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.

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.

China Now Leads the World in New iOS and Android Device Activations  —  Flurry recently quantified China's meteoric adoption of iOS and Android applications.  While China ranked 10th in application sessions at the beginning of 2011, it finished the year in 2nd place, only behind the United States.

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.

Meet The Hackers Who Sell Spies The Tools To Crack Your PC (And Get Paid Six-Figure Fees)  —  At a Google-run competition in ­Vancouver last month, the search giant's famously secure Chrome Web browser fell to hackers twice.  Both of the new methods used a rigged ­website …

Comcast, Verizon Say They're Itching to Fight Google, Apple  —  Late last year, Comcast and Verizon unveiled a whopper of a deal: Verizon would buy a big chunk of wireless spectrum that Comcast wasn't using.  And the cable company and the telco would agree to market each others' products …

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.

Google Said to Rethink Wallet Strategy Amid Slow Adoption  —  Google Inc. (GOOG) is weighing changes aimed at improving its Google Wallet mobile-payment system following slow adoption and the departure of two key managers, according to people with knowledge of the project.

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.

Sprint CEO defends company's decision to bet it all on Apple's iPhone  —  Sprint chief executive Dan Hesse is being watched closely by the company's board of directors, but the CEO has to answer to investors and subscribers as well.  Last year in October, Hesse revealed that the company …

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 …

LED backlight a likely culprit in iPad heat issue, says expert  —  Reported heat issues with new iPad are most likely due to a combination of more backlights and more power needed to drive the backlights, an expert told CNET.  This follows a CNET report attributing extra heat to the new iPad's A5X chip, also.

Ten things Oracle v. Google tells us about the judge presiding over Yahoo v. Facebook — UPDATE: 10 hours later, the case was reassigned to a different judge  —  [Update] Approximately ten hours after this post went live, Yahoo v. Facebook was reassigned to Judge Jeffrey White.

FCC proposals would let Dish build a 4G network, make 700MHz more useful  —  Two important proposals came out of an FCC meeting this morning, both of which have the potential for sweeping effects on broadband wireless in the US in the coming years.  First off, Dish's intention …

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 …

Zynga Just Bought OMGPOP for $200 Million  —  Looks like OMGPOP, the company behind the overnight sensation Draw Something, will end up at Zynga, after all.  The game maker had been talking to several suitors over the last few weeks.  But as TechCrunch reported earlier …

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.

In-Stat: Apple to be top mobile processor company  —  Apple could overtake Intel as the world's top mobile processor company by the end of the year  —  Apple is an iconic consumer electronics company with a string of massively successful products, but it could also become …

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.

Six-Year-Old Twitter Now Has 140M Active Users Sending 340M Tweets Per Day  —  Today marks the sixth year since founder Jack Dorsey and Twitter's first members started using the communications platform.  And for its birthday, the company has posted a number of stats about its growth in usage.

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 …

More Money For Big Data And The Cloud: OpenView Raises New $200M Fund  —  There has been a bit of a landrush of late on enterprise companies focused on big data and how best to harness that in the cloud, and today sees the launch of a new fund that will fuel the growth of even more companies working in that space.

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.