The news that Apple had lost its iPhone trademark in Brazil this week has taken many by surprise, and not least by Apple. It seems that a consumer electronics firm, Gradiente Eletronica SA, had filed its request to use iPhone as a brand way back in 2000, but, it will have to prove it has used it after the trademark was granted, which, surprisingly, was as late as 2008.
Of course, Apple has lodged an appeal over the trademark row, and there are now 60-days for the company to prove the iPhone trademark was used within the allotted period.
It seems rather odd that it took the regulator eight years to approve the trademark, and also odd that in 2008 the first Apple iPhone had already been released. Surely, somebody somewhere in Brazil must have noticed the huge publicity surrounding Apple's launch of the iPhone.
All very strange, eh!
Last week's WebmasterWorld Weekly is here.
Here's this week's WebmasterWorld Weekly Roundup.
This week, WebmasterWorld members were debating the idea of a potential new revenue stream for site owners. The question of whether it is SEO blackmail was also raised.
Worldwide search engine stats can often throw out some interesting facts, or not. According to a comScore report, Russia's Yandex became the World's fourth largest Global search engine in November and December 2012, pushing Bing down to fifth. On closer inspection, the total number of users, worldwide, for Yandex is way below that of Microsoft. It seems that the smaller number of Yandex users are searching more. No doubt they are preferring to use Yandex for the language compatibility. That'll be the same with Baidu, i'm sure.
Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are at saturation in their own markets, so it's only a question of exchanging users between one search service or another. It's a little like the competition between the wet shave businesses: They can only steal share from each other.
I'd expect to see both baidu and Yandex search continue to grow as their market's users come online.
Both Microsoft and Google need to grow traffic from each other, or grow in the fast emerging markets of China and Russia. What do you see in your stats?
WebmasterWorld members were reporting significant drops in link counts in Google Webmaster Tools. The drops were causing some concern, and subsequently, we heard it was a known bug and it had been fixed. It seems the link counts are returning to normal.
Those of you that like to keep a close eye on the Google SERPs and the status of updates going on will like to review our update thread, "Google Updates and SERP Changes - February 2013"
Please do give us feedback if you notice any changes in your site's positioning in the SERPs. 
Twitter announced that it is going to roll out older tweets in its search results. This is something that we all would like to see, i'm sure. Read about the announcement in our thread.
Google said it had started to use it's own WebP image format over JPEG and PNG graphics files. It said that significant bandwidth saving and faster loading times were achieved. What's your view on the need for speed and the WebP image format?
In what appears to be a strange lawsuit filing, Facebook is to be sued over it's "like" button. It is being sued by a patent-holding company, Rembrandt Social Media, acting on behalf of a dead Dutch programmer called Joannes Jozef Everardus van Der Meer.
WebmasterWorld eCommerce Members this week were discussing whether Google's Merchant Center switch to CPC has made it tougher for small eCommerce businesses to compete. How has it affected your eCommerce business?
In more eCommerce news, twitter and Amex announced a partnership where users will be able to buy directly from twitter's messaging. Read more about the experiment in our thread on the topic.
Opera Software announced a milestone of 300 million users, and more importantly, said, "To provide a leading browser on Android and iOS, this year Opera will make a gradual transition to the WebKit engine, as well as Chromium, for most of its upcoming versions of browsers for smartphones and computers." 
Snippets from Eric Schmidt's yet-to-be-published book were revealed by the WSJ, and one particular piece caught my eye. "Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results." These would be your G+ authorship profile. The quote went on to say, "The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance."
Yahoo's CEO, Marissa Mayer, said that its search partnership with Microsoft was not delivering the market share gains or the revenue boost that it should. "One of the points of the alliance is that we collectively want to grow share rather than just trading share with each other," Mayer said. Microsoft must have read that and wondered where next! 
A report published this week suggested that Google will pay Apple $1 billion in 2014 to remain the default search on Apple. That's quite a reasonable sum of money.
WebmasterWorld members were discussing responsive design, and the need for a dedicated discussion area. What do you think?
News came in over a ransom-ware scam that had been shut down. It seems the scammers were installing software that indicated a user has browsed inappropriate content. The scamware then prompted the user to pay to avoid reports going to the authorities.
In WebmasterWorld Supporters (Subscription Required) there a healthy discussion going on over webmasters sabotaging their competition. Have your say in our Supporters thread.
In another WebmasterWorld Supporters thread (Subscription Required) there was news of a bug in Google's mathematical formula results produced adult SERPs. As I understand it, the bug is being addressed so I expect the problem to eventually go away.
We hadn't run a video for a while, so here's something which might be of interest. A WebmasterWorld Member, suzukik, asks Matt Cutts, How many types of messages does the webspam team send to Webmaster Tools?
I hope this week's round-up helped your productivity. If you've spotted some news that we haven't covered or discussed, drop me a stickymail.
Have a wonderful week!
Cheers
Neil
@engine
Follow WebmasterWorld on twitter. #webmasterworld or @webmasterworld
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