Week in review: Ikea’s war on the light bulb

Here’s our roundup of the week’s biggest tech business news. First, the most popular stories that VentureBeat published in the last seven days:

Ikea’s war on Edison’s light bulb — The mass furniture and household goods retailer announced Tuesday that it will no longer stock or sell traditional light bulbs, making good on a plan announced last year.

Microsoft gives LCDs the power to see with Surface 2.0 — Microsoft’s Surface touchscreen technology for large displays has shed a lot of bulk in its newest iteration, and in the process it has also given liquid-crystal displays the power to see with its new PixelSense technology.

Just give up on using your iPhone as an alarm clock — One of the running jokes about the iPhone is that it’s amazing, unless you actually want to use it as a phone. I guess it doesn’t make a reliable alarm clock either.

AT&T’s answer to the Verzion iPhone: A $49 iPhone 3GS — AT&T has come up with one way to combat the fabled Verizon iPhone: Halve the price of the iPhone 3GS from $99 to $49.

Android 3.0 for tablets looks like a leap beyond iPad for Google (video) — Google previewed its upcoming tablet-friendly Android 3.0 update at the Consumer Electronics Show, and it looks unlike any version of Android we’ve ever seen.

And here are five more posts we think are important, thought-provoking, fun, or all of the above:

Privacy setting on Facebook financials to change in 2012 — A document sent to potential Facebook investors suggests that the social networking company intends to hold its initial public offering by mid-2012, though there is still plenty of ambiguity about Facebook’s plans.

Tesla employee: Model S alpha prototype up and running — A Tesla manufacturing team employee, commenting on Engadget, appeared to confirm a test of the much-anticipated all-electric sedan, Tesla’s first mass-market model. The company later showed off the prototype on its blog.

Exit activity leapt 25% in 2010, but is 2011 the “Year of the IPO?” — Successful exit activity for venture-backed companies rose 25 percent in 2010 from the previous year, reaching levels close to those seen before the recession.

Salesforce buys Web-collaboration startup Dimdim to bring Chatter up to speed — The race continues between enterprise-focused social networking services Chatter, run by Web-software giant Salesforce.com, and Yammer, a darling of the venture-capital set.

VentureBeat’s top 10 tech trends of 2011 (vote for your favorite) — We gaze into the crystal ball.