LinkedIn has announced the launch of LinkedIn for iPhone version 3.2, which the company says makes it easier to stay up to date and find important changes happening in your professional network.

The app comes with some changes to how LinkedIn displays profile updates from connections. You can see more info about what changed from All Updates or Profiles.

You can also tap on your connection’s name from a profile update to go to the top of their profile, or tap a section to jump to it. The app will also now inform you when your connections add a Twitter account, change their address or phone number, or add their birthday.

“One of the most commonly used features in our current iPhone app is viewing who you have in common with another LinkedIn member,” says LinkedIn’s Chad Whitney. “It’s a great way to build out your own network, and it’s also useful when you’re meeting someone new and need to know more about them to help start the conversation.”

“You can now see how many people you have in common right from the main profile screen,” says Whitney. “We’ve also created a single view that lets you quickly switch between viewing who you have in common and viewing their full connections list.”

Finally, the app is optimized for the iPhone’s Retina Display, featuring new icons and images.

Whitney says LinkedIn will have some “great things” coming in October and November that the company is excited about.

“For queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain, like [exhibitions at amnh], we’ll now show more results from the relevant site,” says Google software engineer Samarth Keshava. “Prior to today’s change, only two results from www.amnh.org would have appeared for this query. Now, we determine that the user is likely interested in the Museum of Natural History’s website, so seven results from the amnh.org domain appear. Since the user is looking for exhibitions at the museum, it’s far more likely that they’ll find what they’re looking for, faster. The last few results for this query are from other sites, preserving some diversity in the results.”

“We’re always reassessing our ranking and user interface, making hundreds of changes each year,” adds Keshava. “We expect today’s improvement will help users find deeper results from a single site, while still providing diversity on the results page.”

This change may prove to be helpful for a lot of searches, but they could still do more in this area if you ask me. For exmaple, they could rank tag pages (commonly used on news sites and blogs) as top results for appropriate searches.

If a user has their Analytics and AdWords accounts linked, Intelligence will provide important changes in AdWords campaigns performance within Analytics.

“So, in addition to the alerts you are used to getting, such as time on site and revenue, you’ll now receive alerts about your AdWords campaigns and the traffic they are bringing to your website,” Google explains. “You might already be familiar with custom alerts in Google AdWords, which alert you when important changes you specify happen in your account. With AdWords alerts in Analytics Intelligence, you benefit from automatic detection of significant changes, with no extra work for you to configure these yourself.”

“For example, you might see an alert if the CTR for one of your campaigns increased unexpectedly,” Google adds. “Or you might find that revenue from one of your destination URLs has dropped significantly from the week before. In both cases, you didn’t need to know ahead of time what to look for. These important changes are automatically detected and brought to your attention.

With Custom Alerts, Google has added options in the Alert conditions drop downs, like goals you’ve configured (with their actual goal names). There are also now e-commerce and AdWords metrics, more traffic sources, and more content page metrics.

Any eBay user who lives in the U.S. and is a registered member of the site can participate in the eBay Bucks program. eBay Bucks offers shoppers 2 percent back on most items purchased through the site with PayPal.

Shoppers can earn eBay Bucks for most purchases made on both eBay and via smartphones using eBay mobile applications. The amount of eBay Bucks earned is calculated in real-time. When it’s time to redeem, the eBay Bucks certificate is automatically applied to the shopper’s purchase.

When people enroll, each purchase that qualifies will automatically earn eBay Bucks, which accumulate during each quarter, or every three months.  An eBay Bucks certificate is issued and users have 30 days to redeem their eBay Bucks towards purchase with PayPal.

“We’re giving eBay’s most loyal shoppers something special in return – money to spend on eBay,” said Lorrie Norrington, president of eBay Marketplaces.

“eBay Bucks Rewards Program is free to join and easy to use, providing customers with even greater value when they shop the great selection and deals on eBay. With redemption rates well above industry average for comparable loyalty programs, eBay Bucks is a big hit with both buyers and sellers on eBay.”

