Is Kayak a promising IPO candidate? You decide. Here are some of the relevant assessments:

• Meta search engines like Kayak accounted for less than 8 percent of online travel booked in 2009, due mostly to low awareness.

• Kayak is spending heavily to make itself better known — NeXt Up estimates an advertising budget of $50 million a year, but Kayak has said itself it plans to spend $100 million on marketing.

• The travel industry should recover from the recession and see a CAGR of 4 percent from 2009 to 2013, with online travel agents growing with a 7 percent CAGR.

• Promising Kayak initiatives include its iPhone apps (see our story) and Travelpost, its TripAdvisor competitor.

• Kayak is projected to have revenue of $180 million in 2010, growing to $305 million in 2014 with EBITDA margins of 30-35 percent.

• Kayak has raised about $224 million in venture funding and debt from General Catalyst, Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, Oak Investment Partners, Tenaya Capital, Trident Capital, Gold Hill Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, Silicon Valley Bank and AOL.

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Mike Omotoso, senior manager for J.D. Power and Associates’ global powertrain unit, told me the firm plans to lower its hybrid and electric vehicle forecast for 2010, although it has yet to determine how big the hit will be. For the first two months of this year, the hybrid share of light vehicle sales hovered at around just 2.3 percent, compared to 2.8 percent for all of 2009 and 2.4 percent in 2008, according to Omotoso. That’s due to a number of factors — including high unemployment, a weak economy and the biggie: gas prices. But the Prius and its technical troubles loom too large to ignore.

Prior to 2009, the Prius’ share of U.S. hybrid sales had slipped below 50 percent only once since 2005 — in 2006, when it dropped to 42 percent. But even that offers a sign of Toyota’s dominance in the hybrid space. Omotoso explained that 2006 marked “the first year for the Camry hybrid and the first full year for the Highlander hybrid. So other Toyota models cannibalized Prius sales.”

Regulators are only beginning to look into the most recent incidents. But initial reports suggest the problems may not have been linked to a floor mat that pinned down the gas pedal in other Priuses and prompted Toyota to issue a recall last year for 2004-2009 models of the hybrid. Last month, when problems surfaced with the regenerative braking system of some 2010 Prius models, Toyota attributed them to a software glitch.

Regardless of what investigators and Toyota may turn up if they check out the cars involved in this week’s incidents more closely, however, one thing’s already clear: Videos that zipped around the web and TV news shows this week of a visibly shaken driver, and quotes from the 911 call he made during the 23 minutes that his 2008 Prius hurdled at high speeds down a Southern California highway before a highway patrol officer helped him stop, aren’t helping to repair the reputation of either Toyota or advanced vehicles.

Given the Prius’ status as the poster child for hybrids, Omotoso explained, “consumers might think that if the Prius has a problem then all hybrids might be dangerous.” That concern creates one more obstacle for new vehicle technologies to penetrate the mainstream, as some car buyers may forgo experimenting with the next generation of green cars — among them plug-in hybrids and all-electric vehicles from General Motors’ Chevy Volt and Nissan’s LEAF to BYD Auto’s e6, Coda Automotive’s Coda Sedan and Fisker Automotive’s Nina — rolling out over the next few years.

That perception problem is a hurdle that many car makers can’t really afford in this nascent market. Plug-in vehicle developers are competing for a niche that’s likely to remain quite small for years to come. Nearly a decade after the Prius debut, hybrids still hold a single-digit sliver of the pie. And despite optimistic projections from investors like Warren Buffett, who has said he expects all cars will run on electricity by 2030, other forecasts suggest significantly slower adoption, mainly due to high price tags.

Lux Research forecasts that even if oil costs $200 a barrel in 2020, just 4 percent of vehicles sold globally will be all-electric or plug-in hybrid because of the high costs of the battery technology. According to Lux, plug-in hybrids could sell 3 million units per year by 2020 if the price of oil reaches those heights, while hybrids can be expected to sell that many by 2020 regardless of oil prices.

