Facebook’s eight year history is famously speckled with a number of buyout offers from the likes of Yahoo , Google , and Microsoft . But each time, founder Mark Zuckerberg opted to keep his company independent — against the advice of many.

Mass Relevance , a startup that helps media companies and brands tap into this crazy Twitter thing, has raised $3.3 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Austin Ventures, with money from Battery Ventures, Floodgate, Allegro Venture Partners, and Metamorphic Ventures

Lately a trend has emerged: European VCs putting down more roots in Silicon Valley to take advantage of the current scene and act as a bridge for European companies trying to form local partnerships, and of course as a mechanism for M&A or further funding with US-based VCs. One of the more recent firms to do this was Index Ventures , which a year ago put partners on the ground for the first time outside of its bases in the UK and Switzerland. The latest to join that trend is Earlybird Venture Capital out of Berlin which has brought on Valley-based Konstantin Guericke as a venture partner.

Sign of a maturing marketing flattening out, a lack of compelling devices, or a contraction in the economy? Gartner today released figures that note that worldwide sales of mobile phones were actually down by two percent this quarter, to reach a total of 419.1 million units — the first time the market has declined since the second quarter of 2009, the analysts say.

Facebook is nearing a billion users, but what could topple the big blue giant?

Facebook introduced app ratings and negative feedback metrics to the app insights tool today as a way to help developers gain a better understanding of how users respond to their apps. Detailed on developer blog post , these new metrics allow developers to go beyond monitoring growth trends and gain. Facebook has used this data to determine what appears in News Feed, but developers previously did not have the ability to see these insights or track their performance over time

Back in March this year Microsoft launched its first ever “direct” startup accelerator, based out of Tel Aviv, Israel. That meant it would, for the first time, be an accelerator owner/operator

Instagram, Schminstagram. While flashy consumer deals keep getting all the headlines, it was actually cloud computing, enterprise and video that fueled the biggest deals of last quarter’s $25.1 billion in mergers and acquisitions, according to top-tier accounting firm Ernst & Young

For awhile now “gamification” has largely existed as a buzz word. It’s felt just as ridiculous to write the word as it is to read it

This morning, Nielsen is putting hard numbers to how consumers like to shop with their smartphones, backing up trends we already suspected to be the case. In particular, the new report examines how consumers use their phones when shopping out there in the real world (what’s that?) – using phones to compare prices, scan barcodes and even redeem coupons