Much has been made of the mobile risks that Facebook laid out in its S-1 IPO filing earlier this week. Essentially, it’s seeing/pushing massive growth in mobile, but it still hasn’t tried out advertising, its most effective route to revenues, on this platform. That’s not to say it won’t. But meanwhile, there is another area where Facebook is already making money through mobile.

For as long as Facebook has been running its Facebook Credits program—the virtual currency that users can redeem on games and other content peddled through Facebook’s network—it has been letting users top up those Credits using their mobile phones. It does this in partnership with companies like (reportedly) Boku and (definitely) Zong, the payments company bought by eBay’s PayPal last year. Users can also top up their Credits via PayPal and credit cards.

It’s not known how much, exactly, is purchased via the mobile channel today, but it is an example of how mobile is actually already driving significant revenue for Facebook. “Facebook Credits make a lot of money through mobile phones,” enough that Zong was “growing very fast last year” because of Facebook purchases, according to Frederic Court, a partner with Advent Venture Parnters, one of the VCs that backed Zong before the eBay (NSDQ: EBAY) buy.

This is because while sometimes the mobile payments were actually more expensive than a PayPal or credit card transaction, they are often a lot quicker to do, especially if you are in the middle of a game. And, as with other mobile-based payment options, they appeal to those who don’t have or want to enter card details.

Commissions on those Credits netted Facebook $557 million in revenues in 2011. (Facebook writes in the S-1 that the “other fees” that it designates on the same line as Payments was “immaterial.”)

At this point, Facebook doesn’t take any commission on Credits that are purchased via mobile: that service—which uses the premium SMS channel to send a code to a user to redeem Credits on the main site, and then charges the amount directly to the user’s mobile bill—already has some other parties taking a cut, including the provider (eg Zong or Boku), the mobile carrier and even another processing middleman. Rather, Facebook’s cut comes in the form of a commission on the payments, similar to what Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) takes for transactions on its App Store. That fee is 30 percent.

Could Facebook eventually take more control of its payments, and potentially cut out some of those middle people? Probably not soon, in Court’s opinion. “Zong brought something to Facebook that it didn’t know how to do, and it became very deeply integrated,” he said. “I don’t see them starting to do what Zong does, which is connecting hundreds of operators.” Then again, he added, “When they have a worth of $100 billion with $10 billion on the balance sheet they can do pretty much anything they want.”

What’s interesting is that as Facebook starts to expand some of the other functionality on its mobile platform, that will also open up a lot more opportunities in terms of mobile transactions as well.

As Facebook enables and opens APIs to get publishers to build apps for its mobile platforms (via the web and apps), “Facebook will make sure those are monetized,” he said. “I have no doubt Facebook will be making money on mobile games and other content given the engagement and scale on mobile. There is an amazing opening there.” Paying for Credits that will actually get used on the device itself, he said, will be “even more natural.”

Facebook in the S-1 said it had 425 million monthly active users accessing the social network via mobile devices, with that number outpacing the growth of overall subscribers.

“Credits is a wallet that you can top up in all kinds of ways,” he said. “Facebook has created its own currency and has imposed that on anyone offering digital goods on Facebook.” If anything, that currency might have a life outside the platform, to to buy things outside of Facebook.

But even with the opportunity for Credits, Court doesn’t see this eventually overtaking revenues from whatever advertising Facebook plans to put on its mobile services “for a very simple reason,” which is down to how those games are played today. “If you look at Zynga, only between two and three percent of people who play actually pay. The rest play for free. Tt will be the same for Facebook on mobile, with only a fraction spending money,” he predicted. “With advertising, 100 percent of the population is exposed.”

Even though Facebook has listed “no mobile ads” as one of its risks on the S-1, it could be playing its cards very close to its chest: the last few days has been a lot of speculation already about how soon Facebook will launch those mobile ads.

Razorfish (via Digiday) says that it is already working on a pilot for rich-media ads for the social network.

The blog Inside Facebook, meanwhile, has put its money down on sponsored stories to be the “most likely” first stab at mobile advertising on the site, with running a mobile ad network the second-most likely option. (That’s one that we explored a bit yesterday as well.)

Update: Razorfish’s VP of mobile, Paul Gelb, has made a correction on how his comments were portrayed in the Digiday story (via Twitter): his agency is not working on any mobile ad buying with Facebook. “In the interview I was referring to rich media featured stories, not paid ads,” he said.

A Facebook spokesperson, via email, added the following: “We want to clarify that we are not working with any agency to create paid ads on our mobile platform.”

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The French are kicking Google (NSDQ: GOOG) again. This time, in a strange ruling, Paris’ commercial court has found the company is anti-competitive because it offers Google Maps for free to businesses.

The case was brought by French online mapping firm Bottin Cartographes, which charges for its maps.

Google is ordered to pay €500,000 ($658,000/£416,100) in damages and interest plus a €15,000 ($19,740/£12,483) fine, AFP reports.

It’s enough to make an American entrepreneur scratch his head in frustration. Google, like many companies, supplies its products to consumers for free. This case concerned syndication of those maps to other businesses.

