Verizon Deal Nears Regulatory Approval  —  WASHINGTON—Federal regulators are preparing to clear Verizon Wireless's $3.9 billion deal to acquire airwaves from several cable companies including Comcast Corp., according to people close to the negotiations, after the companies reached broad agreement to settle antitrust concerns.

Judge Refuses to Toss Most of Apple's Suit Against Samsung  —  With Apple having finished its primary case, the court took time on Monday to hear Samsung's arguments that the Cupertino-based company failed to meet its legal burden and that the case should be dropped.

Salesforce.com confirms it has completed the acquisition of Buddy Media  —  Salesforce.com has confirmed that it has completed the acquisition of Buddy Media more than two months after the enterprise software giant first revealed that a $689 million deal to buy the social media-focused site had been reached.

Is This T-mobile's First Windows Phone 8 Smartphone?  With LTE?  —  Windows Phone fans, now would be a really great time to pay attention as believe we've discovered T-Mobile's first Windows Phone 8 device — with LTE.  That's right, your eyes are not deceiving you as the user agent string indicates …

Putting An End To The Biggest Lie On The Internet  —  It's long been said that “I agree to the terms of service” is the biggest lie on the internet.  And even if you do read them, many TOS are so ridden with legalese that you practically need to be a lawyer to understand them.

Pixel Perfect  —  I've spent my whole life thinking about dots, largely in the form of on-screen pixels.  I remember first seeing a Pac-Man coin-op arcade game, wondering how it worked, and deducing the basic gist: the screen was a matrix of dots, like animated graph paper.  I loved graph paper.

Gartner: Global Mobile Sales Down 2%, Smartphones Surge 43%, Apple Stalls As Fans Hold Out For New iPhone  —  Gartner is the latest of the big analyst houses to release its numbers for smartphone and overall mobile sales in Q2.  The picture it paints is one of a market that has, effectively …

Think App.net is just a Twitter clone?  Then you're missing the point  —  Much of the coverage of App.net — the ambitious project from entrepreneur Dalton Caldwell that just raised $500,000 through a Kickstarter-like crowdfunding campaign — has focused on the idea that Caldwell is building a “paid version of Twitter.”

Facebook Shares Unlocking  —  An avalanche of privately held Facebook shares could begin hitting the market this week—potentially putting further pressure on the company's stock—as rules expire that have kept some early investors from cashing out.  —  Angel investor Peter Thiel …

Building apps for Facebook: A dance with the devil  —  Facebook has created a booming app economy that's made plenty of developers rich.  It's also forcing a lot of them to lose sleep.  —  Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg  —  Dalton Caldwell caused a stir recently when he posted an open letter …

New Life Event for Timeline, “Expecting a Baby”  —  Now, you can choose to add ‘Expecting a Baby’ as a Life Event on timeline.  —  Life Events are easy and expressive ways to mark significant moments in your life such as getting married, buying a house or traveling to new places.

Yammer Gets HootSuite Integration, A New “Inbox” and Its Own Design Improvements Independent of Microsoft  —  Yammer's first new release under the Microsoft umbrella has nothing to do with Microsoft.  It's not about integrating with Sharepoint or Microsoft Dynamics.

Facebook Says It Now Has 235M Monthly Gamers, App Center Hits 150M Monthly Visitors  —  Facebook's push for more engagement on its platform, to drive advertising and other monetization efforts (and to counterbalance that drooping stock price), is showing some gains, according to updated figures …

Collaborating to deliver Windows RT PCs … Windows 8 and Windows RT each reached the RTM milestone, and we are hard at work in collaboration with ecosystem partners, including PC manufacturers, Silicon partners, and other component suppliers, to complete high quality Windows RT and Windows 8 PCs that we think you'll love.

YouTube's new app for the PlayStation 3 rolling out, allows remote control from smartphones  —  While YouTube has always enjoyed support on Sony's PlayStation 3 thanks to the console's Flash-enabled browser and even offered a YouTube XL layout for connected devices, now it's rolling out a new app …

Researchers Seek Help Cracking Gauss Mystery Payload  —  A string pair from the Gauss malware.  Image courtesy of Kaspersky Lab  —  Researchers at Kaspersky Lab in Russia are asking the public for help in cracking an encrypted warhead that gets delivered to infected machines by the Gauss malware toolkit.

Apple Retail Stores Seeing Significant Layoffs of Recent Hires?  —  Over the past couple of weeks, we've been receiving reports that Apple has been laying off a number of recently-hired staff members at its retail stores.  Most of the reports have been coming from Apple retail employees …

Choosing the Paths Less Traveled?  There's an App for That  —  In his final year at the Design Academy of Eindhoven, Tom Loois received a vague assignment: “Design your personal definition of silence.”  Loois, whose training is in product design, had no idea what to do.

UK competition watchdog gives the green light to Facebook's $1 billion acquisition of Instagram  —  Nearly two months after it said it had launched a probe into Facebook's $1 billion acquisition of popular photo-sharing service Instagram, the UK's Office of Fair Trading (OFT) …

Google's third big foray in travel: Buying Frommer's for $23 milion  —  Updated: The purchase price is a relatively paltry $23 million or so, according to a source quoted in NYT, which according to our source is only slightly more than 1X of Frommer's 2011 revenues of around $20 million.