The move would make too much sense not to come sooner or later, and sooner would no doubt be in PayPal’s best interest. Not only are social games among the biggest trends of the web, but news organziations are still experimenting with ways to drive revenues, and micropayments are not out of the question for some.

Given PayPal’s track record as the go-to online payment service, getting a micropayment service up and running seems like it should be a key initiative.

It has already been an interesting year for PayPal, with a great deal of emphasis on mobile endeavors. Recently, the company extended the bump technology of its iPhone app to Android, and its PayPal X Platorm has opened up a lot of opportunities for third-party developers. In June, it launched a Guest Payments feature, allowing credit card acceptance within apps.

Micropayments, particularly through mobile channels are bound to become much more in demand with the rise of virtual gifts, online news experiments, tablets, and mobile use in general.

Google says advertisers who have used the format in the past have experienced big gains, and have boosted clickthrough rates by over 30% (on average).

“When a user’s query matches a keyword in your Ad Sitelinks-enabled campaign, Google will automatically determine if your ad qualifies to show Ad Sitelinks and whether to show the two-line or the one-line format based on the quality of that ad,” says Dan Friedman of Google’s Inside AdWords Crew. “Ads that currently qualify for the two-line format will not be affected by the addition of the new one-line format.”

“You should keep in mind that Ad Sitelinks is a campaign-level extension, so the links you create should be relevant to any ad in that campaign,” Friedman adds.

Advertisers can set up ad sitelinks for their campaigns by finding the option in the Campaign Settings tab in their AdWords accounts. It’s listed as “Show additional links to my site” in the “Ad Extensions” section.

It is the reception problems that seem to be getting the most attention. This may be due to Apple’s response to the issue. Engadget provides this official statement from the company:

Gripping any mobile phone will result in some attenuation of its antenna performance, with certain places being worse than others depending on the placement of the antennas. This is a fact of life for every wireless phone. If you ever experience this on your iPhone 4, avoid gripping it in the lower left corner in a way that covers both sides of the black strip in the metal band, or simply use one of many available cases.

There have also been complaints about a bug preventing the iPhone 4 from using visual voicemail. “Whenever we went into Phone and clicked on the Voicemail button, instead of going to the Apple Visual Voicemail, it instead placed a call to Voicemail. So basically, it wasn’t working right at all,” writes Alex at RustyBrick, adding, “”The trick is, on most new iPhones, you have to receive a voicemail (or two) before the iPhone will launch the prompt that asks you for your ATT voicemail PIN number.”

Regardless of complaints and minor inconveniences, the iPhone has had no problem selling so far. Some calculations put sales at 1.5 million for the first day. A Piper Jaffray analyst says 77% of the sales were upgrades.

Bing is making changes of its own. It’s been a very big week for the search engine (or “decision engine”) if you will. It’s up to you to decide if any of these changes will have a direct effect on you, but some of them may attract more users in general, and if nothing else, that gives you even more of a reason to give Bing a fair amount of your focus.

Bing has made some design changes and added a bunch of new features. For starters, the quick tabs have moved from the left pane to the just below the search box.

“Secondly, you will see a new design aesthetic applied to Bing,” says Bing Corporate VP Brian MacDonald. “We have tried to bring you an experience grounded in clear readable typography that helps you find your way and organize information. With the new design the rich content in Bing really stands out from pages that are clean, light, open and fast. Result pages are not presented in a one-size-fits-all-layout – instead, Bing results pages are richly and visually organized, making the whole search experience feel dynamic and alive.”

Bing has launched some new entertainment features for music, games, TV, and movies. In addition to an entertainment hub at bing.com/entertainment, users can now find richer search results in these categories.

“76 percent of people use search to help find and navigate their entertainment options online, but only 10 percent say they have a trusted place to go,” says Bing Senior VP Yusuf Mehdi. “So we see a great opportunity to help customers make important entertainment decisions — from deciding what movie to buy or see, which TV shows to watch online or on your TV, what music to listen to, how to find and safely play your favorite casual games – Bing is making a first step today to help make entertainment on the web easy and fun, so you spend less time searching for entertainment and more time doing the stuff you love.”

