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A milestone for Twitter today, according to the Paris-based analyst group Semiocast. The social network has now passed the half-billion account mark -- specifically 517 million accounts as of July 1, 2012, with 141.8 million of those users in the U.S., still about half as many users as Facebook has but positioning it as the second-biggest social networking site. And just as most of Twitter's users are coming from outside the U.S., so are the tweets: the top three cities in terms of tweets, it says, are Jakarta, Tokyo and London.

Have we reached a state of "peak Android" in the same way that the energy industry can reach "peak oil"? This is an idea being floated today by Strategy Analytics. Last week the firm noted that Android partner Samsung was the world's leading smartphone seller last quarter, taking just over 50% of the market. Today, it's broken out what's happening in the key U.S. market: Android sales actually declined by 5% over last year -- and SA says Android may be "approaching a peak" in its market share. The analysts noted that in Q2, which ended June 30, U.S. smartphone sales trends reflected the slowdown that it has been seeing globally. Total shipments in the U.S. stood at 23.8 million units, which was (like Android itself) a drop of 5% on the same period a year ago. Android, at 56% of all sales, remains the most dominant in the U.S. but Apple, the analysts noted, gained at Google's expense and was the only OS to have grown over last year.

A bit of a setback today for mobile payments and specifically iZettle -- the startup modelled as a kind of "European Square" for merchants to take card payments on their phones. The company today had to shut off accepting Visa cards in three of the markets where it has been running pilots -- Denmark, Finland and Norway -- over what appears to be a problem with how it authenticated users on its platform, using an electronic signature instead of a PIN. The problem came to light when users started to receive emails from iZettle with the news (we have one from a reader below) and comes at a time when competition is heating up among point-of-sale mobile payments players, with mPowa, who you might better know as Square's hand nemesis, now extending its payment services to Android; and Square reportedly getting a $200 million investment on a $3.2 billion valuation. iZettle's CEO Jakob de Geer describes the need to shut down Visa acceptance as "disappointing",  "annoying," and "puzzling," but also notes that he thinks it's just a short-term problem: "I’m pretty confident that we’ll find a way forward," he told TechCrunch. "You have to regroup and adapt; that’s part of the game part of being in a disruptive space." For its part, a Visa Europe spokesperson tells TechCrunch that the problem arose over Visa's "standard acceptance device requirements:":

Hacking, viruses, megabreaches and other cybercriminal activity are on the increase, and cybersecurity specialists Bit9 has today announced a significant round of funding to help fight it. Bit9, which works with 30 of the Fortune 100 companies, Raised its biggest round yet, a $34.5 million Series D led by new investor Sequoia Capital, with participation from existing investors Atlas Venture, Highland Capital Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and .406 Ventures.

The buzz about a possible acquisition by Facebook has almost completely died down, but Opera today released an update on the state of its business that nevertheless highlights how its own strategic direction is closely following that of its rumored suitor. The combined number of active users of Opera's mobile internet browsers has now topped 200 million, nearly double the figure a year ago, with pageviews more than doubling to 115 billion. And just as Facebook highlighted in its earnings call last week that emerging markets and mobile use were a key part of its advertising story, Opera in its State of the Mobile Web report has also zeroed in on how well it's been performing in one emerging market in particular: Africa, where Opera's figures reveal that Facebook is, by far, the most popular site in the region.

Amid fierce smartphone competition between Samsung and Apple that has spilled into a multinational patent battle, it looks like Apple may have opened yet another front on the M&A side: it is buying mobile security company AuthenTec -- which had only just signed a deal with Samsung for Android devices -- for $356 million. AuthenTec, among other things, makes fingerprint sensor chips that are used for security and identification purposes; these are embedded in computing devices. The news was first reported by Reuters; the full announcement was filed with the SEC.

A milestone reached as the world of old media continues its push in a digital direction: the storied, pink-sheeted daily newspaper the Financial Times, read by 2.1 million readers daily, today said digital subscribers now outnumber those in print, and that digital revenues now account for half of all sales in the FT Group. And what's more, sales actually grew rather than declined. The FT says that digital subscriptions grew by 31%, and now number over 300,000, while print subscriptions are now at 299,000. The digital portion is outpacing overall growth by quite some way: the FT's total paid subscriber base (both print and online) is now at 599,000, and grew by only 2% on last year. Overall sales at the company for the first six months of 2012 were £216 million ($339 million), compared to $203 for the period a year ago, growth of 6%.

Now that all the big handset makers have put in their quarterly sales figures, Strategy Analytics has done the number crunching for an overall picture of what happened in the mobile market. The upshot: just as many predicted, mobile as a whole -- facing wider economic slowdown and "shifting consumer tastes" -- remained largely flat, growing by just 1%. But smartphones, still at a less mature state, are selling much better: collectively, shipments (which equals sales in SA's book) grew by 32% in the quarter, the analysts said, with Samsung and Apple leading the way with over half the global market between them. That sounds like a good-news story for smartphones, except when you understand that 32% growth (146.1 million units total in Q2) is actually the slowest the smartphone market has expanded in three years. In comparison, the market grew by 77% in the same quarter a year ago.

Facebook is making a big effort to diversify its revenue generation into areas like payments around gaming and other services, but today the game is still ads-ads-ads, and it's growing. In its Q2 earnings which have just come out, Facebook reported advertising revenue of $992 million. That works out to 84% of  its total quarterly revenues of $1.18 billion. Looking back to Facebook's S-1 filing from before the IPO, that's actually an increase as a percentage of revenues from last quarter, when ads made up 82% of revenues.

Update: Twitter service appears to be coming back now after an hour or so of downtime. The mobile site, main website, and iPhone app all appear to be coming back up at least for some people, but not all. [Original story below] Looks like Twitter is down again. We started noticing just little while ago and it's happening on the Web as well as on its iPhone and iPad apps, as well as its mobile web site. Twitter tells us it's aware of the issue and looking into it. This is the second time this year that Twitter has faced a multi-country outage. The first was a month ago.