So dominant is Google now that it seemingly can’t help but get tripped up by anti-trust legislation, which naturally exists to prevent companies abusing dominant positions.

“We will appeal this decision,” Google France tells AFP. “We remain convinced that a free high-quality mapping tool is beneficial for both Internet users and websites. There remains competition in this sector for us, both in France and internationally.”

Google is currently being investigated by the European Commission’s anti-trust department for allegedly abusing its dominant search position by promoting demoting rivals’ web services and by imposing obligations on ad sales.

A group of data protection officers has also this week asked France’s data privacy authority to probe Google’s newly harmonised privacy policy, due to take effect in March.

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An influential European privacy body has urged Google (NSDQ: GOOG) to “pause” its new privacy policy due to be implemented in March. The Article 29 Data Protection Working Party wrote a letter to Larry Page…

“Given the wide range of services you offer, and popularity of these services, changes in your privacy policy may affect many citizens in most or all of the EU member states.

“We wish to check the possible consequences for the protection of the personal data of these citizens in a coordinated procedure. We have therefore asked the French data protection authority, the CNIL, to take the lead. The CNIL has kindly accepted this task and will be your point of contact for the data protection authorities in the EU.

“In light of the above, we call for a pause in the interests of ensuring that there can be no misunderstanding about Google’s commitments to information rights of their users and EU citizens, until we have completed our analysis.”

Good that Europe’s data protection authorities are ensuring @Google ‘s new privacy policy complies with EU law bit.ly/xiz8U6 #EUDataP

— Viviane Reding (@VivianeRedingEU) February 3, 2012

The Article 29 group advises the executive European Commission on data protection and privacy matters and comprises representatives of member states’ national data protection bodies.

In January, Google said it would unify privacy policies from over 70 of its products, a move which mirrors its unification of user services with Google+ and its personalised search launch. It explained: “Regulators globally have been calling for shorter, simpler privacy policies.”

The Article 29 group has previously forced Google to reduce its data retention time, unsuccessfully asked Google to warn the public before it starts photographing for Street View, issued tough new location sharing guidelines and adjudged a Facebook privacy policy revision “unacceptable”

The European Commision’s justice department sought to raise public awareness of use of their data by designating January 28 European Data Protection Day.

Separately, the EC’s antitrust department is currently assessing competition complaints against Google.

BT (NYSE: BT) signed up 39,000 customers to its Vision hybrid Freeview/IPTV service between September and December, taking it to 679,000.

Now, with its relaunch on YouView still delayed, BT is taking it upon itself to relaunch the service’s platform.

BT will replace Vision boxes’ underlying architecture, based on Microsoft’s Mediaroom IPTV platform, over the internet with a lighter, Linux-based alternative, Faultline reports. The new system will include a new recommendation engine from Peter Gabriel-backed The Filter.

Overhauling BT Vision in its current format does not mean BT is out of YouView, the UK IPTV JV of which it is a stakeholder, but which has been poorly delayed. BT CEO Ian Livingstone told City analysts on Friday “middle of the year” remains the current anticipated launch date for YouView.

The service gained a license for Miramax movies this week.

September-to-December 2011 BT profits jumped 48 percent from the previous year after cost cuts despite revenue slipping five percent on fewer telephone calls.

BT’s Infinity fibre-to-the-cabinet customer base grew 95,000 to 400,000.

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Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) in the last 24 hours has been dealt not one but two blows in court cases involving Motorola (NYSE: MMI) and patents in Germany, one involving IP licensing on older iPhone models (not the 4S) and one involving iCloud. However, as the day progressed, an injunction on the sale of the older iPhone models was lifted as the cases continue to develop.

Today’s ruling in a Mannheim court granted Motorola a permanent injunction on Apple products that use its iCloud technology, specifically around push email services, and, like many patent cases, is not based on a recent patent but an older one—in this case, one that Motorola holds around paging devices (one of the company’s earliest wireless products).

Update: Motorola has issued a formal response to the decision:

“We are pleased that the Mannheim court has recognized the importance of our intellectual property and granted an enforceable injunction in Germany against Apple Sales International,” it said in an emailed statement.

[original article continues below]

Apple, meanwhile, said that it is already appealing in this case:

“Apple believes this old pager patent is invalid and we’re appealing the court’s decision,” Apple told paidContent in an emailed statement.

But before you start thinking that this might mean that various new, iCloud-enabled Apple products will be disappearing from German retailers, think again. PaidContent understands that the injunction applies only to a specific function: the instant, push email service that Apple offers via MobileMe/iCloud, and there are only a limited number of users in Germany actually taking that service. Plus, there are already at least two workarounds available: for customers to either download the email manually; or to set up a script to check email regularly anyway.

The case is still developing so it remains to be seen how the injunction will play out.

More pressing, it seems, is the outcome of another Motorola court case that dates back from December, and which has been in the works for even longer, which has resulted in Apple pulling some older models of the iPad and iPhone from its online store in Germany.

