The iPad Is Unbeatable  —  Why Apple's tablet competitors don't stand a chance—and maybe never will.  —  Apple CEO Tim Cook announcing the newest iPad  —  Imagine you run a large technology company not named Apple.  Let's say you're Steve Ballmer, Michael Dell, Meg Whitman, Larry Page, or Intel's Paul Otellini.

A fresh new Dropbox on the web  —  Over the past few weeks, we've been quietly rolling out a major redesign of the Dropbox website.  Today we turned it up to 11, and anyone who signs into dropbox.com will see a simpler, more powerful, and more beautiful web experience.  Here's what we came up with:

Why are companies defecting from Google Maps?  —  First Foursquare and now Apple are scaling back their use of Google Maps.  Why are major players starting to back way from Google's nearly ubiquitous mapping service?  —  In recent years, Google Maps has transformed itself …

Leaked: Police Plan to Raid The Pirate Bay  —  In the spring of 2006 a team of 65 Swedish police personnel entered a datacenter in Stockholm.  The officers were tasked with shutting down the largest threat to the entertainment industry at the time - The Pirate Bay's servers.

T-Mobile executive: Key to fixing industry is removing device subsidies  —  Cole Brodman, CMO of T-Mobile, speaks at the GeekWire Summit in Seattle (Karen Ducey Photography)  —  As mobile devices become more powerful, prices continue to fall.  And while consumers now have more computing power …

Cloud's price race to zero: Microsoft cuts Azure pricing, eyes Amazon  —  Summary: Cloud computing costs are falling fast for IT buyers and are already on par with electricity rates.  —  Microsoft on Friday cut pricing on its Azure storage as you go service and its extra small compute effort.

Green Dot acquires location-based services company Loopt for $43.4 million in cash  —  In a move straight out of left field, Green Dot, a U.S. provider of prepaid debit cards, has acquired Loopt for total consideration of $43.4 million in cash.  —  The press release is below, we're updating this post.

FBI's ‘Sabu’ Hacker Was a Model Informant  —  As soon as he was caught, an influential computer hacker agreed to become a government informant and “literally worked around the clock” to help federal agents nab an elusive collective of alleged cyber criminals who have launched online attacks against companies …

China Telecom Starts Selling iPhone 4S, Receives Over 200,000 Pre-orders  —  Major Chinese carrier China Telecom starts selling Apple's iPhone 4S in China today, and the phone is available for sale at 2,850 retail outlets of China Telecom, and from local electronics retailers.

iTunes 1080p video looks better, saves space using better H.264 compression  —  In the comments on yesterday's AppleTV story, many people doubted whether 1080p support in the third-generation AppleTV will be very useful.  That question becomes even more relevant when observing the file sizes …

Google forcing Android developers to use Google Wallet for in-app payments, Reuters says (Google: same policy as before)  —  Reuters is reporting this afternoon that at least some developers of applications in Google Play (née Android Market) are being forced to use Google Wallet …

Facebook Co-Founder Chris Hughes Is Buying ‘The New Republic’  —  Social media meets old media:  —  Saying that he's convinced “the demand for long-form, quality journalism is strong in our country,” Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes tells NPR's Steve Inskeep that he's buying The New Republic.

Germany Wants To Charge Search Engines To Use News Excerpts  —  Germany's government wants search engines and news aggregators to pay news publishers for using pieces of their material.  —  Its coalition committee has resolved that a collecting society should charge royalties to re-publishers of news material.

Apple A5X and the great quad-core confusion, explained  —  When Apple announced the New iPad, the part about the Apple A5X chip has created a lot of confusion, hype, joy and sometime sheer anger: first, many now believe that the new iPad is a Quad-Core tablet and secondly …

Buzz in the Blogosphere: Millions More Bloggers and Blog Readers  —  Blogs are sometimes overlooked as a significant source of online buzz in comparison to social networking sites, yet consumer interest in blogs keeps growing.  By the end of 2011, NM Incite, a Nielsen/McKinsey company …

Advertising: Google Remixes Four Classic Campaigns - Advertising  —  GOOGLE is going all Marty McFly on Madison Avenue, sponsoring a back-to-the-future project that reimagines classic campaigns from the “Mad Men” age for modern sensibilities — and technologies.

New reddit CEO reporting for duty  —  Hi everyone.  My name is Yishan Wong, and this week I'm starting a new job.  It turns out that this job is the CEO position at reddit.  I've been a redditor since 2005 (yishan) and over the years, I've read blog posts about the ups and downs of the reddit team …

Clearwire outs first post-PC WiMAX dongle  —  The most unsexy gadget in mobile just got a lot more attractive.  Clearwire has started to sell a new WiMAX dongle that users can plug into laptops, tablets or netbooks and get instant mobile broadband access - without installing any device management software or messing about with logins.

HomeSnap Is Not A Boring Real Estate App  —  Sawbuck Realty, an online real estate broker, has just launched a new app called HomeSnap which lets you discover information about any home nationwide just by taking a photo of it.  Using a combination of mobile phone sensors to determine location …

After the pwnage: Critical Google Chrome hole plugged in 24 hours  —  Less than 24 hours after a Russian hacker pocketed $60,000 by exploiting a previously unknown critical vulnerability in Google Chrome, company developers released an update removing the security threat.

Microsoft's next-gen Xbox will reportedly drop disc drives, launching in 2013  —  Microsoft has stayed quiet on its plans to launch a successor to its wildly popular Xbox 360 console, but a new report today has suggested that the company will do away with the traditional disc drive for its next-generation console and launch in 2013.