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Memory-chip maker Micron Technology on Saturday named D. Mark Durcan as CEO and Robert E. Switz as chairman, following the death of Steven Appleton, who had long held those positions. Appleton died Friday in a plane crash in Boise. Sales executive Mark W. Adams was named president.

Maybe you’re a little bit interested in watching part of the Super Bowl on your Verizon phone. This should cure you of that: It’s the ad Verizon is using to push the service, which it’s selling for $3. I’m a Verizon subscriber, and the carrier just sent this directly to my iPhone, unprompted, via MMS.

You’ll have to take my word for this, but this is exactly what it looks and sounds like on my phone — there’s no drop in quality in this YouTube upload.

What’s truly bizarre is that the live NFL streaming that Verizon does provide is actually pretty good. Or at least it was, when they were offering it for free at the beginning of the season. I don’t know why they’d want to promote it with something that looked like it was made on a Commodore 64.

Also odd: Verizon has made competent, attractive ads for its NFL offering in the past. Here’s one from 2011:

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/Neil Webster)

While many techies aren’t sports fans (and vice versa), lots of us are enthusiasts of both ones and zeros and X’s and O’s.

And for those who are into both football and geekery, tomorrow is kind of like the Super Bowl. Well, technically speaking, I guess tomorrow is like the Super Bowl for everyone.

Anyhoo. For everyone looking for some tech to go with their gridiron, there are lots of options.

First of all, NBC is streaming the Super Bowl live over the Internet, for those who can’t make it to a television or want a second screen to enjoy even more of the action.

ESPN president John Skipper said at D: Dive Into Media that he thinks giving away the game for free is a bad idea, but NBC paid for the rights, so they get to do what ever they want.

Verizon is also broadcasting the game live to the smallest of screens via its NFL Mobile service. (However, Peter Kafka notes their marketing of said service could use some work.)

Second, there are a ton of Super Bowl apps, including the official ones for both iPhone and Android, as well as a game program. Peanuts are still not downloadable, but content-tagging app Shazam is offering a variety of commercial tie-ins. Check here for even more game-day apps.

And of course, the big game will be the talk of Twitter, to be sure.

Lastly, as a special treat, AllThingsD will be offering live coverage of the game, the commercials and the social-media hoopla. We had so much fun in January with Footballmer, our liveblog mash-up of Steve Ballmer’s final CES keynote and the BCS championship, that we decided to do it again.

This time, though, I’ll actually get to watch the game, rather than having Ballmer duty. I’ll be commenting on the game, the commercials, the tech and the Twitter commentary. Check back tomorrow before kickoff for that.

We spent a lot of time at the D: Dive Into Media conference talking about the way entertainment gets distributed. But it was also important to talk about the way it gets created. App-maker Khush’s pitch is that it lets everyone become an entertainer, via its music apps that let even the most tone-deaf mumblers create a song.

Here, co-founders Prerna Gupta and Parag Chordia show off some of their creations, including Songify Live, a new app that will let you make music in real time with an iPhone, even if you’re a tone-deaf mumbler like myself.

I do sort of wish we’d kept audio warrior Neil Young onstage just a few minutes longer, so we could have captured his reaction to all of this:

[ See post to watch video ]

Brandon Watson, who has been heading up Microsoft’s efforts to convince programmers to develop for Windows Phone, is leaving the company for Seattle-area neighbor Amazon.

“The rumors are true,” Watson said in a Twitter post. “The team is in great hands.”

At Amazon, Watson will lead a group working on Kindle applications for various Amazon-made and non-Amazon devices.

Watson’s move was earlier reported by ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley.

Update: Microsoft confirmed that Watson’s last day is Monday.

“Brandon did a great job helping us build a vibrant developer community and we wish him well with his next adventure,” a representative said in a statement.

Microsoft did not immediately say who would pick up Watson’s duties.

Caesars Entertainment may be known for its Las Vegas casinos, but it also has a burgeoning business developing way off the Strip.

In its roadshow presentation released online today, the Vegas-based company, which manages 42,000 hotel rooms, said one of the biggest opportunities it had going forward was on the Internet, including social games and real-money gaming.

