Facebook on Thursday confirmed a Bloomberg report that it has begun testing a feature in its mobile app that allows people to search through old posts from friends or pages they follow by keyword. Aside from any eventual tie-in to advertising or ad targeting, the main benefit from adding this capability is simply to make the Facebook app more useful. It also hints at Facebook's broader ambitions for Graph Search, its enhanced search engine, which it began rolling out on the desktop earlier this year.

I would like to think mobile platforms give the struggling magazine industry another at bat with digital. But a decade and a half into the digital publishing revolution, it remains unclear whether one of the most glorious media experiences of the last century will survive this one.

In the emerging world of wearable technology, Ralph Lauren grabbed the spotlight this week with the debut of a new fitness-tracking shirt in connection with this year's U.S. Open. The Polo Tech smart shirt, which tracks things like breathing and heart rate, more aptly fits the "high tech meets high fashion" description than many other wearable gadgets rolled out to date. The same couldn't be said for Google Glass, the smart eyewear Google soft-launched in 2012 with a small group of "Explorers," but only made available to the public widely this spring.

When it comes to mobile advertising, Latin America is still just a tiny fraction of the global market. Figures released by the Interactive Advertising Bureau earlier this month showed that the region accounted for only 0.7% of the $19.3 billion in global mobile ad revenue last year. Among the five major regions the IAB analyzed, Latin America's mobile ad share was the smallest, trailing behind even the Middle East and Africa, which had 1.2%. New data released by Millennial Media today indicates why Latin America is lagging, but also how that translates into potential upside for device makers, and ultimately, …

While it's clever for about a minute, Samsung's ALS Ice Bucket Challenge to Apple, among others, can't escape feeling opportunistic. My feeling of unease could have been assuaged with just a five-second kicker.

The comScore report released yesterday on mobile app use only underscored that apps dominate time spent with media compared to the mobile Web. Apps, for example, account for about 7 out of every 8 minutes spent consuming media on mobile devices, according to the report. So it's clear, based on the comScore data and other research, that apps have won the battle for attention on smartphones and tablets versus the Web.

As of June, apps account for seven of every eight minutes of mobile media consumption, according to a new comScore report on U.S. app usage. The stat that's really eye-catching: 42% of all app time spent on smartphones occurs on someone's single most used app. And almost three of every four minutes spent with apps is devoted a user's top four apps.

The mobile banner has long been a subject of scorn, annoying users by crowding the smartphone screen and frustrating advertisers with their creative limitations. It looks like marketers are indeed cooling on mobile banners, and mobile advertising more broadly, according to the CMO Council's annual State of Marketing global benchmarking study.

Mobile's slice of ad spend is likely to grow over time, but it won't necessarily be in lockstep with share of time. In a session at MediaPost's Mobile Insider Summit on Monday, Amy Bartle, director, media & digital marketing for La Quinta, suggested the focus on the quantity of time spent in mobile is too simplistic, with no consideration of the quality of time spent. She cited figures that 68% of time with mobile takes place at home -- which she said indicates that people are often doing something else while they're using a mobile device.

In contrast to the common-sense, midwestern values projected by former CEO Dan Hesse in Sprint's commercials, T-Mobile CEO John Legere has created a brash, outrageous persona to coincide with the company's "Uncarrier" campaign. The personal style of leadership that both Sprint and T-Mobile have adopted have helped position them as champions of the oppressed mobile masses versus the vast, faceless bureaucracies of their much larger rivals Verizon & AT&T. With Marcelo Claure this month replacing Hesse, it raises the question of whether the new Sprint CEO will adopt the marketing strategy of serving as chief spokesman as well as chief …