In addition to presenting a challenge to companies vying to win over consumers to advanced vehicles, Toyota’s ongoing troubles also highlight a need for the government, the auto industry and even drivers to collect and manage (or in the case of drivers, to file), vehicle safety data and complaints in a more open and timely manner. Noting in prepared testimony that regulators and Toyota had received complaints of unintended acceleration in Toyota models seven years ago, Consumers Union is issuing that challenge – to increase transparency of vehicle safety data – in a hearing this morning on the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s oversight operations. As much as technology may be part of the problem with Toyota’s vehicles, it could also be part of the solution — helping identify problems before too many drivers are put in the situation of having to call 911 from behind the wheel of an out-of-control car.

While we’re at the stats game, Foursquare also says it’s had 15.5 million check-ins and 1,000,000 badges awarded to encourage users to participate (in a bid to inspire further loyalty, it is offering temporary tattoo badges at this year’s SXSW). Foursquare raised $1.35 million in September and continues to be actively pursued by VCs.

The company is most definitely hyped disproportionately to its adoption, but at least it has more users than media mentions. The word “foursquare” has been used 4,140 times in articles indexed in Google News since 2009 and 89,311 times in Google Blog Search — but surely many more times on Twitter, which doesn’t offer a long-term index.

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It’s still only a partial solution, though, and one many iPhone users aren’t satisfied with. True multitasking is still high on the want list of many iPhone users, and really remains the only thing not addressed by the many major feature additions iPhone 3.0 brought. Luckily, true app backgrounding capabilities are said to be on the way in iPhone 4.0.

That’s according to sources AppleInsider describes as having a “proven track record in predicting Apple’s technological advances.” According to those same sources, though, Apple still has a ways to go before it can introduce these features to iPhone users. But the problem doesn’t lie with the iPhone’s ability to run multiple applications at once.

In fact, the iPhone is quite good at multitasking in its current incarnation. Nike+ runs great while you do other things like take calls and/or check your email. But it’s the only non-Apple app that’s allowed that privilege. And Apple developed it for Nike, so it doesn’t really count. What’s new in iPhone 4.0 is that third-party developers will finally be able to run their apps in the background, too.

Apple hasn’t enabled true multitasking for all apps not because it’s been technically prevented from doing so, but because doing so represents a security risk in terms of opening the door to apps being able to run in the background without the user’s knowledge, which is how viruses and other malware works.

There’s also the issue of increased performance requirements, and increased battery usage. Apple is said to be addressing both of those with the new framework, though the source provided no specifics about how exactly that would be managed. I predict that mutitasking will only work on newer hardware, most likely the 3GS and above. A next-gen iPhone will probably be built from the ground up with multitasking in mind, and should offer battery and processor improvements scaled to compensate.

Another challenge Apple faces in bringing background multitasking to the iPhone is redesigning the user interface. As of now, users can access any currently running Apple programs that use backgrounding by tapping a thin colored bar at the top of the screen. While that works quite well for just one app, if you have a number running at once, it could quickly become way too cluttered and obscure the app you’re actually using at the moment.

According to AppleInsider’s source, the solution in the works at Apple leverages some existing tech from OS X to accomplish this. Personally, I’m betting on some kind of Exposé-type interface, possibly accessed through a special gesture or in a way similar to the one used now to bring up the iPhone’s Spotlight search screen. It might also take a page out of mobile Safari’s book, and use an interface similar to the one the browser has for displaying multiple pages.

The iPhone’s interface in general could probably use a makeover at the point. It’s been unchanged since its launch, and while many would call that a testament to its strength and intuitiveness, there’s no denying that as the iPhone gains new abilities, Apple might want to consider some more drastic changes to the ways in which users access and make use of those functions.

I’m sure Apple can handle the UI challenges, but I’m much more wary about how it addresses the potential security risks that come with opening up backgrounding. Luckily, it still has absolute control over the App Store, but it still might be possible for industrious hackers to bypass the safeguards in place and get some malicious software onto people’s devices.

