After acquiring Motorola Home earlier this year, Google this week said it sold the unit to the Arris Group for $2.35 billion in cash and stock. “Motorola Home produces set top boxes that are sold to cable providers who then lease them out to end users,” according to The Verge. “Google has been shopping around the Home side of Motorola for quite some time, with Arris and Pace Plc both considered to be front-runners for the purchase.”    

Before the holidays slip away, the ecommerce industry is trying to squeeze every last penny out of consumers. But, as The Wall Street Journal reports, online retailers can’t compete with their offline competitors when the delivery of products becomes an issue. For that reason, etailers like GSI Commerce Inc., a unit of eBay Inc., are doing everything possible to improve their delivery schedules and guarantees.    

Ecommerce startup Fab has taken a "seven-figure investment" from Times Internet, the digital arm of the Times of India Group. “The specific financial terms were not revealed, but the investment will include a partnership between the two companies ‘to explore and execute on our India market strategy in the coming years,’” CNet reports, citing a blog post from Fab founder and CEO Jason Goldberg.    

For what it’s worth, Slate’s Will Oremus is finally ready to admit that Twitter -- and the vibrant culture of tweeting, retweeing, and following others on the social network -- is no fad. Yes, “New figures make it clear that the 6-year-old microblogging site has lived up to its billing as the biggest thing to hit the Internet since Facebook,” Oremus admits. Twitter announced this week that it has reached 200 million monthly active users worldwide.      

Random as they are, .tattoo, .transformers and .menu might be the Web’s first original domain extensions to go live next year, BBC News reports. They were among nearly 2,000 other generic top-level domains (gTLDs), which were randomly selected for approval by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, this week.    

This year, U.S. mobile advertising will nearly triple to more than $4 billion, The Wall Street Journal’s Digits blog reports, citing a new eMarketer estimate. Driving growth are stronger ad sales for Facebook, Google, and Twitter, while, “Advertisers are warming up to mobile advertising faster than expected,” Digits writes. In September, eMarketer predicted a more modest increase of 80% for 2012.    

Mashable looks into YouTube Capture -- an iPhone-only app launched this week, which it is betting “will likely overtake the device's default video camera.” As its name suggests, Capture captures video instantly, and, with a click or two, posts it to YouTube, with some useful enhancements. As such, “It is as essential to your iPhone experience as its corporate sister product, Google Maps for iOS 6,” Mashable claims.      

Looking for a mobile edge, Apple is reportedly in discussions to integrate local data from Foursquare Labs into its mapping application. “The talks … are the latest sign of Apple's plans to more tightly integrate local services into the iPhone and iPad,” The Wall Street Journal reports. Beyond Foursquare, Apple has reportedly engaged a number of companies that collect local data.    

Sending users into a state of confusion and disbelief, Instagram this week updated its privacy policy giving it the right to sell users’ photos to advertisers without notification. “The move riled social media users, with one likening it to a ‘suicide note,’” BBC News writes. The changes also mean Instagram can share information about its users with parent Facebook, as well as other affiliates and advertisers.    

Are Apple’s best days behind it? Just by its stock price, that appears to be the feeling among some investors. As Bloomberg reports, the company’s shares dropped below $500 for the first time since February after Citigroup reduced its rating for the stock. Troubling investor are concerned that demand for the iPhone 5 is slowing, and that Apple will have to content itself will lower-margin products going forward.