These products were pulled overnight and are indeed absent when paidContent visited the online store this morning. They are, however, still being sold offline through Apple stores and other retailers.

Update: The temporary injunction has now been lifted, but Motorola says the case continues:

“We are pleased that the Mannheim court has recognized the importance of our intellectual property and granted an enforceable injunction in Germany against Apple Sales International. Although the enforcement of the injunction has been temporarily suspended, Motorola Mobility will continue to pursue its claims against Apple.”

Earlier, Apple said it would appeal the decision:

“While some iPad and iPhone models are not available through Apple’s online store in Germany right now, customers should have no problem finding them at one of our retail stores or an authorised reseller. Apple is appealing this ruling because Motorola repeatedly refuses to license this patent to Apple on reasonable terms, despite having declared it an industry standard patent seven years ago.”

This case, essentially, is another chapter in Apple’s European battle over FRAND patents, which fall under rules that require equipment makers to license IP on “Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory” terms, in order to make sure that IP that has been declared industry standard is not intentionally made more expensive for competitors than non-competitors in a field like smartphones.

Apple has been facing other issues over FRAND terms in Europe, specifically with Samsung. That case looks like it may have taken a turn in Apple’s favor: this week the European Commission said that it would start an antitrust investigation into Samsung and whether it has violated FRAND rules in its dealings with Apple. The EC cautions that it has not yet declared a judgement in this investigation so it could still go either way.

In this Motorola FRAND case, Motorola Mobility says that it approached Apple in 2007 with its FRAND licensing terms and attempted to negotiate a license with Apple for over three years.

“Apple’s refusal to negotiate in good faith, as well as their aggressive litigation campaign against Android, left Motorola Mobility with no option other than to seek to enforce the Company’s rights and patent portfolio. Motorola Mobility remains committed to licensing rather than litigation as the proper vehicle for resolving intellectual property disputes,” Motorola told paidContent in an emailed statement.

You might recall that disputes over FRAND licensing was the issue in the FRAND dispute with Samsung—the case that spurred the EC investigation

Whether this will result in a FRAND investigation of Motorola by the EC remains to be seen, but if it does that could have wider implications since the Commission is already investigating antitrust issues regarding the proposed merger between Motorola and Google.

Given that this is all really about stabbing at your competition on a legal level, one possible outcome might be particularly ironic: if what people want are Apple products, by not being able to buy the less expensive, older models, they may end up opting for the 4S in the end and boost sales of the company’s highest margin, priciest device. A Win-Win in that case?

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The hacking investigation that led to the shutdown of News of the World has spread to another News International newspaper, The Times,  police correspondence sent to campaigning MP Tom Watson shows. And its editor has been recalled to discuss it at the government’s hearings on media ethics.

The matter apparently concerns former Times media reporter Patrick Foster, who allegedly unmasked an anonymous police blogger by guessing his way in to his target’s Hotmail account, reports say (Guardian, PA).

The disclosure of the identity of the blogger, detective Richard Horton, led to Horton being disciplined by his employer, Lancashire Police. But The Times also gave its reporter a written warning for professional misconduct, editor Jeremy Harding said at the Leveson public inquiry last month.

At this stage, the email hacking incident appears to have been isolated, unlike phone hacking at News Of The World, which has been described as of “industrial scale.

Foster was “dismissed following an unrelated incident” in 2011, News International CEO Tom Mockbridge previously told Leveson.

Foster is now a freelance reporter. Ironically, since he left The Times, he has freelanced  31 pieces for the media section of the Guardian, which has led the way in covering the phone-hacking scandal. His pieces including at least one piece about the scandal itself.

Disclosure: Our publisher, ContentNext Media, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Guardian News & Media.

News Corp. (NSDQ: NWS) has appointed Lex Fenwick as the CEO of Dow Jones & Company, filling the position left open following Les Hinton’s resignation in July.

Fenwick has been at Bloomberg for the past 25 years, most recently as founder and CEO of VC fund and startup incubator Bloomberg Ventures. Before that, he was CEO of Bloomberg LP. His new position is effective February 13. He will report to Chase Carey, President and COO of News Corp.

The Financial Times reported last week that Fenwick was in the running for the Dow Jones CEO position, noting “the talks with Mr Fenwick surprised some media executives, who noted his limited experience with advertising, one of the biggest sources of revenue for the Wall Street Journal, and with editorial operations. Bloomberg News was under the command of Matt Winkler while Mr. Fenwick was chief executive.”

In a statement, News Corp. chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch said, “We have clearly established WSJ as the premium consumer newspaper and we are thrilled that Lex will be driving our plans to grow all our Dow Jones franchises into true innovative market leaders for today’s digital world. We believe our enterprise business has the potential to follow the brand’s success in the consumer space, and be the premier product in providing the kind of hard-to-find, premium content that the financial customer demands. We are committed to making it happen and we think Lex is the executive to get us there.”

release

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Apartment-letting site Airbnb will get investment, endorsement and distribution from the publisher of Europe’s most-read newspaper.