Mitch Garber, the CEO of the company’s interactive division, said it recently launched Caesars Casino in beta on Facebook, making it the first time that a brand name was used to compete in the casino genre.

Garber believes that the game, which includes video slots, blackjack and roulette, will displace Double Down Casino as one of the category leaders. The developer of Double Down Casino, Double Down Interactive, was recently acquired by video poker giant International Game Technology for $500 million.

Garber said over the past 13 months, so much of the business has changed.

With the sale of Double Down, and the visibility into social games leader Zynga, which went public in December, and the release of more information this week by Facebook in its public filing, there are lots of verifiable signs that this is a big business.

For instance, on Wednesday, Facebook revealed that Zynga made up 12 percent of its overall revenues. Zynga’s Poker game is the leading casino-based game on Facebook, and more recently, it launched Bingo as part of a casino series.

Over the past two days, Zynga’s stock price has soared based on the Facebook news, rising 8.11 percent today alone to close at $13.39 a share.

Caesars said yesterday it was applying to be listed on the Nasdaq market under the symbol “CZR,” and that it was planning to sell 1.8 million shares between $8 and $10 apiece.

Caesars Chairman, CEO and President Gary Loveman was positive about a number of aspects of the business, as he should be in a presentation to potential investors, but one of the highlights was online gaming.

“This is a big deal for us,” he said, calling out the opportunity for gambling online, across both mobile and social networks and across multiple languages.

In addition to launching Caesars Casino on Facebook, the company has been building up its online gaming chops for some time.

Garber said this past year the company purchased Israel-based Playtika, which operates Slotomania, a very popular slots game on Facebook, iPhone and iPad. It also has two software partners that will enable it to expand into online gambling in the U.S. as soon as it becomes legal.

“We aren’t aware of any other bricks and mortar company that has the online experience that is preparing themselves as we are,” he said.

However, Zynga told All Things D it was currently seeking partnerships to pursue real-money gaming, and MGM Resorts also recently unveiled a plan to partner with online poker company Bwin.Party Digital Entertainment.

Of course, the big driver for everyone is that the laws are changing in the U.S., which makes it nearly a foregone conclusion that online gambling — at least some games — will become legal over the next year.

Late last year, the Department of Justice issued a new interpretation of the Wire Act of 1961. Under the new ruling, it interprets the act as only outlawing bets on sporting events — not all events and contests.

With that clarification in place, it will now be up to every state to pass legislation outlining operating procedures.

“We see the odds being close to 100 percent,” Garber said. “It’s just a matter of whether it will be federally regulated or state by state. The states are already doing it, but the federal government is getting their act together, too.”

While Google has endured criticism for biasing Google+ content in its new “Search Plus Your World” features, Bing has been surprisingly shy about pressing its social search advantage. Especially considering how much Microsoft usually likes to publicly poke Google.

In fact, Bing is now the only search engine that has explicit deals to access data from both Facebook and Twitter.

But it’s not like Bing is the all-social, all-the-time search engine. In fact, Bing has been oddly reticent about incorporating social data into its results, especially considering that Twitter and Facebook themselves have relatively poor search offerings.

This morning I asked Bing Search director Stefan Weitz what the deal was. Here’s an edited write-up of our conversation.

Liz Gannes: What’s the status of social search at Bing?

Stefan Weitz: We’ve been blending social signals for 18 months now, even just to do things like detecting possible spikes when we see lots of tweets coming in on a certain topic. And we have a separate SERP — a separate page — where you can see social results.

The first thing is, we are taking this pretty slow, and there’s a pretty good reason for that. People don’t understand how amazingly complex it is to make sense of any social signal. So we are being very conservative about where we fire social results.

That’s the first thing; the second thing is there’s more than likes and shares. It’s more about augmenting this mechanical product — the algorithmic search engine — with people. So we shipped things like understanding the cities where you live, friends’ opinions on stock quotes — a bunch of things besides just firing off social search.

Do you think it makes sense for search engines to pay to access social data?

I’m not on the business side, but I think for search to work properly, you have to understand that if a missing component has to be included, you have to [make a deal for] it.

Has social search positively impacted the Bing experience? Are there measurable impacts of social users being more satisfied with their results?

