Chango CRO Dax Hamman offers a pretty good 101 on the prospects for the Social Network's FBX exchange, and whether it's more suited for search, display or social marketers.

Michael Shehan, founder, president, and CEO of SpotXchange believes that video RTB will exceed Forrester expectations in 2013. According to his article on iMedia Connection, Shehan believes that Forrester's prediction of RTB video spending to grow from $387 million in 2012 to $667 million in 2013 is "conservative."

Several factors are limiting the potential of RTB to capitalize on "value-based" buying, especially the shift from historic CPM to CPA-based valuation models, as well as better attribution insights and better insights into the value each impression contributes.

Ad technology guru Chris O'Hara argues that while the overall market for RTB is limited, "RTB-enabled" ad technology will be expansive, especially as it becomes more integrated with "premium guaranteed inventory -- where the other 85% of media budgets happen." Thus he predicts 2012 will be the "year of programmatic guaranteed."

Yahoo Chief Marissa Mayer has been "kicking the tires" on some real-time media technology biggies, including Turn and Pubmatic, though she is focused on "smaller talent acquisitions" of promising ad technology firms in the range of 20 employees.

Following last week's disclosure about its staff expansion in 2012, programmatic display media optimizer Rocket Fuel said it plans to hire another 300 employees this year, proving that ad technology doesn't just replace people with machines. "We plan to increase the number off engineers and customer-facing positions," CEO George John told the Silicon Valley Business Journal. Apparently, his human customers still need human bill collectors to settle accounts: "It's amazing how many times we need someone to call a customer personally to remind them they need to pay their bill."

Describing Facebook's Graph Search as "engineering narcisism," developer Anthony Wing Kosner says the social network is "enthralled with its own internal workings in a way that does not really connect with its users. As much as the company uses the term 'social graph,' it is only really developers who think about things in those terms. For users, this is 'social search,' plain and simple."

What's the impact of RTB-enabled programmatic buying on the publisher's direct sales? Pretty mixed, according to Operative's "The Op-Ed." In a "trends" to prepare for analysis, the sell-side tech company notes that, "some publishers, including AOL and the New York Times suggest that RTB has cannibalized its direct sales revenue. And Federated Media, one of the earliest and largest ad networks,announced plans to lay off their entire direct sales force in order to focus exclusively on programmatic selling. "To be sure, publishers will need to incorporate programmatic selling into their monetization strategy, and they'll need to do it soon if …

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but this infographic from Infectious Media is worth millions of impressions, literally. It shows the growth of Europe's RTB marketplace in 2012.

Bangalore-based mobile ad platform AdIQuity has struck a deal with Singapore-based mobile ad network Art Of Click to accelerate the development of the mobile RTB marketplace in the Asia-Pacific region. Art Of Click is a mobile demand side platform (DSP) that operates primarily in the South-east Asia and has a strong presence in the APAC countries.