Facebook has finally updated its “status” by filing this week for an initial public offering.

After months of speculation, the social networking giant is going public. The IPO is expected to take place during the second quarter and could be worth as much as $5 billion.

The exchange upon which shares of Facebook will be traded hasn’t yet been determined.

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Digital retail giant Amazon has quietly indicated that it will end its PayPhrase program.

If you’re unfamiliar with PayPhrase, Amazon had previously launched the program as a means for further simplifying the online shopping experience.

Not yet three years old, PayPhrase allowed shoppers to check out by simply using a personal phrase followed by a four-digit pin.

Amazon says on its website that the time has come to move on from PayPhrase.

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Forget traditional celebrity endorsements and cameo appearances, some of this year’s biggest Super Bowl commercials will feature celebrities of a different variety – those who have revolutionized mobile technologies.

Leading the charge in this new direction is Best Buy. According to published reports from Bloomberg today, Best Buy’s Super Bowl commercial will feature mobile pioneers, not run-of-the-mill celebrities.

This is quite a divergence from previous years at Best Buy when the company has turned to the likes of Ozzy Osbourne and Justin Bieber for ads on the big game day.

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Shopify, a venerable name in digital commerce, announced Wednesday that it has acquired mobile app development firm Select Start Studios (S3).

According to Shopify, the reason for the acquisition is to help the company carry out an aggressive mobile growth strategy.

The acquisition marks Shopify’s first major investment since raising $15 million in Series B funding last October.

Having helped to build some of today’s biggest online stores, Shopify can presently boast of 20,000 active online stores in 80 different countries.

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According to a thought-provoking study published Wednesday by Ypulse, “even tech-savvy millennials are baffled” by augmented reality technology, particularly when its infused in mobile apps on leading smartphones.

“Augmented reality has become the futuristic media of the moment, but many consumers,” Ypulse says, but even mobile’s core audience – young, hip, tech-wise adults – are “having a hard time figuring it out.”

Based on the findings of Ypulse’s research, only 11% of high schoolers and collegians have ever used an augmented reality app.

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This week, Rep. Edward Markey raised the curtain on what could amount to federal legislation that adds substantive mobile privacy safeguards to the mobile phone user population of the United States.

On Tuesday, Markey released a discussion draft of the proposed Mobile Device Privacy Act, which, if enacted, would obligate wireless operators and their partners to “notify subscribers if they employ mobile analytics measurement tools like the controversial Carrier IQ.”

As MMW previously reported, the Carrier IQ software is a rootkit that is installed at a carrier’s request on mobile phones and sparks privacy concerns because it monitors and logs user activity.

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The folks over at long-standing digital marketing agency White Horse have published an interesting new infographic that details the concept of “in-aisle” mobile engagement and it’s increasing growth in recent years.

The data used for the infographic stems from a report White Horse published last year called “The Future of In-Aisle Mobile,” in which the agency conducted a first-of-its-kind ethnographic study on consumer use of smartphones to aid in-aisle shopping.  The result was a dramatic picture of the gap between consumer mobile behavior in the aisle and retailers’ readiness to channel that behavior into customer loyalty and sales.

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