Here are a few of the top stories in which eMarketer data and analysis were featured this week:

8/25: Adweek.com – Will New Apple Chief Mean Shift for Publishers?
Apple, its products adored by consumers all over, has nonetheless had a complicated relationship with publishers, who have battled with the tech giant over its intractable position involving the sale of content on its devices. Read more.

8/25: Reuters.com – Social media magazine Flipboard pursues TV, films
Internet video is getting even more crowded. Flipboard, the social media magazine whose investors include actor Ashton Kutcher, plans to add television shows and films to move it beyond the online articles that it offers now. Read more.

8/24: AdAge.com – As Growth of Search Marketing Slows, Agencies Change Tack
Considering some ad agencies are older than your grandmother, evolving for a digital world is hardly a new concept. But newer generations of agencies are focused on evolving too — especially those raised in search marketing. Read more.

8/24: Bloomberg.com – Emirates Craves Apple’s Cool in Online Push for 4,000 Crew
Emirates, the largest international airline, is advertising 4,000 cabin-crew jobs via online music provider Spotify Ltd. as it strives to attract international staff for the world’s biggest fleet of Airbus SAS superjumbos. Read more.

8/24: NYTimes.com – Google Reaches $500 Million Settlement With Government
Google will pay $500 million to settle federal government charges that it has knowingly shown illegal ads for fraudulent Canadian pharmacies in the United States, the Justice Department announced on Wednesday. Read more.

8/24: Mashable.com – Search Stereotypes: What Web Content Reveals About Cultural Biases
Few things bothered Sylvia Martinez more than what the web thought of her and other Latinas. Martinez, a VP and digital content director at the recently launched Mamiverse.com that focuses on the coveted Latina mom market, has been combating one of the web’s dirty little secrets for years. Read more.

8/23: Entrepreneur.com – The Fallacy Behind ‘Facebook Fatigue’
You can call it “Facebook Apathy” or “Facebook Funk,” but “Facebook Fatigue” it isn’t. The term “Facebook Fatigue” has wriggled its way into the business lexicon — most recently, in a pair of reports claiming there is flagging support for social media sites among users. Read more.

8/23: CNNMoney.com – $99 is the magic tablet price point
Hewlett-Packard couldn’t sell many TouchPad tablets for $499. It couldn’t even sell them at $399, which is around what they cost to make. But $99? Bingo. Read more.

8/23: WSJ.com – Tech Today: H-P’s Evolution
In an interview, Hewlett-Packard CEO Leo Apotheker tells the Wall Street Journal that the company is beginning a “needed transformation” to better compete for corporate technology budgets. Read more.

8/23: AdAge.com – Facebook Seeks Acquisitions to Fend Off Google
Facebook, the world’s largest social network, is planning acquisitions that will improve site design, keep its service reliable and advance mobile features to stave off competition from Google and Twitter. Read more.

8/22: Mashable.com – Is Facebook Use Plateauing?
Haven’t sent your friend a virtual Facebook gift in a while? You’re not alone, a new study reports. Researcher Global Web Index compared Facebook usage in July 2009 to June 2011 and found that several Facebook activities, like virtual gifting, are on the decline. Read more.

For more of eMarketer’s recent news coverage, click here.

eMarketer estimates that Apple will grab 30% share of the US smartphone market this year. Android will fall close behind with 28% share, after exploding from just 6% in 2009.

Note: Smartphones are any voice handset with an advanced operating system (e.g., iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, etc.) and features/capabilities that resemble a PC.

A complete report, Smart and Getting Smarter: Key Mobile Device Trends for Marketers, is available exclusively for eMarketer Total Access clients. Learn more.

The theme of the Consumer Electronics Show was ‘The Year of the Tablet,’ and more than 80 were introduced at the show. In this cacophony of device debuts, what’s most important for marketers to know? What follows are four questions and answers that will help put tablets in perspective.

Question: Do any of the more than 80 tablets introduced at CES have a chance of coming close to the iPad’s success?

