Despite growing net income and revenue in the second quarter, Google appears to have fallen out of favor with anxious investors. As a result, Google's stock price has sunk 17% in recent months, and fell roughly 4% in after-hours trading on Thursday. "Like an impatient audience at intermission, Google's investors are waiting for its second act," writes The New York Times. "As Google grows and search becomes increasingly competitive, analysts and investors are beginning to wonder what is next for the company." "The latest figures also reflected only a modest improvement in pricing …

Looking for a simple way to bypass the iPhone 4's potential hardware issues? Just run iOS 4 on an old iPhone 3G! Or not. In a video just uploaded to YouTube by user adamburtle -- "with the idea that subsequent iPhone software/firmware updates and apps galore have drastically reduced the productivity of the device's original -- and most important -- features" -- the video shows that replicating the original 28-second iPod 2 commercial with more current hardware and software is actually pretty tough, reports Gawker. Poor Apple.

What can we all learn from the viral success of the Old Spice Guy ad campaign? To "research, churn, lather, rinse, [and] repeat," according to the Nieman Journalism Lab. Still, "What might the Internet-owning power of the towel-clad spokesman hint about, yes, the future of news?" it asks. "There's the obvious, of course: the fact that the ads are personalized. That their content is created for, and curated from, the conversational tumult of the web -- 'audience engagement,' personified." Furthermore, "The real hook of the videos isn't the OSM's awesomely burly baritone, or the whimsy of his …

Creative video blogger and Web entrepreneur Ze Frank just received $500,000 to build up his company Ze Frank Games. Investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Chris Dixon's Founder Collective, Ron Conway's SV Angel, betaworks, Lerer Ventures, First Round Capital, CrossCut Ventures, Joshua Schachter, and Gary Vaynerchuck. Along with the successful run of his grass-roots video podcast, The Show, and occasional contributions to Time.com, Frank apparently designs games such as Memory, and social games like Twitter Color Wars. "The company is still in stealth mode -- but it will involve social gaming and will be influenced heavily by what I've learned …

So, is YouTube making any money for Google yet? As MediaMemo notes, Google CFO Patrick Pichette predicted a year ago that YouTube could be "very profitable" in the "not long, too long distance future". But, whether or not Pichette's prediction has come true isn't entirely clear. "Look, we don't comment on YouTube," he told one analyst during Google's second quarter earnings call on Thursday. "What I can tell you is that we're incredibly pleased by its trajectory ... Reading the tea leaves, it's a great business for us." To be fair, "It's possible, theoretically, that YouTube is …

In an interesting side note from Google's second quarter earnings call yesterday, the search giant said it spent $100 million fighting Viacom's copyright lawsuit. "And that was before it went to trial," remarks TechCrunch. "The legal bill could have ended up being many times that amount, but last month the judge threw out the case, and Google declared victory." Three years after Viacom filed a $1 billion copyright infringement suit against YouTube, a federal judge threw the case out last month, ruling that the Google unit could not be held responsible for the clips users post online. …

The full theatrical trailer for "The Social Network" -- Columbia Pictures' Facebook movie -- hit the Internet Thursday. After weeks of teaser trailers with just sound, we get our fist look at footage from the film. The screen adaptation of Ben Mezrich's Facebook tell-all "The Accidental Billionaires," has "Fight Club" director David Fincher attached to the project and a screenplay written by "West Wing" creator Aaron Sorkin. Lead actor Jesse Eisenberg, who's playing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, told MTV News late last year that the movie was filming on location at Harvard's campus, where Facebook was founded …

Yahoo has confirmed it will be testing Bing powered results in the live search results, reports Search Engine Land. "Though much of our testing is already happening offline, this month we'll also test the delivery of organic and paid search results provided by Microsoft on live Yahoo traffic," the Web portal explains in an email discussing some of the organic Yahoo-to-Bing transition topics that Search Engine Land believes are on the minds of their advertisers. As the blog notes, Yahoo this month will begin testing search results, both paid and organic, on live Yahoo Search queries. Yahoo …

Mobile retail startup Shopkick just closed a second round of funding worth $15 million, and led by Greylock Partner. Late last year, Palo Alto, Calif.-bases startup debuted CauseWorld, an iPhone and Android app that lets users earn money for charity by "checking in" to stores and restaurants. According to MobileBeat, "That was just an experiment to test out the concept behind its main Shopkick app, which the company plans to launch this summer." Indeed, cofounder and chief executive Cyriac Roeding calls the coming app a "selfish" version of CauseWorld, which was downloaded 550,000 times in five months. …

Mobile might be the medium du jour, but consumers won't be surrendering their desktop devices anytime soon. Indeed, worldwide shipments of personal computers climbed 22.4% in the second quarter, according to new data from market research group IDC. As reported by the Associated Press, the healthy growth is attributed to businesses replacing aging computers, and consumers continuing to show interest in inexpensive laptops. Still, the growth was half a percentage point less than IDC predicted, due to slightly lower PC shipments in the U.S. and Asia. Looking ahead, IDC analyst Loren Loverde said the group will likely …