Half a billion people around the world are now using Facebook on a monthly basis. That means Facebook has a slightly smaller population than the continent of North America. The social network also has enough users to put 75 people on every one of the over 6.6 million square miles of Russia, the largest country in the world by landmass.

Xilinx has announced first quarter fiscal 2011 sales of US$594.7 million, up 12% sequentially and 58% on year. Net profits for the quarter reached US$158.6 million, compared to profits of US$148.5 million in the prior quarter and US$38 million a year ago.

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Qualcomm, the largest wireless chipmaker, has said the mobile phone industry had reached a "transformative stage" as it reported third-quarter sales and profits ahead of expectations.

The talk of a Samsung-Infineon deal surfaced in German publication Manager Magazine but neither firm would comment. Two years ago, Samsung greatly extended its purchasing of cellphone chips from Infineon, largely at the expense of Qualcomm.

Applied Materials has announced it will stop new sales of its "turnkey" SunFab thin-film solar manufacturing line and concentrate on silicon solar and LED lighting. The restructuring of its Energy and Environmental Solutions business will lead to the elimination of 400-500 positions and a third-quarter charge between US$375-425 million.

Samsung has begun mass producing what it claims is the industry's first 2Gb DDR3 memory using 30nm-class process technology. The chip was introduced on February 1.

China mapped out investment of 5 trillion yuan ($738 billion) into alternative energy over the next decade, an official with the National Energy Administration (NEA) said Tuesday.

Raytheon, which makes the Patriot missile defense system, is developing software which could enable a soldier to find enemies in his or her surrounding terrain using a mobile phone running Google's Android operating system.

South Korea's LG Display said on Thursday it would invest 618 billion won (US$513.5 million) in an LCD plant to boost capacity for small-sized flat screens.

Programmable logic vendor Altera set a new all-time high in quarterly sales in the second quarter of 2010. It also beat consensus analyst expectations for sales and net income during the quarter.

"We'll seek opportunities including acquisitions and partnerships," executive officer Takehiro Fukuda, who oversees finance and accounting at Elpida, said in a recent interview. "We need to further expand the range of our business in areas such as mobile phone and television chips, and we plan to cut our debt-to-equity ratio to 1 from 1.3 by year-end and eventually to 0.3."

Samsung in June announced plans to expand the capacity of its 12-inch chip plant in Austin with a US$3.6 billion investment, and hire 500 more workers there by 2011.

Google Energy has signed a deal to purchase 114 megawatts of energy from a wind farm in Iowa, marking the first deal done by Google's energy subsidiary.

Apple posted a video demonstrating the antenna issues in Nokia's smartphone. The phone drops from seven bars to two when held in a similar manner to the grip that causes problems on the iPhone 4.

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When asked whether Toshiba would release smartphones anytime soon, Toshiba Australia's chief Whittard answered with "probably not."

A video-heavy Web site that Apple set up in the wake of the antenna controversy, showed footage of the extensive internal tests that Apple says have been the fruits of the $100 million it's invested in "advanced antenna design and test labs."

Now, many or all the famous (Nvidia, Qualcomm, Marvel...) TSMC customers already use ARM designs with TSMC, but this deal might make things easier for smaller ones. In short: expect to see ARM continue to proliferate on the mobile computing market.

The numbers paint an interesting picture. Apple now sells 92,000 iPhones a day. For comparison, 160,000 Android devices are being sold each day, 120,000 BlackBerries, 45,000 Windows Mobile devices and 260,000 Symbian handsets. Apple's market share in smartphones could now be down to 14%, from its peak of 17%, where it has been for the previous 3 quarters.

Nokia, which is losing market share in high-end smartphones as it struggles to finish the flagship N8 device, has seen two-thirds of its market value wiped out since Apple's 2007 introduction of the iPhone. The company may name a new CEO to replace Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo as early as this month, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday.

Google posted a note on the Nexus One website to explain that it no longer will sell its Nexus One phones online. While it will continue to sell through Vodafone in Europe, KT in Korea and a few others, the experiment of Google selling a phone direct to consumers online is dead.

Texas Instruments has said weaker-than-expected orders from one mobile phone customer, identified as Nokia by some analysts, caused second-quarter revenues to miss Wall Street forecasts.