For sure — the biggest thing we see is when you look on the search page and see the faces [of your friends], the click-through rate goes up substantially. It goes back to basic neuroscience: We pay attention to people. The core user experience has gotten a ton better, and it’s very early. We’ve taken a while to do this, but it’s complex.

What in particular is complex?

Figuring out what does a “Like” mean, what does a share mean. Originally we were going to fire off “Stefan likes this result” even if there’s a comment. But what if I say in the comment, “This article’s totally wrong.” On one hand I have the “Like,” on the other hand I have the lexical comment. Or I might be retweeting it from someone else, or I might have just thought it was funny. Trying to understand that very atomic action is hard.

Bing's Stefan Weitz says search is better with faces.

We’ve found it’s important to look at the whole person and understand “Stefan likes to share on computer science, and he has an interest in spatial dynamics.” On Twitter search we will identify experts on a certain topic. That’s something we can do but we don’t do that on any scale yet.

Why aren’t you doing more to capitalize on the goodwill from people who dislike Google’s Search Plus Your World? Shouldn’t you be mounting a “switch to Bing” campaign?

We are doing some ads this week (There was also a Bing-is-great blog post today). They [Google] are doing a nice job on their own of handling this problem.

But they are learning just like we are. They did what we didn’t want to do, which was make the user experience peppered with this stuff, with +1s everywhere, the Google+ content in the top corner. I think [Google] realized we were ahead and they overextended. But I know a ton of guys there and they’re smart and they’re reacting to what has been said.

What would happen if Microsoft had its own significant social network? How would that change your relationship to other social networking sites? Would you be tempted to give preference to your own on-network content?

Well, we do have Windows Live, which has half a billion accounts — though not a lot of social activity because we have linked to 25 or 40 other social network profiles for years.

I remember the discussion a few years ago that, even though we had a very robust social product, there were 60+ social networks across the planet. We thought, it’s naive to assume a single social network will rule them all or to make people come to ours. So we have the guys running around doing partnerships with 60 different networks.

Us partnering is the only way we’re going to make a big difference here. We have to use the whole web to actualize our vision of helping people do stuff, not just find stuff. And everyone wins, which is nice.

Can you explain what you get through these deals? What information is accessible through data feeds that isn’t through regular crawling?

Just from a technical standpoint, crawling is expensive. We could certainly hit a site a thousand times a minute, but it’s not efficient. Feeds just generally are more efficient. And also crawling doesn’t necessarily have a structured data set.

What about getting access to analyze each user’s social graph, something Google has said is very important?

Certainly having a social graph is a good thing for Facebook, which has an amazing amount of data. There’s also people I follow on Twitter, which is a public record. But different friends are valuable for different things — one single network can’t rule them all.

When are you going to press your social advantage in Bing, seeing as you have both Facebook and Twitter deals and Google doesn’t?

You’re going to see the culmination of a lot of our learnings in the not too distant future. All those lessons will be applied into something that I think is pretty interesting. How we think about social is always evolving, and the next turn of the crank is more differentiated than we’ve seen in the past.

Motorola’s fall sale of refurbished Xoom tablets has gone about as wrong as it could possibly have gone.

The company said today that 100 of the 6,200 it sold through Woot.com between October and December of 2011 may not have been properly reformatted.

In other words, they still contained the personal information of their previous owners — everything from email and social networking passwords to photos and documents.

What an incredible cock-up.

Motorola’s solution to the problem? To “actively pursue the return of the impacted refurbished units” (visit motorola.com/xoomreturn if you think you may have one). Also: offer customers whose personal data might have been compromised a two-year subscription to credit rating agency Experian’s ProtectMyID identity theft service.

A decent gesture, I suppose — unless some miscreant has already pilfered your personal information from the device in the four months it has taken Motorola to notice its mistake.

“Motorola sincerely regrets and apologizes for any inconvenience this situation has caused,” the company said in a statement.

Update: The peanut gallery chimes in:

#bbpBox_165544188543377409 a { text-decoration:none; color:#0084B4; }#bbpBox_165544188543377409 a:hover { text-decoration:underline; } can already see great Synergies in Google Motorolla Aquisition. Google has Personal data and Moto the means of sharing it @JohnPaczkowski February 3, 2012 1:16 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite @yoda_2little Chris

If you want to learn more about the first camera phone, the Super Bowl could be your chance.

