Facebook filed to go public this week, and many analysts expect that it will be valued between $75 billion and $100 billion on the day of its initial public offering. That would make Facebook more valuable than GM, Ford and even Goldman Sachs.

What's most remarkable is that the company has barely 3,000 employees, and many of them are about to become very, very rich.

There's this guy, David Choe. Back in the day, Facebook hired him to paint graffiti murals all over the company's original office space in Palo Alto, Calif. Even Marc Zuckerberg got into the act.

Choe was paid for his work in stock. And according to The New York Times, that stock could soon be worth $200 million.

via Facebook

In its Feb. 1 initial public offering, Facebook announced that it had generated $3.71 billion in revenue in 2011, up from $1.97 billion the year before.

The number of new American Facebook users is going down, and eventually the same will happen in every other market. Soon, Facebook's growth is going to depend on each user spending more time logged in, playing games, watching movies, planning trips and so on.

If you do the math and divide Facebook's value ($100 billion) by its number of users (845 million), that makes every Facebook account worth about $125 — money the company will get from eyeballs on ads. So the longer you're on Facebook, the more ads you look at and the more money the company makes.

That means Facebook would most likely be happy to hear that Duke University junior Justine Hong uses its iPhone app on walks across campus to keep abreast of the news.

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"I can open the app as I walk to class or whatnot and see if there's a campus editorial from the campus website that's been getting a lot of comments or a national news story that my friends have been sharing a lot," Hong says. "It's pretty convenient and quick when I don't have time to actually read a paper."

Facebook also has apps for games, shopping, videos, movies and chatting. Last year, it integrated the music service Spotify, a feature that has kept Facebook user Liam Passmore logged in even longer.

"One of the elements of Spotify that really attracted me is the ticker on the side of Facebook," Passmore says. "You can see what your friends are listening to on Spotify."

For example, the other day, Passmore was at the roller rink when he heard a song he liked. He says he was a little surprised when his friend's 9- and 12-year-old kids told him the singer was Selena Gomez, of Justin Bieber relationship fame, and he wanted to share his amusement.

"I went to Spotify and played it on my Facebook account to let people know I was listening to Selena Gomez so they could comment back," says the 54-year-old.

Passmore's is another story Facebook executives would most likely be happy to hear. He's spending more time on the site, and that is exactly what Facebook needs, says Michael Pachter, a Wedbush analyst who follows the company.

"Ultimately, it's an advertising model; and ultimately, the longer you're on the site, the more information they have about you, the more they can advertise directly to you," Pachter says. "So clearly the more engaged the user, the more profitable that user will be."

Pachter says one strategy the company is starting to use more is to connect with popular websites, so when you sign in to your favorite newspaper site or game site you can use your Facebook username and password.

Justin Smith, the founder of Inside Network, which is dedicated to researching Facebook, says, "Facebook's strategy will be to increase penetration amongst many of the most popular websites where people are spending their time, instead of only being available when people come to Facebook.com."

A lot of people think it would make sense for Facebook to build its own phone or develop its own mobile operating system. The caveat for Facebook's strategy of becoming a portal to everything on the Internet is that many users like Duke student Hong aren't signing up.

"I think it gets a little bit scary when you're sharing a lot of information via your Facebook account," Hong says.

But with new pressures from Wall Street, Facebook is certainly going to try hard to lure Hong and other users deeper into its universe.

The FBI has raised eyebrows in the tech world with a public document that asks for advice on how to harvest information from social networking sites.

According to the document, the bureau is looking for a mapping app — or a "geospatial alert and analysis mapping application" — that, among other things, helps it search "publicly available" sources like Facebook and Twitter for national security threats.

Some other items on the FBI's functionality wish list include:

• "... instant notifications of breaking events, incidents, and emerging threats that have been vetted and meet the defined search parameters."

