Facebook Wednesday announced a partnership with Skype to integrate video calling into the social networking site, adding a long rumored feature and enhancing its role as an online communications powerhouse. Facebook also rolled out a new group chat feature and a redesigned interface for its chat service. In introducing the new offerings at a press conference today, CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed Facebook had hit 750 million users and spoke of a shift in social networking from getting people connected to building apps that help people share more types of content. He said Facebook users are now sharing material at …

Knowledge Networks has acquired Garcia Research Associates (GRA), a research company specializing in measuring the influence of Latinos on commerce and society in the U.S. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Knowledge Networks said the acquisition includes GRA's Cada CabezaSM online panel and team of researchers.

Copyranter got so excited about seeing "blood" on a sanitary pad in an Always ad that it took two exclamation points to point it out in the headline, which refers to a tampon rather than a maxi pad. He calls it an "historical advertising moment," and it may be, but the red dot is so small and the rather incongruous maze surrounding it so odd that it seems more a toe dipped in the water than a pure breakthrough.

Quantcast will start distributing the you-are-being-tracked icons to small publishers the company announced today. The icons will be free to publishers who work with Quantcast and have behavioral targeting revenues of less than $2 million and total revenues of less than $15 million. The icon, licensed by the Digital Advertising Alliance, is aimed at notifying consumers about behavioral targeting. Users who click on it are taken to a site where they can learn about online tracking and opt out of receiving ads based on their Web-surfing history. Since launching last year, the DAA has signed up more than …

In the latest version of its developer tools for Apple iOS devices, Medialets has added support for third-party mobile rich media ad providers including EyeWonder, Limelight Networks, PointRoll and Google. The aims is to streamline the mobile advertising process while increasing the revenue potential for Medialets' more than 200 publisher partners. "By making it possible for other rich media vendors to deliver creatives on the platform that's already embraced by the world's leading publishers, we're giving buyers and sellers the mos direct path to flexibility and scale," said Medialets founder and CEO Eric Litman. Medialets' Universal SDK 2.5 …

Android increased its leading share of the U.S. smartphone market from 33% to 38.1% during the three months ending in May, according to the latest comScore data. During the same period, the iPhone picked up 1.4 percentage points to take 26.6% share and stay ahead of BlackBerry, which dropped about 4 points to 24.7%. Microsoft's Windows Phone platform also continued to lose ground, dropping 1.9 points to 5.8% in May, while Palm's webOS slipped from 2.8% to 2.4%. Read more here.

Verizon Wireless on Tuesday confirmed to Fierce Wireless it will introduce tiered data plans for smartphone customers starting July 7. The nation's largest carrier has previously indicated it would follow AT&T in adopting tiered pricing, but hadn't specified a date. The plans will cost as follows: $10 for 75 MB of data per month, $30 for 2 GB, $50 for 5 GB or $80 for 10 GB. There will be an overage charge of $10 per GB of data. Verizon said existing customers who upgrade to a new device on or after July 7 will be able to keep their …

While U.S. workers enjoyed a long holiday weekend to celebrate Independence Day, Microsoft announced a deal with Baidu, the largest Chinese search engine, to support English-Language searches in China. All English-language searches on Baidu will be redirected through Bing. "The search results powered by Bing will begin appearing on Baidu search result Web pages starting in July 2011," said a Microsoft spokesperson. "We've been working with Baidu on the advertising front for some time. In China, Baidu's ad platform is used and is similar to adCenter in the U.S." (More in Search Marketing Daily: July 5, 2011.)

Social gaming juggernaut Zynga today filed with the SEC for an initial public offering to raise up to $1 billion. The company behind hit games like FarmVille and Mafia Wars said it had a profit of $90.6 million on revenue of $597 million in 2010. For the first quarter of 2011, it reported a profit of $11.8 million on sales of $235 million. It has $995 million in cash on hand. Zynga, which makes money mainly from selling virtual items such as poker chips for in-game use, boasts 232 million monthly active users in 166 countries. Investors include Kleiner Perkins …