Yahoo’s board agreed on Sunday to buy the massively popular blogger site Tumblr for $1.1 billion in cash. The companies both officially announced the deal early this morning, as MMW reported.

This is clearly part of CEO Marissa Mayer’s big picture plan to reposition the company as the tech industry hustles to hop on board the social media train.

Buying Tumblr would be a bold move indeed for Mayer who tries to breathe new life into the company, but the main question remains: Can they make money?

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Facebook isn’t the only company that can pay upwards of $1 billion to acquire a hot digital property.

According to AllThingsD, Yahoo may be seriously considering the acquisition of social networking platform Tumblr.

Earlier this week, Yahoo CFO Ken Goldman spoke at JP Morgan’s Global Technology conference and underscored the need for the aging Silicon Valley Internet giant to attract more users from the coveted 18-to-24-years-old age bracket. Along with more marketing, he explicitly said Yahoo needed to be “cool again.”

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The latest speculation out of the Asian supply chain is that Apple’s next-generation iPhone 5S, which could debut next month or sometime in July, may present a new fingerprint-scanning home button protected by a scratch-proof sapphire crystal glass.

Although rumors have persisted for some time now with regard to Apple introducing a fingerprint sensor in a subsequent iPhone refresh, this news from supply chain sources in Taiwan suggests the possibility of a much bigger effort on Apple’s part to make the home button as revolutionary as possible.

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The United States Department of Justice is really putting the squeeze on Apple.

The DOJ, as we know, alleges that Apple engaged in a horizontal price-fixing scheme with regard to eBook prices. But new documents filed by the DOJ reveal that Apple may have played a much bigger role than anyone realized in the conspiracy with publishers to violate antitrust laws and “strip retailers of pricing authority.”

The department’s Antitrust Division filed papers for a trial set to begin June 3 in federal court in Manhattan that included excerpts of e-mails and depositions of Apple executives including the company’s late founder, Steve Jobs, and Senior Vice President Eddy Cue and publishing executives.

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Ouch. Now, that’s a brutal headline. But you can thank the folks at SAI for that one.

“Apple’s smartphone market share is dead in the water, once again,” says Jay Yarow of SAI.

Yarrow’s report is based on the most recent data provided by Gartner. The data indicates that since 2011, Apple’s market share has fluctuated between 13% and 22%, while Android has surged to secure 75% of the market.

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According to theMobile Marketing Association, the robust and rapidly expanding mobile marketing ecosystem generated $139 billion of incremental output to the U.S. economy in 2012.

It goes without saying why the MMA sees this as a “significant surge” from $48 billion in net sales previously reported in 2010.

“Over the next five years,” the MMA projects, “this figure is set to skyrocket to $400 billion representing an annual growth rate of 52 percent.”

The details were presented in the MMA Mobile Marketing Economic Impact Study, commissioned by the Mobile Marketing Association.

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South Korean electronics manufacturer Samsung is moving full-steam ahead into 5G wireless technology.

Yonhap News reports that Samsung has “successfully developed a core technology of the fifth-generation network (5G) for the first time, aiming to enable users to access faster data services by 2020.”

The new wireless technology will let customers access a stream of data “faster than the current fourth-generation network and download an entire movie in less than a second,” the world’s largest smartphone maker said according to the report.

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