Eying bigger ad revenues, Facebook reportedly plans to introduce a new advertising format before the end of the month. According to leaked documents published by GigaOm, Facebook plans to upgrade its premium ads on Feb. 29. “The company expects the new ads to perform 40 to 80 percent better than its previous product,” Peter Corbett, CEO of iStrategyLabs, writes in GigaOm. 

“As the owner of a social creative agency, and as a rapacious buyer of Facebook ads for clients and for marketing my own company, I live for this kind of news,” Corbett writes. “In an age of over-sharing, these documents landed in my inbox with a splash. I am sharing them in the format I received them.” 

The Facebook presentation document describes a new type of premium ad as a “larger-format ad,” that make the site’s current ads -- which appear in the margins of users’ profiles -- look puny by comparison. In the document, Facebook promises that brands that buy the larger and more “interactive” ads will see a 16% increase in their “fan rate.”

Keeping users on their toes, Flickr a planning a number of new changes in the coming months, including a new photo stream design, dubbed “Justified View,” and a new uploading feature, named “Uploadr.” With the new tools, Flickr is mainly after increased user engagement, as Markus Spiering, head of product at the Yahoo-owned photo-sharing site, tells Mashable.

Set to go live at the end of the month, Justified View trades Flickr’s current white space-filled layout “for something that looks a lot more like Pinterest (as has become the trend in Web design),” Mashable reports. “The new photo stream will first go live with your contacts (the people you follow),” and showcases bigger photos. Meanwhile, the new upload feature, Uploadr, is expected to go live in late March, and let users drag and drop photos from their computer onto the site. Spiering says Uploadr is more like an app than a Web site.

As such, photos are instantly viewed as thumbnail images, allowing users to add tags as you upload. More to the point, Spiering tells Mashable that this will likely increase engagement, as Flickr continues to build the Internet’s largest collection of geo-tagged photos -- currently numbering at about 270 million. Moving broadly, Spiering says Flickr stands behinds Yahoo’s “mobile first” strategy.

Microsoft has filed a competition complaint against Motorola Mobility and Google with the European Commission, the executive body of the European Union. In a (once revised) blog post, Dave Heiner, a Microsoft vice president and deputy general counsel, said the step was necessary “because Motorola is attempting to block sales of Windows PCs, our Xbox game console and other products.” As The Seattle Times explains: “Microsoft's complaint is the latest move in an ongoing, global battle among tech companies over patents,” adding: “Apple, too, has filed a complaint against Motorola Mobility over the same issue.”

The move, however, is more salient in the context of Google winning approval from the EU and United States in its bid to acquire Motorola Mobility. Both Microsoft and Apple are arguing that Motorola is not adhering to agreements to license its patents under reasonable terms, as The Seattle Times notes. “The central issue,” it writes, “is over something called ‘standard essential patents’ (SEP) -- patents owned by private companies that involve technologies that have become standard use in the industry.” Companies that hold such patents agree, as part of joining international standards groups, to license them under "fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory" (FRAND) terms.