Sam Byford / The Verge:
Samsung's S Voice available for Android 4.0 devices through leaked Galaxy S III ROM  —  The firmware for Samsung's Galaxy S III has leaked, a little over a week ahead of the device's release.  While you can't flash the ROM to another phone just yet, developers are able to poke around inside …

Ryan Mac / Forbes:
Mark Zuckerberg's Good Week Gets Better After He Marries Long-Time Girlfriend  —  Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan were married on Saturday according to the groom's Facebook page.  (Photo via Facebook)  —  Mark Zuckerberg's good week just got better.  On Saturday, he married long-time girlfriend Priscilla Chan.

Sue Marek / FierceWireless:
T-Mobile isn't jumping on the shared-data plan bandwagon  —  T-Mobile USA isn't planning to offer shared data plans to its customers like its competitors Verizon Wireless (NYSE:VZ) and AT&T Mobility (NYSE:T).  In a blog post, T-Mobile USA's Senior Vice President of Marketing Andrew Sherrard …

Nathan Ingraham / The Verge:
Google will keep Android free and open for at least five years  —  According to the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and the Associated Press, Google had to agree to keep Android free and available for anyone to use for at least the next five years in order to gain China's approval to purchase Motorola Mobility.

Henry Blodget / Business Insider:
Sorry, But This Whining And Umbrage About Facebook's IPO Is Ridiculous  —  This isn't going to be a popular thing to say, but it needs to be said.  So here goes...  All this whining and umbrage about Facebook's IPO is ridiculous.  —  When are people who voluntarily speculate on stocks finally …

Nick Bilton / Bits:
Facebook vs. Twitter  —  The best way to compare Twitter and Facebook is to look at the old children's story The Tortoise and the Hare.  —  For those that don't remember curling up in bed as a child, listening to an adult narrate it, this is the old fable of an arrogant hare who loses a race to a slow tortoise.

Matt Brian / The Next Web:
China finally approves Google's Motorola Mobility acquisition, deal likely to close next week  —  Google may have announced its $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility last August and gained approval from both EU and US authorities but it's taken until today for the search giant to gain clearance in China.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.8 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It        Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Last December I posted on “The Internet Big Five,” noting their relative strengths and the market cap of each. Since that time, the Five have only gotten stronger, adding a cumulative $272 billion in market cap (much of that is Apple, but Amazon and Facebook – assuming the offering does as expected on Friday – have also increased quite a bit). All in all, nearly 30% increase in value for these five companies – sort of makes me wish I was an investor, rather than a writer and entrepreneur.

I’ll also check the number of engaged users for each platform, to see if there are any significant shifts, though I don’t recall seeing any in the news recently (save Facebook crossing 900 million users). It is interesting to note that Facebook, should it hold its supposed valuation, will be more highly valued than Amazon.

A reminder as to why I’ve made a point of watching the Big Five, from my original and secondary posts:

..there’s more to the selection of this Big Five than just market cap. In fact, there are four main criteria for making it into the Big Five.

First, as I began to describe above, the companies must have financial heft, both in terms of large equity capitalizations, significant cash on hand, and a defensible core profit making machine. This gives them the ability to throw their weight around: they can make strategic acquisitions (like Google’s acquisition of Motorola), and they can leverage their profit centers and cash positions in any number of ways that offer them flexibility to play the corporate game at the very highest levels.

Second, the companies must have scale in terms of direct reach to consumers. By this I mean their brands are used as meaningful platforms by hundreds of millions of people on a frequent basis.

Third, the companies must have deep engagement with those consumers, the kind of engagement that builds brand and creates massive stores of useful data. The relationship between the brand and its customer has to be meaningful and consistent (therefore creating permission to extract a premium and offer new products and services). It takes an ongoing service relationship for such engagement to occur….

More on the product strength of the Big Five here.

The federal government’s decision yesterday to slap fairly hefty tariffs on Chinese solar panels has prompted worries about a big rise in costs for consumers to go solar. But the impact will not likely be as significant for two reasons: any price increase will be absorbed along the way by everyone from manufacturers to installers, and the growing competition in the retail solar market will keep the cost to consumers in check.

The Department of Commerce’s decision determined that Chinese companies have indeed been selling products at below fair market prices, and the ruling addressed part of a broader trade complaint filed by SolarWorld and other manufacturers last October. To offset the impact of the below-market pricing, the commerce department reached a preliminary ruling to impose an import tariff of about 31 percent on solar cells from 61 Chinese manufacturers and nearly 250 percent for the rest.

It’s worth noting that the tariffs will affect only silicon solar cells made in China but not solar panels made in China with silicon solar cells from another country. Plus, the commerce department could modify the tariffs when it issues a final decision in October.

Paper tiger

The 250 percent tariff sounds scary, but the fact is the biggest Chinese solar companies such as Suntech Power, Trina Solar, Yingli Green Energy and Canadian Solar will face the 31 percent tariff. While that 31 percent tariff will likely raise the wholesale prices, there are ways to manage it.

