China has decided that Google and Android have too much control over its smartphone industry. In a white paper, the research arm of China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology did not recommend any specific policies, regulatory actions or other measures, Reuters reports. It did, however, note that China has the ability to create its own mobile operating system. 

Michael Katz, once a high-flying ad executive at Yahoo, is now suing the company. Katz joined Yahoo in late 2011 after it acquired his online ad technology company Interclick for a reported $270 million. As AllThingsD reports, Katz is now claiming that Yahoo tried to “cheat him out of the compensation he was promised during negotiations of the acquisition and to humiliate him as well.” 

Google is reportedly preparing a new ecommerce service to take on Amazon Prime, eBay Now, and other offering. “Google Shopping Express” will be $10 or $15 cheaper than Amazon Prime -- “so $69 or $64 a year and offer same-day delivery from brick-and-mortar stores like Target, Walmart, Walgreens and Safeway,” TechCrunch reports, citing sources.   

Microsoft this week is unveiling a research project, which, by examining nearly 1 billion information cascades across Twitter, seeks to explain why some content goes viral. As The Verge reports, “ViralSearch tracks the diffusion of news, videos, and photos to determine exactly how they were shared on Twitter and to rate their virality.” ViralSearch then presents the data in an interactive timeline of events, so, among other insights, one can see when content peaks in popularity.  

Netflix isn’t the only platform breaking into exclusive content distribution. An independent British film is being released through Microsoft’s Xbox, BBC News reports. “Pulp, a comedy about a struggling comic book publisher recruited by the police to bust a crime syndicate, will be available to Xbox 360 Live subscribers,” it writes. “Microsoft says it will be distributing more films this way in the future.” 

Nick Bilton is accusing Facebook of suppressing posts among his subscriber base because he hasn’t been paying for the company’s sponsored advertising tool. “I foolishly believed there was some sort of democratic approach to sharing freely with others,” Bilton writes in NYT’s Bits blog. Facebook, for its part, swears it is just trying to find the right balance for its algorithm, which decides what people see in their news feeds. 

All is not well between YouTube and its programming partners, who are reportedly complaining about insufficient ad revenue returns. Along with YouTube’s overall pageviews, “Their views are also increasing,” AllThingsD reports. “But the ad revenue YouTube generates for their stuff isn’t keeping pace.” The problem. For starters, YouTube’s low revenue-sharing numbers and lack of marketing infrastructure, one programmer suggests. 

Forget Apple TV. Smart watches are going to give Apple its competitive edge over the next few years, reports Bloomberg, citing comments from Citigroup analyst Oliver Chen. Gross margins on watches are about 60%, according to Chen, and -- according to Anand Srinivasan, a Bloomberg Industries analyst -- that’s four times bigger than for televisions. “Headway in the [watch] business would help compensate for slowing growth in other areas, such as iPhones and iPods.” 

Among the small fraction of users who have been given access to Facebook’s new Graph Search service, what are they searching for? For starters, “videos of their friends, those that are engaged, photos of friends before 2009, and friends of [their] friends who like Kevin Bacon,” The Next Web reports, citing new data from Facebook. “Really!” 

In the wake of revelations that the United States is under siege from foreign cyber-attackers, the Obama administration is trying to figure out how to sideline such threats. “White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Michael Daniel on Thursday said officials might consider financial sanctions, visa restrictions and military action as tools to use against foreign hackers who target U.S. networks,” The Hill’s Hillicon Valley blog reports. “However, the U.S. is still weighing when a cyber incident will prompt a response from the federal government.”