Axel Springer, which publishes Bild and is led by CEO Mathias Döpfner, says it has made a “minor investment” in the site.

But it is also becoming a “strategic marketing partner”. It is pledging space for Airbnb’s listings in its web and newspaper properties. Its own Immonet real estate marketplace site has got an “exclusive” German partnership with Airbnb in Germany.

This appears to be one of those deals that is more about mutual working benefit than future returns.

But Axel Springer is prone to investments.

It may have had to stump up considerably for Airbnb nevertheless - last summer’s $112 million investment in Airbnb by Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global and General Catalyst reportedly valued the company at $1.3 billion.

But much of the value of the deal may be coming from Axel Springer pegging a monetary value against exposure it is committing the site, rather than straight VC money.

Two European companies are this week taking venture capital in the games space…

Flaregames of Karlsruhe, Germany, is taking €6 million, led by Angry Bird backer Accel, to “scale” the company, hire new talent and to to market its upcoming series of free-to-play mobile games.

“Our first focus is on getting fun, high-quality games to market, and reaching the mass-market as well as mid-core gamers with our line-up this year,” said founder Klaas Kersting (via release).

“The mobile games business will likely be larger than the social games business,” according to Accel partner Harry Nelis. The firm is planning five games by year’s end.

Separately, Tusjuegos, a Spanish portal for buying and downloading PC and Mac games, is taking €420,000 from Spain’s VentureCap and others, Loogic reports.

Spain is plagued by illegal downloading. Tusjuegos is aiming to ensure game buying, after the box era subsides, remains legal in the online downloading arena.

Jaime Ferrer has been installed as CEO of Tusjuegos parent ITnet.

Hoping to tap into India’s rapidly growing e-commerce market, Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) is launching Junglee.com in the country today.

Junglee.com is not another “international Amazon” like Amazon.fr or Amazon.de. Rather, it is a marketplace that aims to connect buyers with online and offline retailers. The site offers 12 million products from 14,000 brands.

Amazon is also building a fulfillment center in Mumbai and has development centers in Hyderabad, Bangalore and Chennai.

Users cannot buy goods directly from Junglee, although most product pages do link back to Amazon.com in addition to local sellers’ sites. The Kindle appears on Junglee.com but it is available only through Amazon.com, not from any local seller.

Some features of the site, however, are familiar. In November, Indian digital media site MediaNama reported, “Retailers have to provide XML based feeds of their products to Amazon, customized to Amazon’s categorization, and on completion of the sale, they will be responsible for delivery. Each retailer will be reviewed and rated by customers.

Junglee.com is not India’s only e-commerce site. The most well-known is Flipkart.com, founded by two former Amazon employees in 2007. It sells books—over 11.5 million titles—and other products and ships about 30,000 items per day.

Many Indian customers already use Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.co.uk offers free super saver shipping to India. “From the metrics we see, Amazon currently gets more traffic from India than Flipkart does,” Indian venture capitalist Mahesh Murthy recently told Reuters.

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Mobile advertising may not yet be something that Facebook has explored in its strategy to monetize its massive user base, and given the growth we’ve seen in the space, you can argue that it might be missing a trick.

What’s interesting is that while companies like Google are certainly making huge strides in mobile advertising (more on that below), there are a number of mid-range/smaller players that are also seeing significant growth, in a market that eMarketer projects will be worth $2.6 billion in 2012.

The implication here is that there is an opportunity, and one that is engaging users—or at least users are showing a great tolerance for the ads, as a tradeoff for other content. That opportunity is one that is being taken not just obvious Facebook competitors like Google, but many others.

Longer term that kind of fragmentation will probably lead to more consolidation, but for now as individual companies they continue to grow (and get funded, if you take the latest numbers from Rutberg on VC investments as an indication).

Here’s three examples of that growth from just the past day:

Today, mobile ad network Mojiva is claiming that it (not Google, not Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), not Millennial Media) has become the first mobile ad network to reach more than one billion unique mobile devices—smart phones, feature phones, tablets and touch screen devices such like the iPod Touch—globally on a monthly basis. It says that the U.S. is its single-biggest market, with 224 million monthly unique devices, within a reach that extends to 190 countries, covering 8,000 publishers and apps, with more than 45 billion monthly ad requests overall. (Note: we’re hoping to catch up with Mojiva to get clarification on how it has reached the one-billion mark before bigger competitors.)

That news comes on the back of a couple of other significant mobile ad milestones announced in just the last 24 hours—again some of the smaller players. Inneractive, a mobile app monetization exchange, says that in the last year it has seen some very significant growth on its own mobile network: ad clicks are up by more than 700 percent; ad requests up by nearly 700 percent; a 981 percent increase on Apple’s iOS platform ad requests; and ad revenues up by 522 percent. We’ve asked Inneractive if we can get more concrete numbers behind those percentages. In the meantime, there’s an infographic below with more details on their growth in the last year, including geographical breakdowns.