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But there’s no shortage of players hoping that Redmond can breathe new life into its mobile business. The following are just a few of the entities with a vested interest in seeing Windows Phone succeed:

• Corporate IT departments — Business users are increasingly turning to consumer-friendly smartphones like the iPhone and forcing IT staffers to support their new gadgets. But the emergence of a phone that offers both Microsoft’s seamless integration with Exchange Server and consumer-friendly features and applications would go a long way toward making life easier for IT workers.
• HTC – The Taiwan-based handset manufacturer is fully aboard the Android bandwagon, but hitching your wagon to a single OS is a dangerous strategy for a mobile OEM. So the longtime Windows Mobile supplier is one of the launch partners for Windows Phone and vows to develop an “HTC Hub” for the platform.
• Motorola — Although it joined the Android crowd late last year in a big way, releasing both the Cliq and the Droid, as Om noted in January, Motorola was left out in the cold when HTC was tapped to produce Google’s flagship device. The struggling company will continue to churn out Android handsets, but Windows Phone has caught its eye. Look for increasing interest — and maybe a hardware commitment — out of Motorola as the OS nears its launch later this year.
• Application developers — Microsoft is wooing developers by forcing manufacturers to comply with strict guidelines regarding screen sizes, buttons and features. That will make it easier for developers to deploy apps across a range of Windows Phone gadgets without having to tweak each app for each handset. And longtime Windows Mobile developers are sure to be pleased by a platform that combines high-tech entertainment features with Microsoft’s business-focused technology.
• Gamers — Integrating Windows Phone with Xbox and Windows is an interesting move for a company whose mobile strategy has long focused on the enterprise. But it’s also a strategy that could finally push mobile gaming beyond casual, pick-up-and-play titles and toward more immersive, console-type experiences.

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Betaworks, the brainchild of former AOL executives John Borthwick and Andrew Weisman, views itself as a holding company that both invests in and operates Internet and digital media companies.

In some ways for its investors, Betaworks is a bet on the newly emergent sector amorphously described as the real-time web. It is best known for its bets on the Twitter ecosystem.

The company first tasted success when it sold Summize, an early entrant into the real-time search market, to Twitter in July 2008 for a reportedly big stake in the San Francisco-based company. Since then Betaworks has launched and subsequently spun out URL-shortener Bit.ly, which ended up raising $2 million from the likes of Mitch Kapor and Jeff Clavier of Softech VC. It also created social media analytics company, Chartbeat, a company that emerged from the ashes of a failed Betaworks startup, Firefly.

In comparison to Bit.ly and Chartbeat, Betaworks is purely an investor in Tweetdeck, a very popular Twitter reader. “We have stakes in 24 companies –- some small and some large stakes,” says co-founder Borthwick. It owns a big chunk of five companies -– Bit.ly, Chartbeat, Tweetdeck, Twitterfeed and another startup currently in stealth.

Borthwick explains that the company will use the new funds to do two things: be more aggressive in investing in more startups while at the same time, do follow-on investments as their companies scale up.

Borthwick bristles at the idea of being equated to an incubator.  He views Betaworks as a holding company in the mold of, say, Liberty Media and Barry Diller’s IAC. Of course, on the other end of the spectrum are disgraced names from another era, like CMGI.

P.S.: If you want to get a better idea of how Betaworks thinks about the world of Internet and digital media, check out this  post from Betaworks’ Josh Auerbach.

I have included a poll below asking when and with whom you guys share your location, because as a shy and privacy-focused person I tend to err on keeping my digital presence online and my real-world presence, not…anonymous, exactly, but I certainly don’t broadcast it to the world. And I think that will eventually mean I lose out on those serendipitous connections that location services can provide. For example, I might miss out on meeting the stranger sitting next to me in a coffee shop who reads the site and could offer a great conversation on the future of semiconductors.

With more than 400,000 users of Foursquare and Gowalla already, there are plenty of interesting connections I or anyone else could make. But there are also plenty of people who, like me, are clearly waiting to see how this check-in concept — and by extension, always-on location services like Google’s Latitude or Loopt — plays out. I’m hoping that at SXSW we’ll start seeing tools that use the check-in concept, not to award points or badges, but to facilitate useful interactions among relative strangers, such as, if you see a neighbor checking in at your kid’s school every afternoon, then maybe you can meet them and set up a carpool.

