In 2006, former Yahoo employee Thyagarajapuram S. Ramakrishnan was working for Facebook when he filed a patent for the news feed. Today in a sweet piece of irony, Facebook is using that same patent to sue Yahoo .

I have to confess that when I think about GE , the first thing that comes to mind isn’t radical innovation. But, as usual, I might be wrong.

In some of the old science fiction stories I remember from Weird Tales and Ray Bradbury and the like, robots always figured. But they always came the way you might expect a new dryer or hot water heater to arrive

Justin Kan is a busy guy.

Sprint still hasn’t launched their new LTE network yet, but if a new announcement about a LTE-capable handset is any indication, they’re getting pretty close. Though the existence of a Sprint-bound Galaxy Nexus probably overshadowed it a bit, Sprint has announced that LG’s eco-friendly Viper handset will be available for pre-order beginning on April 12 with a release soon to follow. There’s no word yet on when the Viper will actually hit Sprint’s sale’s channels, though recent rumors point to an April 15 launch date.

Facebook has responded to Yahoo’s patent infringement suit with counterclaims that Yahoo infringes upon 10 of the social network’s patents, according to All Things D . The company asks the court to dismiss Yahoo’s case and instead find Yahoo guilty of infringing on Facebook’s patents. Additionally, Facebook is requesting that Yahoo be prevented from further infringing on patents and that the Internet company pay damages and legal fees.

At the end of October, Urban Airship , the startup that gives developers a simple way to build in-app purchases and push notifications into their mobile apps, acquired SimpleGeo for a reported $3.5 million.

In response to being sued by Yahoo for patent infringement last month, Facebook today filed counter-claims against Yahoo for infringing 10 of its own patents. Facebook says the following Yahoo features and properties violate its intellectual property: Yahoo Home Page, Yahoo’s Content Optimization and Relevance Engine (“C.O.R.E.”), the Yahoo Flickr photo sharing service, and advertisements displayed throughout Yahoo. Facebook also denied the original claims against it from Yahoo, seeks damages for Yahoo’s infringement, and requests a trial by jury

There are some big challenges ahead for mobile advertising, as the industry faces increasing scrutiny from the federal regulators , and as Apple phases out the UDIDs used by advertisers and publishers to identify users. Now privacy company TRUSTe is offering a new way for advertisers to address some of these concerns.

Social marketing platform Involver today introduced a visual tool for building Facebook applications and other customizable experiences. The Visual SML is an addition to Involver’s Social Markup Language , a system that enables front-end developers to code apps more efficiently