A third player, Jumptap, has some numbers specifically around how mobile advertising is playing out across tablets—again, using stats from its own ad network: tablet network traffic was up by 229 percent the day after Christmas compared to the same period a year ago. Over the whole of that month, apparently the Kindle Fire’s share on Jumptap’s network went up from 10 percent to 30 percent suggesting “a trend for lower-priced tablets.” And overall, it notes that Android has the majority of impressions on its network (up to 59 percent in December 2011, compared to 38 percent in December 2010), with Apple’s share diminishing further (down seven percent to 22 percent in December 2011).

And what about Google? (NSDQ: GOOG) It seems that for now its biggest strength in mobile advertising remains in mobile search, where it expects revenues to more than double in 2012 compared to 2011, bringing in sales of $5.8 billion compared to $2.5 billion last year—just under double the revenue that Facebook made in advertising on its main, non-mobile site last year.

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Sony’s new president and CEO has quite a task on his hands. A day after Kazuo Hirai was appointed to replace Howard Stringer, who remains as chair, he announced the company plummeted in to the red by 320 percent.

Q3 net income swung from last year’s 72.3 billion yen profit to a 159 billion yen ($2 billion) loss, as sales dipped 17.4 percent. All divisions brought in fewer sales than the previous year.

Sony (NYSE: SNE) blamed the worsening global economy plus localised issues like Thai floods and the aftershocks in Japan’s post-tsunami economy…

What connected TV boom?
TV sales led the company’s declines, with revenue down 42.9 percent. But that’s partly because a Japanese government TV subsidy scheme had ended.

Games is Sony’s most resilient division - down only 9.7 percent.
But Sony said the business contributed to its overall losses because of the cost of re-promoting its previously hacked PlayStation Network and cutting PlayStation 3 price to head off Xbox.

Music can’t live on big stars
Sony Music Entertainment sales dipped 11.7 percent despite two big Adele releases.

Sony Ericsson (NSDQ: ERIC) is struggling against competition
Sales fell 15.7 percent because feature phone owners are moving to rivals’ smartphones. For the 2011/12 full year, sales are now forecast to be five billion yen (€50 million) below November’s forecast.

“As challenging as times are for Sony now, were it not for the strong leadership of Sir Howard Stringer these past seven years, we would have been in a much more difficult position,” Hirai said on his appointment.

“The path we must take is clear: to drive the growth of our core electronics businesses - primarily digital imaging, smart mobile and game; to turn around the television business; and to accelerate the innovation that enables us to create new business domains.”

It was five years ago that Nokia (NYSE: NOK) executives brushed off the idea of Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) as “not a threat” to Nokia’s top position in mobile sales. After all, Apple was only making smartphones and Nokia was still leading in that still-niche category, as well as mobiles overall. Fast forward to today, and the swift rise of Apple underscores (once more) how short-sighted that view really was.

According to Q4 figures out from IDC, Apple is now the third-largest handset maker in the world, jumping two places from its number-five position in Q3. The reason for the rise, note the analysts, was not so much because it’s now selling cheaper, older iPhones—it is—but because of strong sales of its newest (and therefore premium-priced) iPhone 4S handset.

But it’s not just Apple that is a smartphone force, of course. The other three in the top-five rankings also make feature phones, but they are all also part of the huge push that Google (NSDQ: GOOG) has made into smartphones via its Android platform. Having a feature phone and smartphone strategy is a double-threat to Nokia.

Apple’s rise still puts it at 8.7 market share—some 14 percent behind the Nokia and Samsung bracket—but it is an example of how a much the market has turned around in the last few years, that a handset maker can even be in spitting distance of the lead on the strength of a smartphone-only portfolio.

Apple saw astounding growth in Q4 and 2011 overall—128 percent and 96 percent respectively. However, it will be worth watching whether that trend will continue in the quarters ahead amidst bigger economic factors:

IDC notes that the mobile phone market grew less in the last quarter than it has in the past two years, with vendors shipping 427.4 million units. “The mobile phone market exhibited unusually low growth last quarter, which shows it is not immune to weaker macroeconomic conditions worldwide,” writes analyst Ramon Llamas.

Ironically, that seemed to translate to a bigger-than-expected decline in cheaper feature phones than a slowdown in pricier smartphones. Despite that, IDC says that feature phone sales still accounted for the majority of handset sales in the last quarter.

Nokia—which actually saw sales of feature phones rise in the last quarter as it continued its decline in smartphones—seems catching only part of the wave that IDC describes. It is still holding on to the number-one slot, but given that its biggest driver right now is still feature phones, that leadership may well continue on its fast decline.

But if IDC’s forecast is a wave, then it is really Samsung that is the big Kahuna at the moment, with both strong feature phone and smartphone stories and reaching record levels of 90 million units overall for the quarter and more than 300 million for the year. IDC notes that fewer than 20 million units separated it from Nokia in the last quarter. Samsung earlier in 2011 already surpassed Nokia as the world’s biggest smartphone vendor, according to IDC figures.

Apple and Samsung are not the only ones benefiting from a strong smartphone offering in the top-five.

