iPhone 5: Customers in the Big Apple camp out 8 days early  —  By Sunday there were 7 in the queue — each of them for commercial purposes  —  FORTUNE — In the popular imagination — and in Samsung TV ads — the people willing to wait in line for days to buy the newest Apple (AAPL) …

iPhone 5 Benchmarks Appear in Geekbench Showing a Dual Core, 1GHz A6 CPU  —  John Poole of PrimateLabs let us know that the first iPhone 5 benchmark has hit Geekbench.  —  The results show an iPhone5,2 device running iOS 6 with a Dual-Core 1.02GHz ARMv7 processor and 1GB of RAM.

Facebook's embedded option  —  The best way to think of Facebook's stock is as the sum of two businesses: the existing display ad businesses, and a probability-weighted option on a new line of business.  This is how Wall Street views it.  For example, here is a section of a recent Goldman Sachs analyst report on Facebook:

Marissa Mayer Just Gave Every Yahoo Employee An iPhone 5  —  New Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer just sent an email to all of Yahoo's full time and part time employees in the US, promising them a new Apple, Samsung, Nokia, or HTC smartphone.  —  “People are happy,” says a source at the company.

Shazam hits 250 million users, now lets you tag TV shows on any channel  —  Music-tagging app Shazam today announced that it's expanding its functionality to let you tag any TV show on any channel in order to find out what music is playing, who's acting on screen, and more.

Disruptions: Let Silicon Valley Eat ... Ramen Noodles?  —  You don't have to spend much time in Silicon Valley to start hearing that the people don't care about money.  People here are just trying to make the world a better place.  Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists eat ramen noodles for dinner and drive old, clunky Hondas to work.

Winklevoss Twins of Facebook Fame Return to Invest in SumZero  —  The Winklevoss twins lost the biggest social-network showdown ever when their rival, Mark Zuckerberg, walked away with Facebook.  Now they are trying again—with a social network for professional investors.

Ballmer trumpets Microsoft's ‘epic year’  —  Q and A: Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer discusses new products and services, the state of the company and its future.  —  This fall, Microsoft is embarking on one of its biggest series of launches ever, with new versions or updates …

Top BitTorrent Countries In The World, Top Torrent Towns In The UK  —  The Digital Music Index is a report produced by Musicmetric, a data and analytics company that maps the trends and preferences of music fans around the world.  The data collated and crunched is then supplied to the music industry …

Twitter To Remove Third-Party Image Services From Its Apps  —  Last month's Twitter policy changes not-so-subtly suggested that third-party clients are not long for this world.  Next to be put on notice: the image sites.  —  Twitter will soon remove support for third-party image hosts …