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Investors didn't share the same excitement for King Digital Entertainment stock as Candy Crush fans do for the mobile game, sending King shares down nearly 16 percent in Wednesday's disappointing first day of trading. It slipped a further couple of percentage points on Thursday King's stock debuted at US$22.50, but dropped 15.6 percent to close at...

The United States will tax bitcoin and other virtual currencies as property, the IRS announced on Tuesday Virtual currency will be treated as property for U.S. federal tax purposes, and transactions in virtual currency will be subject to general tax principles....

Microsoft is now offering general availability of its Azure cloud service in China, becoming the first multinational company to provide public cloud services in the Middle Kingdom Microsoft is partnering with 21Vianet, a Chinese data center services provider, a marriage that likely helped appease Beijing officials. (Until now, all major cloud provi...

eBay's board of directors this week urged shareholders to reject Carl Icahn's plan to spin off PayPal as a separate company "Our shareholders and our customers are best served by keeping PayPal and eBay together," the board said in a letter to investors. "No other payments competitor has achieved PayPal's success -- because no other competitor has ...

Bioprinting, Part 1 - The Promise and the Pitfalls Nearly 120,000 people in the United States are on the waiting list for an organ transplant that may save their lives, according to the American Transplant Foundation....

HTC this week announced the HTC One M8, a new model of its flagship smartphone. When the HTC One made its debut last year, AT&T Mobility sent me one to test drive. I thought it was very well designed. However, what it had in substance, the HTC One lacked in brand recognition, marketing, advertising and public relations. Let's face it, HTC is not a well known and loved brand that customers walk in and ask for. Will it be different this year?...

Everyone in business claims to want to listen to the voice of the customer. It's a noncontroversial issue, but the approaches are all over the map. There is little consistency -- and truthfully, many vendors do a poor job of it. Capturing customer feedback always has been a challenge for conventional vendors because they have to generate new pro...

Has Google been spreading FUD to discourage computer makers from using an Android OS retooled to run on legacy computers? The maintainer of the Android-x86 Project has suggested that the Justice Department should investigate whether Google has been interfering with adoption of the open source code his community is developing....

Facebook has agreed to acquire Oculus VR, maker of the Oculus Rift virtual reality gaming hardware Facebook will pay around US$2 billion for the company. That figure includes $400 million in cash and 23.1 million shares of Facebook common stock, valued at $1.6 billion based on recent average trading price. There is a provision for an additional $30...

Ask the Internet That's the pitch in HTC's TV ads for its new flagship smartphone, the HTC One M8. It's a pitch that hopes to acquire by word of mouth what HTC was unable to get for its predecessor: consumer mindshare....

NASA is asking people to vote on their favorite design for the outer shell of the new Z-2 spacesuit While the Z-2 models may descend from their Apollo 13-style ancestors, there are some decidedly 21st Century twists. The "Biomimicry" design, for example, has a reptilian flare; "Trends in Society" has a more everyday look -- at least, as far as spac...

It's long been the dream of humans to be able to regenerate body parts. Scientists have been researching this possibility for years, but the subject is complex, and they are just beginning to get to a glimmer of understanding as to what's required "There are different layers of complexity in developing tissue-engineered products, so the easiest thi...

Disney this week announced it would acquire Maker Studios, a provider of short-form videos, for at least US$500 million -- a number that could go up if Maker meets performance targets Maker's videos account for more than 5.5 billion monthly views on YouTube -- it has 380 million subscribers. The company's content lineup includes popular YouTube cha...

The political frenzy over the United States National Security Agency's collection of Americans' bulk telephone metadata is escalating, with both the White House and the U.S. House of Representatives' Intelligence Committee announcing plans to introduce legislation to regulate the practice The White House's proposal reportedly would require phone co...

Bogus web traffic is creating a crisis for advertisers on the Web Advertisers pay for page views. They assume that those views are tied to living eyeballs. When those views aren't tied to eyeballs -- as when they're generated by automated means -- advertisers can get testy....

China's government is asking the U.S. to explain itself -- and to knock it off with all the cyberespionage -- following reports that the National Security Agency has had its way with Chinese telecom giant Huawei The NSA reportedly penetrated Huawei servers to monitor communications among company executives, and to gain access to the dealings of Hua...

LG Electronics on Monday unveiled a light bulb designed to illuminate consumers lives in a more intelligent way The Smart Lamp, which can be controlled by an iOS or Android device over Bluetooth or WiFi, debuted in LG's home market of South Korea.

While Twitter rose to notoriety by being the place where people spilled the minutiae of their lives, there are times when its users don't want everyone in the online world to see what they're thinking. For those occasions, there's direct messaging When direct messages are sent by one tweeter to another, there's a certain expectation of privacy ther...

Like most small, inbred communities, Silicon Valley encourages and thrives on gossip, even when it's of little substance. In popular-speak, Valley gossip has a "low signal to noise ratio," but the rumor mill is vibrantly alive despite that shortcoming -- partly due to venture capitalists, whose efforts parallel the day-to-day business of technology.

Earlier this year, during the Mobile World Congress, Jon Matonis, executive director of the Bitcoin Foundation, made a compelling argument for the use of bitcoin in mobile payment applications. Mobile payments have not made the traction many expected they would -- but bitcoin could neatly circumvents all of the obstacles that have held them back, ...