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Top U.S. Brands via Brand Finance 

According to Brand Finance, a London-based research firm, Apple is now second to Google in brand value after a 33% increase to overtake IBM, Microsoft, Wal-Mart, and GE for the first time. The firm attributes Apple’s success to “innovative design, loyal consumer base and well-executed marketing activities.”

Google, sitting in the top spot with a brand value of almost $48.3 billion was up 9% among the top 30 U.S. brands analyzed by the Brand Finance. Other top companies other than Apple and Google all seen a significant drop including Microsoft down 9% to $39 billion, and IBM and AT&T both experiencing decreases from the year previous.

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When Google+ was launched, users were pretty receptive, to say the least. After Experian Hitwise reported a 3% decrease in traffic, the site went on to become the fastest growing in history. Today, a new report from Hitwise (via Bloomberg) shows the social network may struggle to catch up to 750 million+ strong Facebook.

While users spent an average of 5 minutes and 47 seconds on the service the week ending on August 27 (a 4% increase from the week before), U.S. visits to the site fell 5.5 percent to 1.6 million. The real story here is the fact that use of Google+ seems to have peaked backed in July.

July 16th seen the average time spent on the service peak at 5 minutes and 50 seconds, while U.S. visits to the site were up 283 percent that week. It’s necessary to note that these numbers can’t be taken as a truly accurate reflection of the service’s growth.

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It’s no secret patent-related legal disputes have become the subject of most media coverage lately…Whether it’s Apple halting sales of Samsung’s tablets, HTC going after Apple, or Google snatching up Motorola to beef up their patent portfolio, it’s clear the company with the most patents will have an advantage over others in the legal proceedings that we’re bound to continue encountering down the road. This is why we’re intrigued by the graphic above (via GigaOM) from mobile analyst Chetan Sharma charting the number of issued patents (in the US and Europe) between 1993 and 2011.

While these estimates of mobile communications related patents don’t take the quality of patents into account (which is obviously a huge factor in determining their long-term value), you can see from the breakdown below that Nokia and Samsung top the list, with the other expected players including IBM, Microsoft, Sony, Motorola, and Intel following.

Noticeably far down the list is Apple, the one company who seems to have had more success than others fighting patent-related issues recently. Again, these numbers in no way represent the quality of patents and the ability for companies to protect their IPs in the courtroom… which is also a good indication that perhaps we should be looking more closely at the quality of patents rather than the sheer number.

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Today comScore posted their latest smartphone market share report showing Google’s Android as the top smartphone platform for the three-month reporting period ending in June 2011, up 5.4 percent from the previous March 2011 report.

78.5 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones during the three months ending in June 2011, up 8 percent from the preceding three month period. Google Android ranked as the top smartphone platform…

A close second to Android is, of course, Apple with 26.5 percent market share, up 1.1 percent, followed by RIM at 23.4% down 3.7 percentage points since March. ComSCore also posted the top mobile OEMs based on the same reporting period with Android manufacturers Samsung, LG, and Motorola topping the list, which also shows Android’s dominance in the current smartphone market.

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With Google execs stepping out of character to share their frustrations with Microsoft and Apple “banding” together to acquire patents, it seems at least a few execs in Redmond are determined to set the record straight, and for good reason given the fact the company is slated to earn more off Android than their own Windows Phones, according to analyst Horace Dediu.

In response to the open letter from Google’s Vice President and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond accusing Microsoft and Apple of “banding” together to acquire mobile device related patents, Microsoft’ general counsel Brad Smith posted the following via his Twitter account this morning:

“Google says we bought Novell patents to keep them from Google. Really? We asked them to bid jointly with us. They said no.”

Microsoft surely doesn’t want to tarnish their relationship with Google, with Android-based HTC phones bringing in three times as much profit in the second quarter in comparison to their own Windows Phone devices. It makes you wonder why Microsoft is spending billions developing and bringing Windows Phone handsets to market when Android devices are clearly their bread and butter in the mobile space.

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwnJ5Bl4kLI&]
Today ComScore confirmed Google+ has officially hit 25 million unique users less than a month after its public launch. We told you not to worry when Experian Hitwise reported a 3% decrease in traffic for the new social network and today’s report from ComScore confirms our hunch that Google might actually be on the right track.

To put this in perspective, rival Facebook took approximately three years to reach the same milestone, while Twitter took two and a half.  Twenty-five million may be a long way from the more than 750 million current Facebook users, but it is certainly a step in the right direction after similar services such as Buzz have been long abandoned.

Its quite obvious Google is pretty serious about this whole Google+ Facebook/Twitter-killer thing and the incredible rate of growth should be more than enough encouragement to make it a big focus over at the GooglePlex. They have already done so by integrating the service into almost every aspect of their other services from Gmail, which SearchEngineLand notes seems to be tied to Google+ adoption, to YouTube Live integration, and rolling out updates for the Android app to both fix issues and add functionality.

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