Much like it took time for people to see use cases and value in Twitter, which was an entirely new means of communicating, it will take time and a display of beneficial results before folks will see the value in displaying their location rather than focusing on the loss of anonymity. Until that happens, many people, when faced with an unfamiliar friend request, will likely hit delete. And without that large network of strangers, then the idea of machine-mediated serendipity remains just that — an idea.

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We learned last year that Verizon would launch its first LTE phones sometime in 2011, but the new ETA is several months earlier than the company had previously forecast. The phones will support promised speeds of 5-12 Mbps on download and 2-5 Mbps on uploads on the LTE network, which will launch in 25-30 markets this year.

But Melone also said that all-you-can-eat data plans are “the big issue that has to change.” (AT&T’s Ralph de la Vega made similar comments in December, pointing the finger at data-hungry iPhone users.) Verizon Communications CTO Dick Lynch in January told the Washington Post that LTE pricing would likely involve a base subscriber fee plus usage charges for bandwidth consumed.  That scenario could apply to several different pricing models, as Stacey has noted. Regardless of how, exactly, Verizon chooses to bill for 4G service, one thing is clear: High-end users are going to pay substantially more than they’ve been paying for 3G.

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Image courtesy Flickr Hector Milla.

When iTunes web preview pages first appeared for songs and albums the industry was abuzz with the possibility that iTunes could be migrating to the cloud. iTunes preview has so far had little impact on how we use purchased media content, but it has had a huge impact on how we find iTunes media content on the web, especially with iPhone apps. The iTunes web preview pages are an enormous draw for search engines and consistently rank high in the results when searching for the names of apps.

A Quick History of iTunes Web Preview

Previously, web links to iTunes content opened a redirect page (hosted on phobos.apple.com) that asked you to wait “One Moment Please” while the iTunes application was launched. This page only had a thumbnail of the cover and sparsely listed just the title and publisher.

iTunes web preview first appeared on November 13, 2009 with full pages including descriptive text (hosted on itunes.apple.com). Audio clip previews were added on January 7, 2010. These pages still launch the iTunes application, but also include the full description, select customer reviews, and links to related content. Preview pages for iPhone apps were published on February 4 and podcasts were added March 1. TV Show and Movies still have the old style pages that just launch the iTunes application.

In hindsight, the launch of iTunes 9 on September 9, 2009 with store pages rendered completely in WebKit using HTML was a sign of things to come.

iTunes Web Preview has SEO Mojo

These web preview pages have exposed text content to Google and other search engines that can now crawl and index these pages. To measure the impact this has had on search results, I did a short study on the Top 100 Paid Apps in the iTunes App Store. I chose to track the relative ranking in Google search results of the iTunes preview page and the app’s homepage when searching on the app name.

For this study, I only looked at the search results for the app name. While keywords would have been interesting to track, they are not publicly available. The keywords that publishers submit to Apple are hidden content in the iTunes App Store and are not included in the web preview page. I dropped special characters that appeared unlikely to actually be typed into a search (trademark and copyright symbols, for example).

In almost all results, iTunes appeared in the first 10 results on Google. In fact, the median result was #4. In some cases, the pages were only launched only a month ago, so that’s impressive. iTunes appeared above the app homepage for 68 of the Top 100 Apps.

In about 2/3 of the apps, the iTunes preview page ranked higher in search results. There is a marked difference between these two sets of apps.

For all 100 apps, the median rank of the developer’s homepage (as published in iTunes) in Google search results was #17. Developers should take note here because a rank of 17 means that your app’s homepage is pushed off to the much less visited second page of results.

For those cases where the homepage appeared before iTunes, the median search result rank was #1. The iTunes preview page median result was #5. When we look at the other set, where iTunes appeared above the homepage, the median iTunes result was #3 and the median homepage result was #71.

We can see here that homepages that rank well for searches on the app name have a pretty good chance of capturing customers who are looking for that app. However, if the homepage is not doing well for a search on the app name, it is far more likely that the customer will end up at the iTunes store, or perhaps a review site.