Inventor Philippe Kahn talks about it in a Best Buy ad running in the first quarter. In a promotional video that ties in to the ad, Kahn shows his first photo, of his newborn daughter, and talks about how the technology came to be.

While not the first time a camera had been attached to a phone, Kahn notes his camera phone allowed the modern notion of instant sharing. A video of the ad is publicly posted on YouTube (though unlisted).

These days Kahn is running Fullpower Technologies, which does some motion control stuff demoed back at our D7 conference. Their MotionX software is a popular iPhone navigation app and their technology is also used in devices like Jawbone’s UP and Nike+ GPS.

Since you might be refilling the snack bowl or taking a bio break when the ad airs Sunday, here you go:

Update: Best Buy wrote me to note that this video is not the ad itself, but rather a longer video expanding upon the ad itself. And the ad will appear in the first quarter, not in the third or fourth, as I originally wrote.

Micron Technology Inc. said Steven R. Appleton, chairman and chief executive of the memory-chip maker, died on Friday in a small plane accident in Idaho. He was 51 years old.

The company released a statement saying: “Steve’s passion and energy left an indelible mark on Micron, the Idaho community and the technology industry at large.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

A couple weeks after introducing its new iBooks Author app, Apple has clarified legal language about what happens to the books users create with the software. Apple continues to insist that users can only sell electronic books in the iBook format via its iTunes store. But it makes it clear that the content of those books can be sold in any other format, without Apple’s approval.

Apple managed to have an injunction against online sales of certain models of the iPhone and iPad in Germany suspended. But it wasn’t quite so lucky with a second injunction against iCloud push email notifications.

This morning, a Mannheim Regional Court granted an injunction against Apple’s implementation of push email in iCloud and its predecessor, MobileMe. Sought by Motorola Mobility, which claims Apple has infringed its European patent on a “multiple pager status synchronization system and method,” the injunction could force Apple to deactivate push email in iCloud in Germany, though it will leave the broader service intact. Assuming it stands. And at this point, it’s not yet clear that it will. Apple, as one might imagine, is fighting it.

“Apple believes this old pager patent is invalid, and we’re appealing the court’s decision,” a company spokeswoman told AllThingsD.

Sony Electronics, the U.S. arm of the Japanese consumer products company, has cut around 100 workers from its ranks over the past several weeks, AllThingsD has learned.

Although word of the cuts comes just as Sony changed its top leadership in Japan and slashed its full-year forecast, sources say the U.S. moves have been in the works for months, and are part of a broader effort by Sony Electronics chief Phil Molyneux to reshape operations here.

Dubbed “Fit for the Future,” the program has Sony looking to improve its profitability and find ways to get closer to its customers through a variety of efforts, including revamping its own stores, putting more workers inside third-party retailers, and stepping up its social media presence.

Its retail makeover began last April, with a new concept store in the Los Angeles area. Sony has since expanded that design to four more locations.

The recent cuts are also unlikely to be the end of the workforce changes, as Sony looks to remake itself in the face of steep competition. Sony has several thousand workers in the U.S., including not only the consumer electronics arm, but also staff in its professional camera unit and its service and support operations.

Sony is expected to talk more about its U.S. plans at a press event next month.

I recently spent the weekend at a unique event that brought founders, entrepreneurs and investors together. I was fortunate enough to spend time with the original pioneer of social networking: Andrew Weinreich, the founder and original CEO of Sixdegrees.com. For those of you who don’t remember, prior to Facebook, Myspace and Friendster, there was Sixdegrees.com. Initially conceived as a way to manage relationships online, the early Web 1.0 company developed the concept and the product and patented many aspects of modern-day social networking. Through a variety of missteps, the company didn’t succeed (although the patents live on).

At one point, our conversation turned to the idea of a Social Operating System, something that becomes an underlying platform for all things we do online, that creates continual connectivity between you and and all your friends. As I look back over Facebook’s history and excitedly toward its future, I think we can all say that Facebook has essentially captured that vision. It has presented to us a world where applications run on top of a social infrastructure and where our identities travel throughout our digital experience with us through Facebook Connect. I could not be more impressed.

