Now that’s quite a week! Google drops 12.5 Billion on a cell phone, a newspaper rants against social media, and IBM declares the end of the PC era.

If you’re Google, what do you say to agreeing to pay 12.5 Billion for a company – and then having to wait while the government decides whether you’re allowed to buy it? And why do they want a cell phone company anyway?

Their answer is slightly different from our answer. They’re looking at it from a business angle, and we look at that. But more important is what it means to us as consumers and business owners. We spend a little more time looking at that.

At the same time, Google is teaming up with Zynga. That’s partly because games are popular in social media, and partly because Google owns part of Zynga.

And while Google adding games to Google+ is interesting, it’s far more interesting to consider the consumer value this places on social media. What do you do when your customers look at Facebook or Google+ as a game center?

The New York Times claims we’re too plugged in. And they might be right, but I don’t think so. They make some good points about the use of blogs and social media sites, but I think a much more important point is one they miss completely.

It’s getting steadily easier to tell whether your customers are online. That’s a boon to any business owner wanting to segment her in-house list. Listen in to find out how you can get it done.

And we wrap up the show on an ironic note – IBM claims the PC era is over.

It’s hard to imagine anyone being quite this wrong about anything, but Mark Dean has managed it. Judging from what we have available to us today, Mark has no idea what personal computing is all about. And that’s aside from the fact that 400 million PCs will be shipped in 2011 alone. Maybe he was just trying to make a splash. (I think he’s just all wet.)

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