Some Surprises

While I was not surprised to see the iTunes preview pages come in at the #1 result for App Store specific titles like “Space Miner: Space Ore Bust,” I did not expect to see the iTunes page fall near the top with some older brands that predate the App Store. “Frogger,” “Skee-Ball,” and “SpinArt” — single word titles — all show iTunes at #6. Tetris, Scrabble, Rock Band and Final Fantasy have the iTunes preview page holding a spot between #13 and #15. “Playboy” — another single word term that I would have thought to have lots of search results — shows the iTunes page for the app at #7.

What Does It All Mean?

There are two issues that most developers should look for right away. The first is the non-safe characters issue mentioned above. The second is to look closely at the app description. Previously, the app description was not indexed for iTunes searches. Only the name and hidden keywords are used for searching inside iTunes. However, the description text is being indexed by Google now. It would benefit publishers to spend more attention on crafting the right message in the app description to reach those searching on the web.

Apple’s move to go with HTML content in the app store and the new preview pages for the App Store and other content have had a clear effect on where iTunes content appears in web searches. More web traffic is going to go straight to the iTunes Store as this trend continues but developers can take a few steps to make sure that customers find the info that they have prepared for shoppers on their own web sites.

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Setting up group deals does require capital, because you need salespeople on the ground to find desirable venues and negotiate with them — and given the now tens of competitors in some cities, elbow out your rivals’ salespeople. LivingSocial is currently in 13 cities (it launches four more today), still quite a bit behind category leader Groupon, which is in 40. But armed with this new capital, LivingSocial CEO Tim O’Shaughnessy said the company hopes to rapidly expand its business.

O’Shaughnessy said LivingSocial’s angle, beyond deals, is to help small businesses grok social media in order to keep in touch with their customers. The Washington, D.C.-based company, which has been around for two and a half years with products like online book reviews and drink coupons, launched the deals product last summer. “We’re basically creating marketing budgets for people who never had marketing before,” he said. “There are not a lot of ways to guarantee customer foot traffic like we do.”

LivingSocial, which is not currently profitable as it expands (again, regret the incessant Groupon comparisons, but they say they have been turning a profit for a while), takes a 30-50 percent split of revenue collected from its deals, but it only pays out if its customers spend money, so there’s little financial risk for participating businesses. It primarily brings in customers through daily emails, but it also has an iPhone app with push notifications and a Facebook presence. O’Shaughnessy pushes off the competitive angle, saying many more merchants want to work with his company than they have space for, but says he’ll work to stand out from the crowd with the launch of an affiliate program today and soon launching more personalized subscriptions.

P.S. For those of you who are skeptical of group buying and competing in such a jam-packed space, I should say I’m a total believer. In the course of writing this article, I happily bought a half-off coupon for my neighborhood sushi joint, which happened to be LivingSocial’s San Francisco deal of the day. Speaking from personal experience, group deals totally spark spending and loyalty.

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In a blog post on the Digg blog, John Quinn, Digg’s VP of engineering, writes:

Perhaps our most significant infrastructure change is abandoning MySQL in favor of a NoSQL alternative. To someone like me who’s been building systems almost exclusively on relational databases for almost 20 years, this feels like a bold move. What’s Wrong with MySQL? Our primary motivation for moving away from MySQL is the increasing difficulty of building a high performance, write intensive, application on a data set that is growing quickly, with no end in sight. This growth has forced us into horizontal and vertical partitioning strategies that have eliminated most of the value of a relational database, while still incurring all the overhead.

Digg is just the latest high-profile convert to the NoSQL world. Instead of using databases such as MySQL, many of the companies that deal in near-real-time information are opting for new kind of data stores — most of them open source, such as Cassandra and CouchDB.

Cassandra is roughly the open-source equivalent of Google’s Big Table. It was intended by Facebook to solve the problem of inbox search; the company needed something that was fast, reliable and had the ability to handle read and write requests at the same time. Messaging in an environment as heavily used as Facebook requires a system that can not only store data but also provide results for search queries at blazing fast speeds.

