Facebook and Instagram: When Your Favorite App Sells Out  —  Facebook, a company with a potential market cap worth five or six moon landings, is spending one of its many billions of dollars to buy Instagram, a tiny company dedicated to helping Thai beauty queens share photos of their fingernails.

It's Official: Yahoo Reorgs Itself Just Like We Said (Memo Time!)  —  Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson just sent this note to Yahoo employees, about a new organization for the company.  —  “It's time for Yahoo! to move forward, and fast,” wrote Thompson (using punctuation I really, with nice comma deployment).

Google's Chrome OS Will Soon Look More Like Windows Than A Browser  —  It's hard to say how popular Chrome OS, Google's browser-centric operating system, really is.  There can be little doubt, though, that Google is quite serious about this initiative.  Today, Google launched …

Carriers Band to Fight Cellphone Theft  —  The nation's major wireless providers have agreed to a deal with the U.S. government to build a central database of stolen cellphones—part of a broad effort to tame an explosion of thefts nationwide.  —  The database, which the wireless companies …

Iran denies has plan to cut Internet access  —  TEHRAN — Iran has denied online reports surfacing Tuesday that it plans to cut access to the Internet in August and replace it with a national intranet, according to a statement by the ministry of communication and information technology.

Apple Snubs Firm That Discovered Mac Botnet, Tries To Cut Off Its Server Monitoring Infections  —  Dr. Web's chief executive Boris Sharov, who says Apple never responded when the firm shared its findings on the Flashback botnet.  —  Until it was revealed last week that more than half …

A million Instagram Android app downloads in a day isn't cool.  You know what's cool? 5 million in 6 days.  —  Instagram is enjoying the biggest week in its existence.  The company, already riding high on its iOS success, launched its Android app and captured 1 million downloads …

Amazon's Takes In-App Purchases Out Of Beta: Here's How They Compromised On Revenue Share  —  Amazon is taking the wraps off a new in-app purchasing service today in an effort to make its app store competitive with what Apple and Google offer developers.  That should let developers …

Availability of Apple's 15-inch MacBook Pros constrained ahead of redesigned models  —  Multiple authorized resellers this week are reflecting stock outs of 15-inch MacBook Pros, suggesting that Apple is ramping down production of existing models before introducing redesigned offerings …

iTunes: Time to right the syncing ship  —  When Apple introduced iTunes in 2001, it served one purpose: As a music jukebox app.  Later that year, it added its most important feature: The ability to sync tracks with the just-introduced iPod.  Originally, you could just drag tracks onto …

Apple CEO Tim Cook to Appear as Opening Speaker at the D10 Conference  —  Walt Mossberg and I could not be more thrilled to announce that Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, will be the opening-night speaker at our 10th D: All Things Digital conference.  —  It will be Cook's first appearance at D …

Nokia Lumia 900 hit by bug that disables data  —  Nokia Lumia 900 launch marred by data bug  —  Nokia's Lumia 900 launch has been partly soured by a bug encountered by early adopters.  Both an AT&T source for Phone Arena, as well as buyers on Nokia's forums and those at WPCentral …

Toshiba introduces 13.3-inch Android 4.0 tablet, new Excite range  —  Toshiba announced its back-to-school tablet lineup today, adding three models to its Excite brand.  The first one you'll notice is the Excite 13, which you can hardly avoid — its 13.3-inch display is absolutely enormous, nearly twice the size of a 7-inch slate.

AT&T Unlocking In-Contract iPhones for Deployed Service Members  —  This weekend, AT&T began unlocking iPhones for off-contract customers.  This allows the iPhone be used with a SIM-card from overseas carriers, or T-Mobile in the U.S. In addition to unlocking phones for off-contract customers …

Apple's Market Cap Hits $600 Billion  —  Another market cap milestone for Apple.  —  With the broader market in decline, shares in the company rose to a new 52-week high this morning: $644.  And that jump was enough to carry Apple's market cap across the $600 billion threshold.

Why Microsoft spent $1 billion on AOL's patents  —  Microsoft dropped an eye-popping $1 billion on 800 AOL patents today, an astonishing amount likely spent to keep the intellectual property trove away from rival Google.  —  But according to a source close to the situation, Google didn't even bid on the portfolio.

Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn resigns  —  Summary: Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn resigned this morning.  Director G. Mike Mikan will serve in the interim.  —  Brian Dunn, chief executive of tech big box retailer Best Buy, resigned this morning.  —  “There were no disagreements between Mr. Dunn …

About Pando  —  Some of you may have read Sarah Lacy's post today stating that I'm no longer on the board of Pando Daily.  —  This wasn't a complete surprise to me, the company notified me last week that they weren't happy that I and MG Siegler (my partner at CrunchFund) were going to speak at TechCrunch Disrupt this coming May.

Google Play Music switches on labs features: HTML5 player, star ratings and notifications  —  We're so used to Google Labs features on commonly used services like mail and maps that we often forget they're technically experimental and now Music has a few of its own.