Answer: What’s happening with tablets is very similar to what happened in the smartphone market. In whatever the category—Apple has one device. And that one device is always being measured against many other devices in the same category. Samsung introduced the Galaxy Tab in the fourth quarter of 2010 and it did pretty well, but it’s unlikely that any single tablet coming out is going to outsell the iPad. It’s more of a question of whether collectively they will reach parity with the iPad.

What we’ve seen in the smartphone space in the past 12 months, as Android has expanded dramatically, is that the growth from Android has been straight up and the growth of the iPhone has been largely flat.

So it stands to reason that we’ll see a similar dynamic in the tablet market. Apple had the lion’s share of the market in 2010 because it basically had the market all to itself. But most forecasters see other tablets on other platforms—not individual tablets but tablets on competing operating systems, specifically Android—chipping away at Apple’s lead.

Question: Let’s say you’re a brand manager and you’ve budgeted a little money to experiment with tablets in 2011. What’s the smartest thing you can do with that money?

Answer: Of course, it depends on the brand and on the objectives. If you’re a marketer and you’re doing display advertising, you are faced with similar choices as you are with smartphones. If you are trying to build awareness, you can do some display advertising on the tablet. You either go with the mass-market approach on one or more of the many mobile ad networks, or you invest the significant resources to put up an iAd, which would then restrict you to the Apple platform.

Naturally there are apps as well and they require some investment—of both resources and in developing attainable goals and objectives. An app does need to be accompanied by some solid thinking about where the app fits within the larger brand strategy, but it remains a solid approach, especially if you want to deliver an immersive experience. Branded utilities—apps that carry the brand name and which do something useful for the end user—also work quite well, such as an airline app that allows users to book flights and check in.

One thing that Apple did intelligently with the iPad is that it developed the platform to handle apps designed specifically to run on the larger form factor. That’s not something that the current version of Android allows for. We saw some CES previews this week of a version of Android (dubbed Honeycomb) that is optimized for tablets and it looks quite impressive, but remember that by the time it comes to market, Apple will already be coming to market with the second version of the iPad.

Marketers should look very carefully at the new tablets and operating systems coming down the line this year. In this particular market segment, Apple will remain the leader through 2012 at the very least, but that doesn’t mean that brands should not consider Android and even BlackBerry tablets.

It’s also worthwhile to consider working with the larger digital platforms such as Amazon and Google, which are expanding their media presence (Amazon with music and video and Google with music and video through YouTube). There is a way that you could work through companies like these that serve as distribution partners.

Question: What is the most important thing for marketers to understand about tablets during this “year of the tablet”?

Answer: The tablet is a different kind of device—a hybrid of mobile and computing. One of the things to watch is the extent to which people are using tablets as communication devices as well as media distribution devices: Some of the recently introduced Android tablets include video-chatting capabilities, and the second-generation iPad is expected to carry these as well.

Of course it’s unlikely that people will do away with their phones right away. But one of the things this trend dovetails with is that people are using their phones less and less as phones—especially younger people. It changes our idea of what a phone is—sometimes a phone more important for its computer-like functions than phone-like functions. And as enterprise interest in tablets grows, it will be interesting to see the opportunities for tablets as a work utility and for communication purposes.

Question: Will there be offices with iPads on the desks instead of landlines and PCs?

Answer: I don’t think tablets will take the place of PCs just yet. But as the enterprise suites become more robust, they make tablets more viable for business users. The enterprise is one area that tablets lag behind laptops and netbooks, but again, we can look to the growth of smartphones to see what we can expect with tablets.

The iPhone was introduced as a consumer device, but because of its appeal, people in enterprises demanded iPhones from their IT departments. So Apple backed its way into the business market, and started to penetrate areas that were traditionally the province of BlackBerry and Microsoft. We will see a similar trend in the tablet market this year.

The 2011 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which wrapped up this week in Las Vegas, saw the introduction of a slew of tablets, suggesting that 2011 will at be the year of the tablet. But amidst the high-flying talk of “iPad killers,” device manufacturers also rolled out an impressive slate of new smartphones, many prepped for the wireless carriers’ new, faster 4G networks.

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A much-debated tax on internet advertising in France took a big step toward approval on Monday, December 13, only to be withdrawn two days later—and big US companies breathed a sigh of relief.

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