This week on VentureBeat: Apple’s profits, Oculus, and that Google-Mattel gizmo

It’s been quite a week. Apple registered a killer $18 billion profit last quarter. Google announced a gadget as a result of a partnership with Mattel. GoDaddy bought a cool little startup. And a whole lot more.

Here’s a little capsule of the best tech news coverage and analysis that’s appeared on the site this week.

Microsoft releases Windows 10 preview for phones with interactive notifications, speech-to-text, and Photos app

Microsoft today launched Windows 10 preview for phones. To get started, you’ll need to download the Windows Insider app from the Windows Phone Store.

Microsoft has already released multiple new Windows 10 preview builds, but those were limited to just PCs. Today’s preview is for smartphones, and it comes with a slew of new features.

GoDaddy acquires Node startup Nodejitsu

Update on Feb. 10: GoDaddy confirmed the deal on Twitter. Read our original report below.

Web hosting company GoDaddy is about to boost its capabilities when it comes to development tools. The company is in the midst of acquiring Nodejitsu, a startup with application hosting and Node package registry services for popular server-side JavaScript framework Node.js, sources told VentureBeat.

The deal isn’t closed yet, one source said. The companies were trying to finish it in time to announce it at this week’s Node Summit, but it looks like that might not happen, the source said.

The deal could provide several pluses for GoDaddy, including talent, influence in the large Node user community, a working hosting service, and paying customers.

Perfect storm: How Apple vacuumed up all of the profit in the smartphone business

That Apple scored an $18 billion profit last quarter — the highest of any public company on record — may not have been the most important storyline in smartphone world last month. Apple also grabbed almost all of the profits made in mobile devices, full stop.

The equities research firm Cannacord says that Apple took 93 percent of all handset profits worldwide with its sale of 74.5 million phones at an average price of $687 apiece.

In its quarterly earnings, Apple reported gross margins of 39.9 percent, compared to 37.9 percent in the same quarter a year ago. The company does not break out margins on specific product lines, but considering that the iPhone constituted 65 percent of its revenue, it’s safe to say margins were somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 percent.

Meanwhile, Samsung, Apple’s chief rival in mobile, reported that it sold somewhere between 72.1 million and 75.1 million smartphones in the quarter, but its profit margins were far less than Apple’s, falling to 18 percent from 21 percent (EBITDA) for the same period last year.

This comparison goes a long way toward explaining why Apple managed to gobble up most of the total pool of profits to be had selling smartphones around the world.

How a ‘stock market for people’ is funding a shot at the next billion-user mobile app

In 2004, Greg Tseng and Johann Schleier-Smith launched a startup called Tagged. They hoped to outdo another nascent project, known at the time as “thefacebook,” in the then-wide open world of social networks.

We know how that turned out. Facebook became the world’s largest social network, with 1.39 billion monthly active users and a market capitalization of $214 billion. Tagged … “didn’t win,” Tseng admitted, in a rather large understatement.

But Tagged, now known as if(we), didn’t fade away, either. The company changed focus, shifting from a service for people who know each other to one meant to help people discover all-new friends. Actually, it became a home for people trolling for love, mainly middle-aged folks in the American South and Midwest. Still, Tagged turned profitable in 2008 on the strength of advertising alone, and today it has just under 10 million monthly active users and brings in $51 million in annual revenue.

Now, more than 10 years later, Tseng is again aiming to win, not with a traditional social network but with an app, the company believes, that will fill a gaping hole in the messaging market and become the next billion-user mega-success.

Google and Mattel reimagine the View-Master to make virtual reality kid-friendly

At a press event in New York, toy-manufacturing giant Mattel and Google unveiled a reimagined View-Master — a $30 augmented reality (AR) gadget powered by Google’s Cardboard tech. The View-Master is set to launch sometime in October of this year.

The View-Master name, of course, comes from the classic 76-year-old stereoscopic 3D gadget. This new device, however, appears to largely mimic the classic View-Master in terms of form factor. Like Google Cardboard, the device requires a smartphone to work.

“The breadth of the content that we want to create is limitless,” said Mattel senior vice president Doug Wadleigh.

I’ve seen the future of the enterprise, and it is Oculus

While much of the attention directed at Oculus focuses on how the technology is being used in games and entertainment, some see it as a natural fit for industrial companies looking for ways to solve problems without having people in the field at all times, or for teaching technicians how to recognize and address problems when they come up.

Facebook reignites real-name controversy after suspending Native American author’s account

Clearly, Facebook is going to have to do more to convince skeptical people that its real-name policy is not onerous and works for people who are known in public by names other than they are called on their birth certificate.