Editor’s note: Chris Moore is a partner at Redpoint Ventures where he focuses on making investments in consumer Internet, online marketing and SaaS companies. Follow him on his blog and Twitter @Moorski.

This year alone, there is an $11.4 billion mobile advertising opportunity, which means there is tremendous upside for nimble and innovative startups with disruptive mobile-first models. As we saw from Facebook last year, the company was able to turn around and actually make something of its mobile business – a business that didn’t exist at the time of IPO. However, despite the potential of the market, and Facebook’s early success, we’re still a long way from realizing the promise of the mobile medium.

When looking at the opportunity, it’s clear there are a few core challenges that need to be addressed quickly in this nascent market. The startups that address these challenges first will be the companies to watch.

It’s that time of the week for a new episode of CrunchWeek, the weekly show where three of us writers plop ourselves down in the TechCrunch TV studio for some real talk about the most interesting stories from the past seven days.

Colleen Taylor, Greg Kumparak and I chatted this week about private social network Path’s rumored $1 billion valuation and the company’s growth to 12 million users, which has been questioned over the past few months.

Next up with Google’s purchase of Waze, the reported price tage of $1.1 billion, and why the search giant spent so much on the social mapping startup. And we talked briefly about the big news from Apple’s developer conference WWDC, including iOS 7, and iTunes Radio.

Editor’s note: Glenn Kelman is the CEO of Redfin, a technology-powered real estate broker backed by Madrona Venture Group and Greylock Partners. He previously co-founded Plumtree Software. His last TechCrunch essays were The Maximum, Beautiful Product and Searching for Beasts in Silicon Valley’s War for Talent. Follow him on Twitter @glennkelman.

Well what do you know! After writing on TechCrunch for the past year about how Silicon Valley’s Gatsbyesque wealth couldn’t find much real estate to buy, Bay Area inventory is up. Bidding wars are down. And rising rates are squeezing buyers who have to borrow money. Below is Redfin’s quarterly rundown of what’s happening in Silicon Valley real estate.

Bidding wars are less intense. Bidding wars are still common, with Redfin agents facing competition on 95 percent of all homes in May 2013, the highest of any of the 21 markets Redfin serves. For example, Redfin Silicon Valley agent Brad Le reports that this nice-enough $2 million Cupertino listing got 12 offers, and likely went under contract in June for well above $2.4 million. But fewer bidders are competing. Since Redfin publishes competitive dynamics for every offer our agents write, we measure the average number of competitors in a bidding war, which has declined from a peak of 16.3 in January to 7.8 in May. As agents, we know that demand is waning not because buyers no longer want a home but because they’ve despaired of ever being able to get one. About one in four of our Bay Area homebuyers have told us at some point in the last three months that they’re taking a break from their search out of sheer frustration.

Calling all startups from Europe, the Middle East and Africa. We want you. For the very first time, the full TechCrunch Disrupt conference (complete with the main TechCrunch Editors and Writers) is coming to Europe and we’re looking for the very best startups to launch on our Disrupt stage as part of the world-famous Startup Battlefield. The winner gets a shiny Disrupt Cup, $50,000 cash, and a huge amount of attention from the world of tech.

The Startup Battlefield is the heart and soul of our conferences. Companies like Yammer, Dropbox, FitBit, Swype and hundreds more have launched from the Disrupt stage. We’ve always had an international contingent, but come October, it will be Europe’s time to shine.

Last month, at Disrupt NY 2013, Enigma bested a very impressive batch of startups including HAN:DLE, SupplyShift, and Zenefits. The very best startups show up at Disrupt.

Editor’s note: Michael Wellman is a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan College of Engineering. 

At 1:07 p.m. on April 23, a hijacked AP Twitter account falsely reported an attack on the White House. Seconds later, major US stock indexes started to fall. They were down 1 percent by the time the tweet was publicly identified as bogus three minutes later. And in another three minutes, the markets had recovered to pre-tweet levels.

The quick plunge appears to have been triggered or exacerbated by computer algorithms that automatically trade based on monitoring and analyzing social media streams. Indeed, a growing number of firms and startups claim they can tease emotion, meaning and context out of social media chatter and identify financially relevant information. Augify, SNTMNT, and Lucky Sort (acquired just last month by Twitter) are a few examples. Although we don’t know how any particular product handled the fake AP tweet, the incident illustrates a potential pitfall of automated trading on news feeds in real time.

Updated. As the PRISM scandal shows no signs of dying down in the public consciousness, Facebook has just released the fullest account to date of the requests it has received from United States law enforcement and governmental authorities for the data surrounding its users.

To borrow a phrase from local news sizzle reels, the numbers may surprise you.

In a report issued today on Facebook’s company blog, general counsel Ted Ullyot wrote:

In this week’s Ask A VC epsiode, we had Canaan Partners’ Maha Ibrahim in the studio to chat about her perspective on social gaming and more.

Ibrahim, who has worked at Canaan since 2000, invests in cloud, social gaming and digital media companies for the firm. We raised an interesting question to Ibrahim: Why aren’t there more female VCs in the industry? According to a recent report, of the 25 most active VC firms in 2011, only 8 percent of their investment professionals were women. Many of these firms don’t have female investment professionals at all.

Considering Ibrahim’s investment in Kabam and the struggles Zynga has faced, we also asked her whether there is still an opportunity in social gaming.