The social-gaming company’s stock has risen by more than 14 percent at times, as investors responded positively to the company’s strong ties with Facebook.

Although Mozilla has never limited its stated goals to merely building an open-source browser, there’s no doubt that Firefox has been the highest-profile project from the Mozilla Foundation.

Since Zynga, the wildly popular maker of mobile and social games such as “Mafia Wars” and “FarmVille,” generates about 95 percent of its revenue through Facebook, the worry for investors is that its relationship with Mark Zuckerberg’s social network is less a risk factor than a business model.

Like the redesigned service — part of an aggressive push to make Twitter the dominant communication tool for people from all walks of life worldwide — the new space suggests a company with grand ambitions.

A huge French company has just banned the use of email within the company. Instead, having concluded that the vast majority of email is just time-wasting noise, it is switching all employees to a Facebook-like interface and instant messaging.

It hasn’t been a good year for Firefox. Mozilla has lost share to Google, it’s lost the loyalty of enterprise customers, and it’s lost key talent. And a deal with Google that supplied 84% of its revenue last year was scheduled to end in November. Can Firefox avoid a slide into irrelevance?

The culture, which has been at the root of Zynga’s success, could become a serious liability, warn several former senior employees who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity because of fear of reprisals.

Social media costs businesses up to $4 million a year. After an earlier report about the UK Ministry of defence creating a series of videos aimed to educating forces staff on the dangers of updating to Facebook and Tweeting information that could be intercepted by “the enemy” and general nasty folk.

Key dates in the history of IBM:

-1911: The company that would later become IBM is formed as the Computing Tabulating Recording Co.

-1914: Thomas Watson Sr., a former executive at National Cash Register Co., joins the company. Watson becomes the company’s guiding force over the next four decades.
See other dates…

PricewaterhouseCoopers partner David Silverman says more time spent online, boosted by the popularity of digital videos and social media, has helped fuel the ongoing advertising growth.