It’s been just over nine months since Google announced their intentions to acquire hardware manufacturer Motorola Mobility for $ 12.5 billion, and now it seems that the final pieces of the deal have fallen into place.

According to a new report from the Associated Press, Chinese officials have finally given the Google-Motorola deal their blessing.

China’s official approval of the deal has been a long time coming — Google managed to score regulatory approvals from the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Commission back in February (on the same day no less), but China’s anti-monopoly bureau leapt into action just a few days later. That period of intense regulatory scrutiny is a routine part of the purchasing process, as every company that makes more than 400 million yuan ($ 63 million) in China and 10 billion yuan ($ 1.6 billion) globally is subject to the process.

Google and Motorola originally expected to close the deal in “early 2012″, and it turns out they weren’t too far from the market. With this final approval in place, Google has confirmed that they expect purchase to be completed some time next week.

With the long process of purchasing Motorola Mobility finally drawing to a close, Google seems to be shifting their attention to the process of selling hardware on their own. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week that Google was looking at fleshing out the Devices section of the Google Play Store with unlocked smartphones and tablets — all of them “lead” devices —  from up to five major hardware manufacturers. Now that Google will have their own in-house hardware team, it stands to reason that they might soon offer their own devices alongside those from hardware partners like Samsung and HTC.

Facebook shares opened at $ 42.05, a 10.5 percent increase from its final price last night at $ 38. This would value the company at $ 115 billion. While the price is going to fluctuate a lot today, there’s a crowdsourced bet from Twitter users on FacebookIPOClosingPrice.com that the company will close at a $ 54 price and a $ 135.7 billion valuation.

Shares are actually currently flat at $ 38, which is the price that underwriters settled on last night. While it may not be as juicy a story, it’s a signal that Facebook’s IPO was priced pretty efficiently and that the company didn’t leave too much money on the table.

Bloomberg noted a premarket offer for Facebook in Frankfurt was at $ 70. Another report from ZeroHedge has Facebook at roughly $ 101 a share, which would value the company at a $ 300 billion valuation even before the start of trading.

Yesterday, the social networking giant priced its IPO at $ 38 a share, at the very top end of its revised $ 34 to $ 38 price range. That makes it the biggest tech IPO in history. Facebook offered 180,000,000 shares of stock in the offering while early shareholders including Peter Thiel and Accel Partners are selling more than 200 million more shares. This is the biggest recent IPO since Zynga, which saw its shares pop 10 percent on its opening trade of $ 11, giving the company a $ 7.7 billion valuation.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg along with vice president of product Chris Cox, COO Sheryl Sandberg, and CFO David Ebersman rang the NASDAQ opening bell remotely from Facebook’s headquarters at 1 Hacker Way in Menlo Park, California this morning.

There’s been strong indication that Apple is contemplating killing off the Mac Pro. But a sad, small group of creative professionals is crying out for Cupertino to give them new machines. Problem is, their clamoring probably won’t be heard, because their bleak little group—We Want a New Macpro—only has a paltry 54 likes.

Business Insider reports on a new research note from Macquarie analyst Ben Schacter, who claims that Google is working to bring a version of its Chrome browser to iOS devices. According to the report, Apple “may already be reviewing” the app, which could debut before the end of the quarter.

Google currently splits ad revenue share with Apple for Google searches performed through Safari, a deal that currently sees Google paying Apple roughly $1 billion per year. With a potential Chrome browser for iOS leading to Google keeping all revenue for searches through the browser for itself, Google could see a significant financial benefit if it can achieve a substantial user base on iOS.

The problem for Google is that Apple does not make it convenient for users to take advantage of third-party browsers, with Safari alternatives like Opera and Dolphin representing only tiny fractions of iOS browser share. Systemwide calls for browser actions throughout iOS apps are linked to Safari, meaning that users have to take extra steps to use a different browser, with the inconvenience leading the vast majority of users to simply use Safari for their iOS browsing needs.

What does it mean when Facebook says it has 901 million monthly active users on its network? According to figures out from the International Telecommunication Union, it effectively signifies that Facebook is the world’s largest social network by a very long shot. The ITU says in a new report that that the number of people using all social media services have passed the 1 billion mark. That is just 100 million shy of Facebook’s usage figure, giving Facebook a 90 percent share of all social networkers.

In contrast to the very biggest players of all — Facebook (900m+ users), Twitter (200m+ users) and LinkedIn (120m+ users) — the rest of the playing field is heavily localized, with services like QQ in China, Vkontakte in Russia, Mixi in Japan, and Google’s Orkut in Brazil, India, and Paraguay among those competing in the space, the ITU notes.

The ITU, which is focused on telecoms regulation, flags social media in its report as an area of growing scrutiny for telecoms regulators: not only are social networks becoming more ubiquitous, but services like Facebook are becoming communications mediums in their own right, with voice and text offerings that go head-to-head against similar services from carriers.

The 2012 “Trends In Telecommunication Reform” report also confirmed something else that Facebook has been telling us: mobile is fast becoming the main way that the vast majority of people are using its service.

That’s partly due to the fact that, although broadband usage continues to grow, the number of fixed broadband subscribers is still nowhere near the majority of households in most countries.

ITU notes in the last five years, the number of fixed broadband users has nearly doubled, and by early 2012 they stood at 591 million — in other words, equivalent to just over half of the number of all social media users.

But broadband growth remains very uneven. Within that 591 million figure, the ITU notes that developing countries have penetration of as low as 4.8 percent of users. Industrialized countries, it says, have average penetration of 26 percent. Part of the problem remains the affordability of broadband services: in Africa, for example, the average monthly price for broadband is still more than three times that of the average household income. Overall, there are still 5 billion people worldwide that have “never experienced even low-speed Internet, or have only experienced it through public or shared access,” the ITU says. And there are some very much on the other side of the digital divide not using broadband, either. (Hello, Steve Wozniak.)

On the mobile side of the equation, Facebook and outside analysts have noted that mobile usage is now outpacing usage from fixed connections on Facebook’s network.

But in developing countries, it looks like Facebook and other social networks will also hit a wall when it comes to picking up mobile users who fully engage with the site.

The ITU notes that only 8.5 percent of the population in developing countries had access to mobile broadband in 2011, with only five percent of global use coming from low-income countries. Effectively, this could mean that the users Facebook is picking up in emerging markets may have people using the site on smartphones, but will probably, more likely, be using something much more pared-down on a feature phone, such as Facebook Zero or something even more basic.

This includes the service launched by Orange in Africa that uses USSD technology — available on even the most basic GSM device — to let people search for friends, invite friends, accept or deny friend requests, write status updates and comment/like/unlike friends’ status updates.

That also suggests that until technology catches up with Facebook, as it continues to get bigger, it may also start to see a growth of less sophisticated usage and engagement on the site as well.