For months Chinese manufactures have been brainstorming around ways to lessen the impact of any tariffs. They have been talking to solar cell makers in Taiwan about buying and shipping their cells to China or elsewhere to be assembled into panels. A company like Canadian Solar, for example, could buy Taiwanese solar cells and assemble them in its Canadian factory (most of the company’s manufacturing is in China, hence it’s considered a Chinese company) or hire a manufacturer in Korea. Chinese companies also could set up solar cell production outside of China.

Shyam Mehta, a senior analyst at GTM Research, estimated that hiring Taiwanese companies to make cells will increase production costs for Chinese companies by 6 percent to 12 percent, which “is meaningful but manageable.”

Solar installers

While manufacturers figure out their strategies, solar service providers – from companies that provide consumer financing to roofers who install solar panels – need to come up with plans to cope with higher solar panel prices. People in the solar retail sector, understandably, have strongly opposed the trade complaint. They contend that the solar market growth could slow if they have to pay more for solar panels.

Certainly, profits will shrink if costs increase. But that doesn’t mean retail service providers will raise their prices or raise by a whole lot. They will likely absorb the added costs and still make good money, especially by increasing the sales volumes (the solar market is hardly saturated). We are not talking about razor-thin margins that will be rendered non-existent by the tariffs.

For a while now, investors and solar retail service providers have talked about how they could deliver or receive very good (double digit) and long-term returns. We’ve seen banks and other types of investors such as Google putting up funds in hundreds of millions to finance leases and power purchase agreements, which are long-term contracts in which consumers pay a monthly fee for solar electricity instead of the high upfront cost of installing and owning solar panels. Consumers opt for these financing plans because they take away the hassles of doing research and picking equipment manufacturers, and because they are often promised lower utility bills. That promise of lower utility bills is a key selling point, and any solar retailer who took that away will lose a serious competitive edge.

Competition in the retail sector has intensified in recent years, and that, too, will make it difficult to raise prices and still compete effectively. Venture-backed startups such as Sungevity, SolarCity and Sunrun started in 2006 or 2007 and have expanded well beyond their home turf of California. Many more have shown up and some of them that first made their fortunes in a different business, such power company NRG Energy, home security company Vivint and roof installer PetersenDean. Consumers only benefit when they have more companies to choose from.

Lastly, solar panels don’t make up the bulk of the price of a solar electric system. In fact, they take up around 20 percent, and the rest comes from the costs of other components, sales and marketing, permits and labor. A bigger worry for installers has been these non-solar panel costs, particularly in permitting and marketing and sales. The average price for a residential system by the end of last year was just over $6 per watt (and less $5 per watt if a homeowner bought a system outright rather than doing a lease), GTM said, while the wholesale price for solar panels was near $1 per watt (it was $1 per watt when I caught up with Chinese solar panel makers at PV America West in March). UPDATE: Solar panel prices fell around 50 percent in 2011 while the average price for a residential system dropped 3.6 percent during that time.

The solar industry wants to show critics that solar electricity can be affordable and compete with power from fossil fuels and it deserves government subsidies to help reduce costs. To raise prices in a big way will only give ammunition to critics that solar is far from prime time. That’s one outcome everyone in the solar industry, regardless of which side they are on in the trade dispute, would hate to see.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• After Solyndra: analyzing the solar industry
• A 2011 Green IT Forecast
• Green IT Q3: Solar stumbles while car sharing zooms ahead

Google has finally received approval from China to complete its purchase of Motorola Mobility, Google said Saturday. That paves the way for Google to integrate Motorola, though it remains to be seen exactly how it wants to use the phone maker. The deal is expected to close in the next week.

Google made huge waves when it announced it was buying Motorola for $12.5 billion last August. After getting the U.S. Justice Department and EU approval in February, the process ground to a crawl as China took its time weighing in on the acquisition. Now, all eyes will be on how Google proceeds with its biggest purchase ever.

Android manufacturers have been nervous about Google giving Motorola an advantage. But Google may be taking some steps to try and allay those fears. The Wall Street Journal reported that Google was preparing to work with multiple manufacturers to launch the next version of Android, instead of picking one device maker. The report also said that Google would sell the devices directly through its Web site and through some unnamed retail partners. That would allow Google to take more control of the Android experience, something my colleague Kevin Tofel has urged Google to do.

While Google has been a leader with its Android smartphones, its operating system has not had as much success on tablets. The Motorola pick-up could be critical in helping improve that situation for Google, which is losing out on revenue on tablets because of the popularity of the iPad and Kindle Fire, which don’t provide as much direct revenue to Google.

Google still faces a big challenge in incorporating Motorola, while still keeping its other Android partners happy. And it has also got to show that the acquisition makes sense from a financial stand point. Motorola has struggled like many other Android makers in the face of Samsung, the leading Android manufacturer. At the very least, Google gets more than 17,000 patents, which should provide some more protection in the smartphone patent wars.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What the Google-Motorola deal means for Android, Microsoft and the mobile industry
• U.S. Wireless Data Market: Q4 and Year-End 2008
• A global mobile handset forecast: 2011-2015

For those of you who collect, here is the Apple Retail iPad 2 launch video!