Microsoft banning Mac, iPad purchases by its sales and marketing group?  —  Summary: An alleged internal Microsoft e-mail claims the company's marketing and sales organization is about to halt Mac and iPad purchases made with company funds.  Smart or pointless?

Our test finds new iPad hits 116 degrees while running games  —  The new iPad can run significantly hotter than the earlier iPad2 model when running an action game, Consumer Reports testers have found.  —  Using a thermal imaging camera, Consumer Reports engineers recorded temperatures …

How One Response to a Reddit Query Became a Big Budget Flick  —  James Erwin, 37, works for a financial services firm in Des Moines, Iowa, writing software manuals.  He's been doing that for a couple of years, and he enjoys it.  It's a pretty low-stress job for a person with a methodical turn of mind—good pay, short commute.

Video Speed Trap Lurks in New iPad  —  Users Find the Superfast 4G Link Carries a Big Cost: Churning Through Data Limits in Mere Hours  —  Brandon Wells got the new iPad last Friday, started wirelessly streaming March Madness games the next day and by Saturday night was out of gas.

FreedomPop's New iPhone Case Promises Users Free Wireless Data  —  Skype founder Niklas Zennstrom's new FreedomPop project was initially shrouded in secrecy, but they've recently become a bit more talkative about how the company plans to offer “free wireless broadband” to their customers.

Exclusive: Hipstamatic, Instagram To Unveil Photo-Sharing Partnership  —  Last week, Instagram hit 27 million users, solidifying it not only as one of the most popular photo-sharing services on the market, but as one of the world's fastest-growing social networks.

HP combines printer, PC units; Analysts question synergy  —  Summary: HP said in a statement that the combination will help the company's go-to-market strategy, branding, supply chain and customer support.  —  HP on Wednesday made it official: It is merging its PC and printing units in a bid …

$1.5 billion: The cost of cutting London-Toyko latency by 60ms  —  Starting this summer, a convoy of ice breakers and specially-adapted polar ice-rated cable laying ships will begin to lay the first ever trans-Arctic Ocean submarine fiber optic cables.  Two of these cables …

What's Coming In Microsoft Outlook 15  —  I make no apologies for my refusal to use Microsoft Outlook, but hundreds of millions of business users and consumers rely on this multi-functional solution every day.  In fact, it's the center of many people's computing experience, period, the dashboard by which they manage their daily lives.

Adobe Expands Its Social Analytics Lineup With Adobe Social  —  Must be something in the air.  Less than a day after Google announced that it's adding social media reports to Google Analytics, Adobe is unveiling its own social analytics tools.  —  Even though the company is best known …

Eventbrite's New iPad Credit Card Reader Allows Event Organizers To Collect Ticket Payments At The Door  —  Online ticketing platform Eventbrite is making a big push towards reaching $1 billion in gross ticket sales in 2012; after doubling both the number of events on platform in 2011 …

BSkyB announces Now TV, offering pay-as-you-go Internet TV to the masses  —  The Next Web is at the Guardian Changing Media Summit this week, a conference promising to deliver insights from the organisations and individuals capitalising on disruption within the digital content space.

Walmart steps up with Angry Birds Space promotion  —  Angry Birds Space, Rovio's next big game in the phenomenal mobile game series, launches on Thursday with some major promotions from Walmart.  —  Angry Birds Space will debut in a variety of app stores, but this event marks Walmart's first in-store promotion with a mobile app.

Siri Gets A Slight Update, Expanded Yelp Functionality.  —  Back when Siri was first introduced to us, we were informed that she would constantly be receiving updates.  More recently, the few noticeable updates have included how she dictates our voice searches, as well as how she reads back words to us.

Fragmentation bomb wounds Android in developer war  —  Devs losing interest in the li'l green guy  —  A new study conducted by IDC and mobile-developer platform and services company Appcelerator has determined that as Google's open source Android operating system becomes more and more fragmented …

Virgin Mobile USA restores service, apologizes for the inconvenience  —  A dozen or so hours after the carrier came clean with its most recent outage, Virgin Mobile USA service has been restored.  Data, texts and calls should be flowing normally now, and the company has stated …

NSA Chief Denies Wired's Domestic Spying Story (Fourteen Times) In Congressional Hearing  —  In his recent bombshell story for Wired magazine, National Security Agency chronicler James Bamford writes that the joke that the agency's acronym stands for “never say anything” applies now more than ever.

Windows Phone launches in China, HTC Eternity on sale today  —  Microsoft is launching its Windows Phone operating system in China today with the release of the HTC Eternity.  Known elsewhere as the HTC Titan, the Eternity will come loaded with specific Chinese apps, a Chinese-language interface …

Linus Torvalds: The King of Geeks (And Dad of 3)  —  The license plate on Linus Torvalds' Mercedes SLK convertible says it all.  The frame running around the outside of the plate reads “Mr. Linux.  King of Geeks.”  But the plate itself says “Dad of 3.”  —  If you meet Linus Torvalds …

Facebook Investor DST Seeks $1 Billion for New Tech Fund  —  Digital Sky Technologies, a Russian firm that invested in Facebook Inc. (FB), is seeking $1 billion for a new late-stage technology fund less than a year after raising its last pool, promising investors a stake in the social- networking site in return.

Ten things Oracle v. Google tells us about the judge presiding over Yahoo v. Facebook  —  On Google+ I recently said that I don't consider Yahoo v. Facebook, however interesting it may be for the Internet community at large, to be sufficiently wireless-related for the FOSS Patents blog to cover.

Silicon Valley's Hottest VC Is a Rug Dealer  —  It's a balmy February evening in Palo Alto, and Pejman Nozad is sipping tea on the deck of the Rosewood Hotel, the hot spot of venture capital's capital, Sand Hill Road.  He's chosen a table situated just central enough so that he can see everyone who walks in.

Current Google Wallet customers given $5 on pre-paid cards for all the provisioning hassles  —  If you opened up Google Wallet today, you may have noticed there's an extra $5 sitting on your pre-paid card.  It turns out it's not a glitch, it's compensation from Google Wallet in exchange …