• "Ability to immediately access geospatial maps" that plot "US Domestic terrorist data"; "global terrorist data"; "US Embassy, consulate and military installations around the world"; weather conditions and forecasts; and "video feeds from traffic cameras."

• "Ability to instantly search and monitor key words and strings in all 'publicly available' tweets across the Twitter Site and any other 'publicly available' social networking sites/forums (i .e. Facebook, MySpace, etc.)."

• "Ability to immediately translate into English, tweets and any other open forum publicly available social media captured in a foreign language."

• "Ability to geo-locate the open source social media 'search' by setting a radius by both miles and kilometers (i.e. 5 miles, 10 miles, 50 miles radius) that will allow the user to quickly narrow the search to a specific area/region/location."

• The ability to "geospatially locate bad actors or groups and analyze their movements, vulnerabilities, limitations, and possible adverse actions"

• The ability to "develop pattern-of-life matrices to support law enforcement planning and enforcement operations"

• "... reference documents such as a dictionary of 'tweet' lingo"

Sean Gourley has worked with defense agencies in the past and now heads the intelligence firm Quid. He gives NPR's Audie Cornish one example for how the agency might use the app to monitor breaking news.

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"If there's an attack that's just been carried out in north Afghanistan that they weren't aware of, there might be reports of that on the social media channels that they're watching," Gourley says. "[People] might be tweeting, 'I heard a loud bang,' or someone says, 'Maybe there's a bomb around the corner' or there are these kinds of reports. Now, each of these pieces kind of starts to form a little bit of a mosaic and they start to combine this mosaic back together to say, 'We can be pretty sure that something happened here and here's what we think it is.' "

But the FBI also specifies that it wants to use the app to "predict future actions taken by bad actors." According to Gourley, that involves creating profiles of known bad actors based on their social media presence.

"Then what they can do with that is say, 'Here's the kind of profile of somebody that we'd be potentially interested in, even if we don't know that they're already a bad actor,' " Gourley says. "I should say that this stuff is all very experimental at the moment, and by no means does it exist today."

In an email statement to NPR, the FBI said, "The application will not focus on specific persons or protected groups, but on words that relate to 'events' and 'crisis,' and activities constituting violations of federal criminal law or threats to national security."

Then there's the question of why the FBI — an agency that's usually reluctant when it comes to sharing its social media tactics — would publicly lay out its intelligence-gathering plans and then ask for civilian help in executing them. Gourley theorizes that it has something to do with the fact that these days it's easier to find qualified mathematics Ph.D.'s in Silicon Valley than it is to find them in the federal government.

"What that means is the top solutions to these kinds of problems don't actually lie within the government anymore; they actually start to lie in the startup companies," Gourley says. "So increasingly the government starts to turn to these groups to say, 'Can you help us solve these types of problems?' "

Enlarge Paul Sakuma/AP

Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., in 2007. The company is expected to file papers for an initial public offering this week.

Paul Sakuma/AP

Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., in 2007. The company is expected to file papers for an initial public offering this week.

Many investors are expecting Facebook to file papers for an initial public offering sometime later this week. The company, which was founded in a Harvard dorm room less than a decade ago, is expected to be valued at nearly $100 billion by Wall Street.

And if these early reports are true this is shaping up to be the biggest Internet IPO ever.

"It will be larger than the Google IPO — larger than the Amazon IPO — the largest internet IPO in history," says Kathleen Smith. She tracks initial public offerings at Renaissance Capital. "It's rumored that they will seek to raise $10 billion."

The deal could create more than 1,000 Facebook millionaires and is likely to give Facebook's 27-year-old co-founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, a net worth north of $20 billion — at least on paper.

So this all kind of raises the question: Is Facebook worth the price, or is this another Internet bubble in the making?

"This is very expensive company, let's face it," says Sam Hamadeh, who follows the tech industry and Wall Street for the financial research company PrivCo. "At $100 billion you are talking about one of the largest companies in the United States, or the most valuable companies. The upside is reasonably limited."