ZTE, which started to introduce smartphones into its portfolio last year and has huge ambitions in this space both on its own brand and partnering with carriers, took a big leap, the second-biggest after Apple for the year, in fact.

In contrast, LG (SEO: 066570), which has been somewhat rudderless in its smartphone strategy and equally less exciting in its feature phone offerings, saw very big declines, much bigger than Nokia’s: over 24 percent over the year compared to Nokia’s eight percent.

With ZTE just behind LG at the moment, it looks like those two might be swapping places in the quarters ahead if LG doesn’t manage to turn things around. So which should it concentrate on fixing first: smartphones or feature devices?

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Facebook has made a $3.1 billion business from a social advertising sector many, even it, concede is experimental and unproven. Now it must find that proof. But experimenting on Wall Street, as well as Madison Avenue, could prove challenging.

“Our advertisers typically do not have long-term advertising commitments with us,” Facebook’s S-1 warned. “Many of our advertisers spend only a relatively small portion of their overall advertising budget with us.

“In addition, advertisers may view some of our products, such as sponsored stories and ads with social context, as experimental and unproven.

“Advertising on the social web is a significant market opportunity that is still emerging and evolving. We believe that most advertisers are still learning and experimenting with the best ways to leverage reach, relevance, social context, and engagement offered by Facebook.”

Facebook manages to target standard display advertising very well because it knows so much about users, but the biggest opportunity may yet lay in getting users to participate in and distribute to their friends ad campaigns that are part of their social experience may yet hold greater promise. It is a long way from there, however.

Forrester analyst Nate Elliott cautions (via Reuters): “I worry that the billions of dollars of revenue that they generated last year aren’t as solid as they need to be because the advertisers who spent the money aren’t as thrilled with the results they got for it.”

Amongst advertising’s biggest skeptics is advertising’s biggest beast. WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell thinks advertisers will be challenged to reach social network users without offending them, making Facebook a better PR and word-of-mouth medium than a straight advertising one.

Indeed, Facebook has been trying to strike that very balance. But, with its quest to roll out the perfect formats still ongoing, Facebook has made frequent missteps along the way, such as its Beacon system, which proposed sharing users’ web purchases to friends before it was aborted.

Today, less than half a percent of people who Like big brands’ Facebook Pages actually bother to engage with them, according to new research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute.

Social is not Facebook’s only advertising play. Its offering today is focused mainly around display ads that run alongside users’ feeds. Here, Facebook is so big that, in some key markets like the U.S. and UK, it’s actually the biggest player of all in display advertising - social or otherwise - leaving those that effectively created the display field—Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO), AOL (NYSE: AOL) and others—in the dust.

But it’s social advertising where perhaps the greatest potential lays. And frankly Facebook, like its advertisers, has not yet cracked the nut; that mission goes on.

If, previously, upgrades like Beacon, Timeline and its perpetual redesigns have prompted user outcry, expect future responses to manifest as share price fluctuation when such revisions take place in the public glare of Wall Street.

Still, users’ redesign shock often subsides, stock price can rebound accordingly. And, if Facebook can execute fully on the social advertising holy grail, it can become spectacularly successful.

None of this looks very problematic today. In 2011, Facebook advertising revenue rose 69 percent because it showed 42 percent more advertising thanks to a growing user base; it scored an 18 percent higher price per ad.

But Facebook concedes these growth rates may not be sustainable. “Our user growth has been a primary driver of growth in our revenue,” its S-1 says. “But “our rates of user and revenue growth will decline over time”, especially in the west.

One Facebook ad buying agency thinks that slowdown could be a good thing…

“The market has now entered a phase where there is no longer any super-growth in user numbers to dilute the increases in cost caused by demand increases,” Alchemy Social managing director Will Ashton writes in a new white paper. “As such, we expect costs to increase at rates substantially higher than those we have seen previously.”

In other words, advertisers rushing to Facebook are driving up demand, but the slowdown in Facebook user growth suggests finite supply, driving up the rates it can charge.

Outside the west, Facebook has a huge opportunity in mobile, having gathered 425 million users. But it’s not monetising a single one because it is not selling any ads through mobile. Worse - until then, mobile success could actually hurt the company from within…

“Growth in use of Facebook through our mobile products, where we do not currently display ads, as a substitute for use on personal computers may negatively affect our revenue and financial results,” the company warns. “Our ability to (generate mobile revenue) successfully is unproven.”

$3.1 billion in 2011 ad revenue suggests Facebook is well on its way. What an amazing number for such a young paradigm. But some investors may question whether much of that was short-term experimentation by advertisers, meaning Facebook must work hard to prove its value to them as much as they have to itself.

