In this week’s Techzone360 space, there was an array of news spanning across several topics including Pinterest’s success, parental controls for smartphones and tablets, and patent infringement lawsuits.

Kicking off the week, social networking has become a platform for real-time communication between customers and businesses, but Pinterest has proven successful in creating sales for retailers, according to an analysis from SteelHouse. Facebook and Twitter are effective promoting specials, but Pinterest’s platform of “pinning” ideas or products is superior to Facebook’s newsfeed. SteelHouse has also found is that Pinterest users are twice as likely to buy something they see posted or “pinned” from their followers, versus just seeing a friend’s Facebook wall post. 

All respondents said Facebook or Pinterest played a pivotal role in purchasing decisions with only 33 percent of Facebook users saying they actually purchased an item they saw on a Facebook ad. Meanwhile, 59 percent of Pinterest users made a purchase based on an item they saw posted. Despite Pinterest’s prominence in social media purchasing power, Facebook is still the preferred platform for getting an idea for what products or services should be shared socially. Over half of those surveyed said they flaunt their purchases on Facebook, while 22 percent would share via Twitter, and 14 percent would share via Pinterest.

Pinterest has given the power to the customer because pinners are doing the posting versus the lone marketer posting on the Facebook account. Businesses are continuously joining Pinterest to display products, create brand awareness, build communities, and in turn, grow profits.

In other Techzone360 news, Mobiflock , a company that helps parents provide their kids with a safer, more fulfilling experience with high tech devices, has released a host of different security add-ons that work with a variety of tablets and smartphones. The security suite has brought a lot of different ways in which parents can block Web access for kids who have their own smartphone, including Blackberry or Android devices.

Part of Mobiflock’s new suite is more than website protection as Mobiflock My Life can actually give parents the ability to block out calls and texts from certain phone numbers. This means people who have been bullying in a number of ways can be completely blocked from contact through a child’s smartphone.

“It's no longer a case of 'if' my child gets a smartphone, but rather 'when,' and the benefits these devices give our children are huge,” said Patrick Lawson, Mobiflock founder. “But no matter how tech-savvy kids appear, they are still children and need both guidance and protection from their parents and guardians. We've carefully built Mobiflock My Child to allow parents to choose the most appropriate restrictions for each of their children and given them the ability to relax these as the child matures.”

Lastly, Nokia has filed lawsuits against Research In Motion, HTC Corp and Viewsonic Corp for alleged patent infringement, seen as a way for it to collect much-needed money from royalties until it can generate revenue from other sources.  In the lawsuit, there were 45 patent infringements claimed with cases related to the U.S. and Germany, and connected to phones and tablets.

Businessweek reported that the patents relate to dual-function antennas, multimode radios and power management. Among the software were application stores, multitasking, navigation, conversational message display, dynamic menus, data encryption and retrieval of e-mail attachments on a mobile device.

“We have taken this step to stop the unauthorized use of our proprietary innovations and technologies which are not extensively licensed to the industry and make up the majority of our industry leading patent portfolio,” Nokia said in a statement. “Nokia believes that other companies need to compete using their own innovations, rather than copying our proprietary technologies.”

Check back here next week for more news in the Techzone360 space!