Hamedeh believes this is one of the reasons that Morgan Stanley may end up leading the IPO instead of Goldman Sachs. Morgan has an enormous network of brokers who sell stock to wealthy individuals like doctors, lawyers and retirees.

"Those are the kind of people who will buy without digging too much into the numbers or being picky about the value of the company," he says. "They tend to buy company names that they recognize."

Hamedeh says these retail investors tend to be less price sensitive than the big institutional investors Goldman Sachs typically deals with.

And Hamedeh says Facebook will have to grow like a weed for years to justify its stock price.

But the reason so many investors seem optimistic is that Facebook has been growing like a weed.

"We forecast that Facebook's revenue in 2010 was about $2 billion," says Debra Aho Williamson, an analyst at eMarketer, which tracks online advertising sold by private companies.

She says this year Facebook brought in more than $4.2 billion in revenue, "so you can see that it more than doubled from 2010 to 2011," she adds.

The year before that Williamson estimates that the company's revenues tripled. Earnings figures won't be available until the company files to go public and releases audited financial statements.

Enlarge Paul Sakuma/AP

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg shows Timeline during the f/8 conference in San Francisco in September.

Paul Sakuma/AP

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg shows Timeline during the f/8 conference in San Francisco in September.

Facebook's Timeline — the long-anticipated overhaul of the site — is rolling out across the world this week.

Timeline allows friends to surf through all your posts going back to the beginning of Facbeook time. Graphically it can be a beautiful thing. Mark Zuckerberg calls it a chance for users to tell the stories of their lives. And over the next few weeks, users across the world will get it on their profile.

But here's the important part — once you get it, you will have just seven days to clean up all your old posts and make it presentable to the world.

The problem with Facebook's Timeline is that the story you chose to tell about your life back in college in 2004 might be considerably different from the story you would like to tell about your life now. But Timeline will make all those old posts and photos documenting things back in the day easily visible to the world.

So unless you take action now and clean up your profile, be prepared to experience the joy of oversharing.

My recommendation — forget that work deadline. Your kids' homework can wait — order pizza for dinner. You have work to do. Facebook, your true corporate master, is calling and it wants you to put in a couple hours right now creating beautiful new content for its site.

Get busy and stop complaining. And if you don't clean up your profile — don't say you were not warned.

What?! You didn't read the terms of service?

OK, to be fair there is still one other option. You can quit Facebook, pull the plug and cancel your account.

Feng Li/Getty Images

A new iPhone 4S at Apple's Beijing flagship store.

Apple has been taking a lot of heat lately for working conditions at plants making its products in China.

There've been stories in The New York Times, an hour was devoted to the subject on This American Life and there are countless blog posts and tweets, like this one from the Times asking, "Would you pay more for an iPhone if it were made in the United States?"

Of course, Apple is not the only electronics giant that manufactures its gadgets in China. And bleak working conditions have been well documented at most of the company's rivals, from Dell and Hewlett-Packard to Nokia and Sony.

Interestingly, some of the best reporting about abuses in Apple's supply chain is done by Apple itself. Each year in January the company publishes its "Supplier Responsibility Progress Report."

It is damning.

In the 2011 report, Apple reported 91 documented incidences of child labor at Apple plants. In this year's report, the company went into detail about what led to explosions at plants owned by Foxconn and Ri-Teng that together injured more than 70 people.

If you are outside of Apple it is difficult to know exactly who the company is dealing with, and what factories are manufacturing its products. You can document a problem at a factory, but proving that factory is making Apple products is another challenge. Until two weeks ago — even the names of Apple's largest suppliers were a closely guarded company secret.

And Apple's relationships with its largest suppliers are complex and tangled. Apple needs these firms. Its enormous financial success depends on them.

But some, like Pegatron and its subsidiaries Ri-Teng and Kaedar are repeat offenders. The explosion at a Ri-Teng plant was featured in the Times Thursday.