Stu Hood, the technical lead for the search team in the Email & Apps division of Rackspace, recently said:

I think that distributed databases solve a problem that a lot of companies with large datasets have had to solve independently in the past…Cassandra has an approach that hybridizes the Bigtable and Dynamo models, where a lot of its competitors chose to take one path or the other. Over the Bigtable clones, Cassandra has huge high-availability advantages, and no single point of failure (possible because of the eventually consistent approach). When compared to the Dynamo adherents, Cassandra has the advantage of a more advanced datamodel, allowing for a single “row” to contain billions of column/value pairs: enough to fill a machine. You also get efficient range queries for the top level key, and even within your values.

In a post last year, contributing writer Gary Orenstein pointed out that thanks to these attributes, Cassandra has potential applications beyond inbox search that include “recommendation engines, targeted advertising, and content search, particularly when you combine many concurrent inputs and output requests to the same data set.”

Digg is a prototypical application. The company tells me that it gets:

• 40 million visitors a month, who in turn account for roughly 500 million page views a month.
• 20,000 daily submissions

It also generates:

• 170,000 daily Diggs
• 19,000 comments

As these numbers suggest, there is a high amount of interaction between the system and its users. No wonder Digg digs Cassandra!

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Recently, while writing a column, she did a search through the archives of SFGate.com, the online presence of the Chron. She discovered that the web site was “copying” and “distorting” her column archives. (Here’s the link– Warning: Not Safe for Work) Here’s how she describes what she saw:

The column had been stripped of all links, and divided across several pages. My bio was missing, as were all the comments. Freakishly, all the commas were gone. And the URL had been changed. The address was comprised of words; to my horror the URL had been keyworded to say “ashamed porn star” — the exact opposite of the article’s content. There is a much bigger story here. It’s all in what’s going on with archive duplication and the nation’s old media newspapers online. I think that the work done to the duped content is done for the purpose of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The idea here seems to be stripping content, duplicating it, make SEO’d content that is a dead end for readers, and drive up results with cost per click ads.

The San Francisco Chronicle, it seems, like the Los Angeles Times, is using the technology of an LA-based startup, Perfect Market, which has raised $20 million from Trinity Ventures, Rustic Canyon Ventures and others. Tim Oren, a venture capitalist at The Pacifica Fund, on his blog, Due Diligence, points out that while there’s nothing illegal about what the newspapers are doing, it does border on scraping. Typically, spammers scrape web sites, then set up shadow blogs and fill them with pay-per-click ads. As Oren writes:

The keyword and ad-stuffed dead end pages apparently produced by Perfect Markets’s technology are isomorphic, from a search company’s point of view, to those created by more questionable tactics such as scraping. The intent is the same: to spam the index. This is the behavior that routinely gets questionable sites shoved to Google’s back pages, or banished altogether. One has to wonder just how long this type of abuse will be tolerated, simply because it’s being practiced by a recognized media outlet.

I couldn’t agree more. Nor could I help but notice the irony, considering how quick the mainstream media is to lament the traffic-stealer that is Google. It wouldn’t surprise me if more newspapers adopted these kind of strategies.

Update #1: A reader after some sleuthing points out that Perfect Market may also be working with LA Times, Baltimore Sun, Orlando Sentinal, South Florida Sun Sentinal, Hartford Courant, Allentown Morning Call, Virginia Daily Press and the New York Daily News.

Update #2: Julie Schoenfeld, Perfect Market CEO Responds:

