Apple coasted to another non-holiday record in terms of revenue and earnings during the second quarter, posting a profit of $1.23 billion, or $1.35 per share, compared with $1.07 billion, or $1.19 per share, a year earlier. Revenue rose 12% to $8.34 billion from $7.46 billion. However, as TechCrunch's MG Siegler points out, the real story of Apple's second quarter earnings was iPhone sales. "Let's just say it," he says, "the iPhone looks well on its way to being Apple's primary business." Indeed, Apple sold 5.2 million iPhones in the quarter, a whopping 626 percent increase over …

Asia's share of the global online population is growing steadily, while North America's is shrinking, according to a new report from Forrester Research. In just four years, Asia's total will swell to 43% of the active online population, up from 38% in 2008, while North America's will shrink to 13%, down from 17% in 2008, Forrester says. Europe, like North America, will see its percentage of the online population decrease to 22% from 26% over the next four years, while Latin America will remain unchanged at 11%, and Africa and the Middle East will bring up the rear at 10%. …

What is Twitter's ubiquitous media coverage worth? According to VMS, a news-monitoring agency, Twitter coverage over the last 30 days is worth around $48 million. Ad Age's Abbey Klaassen points out that that's nearly half of what Microsoft plans to spend on marketing for its new search engine, Bing. Twitter received exactly 2.73 billion impressions in the past month-and this doesn't include the huge bounce the microblogging service received in April when celebrities like Oprah and Ellen started tweeting. According to the report, TV contributed to 57% of the PR value, newspapers 37% and magazines 5%. VMS CEO …

Today, Yahoo is expected to unveil a new homepage, months earlier than previously planned, The Wall Street Journal reports. Former Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang started the project, codenamed "Metro". It's been one of the company's biggest undertakings over the past year. According to The Journal, the biggest change is a left-hand menu users can customize with links to dozens of potential third party applications. Yahoo will pre-populate this menu based on users' browsing behavior, sources said, with news and headlines running down the middle of the site. Starting today, the new design is expected to be available as …

Many large brands are interested in growing their presence on Facebook. For those companies, All Facebook's Nick O'Neill says, the challenge is not determining whether or not to be on Facebook, but rather what the best approach is. O'Neill takes a closer look at four different branded opportunities on the world's largest social networking site. The first type is Facebook Engagement Ads, which are displayed on the homepage. Facebook presents advertisers with a number of different types of Engagements Ads, including Poll Engagement Ads, Video Engagement Ads, Branded Gift Engagement Ads, Event Engagement Ads, Fan Page Ads and …

One metric for measuring the popularity of a social network is how much content is shared between users. Widget maker AddToAny, whose product for content sites lets readers share stories across multiple social media sites, is reporting that Facebook now dominates sharing, with 24% of shares from its widget consisting of users posting items to Facebook. That beats email (11.1%) and Twitter (10.8%), making the world's largest social net the most popular service for sharing content, too. As Mashable's Adam Ostrow says, "this is undoubtedly welcome news at Facebook, as the site continues to emphasize sharing and readies its own …