Pegatron suspended Kaedar's top executive in 2010 over allegations that Kaedar's representatives were paying kickbacks to an Apple manager in return for business. That manager, Paul Shin Devine, was criminally charged in the case. The case is pending.

Still, Apple kept working with Pegatron and Kaedar. And as recently as this fall a Kaedar plant — allegedly making Apple products — was having environmental problems. Even after the plant was cleaned up there were reports villagers had been threatened by local thugs and told to keep quiet.

Every Apple employee I have ever spoken to about these issues cares deeply about improving working conditions and environmental safety in its supply chain. But perhaps even a company as controlling as Apple can have a hard time managing a supply chain in China.

Engineers from Facebook, Twitter and other social media firms have launched an app that allows social searching on Google to become truly social. And they are calling it Don't Be Evil, a play on Google's fabled motto.

It you don't spend your time reading tech blogs here's the quick back story. Last week Google launched a new search tool. The Googlers call it Search Plus Your World. It integrates photos, posts and videos that have been shared with you. It made sharing social, but here's the thing: It only integrated what was shared using Google+.

Facebook and Twitter and sites like Tumblr went nuts. The effect of Google's social search was to push content on their sites — content that may have been shared with you — well down the page in Google's rankings.

Bloggers who normally want the government to keep their hands off the Internet called for an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission. And Googlers — somewhat disingenuously — implied that Google was sharing all the social information it had access to.

Over the weekend coders at a handful of other companies got busy. These engineers built a simple plug-in called a bookmarklet that you can download at focusontheuser.org.

This app uses only data Google already has to give users a more inclusive social search experience.

Using the app requires a couple of clicks — for each search. But when you click you can see for yourself how Search Plus Your World is favoring Google's own social network. So now the question is what will Google do about this? Will it take the suggestion of its competitors and focus on the user?

Or will it keep trying to use search to make its own social offering more prominent? For now at least, it's up to Google.

Now wasn't that easier than an FTC investigation?

Although, Google co-founder and CEO Larry Page may want to re-read Google's code of conduct, or he may want to amend it. It's up to him.

AP

On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog. But your true identity is key to Google+.

Google will begin allowing users to add nicknames on Google+, Bradley Horowitz, the vice president of product at Google's social network said Tuesday.

True pseudonyms are still verboten on the network unless you go through an application process. To earn the right not to use your real name on Google+ you will have to prove you already have an online following that knows you that way.

When Google rolled out its social network last year, it had this ironclad rule: no fake names. It didn't matter if you were a Syrian activist and wanted to use Google+ to post about street protests in Damascus or a spammer — you have to use a real name or risk getting kicked off.

Why? Because for Google its social network is not really about competing with Facebook to create a place where you can hang out online. It's about figuring out who you really are.

Basically tracking the real identity of real people and collecting their online preferences is the heart of Google+ mission. Just ask Eric Schmidt.

(Sounds an awful lot like a liking something on Facebook doesn't it? Facebook's getting great data — and by the way it requires you to use real names too.)

But to understand why Google cares about this you have to go back to the beginning. When Larry Page built his first search engine he basically copied an academic system for weighting the impact of journal articles. The more time the article was cited by other papers, the more influential it was.

Page decided that links on Web pages were analogous to academic journal citations. So the more links your site had to it — the more important it was and the higher it would rank in Google's search results. Page was really just harnessing the wisdom of the crowd. In the early days of the Web, real people made those links and they were real endorsements of the content they were linking to.

The problem with Page's system was that Google became powerful and spammers decided to flood the Web with fake links to try to game the results. Sorting out real links from fake ones takes enormous effort. Basically Google's search engine engineers are in a non-stop battle with spammers — and are desperate to find a better way — or better, clearer data.

And that's where Google+ comes in. If the people on Google+ are real people and they are expressing real preferences, then their likes are real. If you sign into your Google+ account and search and browse the Web, Google can be a bit more certain there is a human being back there behind the keystrokes. It knows it's getting better data.

