In what it’s calling a mobile-focused restructuring effort, StumbleUpon just laid off 30% of its employees, TechCrunch reports. That drops the content discovery site’s ranks to 75. After slimming down, StumbleUpon says it can now achieve profitability before the end of the first quarter of the year. 

Make way for phablets -- smartphone-tablet hybrids with larger screens and growing appeal among consumers. Research and advisory firm IHS ISuppli expects the number of shipments for such devices to double, this year. “IHS ISuppli expects phone manufacturers to ship 60.4 million phablets,” the Los Angeles Times reports. “That would be up 136% from the 25.6 million shipped in 2012.” 

Gadgets are only as good as the programs, apps, and services made for them. With that in mind, Google is preparing to hand its Project Glass initiative over to the developer community. That means: “two full days of hacking that will allow developers to get an early look at Glass and start developing for the platform,” Mashable reports. 

A Manhattan district judge ruled this week that Agence France-Presse and The Washington Post improperly used images that a photojournalist had posted to Twitter. Reuters calls the decision “one of the first big tests of intellectual property law involving social media.” The judge said that Twitter's terms of service did not give the publishers license to publish the images without the photographer’s permission.  

Pushing the limits of irony, Google just won a USA Today contest to promote creativity in print advertising. Indeed, the search giant is the “reason there are contests to encourage creativity in print advertising,” Stuart Elliot quips in The New York Times. Technically, the winner of the contest is the Google Creative Lab, which, as Elliot notes, “is known for … Google News, a free aggregator of the content of newspapers like USA Today.” 

Lockerz, a social commerce and photo-sharing service, is hemorrhaging staff, TechCrunch reports. The startup -- which has so far raised some $43.5 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, DAG Ventures, Live Nation and Liberty Media -- is defending the layoffs as part of a broader restructuring. TechCrunch, however, wonders whether Lockerz can regain its mojo. 

Janrain, a developer of social log-in management platforms, has raised $33 million in funding led by Millennium Technology Value Partners, “The company has a number of social software tools for developers,” TechCrunch reports. Janrain recently launched a one-click Facebook sharing mechanism, for example. Split Rock Partners, Epic Ventures and Salesforce participated, along with existing investors.

Microsoft sold about 1 million Surface tablets during the holiday season, estimates UBS. What’s wrong with that? “This is down from the analyst’s previous sales estimate of 2 million units for the product line,” The Next Web reports. “The company obviously wanted more. 1 million Surfaces is a fraction of the supply numbers that were floating about … in the last few months of 2012.”  

What does Turkish pop star Murat Boz have to do Twitter and its future prospects? Approaching 2 million followers, Boz’s popularity on the social network suggests that the site has tons of growth potential beyond U.S. borders. Indeed, it’s “a sign that the U.S.-based microblogging service is gaining popularity overseas as growth slows in its home market,” writes Bloomberg.

In the fourth quarter, global PC shipments dropped 4.9% year-over-year, according to new data from Gartner. The culprit? “Tablets have dramatically changed the device landscape for PCs, not so much by cannibalizing PC sales, but by causing PC users to shift consumption to tablets rather than replacing older PCs,” Mikako Kitagawa, an analyst at Gartner, said in the report. “This transformation was triggered by the availability of low-cost tablets in 2012."