Perfect Market has been working over the past year to increase revenue for newspapers through search and social media and we have had wonderful success. We are actively working with our partners to delight our customers and users with innovative new content experiences.  In the meantime, there are factual errors being perpetuated about our services that we would be remiss to leave unaddressed. Here are the facts: * Perfect Market serves up professionally produced news articles on the major search engines and only works with high-quality publishers.  Our pages contain highly professional editorial content, representing decades of careful work by journalists and writers who work for publishers to produce quality content.  We are held to a high standard by our publishers to preserve the integrity and quality of content we publish online, and we hold ourselves to a high standard. * We are not ‘scraping’ ‘spamming’ ‘keyword-stuffing’ or ‘duplicating content’.  While spammers attempt to surface pages with little meaningful content.  Perfect Market simply manages the search experience for publishers.  We provide contextual navigation to relevant related content and topics so the user can browse the publishers vast content library rather than creating dead ends. Content is not unreadable.  Quite the contrary, it is out in the open and accessible to all, and often times, more accessible than ever before. * We know how traffic from search engines and properly targeted CPC ads can generate big revenues.  We are bringing those learning’s to high quality publishers so they can more fully participate in the vibrant internet ecosystem.

1. People want digital persistence: They have an expectation that their content will be available everywhere at any point in time.
2. People want universal access to content across all devices.
3. The industry needs to make discovery easy, which means once people have access to digital content, they need to be able to find their stuff and new stuff they will like using semantic data.
4. There will be new ways to empower social expression and engagement, much in the same way Twitter created a new category of expression and a way to communicate.
5. The digital revolution will be a global phenomenon.

Facebook had 436 million U.S. searches in February — still a drop in the bucket compared to Google, which had 13.5 billion search queries. Google was down 4 percent for the month, but then, February is short, and every single site in the top 20 listed by comScore showed a monthly drop except for Facebook.

Facebook still has a long way to go to compete on search, though it has recently made its internal search tool much more useful by including sortable results from friends’ status messages, pages and events. The site sits at 15th in comScore’s ranking when you split out the major properties’ sub-search engines, such as YouTube and dedicated search domains like Ask.com. But this trend seems likely to continue. Understanding information through a social lens can be incredibly useful. Not to mention, half of Facebook’s 400 million users log in every day, so they will likely become accustomed to searching through the site where they live on the web.

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Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my bio.

Wireless Ink claims the two companies had to have known about the patent, the application for which was made public back in 2004, “given the time and resources defendants have invested in their desktop and mobile Web sites as well as their strategic importance,” Bloomberg quotes the complaint as saying. Facebook has said the suit is without merit and Google said it’s busy reviewing it.

Wireless Ink is reportedly seeking cash damages and an injunction against use of the technology. You’d think — if the patent is found valid — the company would license it out, given that mobile sign-ups are compelling, and increasingly so as handset browsers become better and social networking reaches into regions and demographics where PCs are less common.

Here’s the patent in question: “Method, apparatus and system for management of information content for enhanced accessibility over wireless communication networks.” The lawsuit, filed in New York, does not seem to have appeared yet online as a public court document.

Facebook and Google also like to register IP themselves; most recently, Facebook was awarded a patent for its news feed, and Google a patent for location-based advertising.

Image courtesy of Walknboston on Flickr.

The issue of just how far the FCC’s authority reaches was raised last summer, when the agency opened up a probe into the blocking of Google Voice on the iPhone. It turns out that Apple had blocked the application, not AT&T, prompting questions as to what the FCC could really do to force Apple to allow Google Voice on the device. Apple has yet to relent.

Additionally, the FCC doesn’t appear to have authority to stop the recent efforts of carriers and ISPs to introduce metered wired broadband, according to Martin. The Commission can, of course, step in when ISPs discriminate by tying services to required service bundles, but he doesn’t think metering violates any rules.

Martin also praised the potential for more spectrum for mobile broadband, but suggested that more spectrum alone isn’t the key. He said getting traffic off the wireless network faster will help, as will bigger and better fiber connections. Additionally, he said the FCC’s stated goal of providing 500MHz of spectrum to carriers, and its plan to offer broadcasters compensation for relinquishing some of their spectrum, will require changes in the law that only Congress can implement.

Martin steered clear of making judgments on the current FCC, but by delineating the limits of the Commission’s authority, I left feeling doubtful that the agency has the authority to implement some of the policy goals it’s recommending in the National Broadband Plan. I also wish that instead of focusing on things it can’t control, the FCC comes up with a solid plan to address competition in wired and wireline, so that a competitive market can do what the FCC cannot.