And for now, at least, better data is more important to Google than figuring out a way to help dissidents use its social network safely and anonymously.

Enlarge knowitvideos/vie YouTube

Stanford Engineering's Online Introduction To Artificial Intelligence is made up of videos that teach lessons by drawing them out with pen and paper.

knowitvideos/vie YouTube

Stanford Engineering's Online Introduction To Artificial Intelligence is made up of videos that teach lessons by drawing them out with pen and paper.

Last year, Stanford University computer science professor Sebastian Thrun — also known as the fellow who helped build Google's self-driving car — got together with a small group of Stanford colleagues and they impulsively decided to open their classes to the world.

They would allow anyone, anywhere to attend online, take quizzes, ask questions and even get grades for free. They made the announcement with almost no fanfare by sending out a single email to a professional group.

"Within hours, we had 5,000 students signed up," Thrun says. "That was on a Saturday morning. On Sunday night, we had 10,000 students. And Monday morning, Stanford — who we didn't really inform — learned about this and we had a number of meetings."

You can only imagine what those meetings must have been like, with professors telling the school they wanted to teach free, graded online classes for which students could receive a certificate of completion. And, oh by the way, tens of thousands have already signed up to participate.

For decades, technology has promised to remake education — and it may finally be about to deliver. Apple's moving into the textbook market, startups and nonprofits are re-imaging what K-12 education could look like, and now some in Silicon Valley are eager for technology and the Internet to transform education's more elite institutions.

Thrun's colleague Andrew Ng taught a free, online machine learning class that ultimately attracted more than 100,000 students. When I ask Ng how Stanford's administration reacted to their proposition, he's silent for a second. "Oh boy," he says, "I think there was a strong sense that we were all suddenly in a brave new world."

Ng says there were long conversations about whether or not to give online students a certificate bearing the university's name. But Stanford balked and ultimately the school settled on giving students a letter of accomplishment from the professors that did not mention the university's name.

"We are still having conversations about that," says James Plummer, dean of Stanford's School of Engineering. "I think it will actually be a long time — maybe never — when actual Stanford degrees would be given for fully online work by anyone who wishes to register for the courses."

More than 3,100 companies flocked to the Consumer Electronics Show this year to hawk their wares. The show's host, the Consumer Electronics Association, estimates that roughly 20,000 products were launched at the show this year. And chances are good that many — maybe even most — will fail.

The show will close its doors Friday, and many of the little companies and entrepreneurs that are packing up may not make it back next year. Still, their hustle is infectious. And with luck, a few startups launched here this year could go on to become huge.

I just got my first smartphone a few weeks ago. And one of the first things I downloaded, after the NPR app of course, was Words With Friends. That's the popular Scrabble-style for-your-phone interactive game that recently got some attention after Alec Baldwin was kicked off an American Airlines flight when he couldn't tear himself away.

Enlarge biberfan via Flickr

Words With Friends has a lot to do with strategy.

biberfan via Flickr

Words With Friends has a lot to do with strategy.

So when I got the app, I immediately invited my younger brother to a match.

"I've never lost a game," my brother bragged over Gchat after he got the invite. I was undaunted about the prospect of sparring with my brother, who is studying engineering, in a game that tests word knowledge and spelling.

But, to my surprise, it didn't take long for him to achieve a comfortable lead on my score.

"I won't play with you if you cheat," I messaged him.

"I'm not cheating," he replied.

As the point spread exceeded 100 points, it made me think: Is there more to Words With Friends than the ability to string words together with letter tiles? Turns out, there definitely is. After browsing YouTube, I came across several strategy videos by William Spaniel, a political science doctoral student at the University of Rochester who studies game theory. He also authored Game Theory 101: The Basics.

One of his big tips: Think about trying to limit how many points your opponent scores on you.

"When you play random games against players, you see a huge separation between bad players and average players," he says.

