Worldwide media tablet shipments rose by 88.9% on a sequential basis -- and 303.8% year-over-year -- in the second calendar quarter of 2011, according to new findings from International Data Corporation. That amounted to 13.6 million units during the quarter, according IDC. What's more, based on the strong performance in the second quarter, and an improved outlook for the second half of the year, IDC raised its shipment forecast for 2011 to 62.5 million units -- up from a previous projection of 53.5 million units. "Worldwide media tablet shipments in the second quarter were driven by continued robust …

How much money could an ad network make if could place ads on every Web site and individual Web page online? Though fraught with risk, it would still help to know how many such pages exist. Enter The World Wide Web Foundation -- founded by Tim Berners-Lee, who, according to CNN, "pretty much created the Internet" -- which has set out to determine just how big the Web really is. With a $1 million grant from Google, the foundation plans to release the results of its online forensic search, called the World Wide Web Index, early next year, …

Perhaps more publicity stunt than money-making proposition, LivingSocial has teamed up with Whole Foods to run the first nationwide grocery store daily deal. Archrivals Groupon and LivingSocial have run grocery deals before, but such offers were focused on small areas or niche outlets, according to David Sinsky, data product manager at deal aggregator Yipit. "It is hard for grocery stores to offer deep discounts because they already operate with thin profit margins," Reuters notes. That suggests to Sinsky that LivingSocial is subsidizing the Whole Foods deal for publicity purposes. "In return for such a subsidy, LivingSocial gets to …

What's the latest on the horse race in which mobile platform providers remain feverishly engaged? In the last quarter, Google's Android platform overtook Apple's iOS software to become the second-most-popular smartphone operating system in the EU, according the latest data from comScore. Both platforms continued to chip away at Symbian's share -- "despite the fact [that] it still powered one in every three smartphones bought during that period," notes The Next Web. Nokia's Symbian now holds a 37.8% share of the market, down 16.1 points year-over-year. The culprit? Google's Android platform accounted for all of Symbian's loss, posting …

Since its inception, Groupon has traded in services and locally sold goods so it couldn't be undercut by e-commerce giants like Amazon. Ready for something new, however, the daily deal leader has decided to offer heavily discounted products online -- at least in the U.K. As Bloomberg Businessweek reports, the move immediately thrusts "the Internet-coupon company into closer competition with the likes of Amazon.com Inc. and EBay Inc." Its prospects for success? Not bad, Bloomberg Businessweek believes. "Groupon ... may be able to bolster its growth by adding vouchers for e-commerce sites," it writes. Seconds Scot Wingo, CEO …

Volatile as it is, the daily deal space is still attracting new services. CityPockets, for one, offers a "digital wallet" for storing past deal offers, along with a secondary market for buying and selling discounts. "The service, which can organize daily deals from about 30 sites, including Groupon, Living Social, BuyWithMe, Tippr and others, has been on a roll lately," reports GigaOm, "raising $735,000 in June and last month buying DealBurner, a deal aggregator service that pushes out text messages on nearby daily deals to people who check-in on Foursquare and Facebook Places." Next up, CityPockets …

Amazon is reportedly close to launching a book rental service, which would charge a fixed monthly fee for access to its vast library. First reported by The Wall Street Journal (behind a paywall), word is that Amazon is ready to offer book publishers a considerable fee for their involvement in the program. "The idea isn't entirely new with services like 'the library', booksfree.com and bookswim existing for some time," notes The Next Web. "But both are currently primarily for offline paperbacks and hardbacks." More to the point, "With Amazon's Kindle platform and intimate relationships with every premium publisher …

YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen have discovered the next killer Web service: Delicious! Well, maybe "discover" is too strong a word, but the duo has resolved to breathe new life into the once-trendy social bookmarking service. What do Hurley and Chen see in Delicious, which they purchased from Yahoo earlier this year (for an undisclosed sum)? Apparently, no less than a cure to information overload. "There are a lot of services trying to solve the information discovery problem, and no one has got it right yet," Chen tells The New York Times. Once the blight of …

In what shouldn't come as surprise to anyone, Yahoo's scorned CEO Carol Bartz resigned from the company's board on Friday. The move came days after Bartz was fired from the company, after which she called her fellow board members "doofuses," adding that they "f---ed [her] over." Meanwhile "The company is in the midst of trying to figure out its next steps," reports Dealbook. "It has hired at least two investment banks, Allen & Company and UBS, to help evaluate strategic alternatives for the company." Options for Yahoo include divestitures of its Asian investments, which, as Dealbook notes, some …

While terms of the deal were not disclosed, TechCrunch insists that Google just got Zagat for less than $66 million. How so? "There was no FTC antitrust review, which is automatically triggered by any deal worth $66 million or more," it reminds us. If TechCrunch's deduction is true, it's not a bad deal for Google, considering the reviews and ratings service was reportedly shopping itself around for $200 million just a few years back. Critics, however, don't buy the idea that the somewhat antiquated Zagat can substitute for Yelp -- the more modern review services, which Google has …