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Weekly News Roundup - August 20, 2011

What should you be paying attention to this week?

It’s getting easier to put up a storefront on your Facebook page, thanks to a partnership between Facebook, e-commerce platform provider Magento, and service provider Zibaba. Say that ten times fast. (Internet Retailer)

Your takeaway: If you’ve been wondering how merchants like LL Bean and Petco got their Facebook stores up and running, it’s going to get easier. If you do a lot of online sales and Facebook is (or you want it to be) a major customer channel, now’s a good time to start thinking about what it would take to do this.

Google, among other things this week, has launched a catalog app for the iPad. Also coming soon for Android, Google Catalog lets users flip through digital catalogs, go shopping, and share with friends.  (Time Techland)

Your takeaway: If you've got a catalog, and you sell to a relatively affluent audience (i.e. people with iPads), then this is something you might consider. The more convenient you make shopping for your customers, the better.

Gotorola or Motoroogle? Never one to rest on its laurels, the real big story for Google this week is the acquisition of Motorola Mobility. This is a good news/bad news situation (ZDNet)

What does it mean that Google will now own its very own mobile device manufacturer? Google will be more like Apple – they will supply the software platform and the device hardware, as well as the content and apps they already provide.

But let’s not forget that a huge motivator for Google’s acquisition was to strengthen its position in the patent wars – here’s more on these from NPR, including a handy graphic that explains who’s suing who.

But as ZDNet says, this also means that Google will then compete against the very handset makers using its Android platform – Samsung, HTC, etc. Isn’t this a bit cannibalistic?
Of course, Google could always just shut Motorola down completely and keep the patents, and there’s always a chance they could do that, but I hope not. That’s a lot of jobs we can’t afford to lose.

What do you think the Google acquisition of Motorola means for technology, jobs, telecom? Please share in the comments.

Have a great weekend, and thanks for reading!

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