It’s June, and summer has arrived (although if you’re in the UK you’ll have to take the Met Office’s word for that). This means the start of festival season and long weekends spent cavorting around fields covered in UV paint and making friends with strangers called ‘River’. If you can’t bear to leave your Smartphone in the safe, mud-less confines of home, make sure you at least check out the latest festival apps designed to make your weekend one to remember (or not, depending on your hedonistic inclinations).

Mary Meeker’s annual state of the digital world address, delivered earlier this week under the name the “2012 Internet Trends” report, is yet again a must-read for anyone trying to get their head around what to prioritize investment-wise going forward. There’s a lot here, but the big summary is: mobile is a driving force in consumer digital uptake. The only problem is: when will it pay off?

This is one of those questions that admittedly is being asked in just a handful of companies these days. But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be a pressing question for brands, publishers and organizations of all stripes who seek to reach a global audience on the device they prefer. A new forecast on tablet sales may just accelerate the conversation at the board level.

We started the week with a big Facebook #Fail from Coca-Cola Down Under and things didn’t get much better as we all tuned in for the big tech news of the week – the details of the new iPad. To recap, Coca-Cola Australia figured it would be a fun idea to ask its 736,000 Facebook fans to participate in a type of word-association game that quickly spiraled into a fan-on-fan insult-fest. It was yet another lesson (as if we needed reminding) that in social media, brands have little to no control over what fans will ultimately say.

It’s been less than 24 hours since Apple unveiled the new iPadHD iPad3 iPad and tech bloggers and journos are still picking it apart. It has super-fast LTE hookup for those 14 or so people on the planet signed up to a true 4G plan. It has a better camera, packs more pixels and has a faster processor for gaming and video-on-the-go. What’s it missing? For starters, a single share button or a helpful re-tweet.

As tech developers continue with their seemingly relentless crusade to turn us all into amoebic, sofa-dwelling blobs mashing at touch screens to sate our every whim and desire, Domino’s Pizza have launched an iPad app on the UK market.

PayPal UK launched an effort last week to boost its social media presence through a giveaway contest dangling free iPad 2′s. Its message: love us and we might award you with this must-have baby. Can boosting social followers through bribes be a genuine lure? More importantly, does it work?

Part of Apple’s phenomenal growth story over the last decade can be seen here in Europe. A decade ago, Euro Mac addicts were hard to spot. Now they seem to be everywhere. Fittingly, it’s Apple gadgets like iPhone, iPod and iPad leading the charge with mobile-mad Europeans.

Color is a new (launched March 23) photo-sharing social network for the smartphone crowd. The network is novel in that it has no privacy settings or friending capabilities, but instead organizes and presents user photos based on relevancy, location and interests.

Fast Company may have said it best, when it described Dailybooth as a micro-blog, like Twitter, “based on photos.” So far the user base appears to be dominated by tech-savvy teenagers with photo-capable smartphones. Could the iPad 2 crowd provide yet further growth?