The way the principles of the social operating system continue to evolve will have a tremendous impact on our society.

First, marketing will change. Friend-to-friend marketing has already shown its strength as the driving force of growth for companies like Gilt Groupe, Uncovet.com and Fab.com, whereby you earn credits with the site by referring your friends to sign up. The idea of shifting traditional marketing spend to continually incentivizing your customers to market on your behalf is changing the way I look at developing systems. The idea, though it sounds simple, has many ramifications. For example, it requires new software to be built with a new set of metrics in order to understand how friend-to-friend marketing is working. It would also lower the cost per acquisition compared to traditional marketing spends.

Second, it’s the influencers who will have most of the power. As we become more and more reliant on our social graph for discovery, the less and less dependent we will become on traditional media. This is one of the principles that drives Twitter, Pinterist and YouTube adoption. We can see how effective is it with companies like ShoeDazzle and BeachMint, which build product lines around celebrities and influencers online. By doing this, they immediately drive higher sales. I theorize these influencer networks will be the next ad networks, having the sway to move audiences to new services and drive sales.

Lastly, these new principles of social software design will prevail. Built on top of platforms like Facebook, they will quickly replace older systems. In the last big wave of acquisitions, we saw media companies and portals buying start-ups to bring innovation inside. I believe the next set of acquirers will be from a wider, more distributed set of buyers — ranging from consumer product brands to financial companies — who are looking for innovators building the next generation of solutions on top of the social operating system. (Looking at the staggering growth rate of the socially-minded site Fab.com quickly reminds us that products built with social grow faster than those without.)

With Facebook’s IPO, the general public will be even more vested in its success and thus help to further boost Facebook’s exponential growth. Facebook’s investors will, in essence, collectively help to drive forward the innovation of social operating system platforms. In addition, any companies that rely on Facebook’s technology or its platform — such as Zynga, Renen and Snap Interactive — should also see a lift in value. This wave of new technology companies will reinvent, once again, the way we live online.

Now that Facebook has gone public, I think we can call the era of Web 2.0 over. The social web is taking its rightful place as the new king.

Michael Jones is the founder and CEO of technology studio Science. The former CEO of Myspace, Jones is a long-time entrepreneur, building and selling numerous successful online and mobile businesses. He is also an individual investor in numerous private start-ups, and, in full disclosure, holds stock in some of the companies listed above.

One would hardly think a video about glass would go viral.

But that’s what happened a year ago, when upstate New York-based Corning Inc., maker of optical fiber, Pyrex and the ultra-thin chemically strengthened glass used in many newer tablets and smartphones, posted a slickly produced marketing video on YouTube.

The five-and-a-half minute spot gave more than 17 million viewers a futuristic glimpse at the ways glass could be used in day-to-day life, from tablet screens to home appliances to car dashboards to bus-stop poster panels. The video shows a shiny happy family interacting with the touch-friendly surfaces in a world that I can only guess has flawless, perpetual Internet connectivity.

Now, Corning is looking to recreate some of that viral magic with a sequel video, aptly named A Day Made of Glass … 2!

It’s not remarkably different from the original video. There are two versions of the sequel; one with a narrator, and another without all the explanatory dialogue.

The sequel features the same family, but takes the scenario a few steps further — for example, tablets are now present everywhere, from the bedroom to the classroom, and the neurosurgeon dad is using antimicrobial glass in the operating room, as well as large-panel, fiber-optic glass displays to communicate via video chat with fellow doctors in China.

Despite the fact that large displays play a prominent role in the videos, Corning’s chief financial officer, Jim Flaws, said that large-screen displays are still too expensive for the masses, and that the company sees smartphones and tablets as the fastest-growing area for Corning in the near term. Flaws also said we can expect to see more glass in smaller feature phones, not just in smartphones.

He reaffirmed that Corning is forecasting $10 billion in sales for 2014; last year, the company hit record annual sales of $7.9 billion.

Corning’s Gorilla Glass is currently used in more than 575 consumer-tech product models across 30 major brands, totaling more than 500 million units worldwide. While it’s unclear whether Apple’s latest iPhone and iPad displays are made using Gorilla Glass, Corning was tapped to supply its specialty glass for the original iPhone (which you can read more about in this New York Times story about Apple’s supply chain in China).

