The Google Effect; Facebook numbers look good

Every week, Mountain View makes news with technology developments, discoveries and sometimes controversies.

Today, Mountain View Patch brings you , where we’ll relay the past week’s news highlights from our backyard giants, start-ups and small businesses alike.

Look what tech giant in our backyard can do to competition. While the challenge has sent Facebook on an acquisition spree, Twitter, the 140-character limit micro-blogging and social networking company plans to take the advertising route. Get ready to see “promoted tweets.” Twitter now has 100 million active users and 400 million monthly uniques, revealed CEO Dick Costolo, at a press conference on Sept. 8.

Expected to go public in 2012 by industry observers, social media king, Facebook is nicely poised in number terms, according to a Reuter’s news report. With 750 million users, $500 million in net income and $1.6 billion in revenue in first half of 2011, Facebook continues to raise the bar. Started from a Harvard dorm room by Mark Zuckerberg, today the company is roughly valued at $80 billion in private markets by investors.

Its good news for Silicon Valley start-ups and venture capitalists as IBM courts the “Big Data” arena. IBM expects to spend $20 billion on acquisitions between 2011 and 2015. IBM joins the list of non-Silicon Valley tech firms making inroads in the region with EMC Corp., Citrix Systems Inc. and Research In Motion Ltd. buying start-ups, AOL Inc. posting hiring billboards along Highway 101, and Microsoft Corp. setting up office in Mountain View to work with venture firms.

Medical technology company, Stryker is all set to acquire Mountain View-based Concentric Medical in a $135 million cash transaction.

There’s a lot happening at Google. In a bid to improve its local offerings, Google bought Zagat, the restaurant review service for an undisclosed amount. Zagat currently offers reviews and ratings on restaurants in over 100 cities across the world, based largely on surveys of diners.

After shutting down Slide, Google kills Aardvark, the Q&A service it bought last year for about $50 million. Slide, the social gaming company was bought by Google for about 200 million last year.

Guess what? Google, the 29,000-employee Internet search company, consumed 2.26 billion kilowatt hours of electricity in 2010 alone. That would be an equivalent of electricity consumption by about 200,000 homes in United States.