Last week, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel said ads were coming to the messaging platform. Yet, “Spiegel’s words were something of a feint,” The Information reports. “While ads will indeed be coming to Snapchat soon … they are not the long-term play.” Regarding said play, The Information adds: “The company has been holding discussions about the real way it plans to mint millions: turning its app into a platform, i.e. making money by integrating with other services and building services people are willing to pay for.” 

Jumping into the vanishing message space, Microsoft’s Skype unit just launched Qik -- a mobile-messaging app that automatically deletes videos after two weeks. “The sender of any video can delete it on both their phone and the recipient’s phone, including right after they send it, whether it’s been watched or not,” Venture Beat reports. “Also, the app doesn’t have options to save videos locally or share them again to others.” 

At least for the moment, U.S. teens do not appear overly excited about the prospect of owning an Apple Watch for $350. That’s according to a recent survey conducted by Piper Jaffray, which found that just 16% of teens -- among a sampling of about 7,200 -- expressed interested in "buying an iWatch for $350" upon its debut, next year. “As for the iPhone, [Piper Jaffray’s] fall survey showed 67% of teens owned Apple's handset, up from 61% in spring, and 73% said they expect to buy one as their next smartphone,” Apple Insider reports. 

Top legal counsels for Microsoft, Facebook and other Web giants gathered this week to condemn the U.S. government for its continued disregard for personal privacy. The overarching message was that consumers own their data, “and the government needs to start respecting that,” Wired reports. Yet, noting the irony, Wired writes: “This stance flies in the face of what we expect from Internet companies these days, many of whom tend to act as if they own the content we create.” 

Expanding it analytics platform, the server-side app monitoring specialists at New Relic have bought cloud dashboard-building tool Ducksboard. “Ducksboard … provides a way to connect to a variety of cloud services, such as Salesforce.com, Zendesk and many others, and build a dashboard to see how these services are running in real time as it relates to your business,” TechCrunch reports. “Since Ducksboard is now part of New Relic, the plan is to use this capability to give New Relic customers a much broader view of their customers beyond pure APM.” 

As further evidence that consumers are willing to pay a premium for quality gadgets, Macintosh personal computers posted their strongest worldwide market share ever, last quarter. That’s according to the latest estimates from IDC, which puts Apple among the top five global PC vendors for the first time, Apple Insider notes. “Mac shipments were up an estimated 8.9 percent in the third quarter of calendar 2014 … to nearly 5 million total units.” 

Without using the B-word, The Wall Street Journal is accusing the tech world of returning to its pre-bubble excesses. “Startups feel the need to outspend on recruiting, marketing and designing their offices, echoing poor choices made 15 years ago when unprofitable companies overextended themselves, then crumbled when the market turned,” it writes. And, it’s not just WSJ. “Venture capitalists have spoken out in recent weeks,” it notes. Among others, “Benchmark partner Bill Gurley says Silicon Valley startups are burning capital faster than they have since 1999.” 

Google is planning to launch its own mobile messaging app, India’s Economic Times reports. Of particular note, “Unlike other Google products, the messenger will not force users to use their Google login,” according to the newspaper’s sources. “The Google messenger is in early stages of development and is likely to be launched in 2015.” Testing is expected to begin in India, with the potential for a broad worldwide rollout.

As the Net neutrality battle expands into the mobile realm, top tech companies from Google to Facebook are making their positions are heard through significant lobbying efforts. “The Internet Association, a trade group made up of 28 Internet companies including Google … and Twitter, released a survey Tuesday showing that a vast majority of the American people would support net neutrality rules applying to their wireless phones,” Re/Code reports. “The group’s lawyers also met with FCC officials last week to lobby on the same point.”