No surprise here. Google is trying to license TV channels for an Internet cable service, according to The New York Times, citing people in the know. Google isn't alone. Others that are interested include Apple, Intel, Microsoft, and Sony. Cable company Cox Communications has begun trying to sell a service in Orange County, Calif. -- a bundle of 100 channels -- to consumers who have broadband, but not cable TV.

David Kirkpatrick shows B2B marketers how social can become a powerful channel with the correct strategy. He details a case study analyzing SAP's social media strategy, which provides insight on building a social media strategy by understanding the audience and their reaction to social media, as well as methods to consolidate accounts. At SAP, results ranged from growing followers and interaction rate to growing subscribers to social media accounts internally, and getting more employees involved. Read the article here.

Andrew Dumont has put together a list of tactics to acquire new customers. The list focuses primarily on software and consumer Internet start-ups, but it can apply to nearly any Web business. He breaks the list down into two categories to help prioritize investments. Implement the low-hanging fruit tactics today, but evaluate the long-term investments.Here are 21 ways to grow your business. Read the article here.

Larry Kim tells us how quality scores influence the cost marketers pay per click, and then tells us how to reduce what you might pay, by guiding us through the changing relationship between the CPC and quality score, as well as optimizing the quality score to improve it. Read the article here.

Eric shares tips on prep work to quickly build out and scale paid-search campaigns. He guides us through the process of generating Excel templates to scale ad groups based on variations discovered in research, and explains how to analyze account structure and ad group naming conventions to assist with generating ad copy. Read the article here.

Promoting mobile apps may seem more difficult than creating the app itself. Here's an app that may help marketers get the word out. Snapguide lets people create and share how-to guides using slide show-style tutorials that support many topics. Zach Bulygo provides screen shots and details on why how-to guides are important and how they can improve marketing plans. Read the article here.

David Pann gives us insight into the momentum at Bing during the past year -- such as the 159 million unique searchers on the Yahoo Bing Network, about 51 million of whom do not use Google. Since last fall, Bing execs have seen numbers rise 4.5% and 11%, respectively. During the past year, click volume rose 25%. Now in 25 international markets -- soon in 50 by the end of the year -- the agreement with Yahoo continues to build on a positive momentum in revenue per thousand searches (RPS). Read the article here.

I've been writing about how gadgets (PC, tablet and smartphone) will turn into dump computers hooked to the cloud. Matt Cutts describes how people once upgraded their CPU to make a faster computer, but now the cloud has become the heart of the network connection, rather than the hard drive. The first time I saw a large corporation take to the cloud was back in the mid 2000s when Sun Microsystems employees logged in to work remotely. That was long before Oracle acquired the company in 2010.

Microsoft filed a lawsuit against Google accusing U.S. Customs of not following a trade agency order to block imports of Google phones, reports Bloomberg. The U.S. International Trade Commission issued an import ban in May 2012, after determining that Motorola Mobility devices infringed a Microsoft patent for calendar synchronization with other devices. Google responded. Bloomberg's Susan Decker and Tom Schoenberg explain other similar lawsuits.

Dare Obasanjo explains how Microsoft will require all marketers to log in to a Bing Ads account with a Microsoft account to make sure all users take advantage of the increased security features. It's a two-step verification process. Marketers managing their paid-search campaigns with the Bing Ads Editor cannot log in through their Microsoft account in the current version, according to Obasanjo. Read the article here.