The bad players, he says, aim to make the longest words and score a lot of points. But better players try to restrict their opponent's access to big-money bonus spaces, particularly triple letter and triple word score spots.

"If you make a bad mistake about that, that can be the end of the game right there," he says. In one of his YouTube videos, he says that 80 percent of the game revolves around the triple letter and triple word spots — and the spaces connecting them.

Another pointer?

"You should definitely know all the two-letter words to play across another word," he says. For example, if the word "candy" is on the board, a player could put the word "broom" parallel to the "y" in "candy." The move creates two words: broom and by. And if that "b" is on a bonus spot, that means mega points.

After implementing some of Spaniel's tips, I've definitely seen an improvement in my own Words With Friends performance. But that — and learning that players can try out several different letter combinations on the board without losing a turn — still hasn't been enough to catch up to my brother.

Computer chips and technology are invading all sorts of previously dumb devices. Phones are now smart. Cars are becoming connected computers on wheels. Call it the computerization of everything. But how we interact with these machines is bound to evolve.

At this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, touch pads are everywhere — in phones, in tablets and laptop screens. And Brad Feld has had enough.

"The whole idea that it is socially acceptable or functionally acceptable to have a whole mass of humanity that is staring down at a piece of glass and pounding on it with their thumbs is kind of absurd," says Feld, a venture capitalist at the Foundry Group. His firm is investing aggressively in startups that are creating new ways for humans and computers to interact.

"Twenty years from now the way we interact with computing will be unrecognizable to us today," he says.

Enlarge Ethan Miller/Getty Images

Attendees try a prototype 3M Touch Systems projected capacitive display at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Analysts say the way we interact with computers and other devices will be radically different in a few decades.

Ethan Miller/Getty Images

Attendees try a prototype 3M Touch Systems projected capacitive display at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Analysts say the way we interact with computers and other devices will be radically different in a few decades.

But judging from the displays at CES, the touch pad craze hasn't crested — yet. Just inside Microsoft's enormous booth here there's a giant touch pad the size of a tabletop. It looks like the love child of an iPad and a flat-screen TV.

But Microsoft's Steve Clayton says it's a little bit different. This table doesn't just respond to touch, he says, it's actually watching us, paying attention to where we are — where we're standing.

"If I click on one of these images or I tap on one, the image rotates to me," Clayton explains. "This device can see, it can see the orientation of my finger and it can present the image towards me."

More and more computers are doing just that — paying attention, watching and listening to us.

Microsoft's Kinect responds to gestures. Apple's Siri listens to our voice. And observant little machines are popping up in places you might not expect.

Enlarge Nest

Nest's thermostat observes patterns in your house, then programs itself.

Nest

Nest's thermostat observes patterns in your house, then programs itself.

Matt Rodgers is a founder at Nest, which has developed what it calls the first "learning thermostat." It observes patterns in your house, then programs itself.

"Use it like any non-programmable thermostat. Turn it up, turn it down and make yourself comfortable and Nest will learn your patterns," Rodgers says.

If you turn up the heat and then leave the house, Nest has sensors that will notice you are out and turn the heat down. You end up programming the computer inside this thermostat without even realizing you've done it.

John Underkoffler envisions a day where machines all around us that respond to how we move and what we want. He's best known as the brains behind the futuristic computers in Steven Spielberg's film Minority Report.

Spielberg didn't want Tom Cruise to mess around with keyboards or touch screens in a film set in the future.

"When I proposed to Steven that it could be a gestural interface that it could be body centered — human centered — and that you could literally point at the screens and command the pixels and sift data using your hands at a distance. I think Steven loved that idea," Underkoffler says.

So, in the 2002 film, Cruise stands in front of a screen and conducts his computer like Mickey Mouse in Fantasia.

