New Android Boss Finally Reveals Plans for World's Most Popular Mobile OS  —  For the past few years, Sundar Pichai has been part of a tag-team routine staged at Google's annual I/O developer conference.  Pichai, a Googler since 2004, would present on behalf of Google's Chrome division …

Confirmed: Amazon Bought Liquavista - Color Kindle to Follow?  —  For the past four months I have been saying that Amazon was in the market to buy Samsung's screen tech company Liquavista, and today I do believe the rumors have come true.  —  New filings from the Netherlands Chamber …

Google Unifies Its Free And Paid Storage Options, Gives You 15GB To Share Between Drive, Gmail And Google+ Photos  —  Until now, you've had to track your free storage on Google products separately.  It was just another thing that Google hadn't brought together to make it easier on users.

Facebook Home flagship phone, HTC First, may be discontinued  —  Facebook's HTC First, the smartphone herald of Facebook Home, will be discontinued by carrier partner AT&T, according a report from BGR Monday.  The phones, released just over a month ago, will be returned as unsold inventory to HTC …

Bill Gates on Steve Jobs: We grew up together  —  We've seen plenty of Bill Gates on television, but we'd never seen him get emotional before.  It was a striking, yet subtle moment in Gates' 60 Minutes interview this week when Charlie Rose asked him about his longtime business rival, the late Steve Jobs.

Amazon Now Offers Amazon Coins Virtual Currency On Kindle Fire, Gives $5 In Free Coins To All Users  —  E-commerce leviathan Amazon today is taking a step into social gaming: Amazon Coins, its new virtual currency, is now live in the U.S. To kick it off, Amazon announced that it would put $5 worth …

Samsung ready for 5G rollout in 2020, has reportedly pulled down 1Gbps in tests  —  LTE might be all the rage right now, but next generation mobile technology is already in the works.  According to Korea's Yonhap News Agency, Samsung has successfully tested its 5G platform, pulling down data at 1Gbps in recent tests.

France weighs ‘culture tax’ for Apple, Google products  —  (Reuters) - President Francois Hollande will decide by the end of July whether France should impose new taxes on technology giants like Apple and Google to finance cultural projects, a move that could feed into an anti-business image days after a spat with Yahoo!.

Twitter Acquires Big Data Visualization Startup Lucky Sort, Service To Shutter In Months Ahead  —  Lucky Sort, a Portland, Oregon-based startup behind a visualization and navigation engine called TopicWatch that helped to discover patterns in live data streams, has been acquired by Twitter.

Path Product Management Director Dylan Casey Departs for Yahoo  —  Dylan Casey, director of product management at Path, has left the company and will soon join Yahoo, according to sources familiar with the matter.  —  Update 9:29 am PT: And Casey has confirmed his new job via Twitter …

Apple, Google Pressed by N.Y. Over Handheld Device Thefts  —  Apple Inc. (AAPL) and Google Inc. (GOOG) are among technology companies being asked by the New York attorney general to take steps to deter thefts of iPhones and other handheld devices and eliminate a black market for the products.

ESPN, Twitter Expand Collaboration  —  ESPN and Twitter Inc. are announcing a major expansion of their collaboration to post sports-related videos on the short-messaging service—part of a growing wave of tie-ups as TV networks and Twitter hunt for new advertising revenue.

Google Launches Content Recommendation Engine For Mobile Sites, Powered By Google+  —  Google continues to increase the reach of its Google+ platform, and today the company is launching a new mobile content recommendation service powered by Google+.  These recommendations will appear …

Microsoft rolls out new SkyDrive timeline and filmstrip views, speeds up photo upload time three-fold, and more  —  Microsoft on Monday announced new features and improvements for its SkyDrive cloud storage service, with a particular focus on photos.  The updates are available starting now …

Intelligent To Do List App Any.DO Raises $3.5 Million, Will Further Expand Into Personal Productivity Space  —  Q: Why does a to do list application need $3.5 million in funding?  A: Because it's becoming more than a simple to do app.  Today, Any.DO one of the more popular to do list applications …

All Google Play Developers Can Now Reply to User Reviews  —  There are a lot great things a developer can do to promote their app, but the best way for your app to take off is when a really happy user tells their friend about your app, who tells their friend, who tells someone else — you get the picture.

You Can Do Too Much Due Diligence  —  It's Monday, time for another lesson I've learned in the venture capital business.  Today I will tell a story that I love telling.  It has some of my favorite people in it.  —  Back in 2004, early in my blogging career, I heard about a service that had just launched called Feedburner.

T-Mobile Raises iPhone Price by $50, Down Payment on iPhone 5 Starts at $150  —  When 4th-place U.S. cell carrier T-Mobile launched the iPhone last month, customers could purchase it for a $100 down payment with 24 monthly payments of $20 to cover the full cost of the phone.

Verizon bumps up Samsung Galaxy S 4 launch to May 23rd  —  Disappoined that Verizon wasn't going to offer its variant of the Galaxy S 4 until May 30th?  You're in for an unexpected treat: Big Red has just moved up the launch by a full week, to May 23rd.  The $200 contract price remains the same …

On key software decision, top patent court grinds to a stalemate  —  Over the course of the past year a case about four financial software patents has taken on great significance.  In 2007, Alice Corp accused CLS Bank of infringing its patents on a type of computerized trading platform that used “shadow accounts.”