Apple Gears Up for New Products  —  RANCHO PALOS VERDES, Calif. - Apple Inc. chief executive Tim Cook teed up big expectations for the world's largest technology company, saying in an interview that the company is preparing to release some “incredible” new products.

Google Places Is Over, Company Makes Google+ The Center Of Gravity For Local Search  —  When Google+ and Google+ Pages for business were introduced a little less than a year ago many people in the local search arena began anticipating the day when Google would merge or integrate Google Places and Google+ Pages.

Skype's present is secure, its future is not  —  It has been over six months since Microsoft officially became an owner of Skype, one of the biggest communication services in the world.  The company has been growing quietly, thanks to its “Skype everywhere” strategy.

Salesforce Set to Snap Up Facebook Friend Buddy Media for More Than $800 Million  —  Enterprise, meet social: Cloud-computing pioneer Salesforce.com is close to a deal to acquire Buddy Media, the five-year-old company that helps brands manage their Facebook presence.

Apple Store now selling Nest Learning Thermostat for $249.95  —  It turns out the rumors were true: Apple has begun selling the Nest Learning Thermostat in its online store for $249.95.  It's the second large retail expansion for Nest in the past 24 hours, with the company announcing Canadian availability …

Mitt Romney's New App Misspells America, Twitter Goes Wild  —  Mitt Romney's new iPhone app, With Mitt, “lets you customize photos with a variety of Mitt-inspired artistic frames.”  Slogans like “Believe in America,” “Obama Isn't Working,” and “I'm a Mom for Mitt” are just a few …

Wasting Time Is New Divide in Digital Era  —  In the 1990s, the term “digital divide” emerged to describe technology's haves and have-nots.  It inspired many efforts to get the latest computing tools into the hands of all Americans, particularly low-income families.  —  Those efforts have indeed shrunk the divide.

Improving performance on twitter.com  —  To connect you to information in real time, it's important for Twitter to be fast.  That's why we've been reviewing our entire technology stack to optimize for speed.  —  When we shipped #NewTwitter in September 2010, we built it around …

Google: Search Activity Rising Following Revamp  —  Google said it has seen a noticeable increase in activity on its vaunted Web-search in the two weeks since the company began one of the biggest search transformations in its history.  —  People doing Web searches now see a big box …

Facebook HQ expansion plan approved; new limit of 6,600 workers, will pay Menlo Park up to $15m  —  At a meeting last night, Menlo Park officials approved a deal that will let Facebook employ thousands more people at its headquarters in the Silicon Valley city.

Netflix agrees to delete data on ex-customers  —  Turns out that nobody has to know about that copy of Bad Girls of Red Light District 6: The Extended Cut you rented from Netflix just over a year ago.  —  U.S. District Court papers filed Friday revealed greater detail as to how Netflix settled …

Google Nexus tablet appears in benchmarks, appears to run on quad-core Tegra 3  —  ASUS's seven-inch MeMo tablet has just ducked under the FCC's gates, but some benchmark results for a purported Google and ASUS team-up could tally with the same device.  According to the listing …

The Case for Facebook  —  Let's not let 10 days of share price fluctuation blind us to Facebook's unprecedented accomplishments.  Consider this a skeptic's guide to the bull case for the social network.  —  Facebook just had modern history's worst IPO and it's down again today by some percentage that will be quoted endlessly.

How Twitter Beat Facebook At Its Own Story  —  On the day Facebook went public, all eyes were on its biggest competitor.  Those hazy months when the IPO was just a rumor, the giddy days and hours before the market opened, the hilariously chaotic trading period, the ensuing backlash …

Google launches Chromebook, Chromebox & gets it right  —  We often joke Google is like the old Microsoft — getting things wrong, bumbling its way into new markets, and getting things right on the third try.  This seems to be quite true of Google's efforts to develop a cloud PC.

Iran ‘finds fix’ for sophisticated Flame malware  —  The sophistication of Flame helped it avoid detection by security software  —  Iran says it has developed tools that can defend against the sophisticated cyber attack tool known as Flame.  —  The country is believed to have been hit hard …

6.4 percent of most popular Windows Phone apps are incompatible with Tango devices  —  We've already seen several instances where low-memory Windows Phone devices like the Lumia 610, which has just 256MB of RAM, simply can't run certain high-profile apps.  But just how bad is the problem?

Hewlett-Packard Promotes Veghte To COO, Kadifa To Lead Software  —  Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ) has elevated Bill Veghte to chief operating officer and named George Kadifa executive vice president of the company's software business.  —  Kadifa will report directly to Chief Executive Officer Meg Whitman …

Educational games maker Mindshapes raises $4 million from Index, others  —  London-based app development startup Mindshapes, which is behind a series of educational games and applications, has secured $4 million in funding from VC firm Index Ventures, Richmond Park Partners and existing investors.

Facebook's Cognitive Dissonance with Sharing  —  Two philosophies  —  One of Facebook's core philosophies is that a user's privacy is paramount.  Part of that privacy is the data you create by browsing Facebook is never shown to other users.  You'll never see a newsfeed story that says, “Joe viewed your profile 1,024 times.”

Google introduces a new display business trends report for publishers  —  Advertising on the web is certainly at a crossroads.  With huge companies like Facebook figuring out how to monetize its userbase, trends in display ads are more important than they've ever been.

Badgeville raises $25M, shows gamification has legs  —  While skeptics still scoff at the term gamification, Badgeville keeps gaining the trust of big companies and investors, who believe in its power.  Badgeville announced Wednesday it raised $25 million in a round led by Interwest Partners …