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»  Facebook’s biggest risks explained (ReadWriteWeb)

»  Is Facebook’s IPO the start of something, or the end? (GigaOm)

»  Zuckerberg claims “We don’t build services to make money” (Forbes)

»  IPO filing says that Zynga accounted for 12% of Facebook’s revenue in 2011 (TNW)

»  From founders to decorators, Facebook riches (NYT)

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Facebook‘s nearly 200-page S-1 filing appears to have crippled the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Edgar website with the mass of people going there to take a peek at the social network’s numbers. That traffic may well be matched by the weight of numbers in the filing itself. Here’s a look at some of them:

845 million active users, 100 billion “friendships”, 250 million photos uploaded daily

That works out to an average of 118.3 friends per user, and an average of 3.4 0.3 pictures uploaded each day by those active users. Among those 845 million active users, more than half—483 million—are actually daily active users (taking the photo average up to 0.5 uploads per day, or around 15 per month). They’ve gone up by 48 percent since December 2010, when they stood at 327 million DAUs. Those numbers sound big on one hand, but not so big on another: doing some very basic math, this works out to average revenues per user of only $4.39. As a point of comparison, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) currently makes about $36 per user; Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) $16 per user (via CBS).

$1 billion in net income on revenues of $3.711 billion

That works out to net income at about 30 percent of revenues in 2011, up slightly from the previous two years when net income was at about 29 percent of revenues. A sign of improving efficiencies?

$3.2 billion in ad revenue

That’s the ad revenue figure for 2011, out of total revenues of $3.7 billion. The rest of its revenue is made up by Facebook Credits and other payments. The growth in ad revenues at the moment appears to be slowing down: Facebook says between 2009 and 2010, ad revenues grew by 145 percent, but then between 2010 and 2011 it grew by only 69 percent. There’s a clear sign that Facebook will need to further diversify how it makes its money if that trend continues. Credits and other fees are still very much on the rise and becoming a more prominent part of the overall revenue pie. In 2011 they amounted to 15 percent of revenues ($557 million); in 2010 they accounted for only five percent ($106 million).

$0 in mobile advertising

Facebook currently makes nothing from advertising on mobile devices because it has yet to extend ads to its mobile platforms. The S-1 didn’t specify whether it planned to introduce this and in fact cast its mobile prospects in the most sober light possible: Facebook thinks that growth in mobile monthly active users will exceed the growth of overall MAUs “for the foreseeable future” as Facebook continues to encourage more mobile use of its platform. There must be a business agenda in that but Facebook doesn’t spell it out here. In fact, it cautions that as more people could just start using the mobile platforms more than the desktop version, where ads do appear, “if we are unable to successfully implement monetization strategies for our mobile users, our revenue and financial results may be negatively affected.”

Zuck’s salary is going down to $1 from next year. At the moment Facebook has 3,200 employees in total. That works out to an average revenue per employee of $1,159,687.50.

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It took the whole day, but Facebook finally—as many expected—filed its S-1 with the Securities Exchange Commission for its long-awaited IPO. While guesstimates for how much Facebook would try to raise ranged from $5 billion to $10 billion, in the end, it looks like it is the lower of that range: $5 billion.

There’s no firm idea yet on what that $5 billion might mean for a valuation of the company. But here are some quick early numbers: Facebook made $3.71 billion in revenue in 2011, almost twice what it did in 2010. Of that $3.71 billion, $1 billion was net income.

It has 845 million active registered users with 483 million of them termed “daily active users”.

Advertising accounted for 85 percent of its revenue last year. Zynga accounted for 12 percent of its revenues overall and over 80 percent of its payment revenues.

And to confirm the rumors we heard about which banks are involved: Morgan Stanley is leading the IPO filing with J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, BofA Merrill Lynch, Barclays Capital, and Allen & Co also participating.

Several folks are in line for a big gain on their investments. Facebook listed Accel Partners, DST Global Limited, Goldman Sachs, and T. Rowe Price as its major institutional shareholders. Dustin Moskovitz, a Facebook co-founder and CEO of startup Asana, is also a major stockholder listed in Facebook’s statement. Notable among the individual investors is Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and will serve on Facebook’s board of directors.

It’s not just the IPO price, bankers and valuation that had people busy guessing. People have been speculating about other aspects of this IPO, including how much of a fee the banks will get on the deal (the range we’ve seen: between one percent and seven percent).

Now, with the IPO finally out, people will begin to pore over the numbers to figure out all sorts of things about Facebook that have not been completely clear while it was still in startup mode: What are its margins? What does it expect its growth rate to be? What are the comparative sizes of different business areas like advertising versus Facebook credits? What’s the geographical spread of its business?

However you cut it, the company has been a ground-breaker in the online world. You can argue about whether or not Facebook introduced the concept of social networking, but it has certainly run away with it, and now has 845 million users. And counting.

The question today is whether it will be able to convert that into a sustainable financial juggernaut, too?

More S-1 detail and number crunching here.

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Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) has accused Samsung of “slavishly copying” its hardware designs; but whether or not that is true, one area where Samsung is taking a note from Apple is in how it debuts its big products. The company today announced that it would not be launching its next big smartphone, the Galaxy S III, at this month’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, as originally expected.

Instead, Samsung will be presenting it at its own-branded event, with less of a gap between the product launch and actual roll-out.