Underkoffler built a working model at MIT and after the movie he refined it and started a company called Oblong. The full Oblong system can cost up to half a million dollars, but eventually he hopes it will control all sorts of machines "like laptops and desktops, but also computers that you don't think about — the front of your microwave oven, the dashboard of your car, the TV set in your living room."

And Oblong executives at CES this week say they see more and more signs that this transformation is on its way.

Julie Jacobson/AP

Nokia President and CEO Stephen Elop introduces the Lumia 900 smartphone during a CES news conference in Las Vegas.

Not too long ago Nokia was the largest tech company in Europe. Its market cap rivaled Microsoft's. It helped create the mobile phone industry as we know it. But the emergence of a new generation of smartphones — led by Apple's iPhone and Android-based offerings from Samsung, HTC and others — left Nokia behind.

Now Nokia, with the help of Microsoft, is trying to force its way back into the North American smartphone market. At the Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas, Nokia said it will begin selling a new Microsoft Windows phone on T-Mobile on Wednesday — and is unveiling the high-speed Lumia 900 this week.

The Lumia 900 will be launched exclusively on AT&T and will take advantage of that carrier's new high-speed 4G LTE network. Executives at Nokia have to hope this represents a turning point for the company.

Nokia spent billions on research. Just a decade ago Nokia's dominance seemed unassailable, but the last five years have not been kind to the Finnish mobile phone icon.

As Nokia struggled to catch up with consumer tastes, the company's research and partnerships with other giants like Intel failed to bear fruit. And in late 2010 the company's board hired a former Microsoft executive, Stephen Elop, to try to turn the firm around.

Elop decided last year to abandon Nokia's own smartphone operating system, comparing it to a burning oil platform in the North Sea. He said the company's predicament reminded him of an oil worker trapped in a disaster:

"In mere moments, he was surrounded by flames. Through the smoke and heat, he barely made his way out of the chaos to the platform's edge. When he looked down over the edge, all he could see were the dark, cold, foreboding Atlantic waters.

"As the fire approached him, the man had mere seconds to react. He could stand on the platform, and inevitably be consumed by the burning flames. Or, he could plunge 30 meters in to the freezing waters. The man was standing upon a 'burning platform,' and he needed to make a choice."

So Nokia jumped. It decided to commit the company to building new phones based on Microsoft's Windows operating system. Microsoft — like Nokia — had been left behind in the smartphone market after a series of false starts. Microsoft's market share was virtually non-existent.

After announcing the switch to Windows, sales of existing Nokia smartphones collapsed. It has taken nearly a year to bring new Microsoft-powered phones to market in the United States. In the meantime Nokia has been stuck — metaphorically at least — struggling to keep its head above water in the frigid North Atlantic.

Enlarge Anonymous/AP

Members of the adult entertainment industry and its trade groups gathered in San Francisco in March to oppose the creation of a separate Internet address for adult entertainment websites.

Anonymous/AP

Members of the adult entertainment industry and its trade groups gathered in San Francisco in March to oppose the creation of a separate Internet address for adult entertainment websites.

Education has .edu, .gov belongs to the government, and now, adult entertainment has .xxx.

Since last week, anyone can go online and buy a domain name ending in .xxx — but it's not all adult entertainment companies that are rushing to purchase the new addresses.

Colleges and other institutions have purchased .xxx domains pre-emptively to prevent others from doing so and associating their names with adult content. And many big names in the adult entertainment industry are opposed to the possibility of censorship by places that could block the entire .xxx domain.

Stuart Lawley, chief executive officer of ICM Registry, the company that owns .xxx, has been fighting for approval to add the adult domain to the Web for the past 10 years. He says the domain acknowledges adult entertainment exists: People can then identify the content, he says, and either select it or avoid it as they see fit.

So far, more than 100,000 new domains have been registered for .xxx addresses — and some of those are quite specific.

"We've had requests for like 62-character-long names, and I have to admit, [for] some of them I've had to go look them up in the Urban Dictionary to find out what they mean," Lawley says.