Ex-Nokia staff to build MeeGo-based smartphones  —  A group of ex-Nokia staff and MeeGo enthusiasts has formed Jolla (Finnish for “dinghy"), a mobile startup with the aim of bringing new MeeGo devices to the market.  According to its LinkedIn page, Jolla consists of “directors and core professionals …

Groupon Crashes To A New Low...  Remember when Groupon went public at $20 a share?  —  That was a long, long time ago.  —  (Well, actually, it was about 8 months ago).  —  In any event, now you can pick some up for less than $8.50 a share.  —  The company is valued at about $5 billion now, which seems pretty fair.

Netflix on last week's AWS outage: “We're still bullish on the cloud”  —  As you probably already know, some of your favorite Internet services were unavailable for the better part of a day due to a massive Amazon cloud outage caused by a single point of failure due to a storm in Virginia.

Windows 8 boots 55.26% faster than Windows 7, and that's important for tablet devices  —  At its BUILD event last September, Microsoft presented an operating system that it claimed would boot faster than its predecessors, and consume less memory.  Back then, only Windows 8′s developer preview was made available.

That was quick.  Facebook shuts down Face.com APIs, kills Klik app, enrages developers  —  Fresh from its acquisition by Facebook last month, Face.com is closing down its facial recognition APIs over the next 30 days.  While such a move isn't that surprising, third-party developers …

It Never Gets Better  —  Why you should never buy a mediocre piece of technology expecting that it'll be more amazing tomorrow than it is today.  —  Source: dahlstroms  —  There's an update waiting for you.  For your apps, for your computer and phone and tablet and the box attached to your TV.

Pirate Bay Founder Submits Emotional Plea for Pardon  —  After his sentence was made final earlier this year, Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde was due to go prison early May.  —  However, due to various delays, he has yet to be committed to confinement.  —  This week in a final attempt …

Microsoft to launch Bing Fund angel investment incubator  —  Summary: Microsoft is poised to launch a new startup/accelerator incubation effort designed to bring innovation to the company's Online Services Division.  —  Follow @maryjofoley  —  For the past few weeks …

PSA: Galaxy Nexus HSPA+ up for sale again at Google Play store (update: now shipping in '1-2 weeks')  —  And just like that it's back.  Following a yesterday's temporary stay of the ban on Google's HSPA+ Galaxy Nexus by Judge Koh, the soon-to-be Jelly Bean-loaded device is again up for sale …

Google to launch global bid to ‘Legalize Love’ for gays  —  Global giant Google searches for a way to make the world a better place for lesbians, gays and bisexuals with new campaign  —  Google is launching a new campaign calling on countries to ‘Legalize Love’ - making it legal to be lesbian, gay or bisexual around the world.

Tech Companies Leave Phone Calls Behind  —  Quora is a Web site that crowdsources answers to just about any question imaginable, including “What is the meaning of life?” and “Is it possible to stick someone to the wall with Velcro?”  But anyone searching for a phone number for the company is out of luck.