Recently, Corning unveiled a new version of its Gorilla Glass that is 20 percent thinner than the original glass.

For your viewing pleasure, the new Corning video is below:

And in other glass-related news — because it’s a slow Friday, so far — ScienceNOW says that researchers have accidentally created the world’s thinnest pane of glass, measuring just three atoms thick.

Closely following dozens of layoffs, the Gilt Groupe has appointed Elizabeth Francis to the position of chief marketing officer. Francis will be responsible for acquiring new customers and customer retention across the company’s flash sales sites and full-priced apparel and food sites. Francis takes over the role from Alexis Maybank, a founder of Gilt, who will resume the position of chief strategy officer. Prior to Gilt, Francis was the chief marketing officer at Intelligent Beauty and president of JustFabulous, an online fashion and accessories brand that recently raised $33 million in capital.

Persistence — even if it is the whiny, likely undeserved, lunkheaded legal version of it — certainly pays off.

But you have to marvel at the bizarre karma going on, given that my favorite matching pair of digital ottomans, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, are poised to collect up to $300 million from the shares they got in a settlement with Facebook and its CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg over the founding of the social networking giant.

That’s right, folks, the rich do get richer, especially if they pursue their case well past the point of shame.

It’s not clear how many of the 1.2 million shares the Winklevii still have from the settlement they got in 2008, since they wrangled with their own lawyers over it, and the stock has also split.

But let’s assume the Olympic rowers kept a chunk, which will be worth a lot of gold-plated oars if Facebook reaches the upward of $80 billion valuation it is expected to in its upcoming initial public offering.

Facebook filed its long-expected IPO earlier this week.

And here’s a lovely tweet about the IPO from Cameron Winklevoss, who is looking very fetching on his Twitter page, even if it is perhaps about time to lose the rower meme image thing, given he’s on the closer side of 30 years old.

We r excited 4the #FacebookIPO + wish the company + all involved the very best,an amazing accomplishment! cc @tylerwinklevoss @DivyaNarendra

— Cameron Winklevoss (@winklevoss) February 2, 2012

He sent it to his twin brother, Tyler, and also to Divya Narendra, their other partner in the ill-fated ConnectU service.

Without going into all the well-gone-over deets (go see the Aaron Sorkin-penned movie and believe about 26 percent of it), ConnectU was the Harvard University dating site that Zuckerberg allegedly submarined in order to start Facebook.

Well, presumably water under bridge — unless you are talking about the perpetually disgruntled Winklevii.

At the time they finally dropped their seven-year fraud lawsuit this past summer, they then reopened to a different one then pending.

“The Social Network 2: The Overly Compensated Vii Strike Back,” anyone?

MORE ON THE FACEBOOK IPO:

• Facebook’s Ad Business Is a $3 Billion Mystery
• Viral Video: Farewell to the No-IPO Mark Zuckerberg
• Zuckerberg Is the Billion-Share Man: Who Owns What, Who Makes What in the Facebook IPO
• Zuckerberg Tells Investors, “We Don’t Build Services to Make Money”
• Mobile Highlighted as Key Risk Factor (and Opportunity) in Facebook Filing
• Stop All That Poking: Facebook Filing Temporarily Crashes SEC Web Site
• Zynga Accounted for 12 Percent of Facebook’s Revenue in 2011
• Facebook Has 845 Million Users
• On Its Eighth Birthday, Facebook Files to Raise $5 Billion in Massive IPO (Get Your S-1 Here!)
• Go the F**k Back to Sleep, Silicon Valley: Facebook IPO Likely to File Later Today at Earliest
• Dude, Where’s My Facebook IPO Filing? (Ashton’s on Hold!)
• The Quiet Man: Meet the Less-Known Face of the Facebook IPO, CFO David Ebersman
• Facebook Board Meeting Today for Final IPO Okays
• Facebook (Eye)PO: Tracking the Truth of the Biggest Deal of Web 2.0
• Viral Graphic: Visualizing the Facebook IPO
• Is Facebook IPO on Track for Late May?
• IPO Watch: Facebook Hiring Brunswick to Help With Comms for Expected Public Offering
• Complete Facebook coverage

That was fast.