Bing is now putting lyrics to songs on the search results page, as well as full length streaming of over 5 million songs (in partnership with Microsoft’s Zune branch). Users can stream any of these songs once at their full length. After that, the song will allow for a 30-second preview. Of course users are given the option to buy songs from Zune, iTunes, or Amazon.

Bing is now providing info on over 35,000 games, including reviews, cheats, and walkthroughs. In addition to that, Bing is offering about 100 games that can be played right from Bing.

“Just Search, Click. Play . So you can now search for your favorite casual game, and with one click, be playing the game,” says Mehdi. “This is cool for a couple of reasons. First, it’s easy. Second, hosting the games inline means you can be sure they are actually games and not malware. Finally, the Microsoft Games team included some fun social features that allow you to actually invite friends from your social network to play with you right from the game.”

Bing is now offering thousands of episodes from over 1,500 shows (including some HD). They also provide guide information.

Bing has also enhanced its search experience around categories like autos, finance, and movies, and health is reportedly getting an overhaul as well.

Bing has posted a closer look at some more new features including Bing News, Bing Finance, Combined Flight Answers, Auto Suggest, and Visual Search here, and here’s even more specifically on Finance. Here’s a closer look at new Shopping features.

Bing is also available as a default search option on the new iPhone, and Microsoft has been heavily encouraging users to switch to it. That could be another factor in increased Bing usage. Here are some more reasons the future looks bright for Bing.

A post on the Official Google Blog shared all of the relevant details.  Interestingly, the post was written by Evan Roseman, a software engineer, rather than Peter Fleischer, Google’s global privacy counsel, or perhaps Marissa Mayer or even Eric Schmidt.

Still, Roseman explained, “When you search on https://www.google.com, an encrypted connection is created between your browser and Google.  This secured channel helps protect your search terms and your search results pages from being intercepted by a third party on your network.  The service includes a modified logo to help indicate that you’re searching using SSL and that you may encounter a somewhat different Google search experience . . .”

Later, Roseman added, “Today’s release comes with a ‘beta’ label for a few reasons.  First, it currently covers only the core Google web search product.  To help avoid misunderstanding, when you search using SSL, you won’t see links to offerings like Image Search and Maps that, for the most part, don’t support SSL at this time.  Also, since SSL connections require additional time to set up the encryption between your browser and the remote web server, your experience with search over SSL might be slightly slower than your regular Google search experience.”

It seems possible that this development will leave Bing and Yahoo looking unsafe to some users.  Let us know in the comments section what you make of the encrypted search option, and perhaps (since Google probably won’t share much data) some polls and surveys can sort out other people’s opinions next week.

In fact, AdMob really hasn’t come up a whole lot in the discussions that I’ve been witness to. But that hasn’t stopped Google from talking about various mobile ad formats its offers. A portion of a lengthy keynote delivered Thursday morning was devoted to this.

Google VP, Engineering, Vic Gundotra had the following to say (paraphrased):

It turns out we know a little bit about advertising. This year is Google’s tenth anniversary of providing ad solutions. We’ve learned a few things. if you want a healthy ecoystem, you need advertisers and we have hundreds of thousands of them. we’re not new at this game…

He reminded everybody that Google has Doubleclick, AdWords, AdSense, and Analytics. He then revealed some new expandable ad formats for mobile. More info about Google’s mobile ad formats can be found here. Google is expanding its click-to-call ads to mobile content and apps as well. More on this here.

Gundotra said in a Q&A that the company is being careful about ads so they span both apps and mobile sites.

When it comes down to it, mobile ads mean money for developers. More importantly, they mean motivation to innovate with mobile apps, which of course is critical to Android’s success.

Apart from monetizing the apps themselves, mobile ads can greatly contribute to the discoverability of mobile apps themselves.