a sort of a bear hug: Sprint, the also-ranniest of the also-rans in the carrier world, lost money selling phones that, on the aggregate gained them subscribers. It's also Catch-22, a blindside, and a mess. According to Sprint, the company reported a net loss last quarter while still selling 1.8 million iPhones and increasing their subscriber base by 1.6 million. How? The costs associated with provisioning and supporting these new phones drove operating losses to $438 million, up from $139 million in Q4 last year.

Flurry: When The Super Bowl Bored Us, We Opened Apps

During the lackluster moments of this year's Super Bowl, we turned to our second screens. A study released by Flurry today shows that during great ads and the half-time show we kept our devices stowed, but returns from commercial breaks, boring ads, and waning interest in the 3rd quarter caused spikes in mobile app usage. This means advertisers and TV producers need to get flashier, because every viewer has a wildly engaging device in their pocket. Subtle, conservative, slow-building ads just don't cut it any more.

LG Takes A Chance With The Oddly-Proportioned Optimus Vu

After spending the past few quarters in the red, LG recently turned things around with a bit of growth in their once-ailing smartphone division. By focusing half of their 2012 capital expenditures budget on developing smartphones, LG wanted people to know that some big mobile plays were on the horizon. As it turns out, their plans for year include the newly-leaked Optimus Vu, which isn't exactly the sort of big we were hoping for.

Yep, People Research Movies On Their Phones ? Especially On Apps

Adding to the stream of reports about how people do more and more on their mobile devices, mobile ad network Greystripe just released the results of a survey about the movie research process. The network says it recruited participants through, yes, a mobile ad in its network, ultimately surveying 248 smartphone users (including iPhone, iPod Touch, and Android) and 298 iPad users in November of 2011. It found that those smartphone and iPad owners are indeed movie goers, with 39 percent of smartphone respondents and 41 percent of iPad respondents watching movies more than four times a year