Google and LinkedIn Make Headlines This Year

Every week, Mountain View made news with technology developments, discoveries and sometimes controversies.

Patch brought you "Bits and Bytes," news highlights from our backyard giants, start-ups and small businesses alike. As the year draws to a close, we look at the top news of the year.

It’s been a year of acquisitions, new initiatives and legal spats for tech giant, Google. Co-founder Larry Page replaced Eric Schmidt as CEO of Google in an unexpected move, earlier this year.

Also this year, Google made the most number of acquisitions, outdoing its previous best 48 acquisitions in 2010. In a bid to "supercharge" its Android ecosystem and bolster its patent portfolio, Google acquired handset maker, Motorola Mobility for US $12.5 billion making it the most expensive purchase to date.

Android continues to dominate the US smartphone market. Google announced 700,000 new Android device activations each day, only last week. This number surged to a whopping 3.7 million activations over the Christmas holiday weekend, tweeted Andy Rubin, senior vice president of mobile at Google.

Google also launched its social network, Google+, in June. According to a Mashable Report, the Google+ numbers may be well up to 62 million users. The network is reportedly adding 625,000 new users every day. While 2011 went to Facebook, hands down, the battle between social media players, Google and Facebook is expected to heat up in 2012.

Professional networking company, LinkedIn made for the biggest Internet IPO since Google, when it went public in May 2011. Its on the first day of trading for a remarkable debut.

in September. Mr. President primarily talked jobs, highlighting the various facets of his US $447 billion job creation plan, the American Jobs Act at a town hall hosted by the company.

The business social networking site is fast growing with 135 million users in more than 200 countries.

Mountain View-based coupon provider, Coupons.com raised US $200 million in investments from a group of institutional investors including several mutual funds in June this year.

Under the Radar, the 18th annual tech innovation conference took place at Microsoft in Mountain View in November. The , entrepreneurs, innovators, industry experts and investors. Mountain View companies – RewardMe, Ginzametrics, and Outright – participated in the event.

Business Insider compiled 20 best new startups of 2011. Mountain View-based Lytro, the light field camera that allows you to “shoot now and focus later,” featured in the top 20 along with online programming tutorial and Y Combinator graduate, Codecademy.

And Evernote took spot.