Apple, which has spent the past day pulling older model iPhone and iPad inventory from the shelves of its online store in Germany, is now scrambling to restore it. This morning, a court temporarily suspended an injunction that prevented Apple from selling or distributing iOS devices believed to infringe certain Motorola Mobility patents.

In a statement given to AllThingsD, Apple confirmed that the iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 and 3G/UMTS-based iPads should be returning to the shelves of its German online store in a matter of hours.

“All iPad and iPhone models will be back on sale through Apple’s online store in Germany shortly,” an Apple spokeswoman told AllThingsD. “Apple appealed this ruling because Motorola repeatedly refuses to license this patent to Apple on reasonable terms, despite having declared it an industry standard patent seven years ago.”

The injunction at issue here was granted last December, but wasn’t served until recently, sources say. Apple began making the appropriate adjustments to its German online store earlier this week, while continuing to appeal the injunction, which was subsequently suspended this morning.

So what happens next? Well, this is only a temporary suspension. So, at best, it’s a brief reprieve for Apple, until the legal issues surrounding it are resolved. Top among them: Apple’s argument that Motorola Mobility is not honoring the FRAND licensing obligations (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory) it has on some standards-essential patents.

“In a best-case scenario for Apple, the suspension would now be in effect until the appeals court makes a decision on Apple’s appeal,” FOSS Patents’ Florian Mueller explains. “In that case, it would be in effect for well over a year.”

Hewlett-Packard released its annual proxy statement this morning, which, among other things, gives a look at what its top five executives made last year. Here’s the rundown:

CEO Meg Whitman, who upon becoming CEO agreed to take an annual base salary of $1, received more than $16 million worth of stock awards. Add on another $372,598 in other compensation, and the total value of her package was north of $16.5 million. Much of that other compensation stemmed from the period when Whitman was a director on HP’s board, and before she was CEO.

Under her employment contract, Whitman received an option to purchase 1.9 million shares of HP stock at a strike price equal to the value of the share price on the date of the grant, and subject to vesting requirements over time. As of today, 1.9 million shares would be worth almost $55 million. Whitman, the filing says, was the only one among the company’s named executive officers to receive an options award during 2011.

The filing also shows that CFO Cathie Lesjak made a base salary of $825,000, plus $9.3 million in stock-based compensation, $679,000 in incentive pay and $101,500 in other compensation, for a total of more than $11 million.

Todd Bradley, executive vice president and head of the Personal Systems Group, the division that HP briefly considered spinning out last year, made a base salary of $850,000, plus $9.3 million in stock-based compensation. He received $464,457 in incentive pay, plus $105,000 in other compensation, for a total just shy of $10.7 million.

Vyomesh “VJ” Joshi, the executive president and head of the Imaging and Printing Group, got an $850,000 salary, too, and nearly $8 million in stock awards, plus $638,355 in incentive pay, for a total of $9.8 million.

Shane Robison, the former chief strategy officer who retired last year, received a base salary of $781,250, plus stock awards worth $7.6 million and $606,506 in incentive pay, for a total of $9 million.

Finally, we have a full accounting of what former CEO Léo Apotheker made for his 11 months of service at HP’s helm. The full amount was $30.4 million. The precise amount had been the subject of some guesswork based on less-than-complete HP filings made around the time of Apotheker’s departure. The filings netted for HP a dubious award for “Worst Footnote of the Year” over at Morningstar’s Footnoted blog. My best guess had been in the $28 million to $33 million range.

Apotheker’s compensation breaks down like so:

• $1,152,770 in base salary.

• A $6.4 million bonus, of which $4 million was a signing bonus when he joined HP, and $2.4 million paid under the terms of his separation agreement.
• Stock awards worth $17,660,759.
• $5.2 million in “other compensation.” Within that was $2.9 million in relocation expenses related to Apotheker’s move from France to California and back; $1.7 million in “miscellaneous,” the majority of which, as explained in a footnote, was a “reimbursement for foregone non-competition payments that would have otherwise been payable by his former employer,” which refers to the software company SAP, where Apotheker was co-CEO.
• Another $25,000 representing his personal use of HP aircraft.