No doubt helped by the World Cup and the explosion in smartphone usage, mobile video consumption is booming in much of Europe with the UK and Italy leading the way, new comScore research shows. Roughly two-thirds of all smartphone users use the handset to view video, the data show, either via a mobile TV subscription or by accessing video-sharing sites (or, their apps) such as YouTube.

Facebook’s virtual currency, Credits, has emerged, seemingly from nowhere, as a huge potential money-spinner for the social network. Now we are getting a picture of just how big it could be, but can it ever hope to eat into PayPal’s lucrative market as the de-facto online payment system?

Corporate social media deployment has to start somewhere. Deutsche Bank, in a new piece of research, traces it to its origin to find out how companies are benefiting from web 2.0 investment. Some of its findings may surprise you:

Social searching is getting smarter all the time (or so we hope), and Microsoft announced some further interesting developments on Bing Social this week. But how do the two heavyweights of social search, Google and Bing Social, match up? We measure them up here.

An “apps culture” is emerging among U.S. cell phone users, yet many are still unaware of what their phone can do, and some don’t even know if their phone has apps. Those are among the findings of new research by the Pew Internet Project, which suggests the apps market is some way ahead of most adult phone users.

Facebook over the weekend quietly unveiled (and then pulled again) a new pages-discovery system. The new initiative recommends pages to users, compiling the most popular pages in a user’s network and combines them with individual interests to create personalized “Like” recommendations. Considering the many other tools recently released for mining potential customer “likes”, Facebook is trying to ensure the wave of brands coming onto the social network don’t get lost in the stampede.

Yes, Google Instant is a time-saver. But does this new innovation in search (the first we’ve had in ages) really lead to smarter search results as Google claims, or does it tell us what we already know, just more quickly? We took it through its paces in multiple locations. Here’s what we found.

It could be just what couch potatoes everywhere have been waiting for – YouTube (as well as much of the rest of the Web) is coming to your TV, Google CEO Eric Schmidt announced yesterday. Before you ready your Microsoft WebTV cracks, consider this: Americans alone view over 13 billion videos a month on YouTube. That’s a lot of eyeballs.

Nike released a new iPhone app yesterday to act as a personal coach for runners. As well as functions such as a GPS map with pace speedometer and inspirational Lance Armstrong audio quotes, the Nike+ GPS will allow runners to connect and compete with their friends for better runs in a network called “Challenge Me”. But is Nike’s entry into this marketplace too late?

“Location” has become the new keyword over the past few months with the rise of geo-based sharing services, most notably Foursquare. But many observers are skeptical, and a new report by Forester Research has everyone wondering: if they build it, will users actually end up checking-in? We think they will.