How is Buzzfeed -- which sees itself as the digital news organization of the future -- going to grow from a reported valuation of $200 million to $1 billion? For starters, by continuing to eschew display advertising, Pandodaily reports. “BuzzFeed works with advertisers as ‘partners,’ and hosts their sponsored content, which is similar to the publication’s independently produced journalism.” 

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt used his trip to North Korea to advocate for more open Internet access. “Their decision to be virtually isolated is very much going to affect their physical world,” Schmidt said Thursday. New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, with whom Schmidt traveled, said the country is anxious to improve relations with the U.S., Bloomberg reports. 

Google is giving up on its attempt to stop Microsoft from using video-compression technology on the Xbox. “Microsoft wants to license two standards-essential patents for H.264 that Google controls, now that it owns Motorola -- but not on Google’s proposed royalty terms,” AllThingsD reports. Google this week filed with the U.S. International Trade Commission to terminate its case against Microsoft.  

Confirming a year of rumors, sources tell The Wall Street Journal that Apple is indeed working on a cheaper iPhone. If and when the phone debuts, it will help the company compete against less rivals like Samsung, while giving more consumers access to the mobile computing revolution. WJS calls the move “a big shift in corporate strategy as [Apple’s] supremacy in smartphones has slipped.” 

Twitter is testing new search capabilities that, as, ReadWrite.com reports, “give it the upper hand as a breaking news destination over basically every other news organization on the planet, from newspapers to cable networks to Web sites and everything in between.” Twitter's new API partially relies on Amazon's Mechanical Turk service, which tasks live humans with categorizing searches to help make them more relevant to readers. 

Worldwide, LinkedIn has surpassed 200 million users, the business-oriented social network announced Wednesday. Not showing any signs of slowing down, new users are signing up at an average rate of two per second -- or 172,800 per day -- LindedIn reports. “Not bad for a professional social network (but obviously still a far cry from Facebook’s one billion+),” TechCrunch remarks. Stateside, LinkedIn claims about 74 million users. 

Creating the largest public outdoor Wi-Fi network in New York City, Google plans to turn Chelsea into one big hotspot. The move is part of a larger effort by the search giant to “foster a technology hotbed in the city,” Bloomberg reports. Conveniently, Google also owns a building in the neighborhood, which it bought in 2010 for nearly $2 billion. 

Chartboost, a mobile game discovery and monetization platform, announced $19 million in Series B financing, this week, led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from existing investors TransLink Capital and SK Telecom Ventures. “The sizeable check is a reflection of the 14-month-old company’s torrid growth, which Sequoia partner and Chartboost board member Jim Goezt described as the fastest his firm has ever seen in the mobile space,” PandoDaily reports.  

Putting video streaming services on notice, Cisco this week unveiled Videoscape Unit -- a cloud-based video platform that it hopes service providers will embed in their set-top boxes. “The software package includes a tool to recommend shows to a person based on past viewing patterns,” The New York Times’ Bits blog reports. “It creates a profile for each user.” 

Despite their infancy, tablets are on track to outpace notebooks in global shipments, this year, according to new estimates from NPD DisplaySearch. “Tablet shipments are expected to surpass 240 million, while notebooks shipments will reach around 207 million,” CNet reports, citing the research. “For the first time ever, tablets will grab more than 50 percent of the annual market share this year.”