“Samsung is looking forward to introducing and demonstrating exciting new mobile products at Mobile World Congress 2012. The successor to the Galaxy S II smartphone will be unveiled at a separate Samsung-hosted event in the first half of the year, closer to commercial availability of the product. Samsung stays committed to providing the best possible mobile experiences for customers around the world,” a spokesperson told paidContent, via email today.

The Android-based S II (pictured here with its best enemy, the iPhone 4S) has been one of Samsung’s best sellers since launching last year—although Samsung hasn’t given exact sales figures—and many have been anticipating the upgrade, which will apparently feature a faster processor, better camera and other enhancements.

One of the big issues with the S II, however, was that while Samsung unveiled the device at the 2011 MWC event, it didn’t launch in Europe until summer, and the U.S. several months later, in September.

Did that possibly steal some thunder from the launch? As smartphone competition hots up—including leaks of the first BlackBerry 10 “London” devices and even a new iPhone coming this year—that’s a variable that Samsung probably doesn’t want to explore again.

But while Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) has pulled out of CES, and Apple has been running its own launch events for years, Samsung doesn’t seem to be bowing out of the trade show peep show altogether. There have been rumors of Samsung unveiling its first Tizen handsets—that is, the new linux OS that it is developing with Intel (NSDQ: INTC) from the ashes of MeeGo—which could point to a new direction altogether for the Korean handset maker. There are also reports of further tablets on the cards.

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So it’s redundancy time once again. First, at the two Telegraph titles and now at the Mirror trio.

This is the stark reality of modern newspapers, the result of a coincidence of commercial necessity and technological innovation.

There is sure to be more hand-wringing at the decision by Trinity Mirror (LSE: TNI) (TM) to cut a further 75 jobs, amounting to 18.75% of its editorial workforce.

But, without wishing to appear to bless another tranche of redundancies at the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and The People, it must be obvious to all that it is the way of the world.

Most people are expected to leave voluntarily and it is to be hoped they pick up enough severance cash to ensure they can pay their mortgages for some time to come.

What many of them will know is that getting a replacement job is going to be very tricky indeed.

I expect both the British Association of Journalists (BAJ) and the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) will issue statements condemning the action.

They will be heartfelt and sincere, of course, but they will not change the course of a process that is now irreversible.

In June 2010, I reported that TM was making 200 editorial staff redundant. That 25% cut resulted in the overall staffing being reduced to the current 400.

So the three papers will end up in a couple of months’ time with 325 journalists between them. (I seem to recall, when I edited the Daily Mirror 20-odd years ago, that it alone had more than 400 staff).

TM has announced that its move is linked to what it calls “editorial restructuring”, which involves an expansion of its ContentWatch production system.

In its statement this afternoon, TM claimed that ContentWatch had “helped transform the newsroom”. It probably has. And it is probably right in claiming also that the restructuring will “create an even more efficient multimedia operation.”

None of can ignore the fact that it is possible to do so much so quickly with advancing digital tools.

Note, however, that “a centralised reporting and production hub” will operate with “teams working across all three titles” over seven days.

I can understand the production part of that operation. I am less sanguine about reporters working across titles.

Then again, somewhat contradictorily, the company’s statement also says that there will be a “retention of bespoke editorial teams for each title to protect their unique identity.”

I’m not quite certain how that squares with editors having “access to a greater number of reporters than is currently available to them on an individual basis.”

Clearly, the editors - Richard Wallace, Tina Weaver and Lloyd Embley - have their work cut out to bed in the new system.

Wallace is evidently going to assume management responsibility for the new system while continuing to edit the Daily Mirror. Good luck with that, Richard.

Research in Motion (NSDQ: RIMM) will be pinning its comeback hopes on the first generation of BlackBerry phones to run its BlackBerry 10 operating system, and it seems to have settled on a design. Leaked media images to a friendly outlet suggest that RIM wants to borrow cues from the Playbook tablet when it releases those handsets later this year.

Crackberry, fresh off an interview with new RIM CEO Thorsten Heins, has somehow obtained a new image of the BlackBerry London, a concept device we’ve heard about before but that appears to have gone through a redesign or two. In a breathless and fawning account that skates over all the issues with the BlackBerry 10 software, Crackberry tells us that the phone resembles “a downsized Playbook” and that slightly different versions are planned for the U.S. and U.K. markets.

While it may have a few friends in the fanboy blogging community, RIM is going to need a lot more than that to reinvent its brand by the time these handsets arrive toward the end of 2012. And we’re not talking about cartoon superheroes.

It took RIM a year to make its BlackBerry 10 software compatible with its famous e-mail system, and the Playbook tablets have been a dismal failure. And it apparently still hasn’t settled on a chipset for these phones, with Crackberry suggesting the company is still debating between Texas Instruments and Qualcomm (NSDQ: QCOM) months after former CEO Mike Lazaridis told investors the phones would be delayed because RIM needed a special processor that wouldn’t be available until the middle of this year.

Should RIM be able to join the modern mobile software ranks, it might be able to reverse its decline in the U.S., but there’s an awful lot more that we’ll need to see before we can handicap those chances.

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