YouTube’s ad sales from mobile devices has tripled in the last six months, adding as much as an estimated $350 million in revenue to the Google-owned video hub, according to a Bloomberg report. Nearly a quarter of YouTube’s 1 billion users worldwide access the service through handheld devices, driving up mobile ad spending, Lucas Watson, VP of sales, at YouTube, said. eMarketer projects U.S. mobile video ad revenue will grow 10-fold from last year to $2.69 billion by 2017.

Pandora on Wednesday announced a new browser-based version of its music service for the living room it touts as designed “from the ground up” for TV and the remote control. The Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 are the initial devices to support tv.pandora.com, but the company plans to expand the new HTML5-based offering to compatible smart TVs and set-top boxes in the coming months. Already more than 10 million people access Pandora through connected TVs or set-top boxes. But that effort to date has required developing customized integrations for each different TV model or related device. To …

Nearly a quarter (23%) of external traffic to news sites comes from social networks, with Facebook driving 58% of social referrals. The finding comes from SimpleReach, which makes software powering sharing activing across a network of 5,000 sites ranging from personal blogs to large outlets like Forbes.com, People.com, and FoxSports.com. In a recent blog post, the company said Facebook’s share of social traffic was more than twice the share for Twitter (26%), with StumbleUpon a distant third, at 6.6%. Given that Facebook’s user base is four times that of Twitter (1.1 billion monthly active users versus 200 …

Smartphone shipments will outstrip those of feature phones for the first time this year, with the former accounting for 52.2% of all mobile phone shipments worldwide in 2013, according to a new forecast from IDC. The research firm projects smartphone shipments will grow 32.7% to 958.8 million units this year, with emerging markets accounting for nearly two thirds (64.8%) of that total. Driving smartphone sales has been a combination of factors including rising demand for mobile data, increased emphasis by carriers and manufacturers, and a wide selection of devices at varying price points. The average selling price …

Struggling social games maker Zynga on Monday said it plans to cut about 520 jobs, or 18% of its workforce and close some offices to reduce costs amid disappointing sales of newer titles. The restructuring will save an estimated $70 million to $80 million in pretax expenses. The cutbacks to be completed by August will result in restructuring charges of $24 million to $26 million in the second quarter and $2 million to $5 million in the third quarter. As a result of the layoffs and office closures, Zynga projects a second quarter net loss of between $39 …

In the last presidential race, Obama for America 2012 campaign workers had an idea for an email initiative. They wanted to wanted to send supporters emails that would include other people's names and phone numbers, with instructions to call them and make sure they went to the polls. The campaign believed that doing so would have been legal, but nonetheless decided against it, according to Rayid Ghani, Chief Scientist of the Obama for America 2012 campaign. Speaking at a conference on Friday about data and political campaigns, Ghana said that campaigns, in some respects, “stay far …

The volume of app downloads rose in April for the first time since January, along with the cost to market those apps. That’s according to the latest figures from app marketing firm Fiksu, which has tracked more than 107 billion app actions on its platform that helps developers and brands optimize their iOS and Android campaigns. The company’s app store competitive index, measuring downloads of the top 200 free U.S. iPhone apps, rose 11% in April to 5.61 million daily downloads from 5.02 …

Facebook on Wednesday introduced verified pages to help users find the official presence of popular brands, celebrities and other high-profile people on the social network. The verified accounts will be labeled with a small blue icon with a check mark next to their name on timelines, in search results, and elsewhere on Facebook. Besides fan pages, the update is also rolling out to individual profiles. Page owners can’t request to have their accounts verified. Rather, Facebook is proactively verifying the pages and profiles with the largest audiences. While users can’t ask to get their accounts verified, …

Smartphone penetration among mobile users last year reached 50% or higher in U.S., South Korea and Australia, the U.K., Sweden and Norway. The worldwide smartphone adoption rate among mobile users will remain under a third this year and approach the halfway mark by 2017, according to a new eMarketer forecast. In regional terms, only North America will have average smartphone ownership above 50% this year, when Canada  joins the U.S. in crossing that threshold this year. Western Europe as a whole will reach that level in 2014. The eMarketer figures are based on more than …

Tablet shipments will outpace those of portable PCs this year as demand for PCs overall continues to slide, according to a new IDC forecast. The research firm project tablet worldwide shipments will rise 58.7% to 229.3 million units in 2013 while notebook computers will fall 6.7% to 187.4 million. IDC also revised downward is forecast for the total PC market from a decline of 1.3% this year to 7.8%, with shipments falling from 349.2 million to 321.9 million. Further, tablets are expected to surpass total PC shipments by 2015. The tablet surge “marks a significant change in …