News

• At Google I/O, developer services hogged the spotlight

  Forget Glass, self-driving cars or a smartwatch. Developers, not physical consumer products, were Google's darlings at the company's annual I/O conference this week.

• Yahoo calls press conference amid Tumblr acquisition rumors

  Yahoo has called a mystery press event in New York City on Monday afternoon, hot on the heels of rumors that it plans to buy Tumblr for US$1 billion.

• Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr try out social networking apps for Glass

  While Google promotes its Glass head-mounted display as a new way for people to receive and document information on the fly, several social networking companies including Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr now want a piece of the action, by offering social applications on the device.

• Google to boost speed, cut data use on mobile devices

  Google has shown off new features that can reduce data consumption and improve Web performance on Android-powered mobile devices, drawing partly from capabilities already supported in the Chrome desktop OS.

• Google improves interface, photos in Google+ social network

  Google is adding 41 new features to its Google+ social network on Wednesday, including a richer interface that works better on mobile devices and some major enhancements to photo sharing.

• Google launches subscription music service

  Google is rolling out a subscription music service that will bring users unlimited access to millions of songs in return for a monthly fee.

• Google says it has 900 million Android activations

  Google's Android OS has more than 900 million users, the company said Wednesday at its I/O event began in San Francisco.

• Twitter buys big-data analyzer Lucky Sort

  Twitter has acquired Lucky Sort, a data analytics company, in a move that could give the social network deeper insights into its users' tweets and how to best place advertisements on its site.

• At Google I/O, expect Android, Chrome, and some privacy questions about Glass

  Google kicks off its I/O developer conference next Wednesday and if there's one thing that could steal the limelight from Android, Chrome and all the other Google projects, it's Glass.

• Bing brings more of Facebook to search

  Bing is adding some new social features to its search engine, by letting users comment and "like" their Facebook friends' posts directly on the site.

• Twitter buys Ubalo to speed up its back-end

  Twitter has acquired Ubalo, a company that provides various services aimed at speeding up the coding process, the social network announced Thursday.

• YouTube rolls out paid subscription channels

  Not everything on YouTube is free any more. The video-sharing website will now charge users a monthly fee to view certain content offered through subscription channels, the Google-owned site announced Thursday.

• Facebook Home attracts close to 1 million downloads

  Facebook has attracted "just about" 1 million downloads of its Home application in its first month of availability.

• Facebook may be driving deal for Waze mobile app

  Facebook reportedly is in talks to buy a popular Israeli-based crowd-sourced mapping and traffic app.

• Downdetector.com scours Twittersphere to detect service outages faster

  A Dutch startup has launched a service that studies data from social networks to quickly identify online service outages -- sometimes, it says, before the service providers know about the outages themselves.