Ex-Googler Ben Ling Brings His Operations Experience To Khosla Ventures  —  Former Badoo COO and ex-Googler Ben Ling has joined Khosla Ventures, according to sources.  Ling, who has held senior operations roles for a number of big companies in the mobile and Internet space …

Lyft Lifts $60 Million From Andreessen Horowitz, Gives 30,000 Rides A Week A Year After Launch  —  It was almost one year ago (to the day!) that my colleague Kim Mai-Cutler wrote our first story on Lyft, and how the company was going to offer some lower-priced competition to on-demand ride leader Uber in San Francisco.

Mailbox Takes Its Email App To iPad, With Android Waiting In The Wings  —  What has Mailbox founder Gentry Underwood and his team been up to since selling the email-app maker to Dropbox for a reported $100 million in March?  —  Mostly working on new versions of the product …

Apple's WWDC Keynote Scheduled for Monday, June 10  —  Apple today said the keynote address for its annual Worldwide Developers Conference will occur at 10 AM PT Monday, June 10, at Moscone Center in San Francisco.  Not a big surprise, as that is the day the event kicks off.

Facebook won't bring HTC First smartphone to the UK after all (update: due to bad feedback in the US)  —  After a series of rumors about the HTC First not selling too well in the States, we've now heard that the customized Facebook / Android handset won't be coming to the UK.

Yahoo Acquires Gaming Platform Startup PlayerScale  —  Another day, another acquisition by Yahoo.  —  Today Yahoo is announcing it's acquired PlayerScale, a California-based startup that makes software infrastructure for cross-platform gaming.  Financial details haven't been disclosed …

Evernote Launches Reminders  —  In the years I've spent using and recommending Evernote, I've always noticed a chasm between people who rely on the service to store reference material and notes, and those who want to also use Evernote as a “getting things done” system to keep track of their todos.

Nvidia launches its GeForce GTX 780 for PC gaming that is faster than Xbox One  —  You could wait for the Microsoft Xbox One or the Sony PlayStation 4 to arrive this fall, or you could play PC games with better graphics now.  Nvidia is launching its GeForce GTX 780 graphics chip today …

In China, Hacking Has Widespread Acceptance  —  BEIJING — Name a target anywhere in China, an official at a state-owned company boasted recently, and his crack staff will break into that person's computer, download the contents of the hard drive, record the keystrokes, and monitor cellphone communications, too.

Google engineer bashes Microsoft's handling of security researchers, discloses Windows zero-day  —  Microsoft confirms probe of vulnerability hackers could use to gain additional privileges on targeted PCs  —  A Google security engineer accused Microsoft of treating outside researchers with …

Why iPhone repair costs have soared  —  A broken screen can now cost more than $200 to fix … The company charges as much as $229 to replace an iPhone 5 with a broken screen.  That's more than the $200 price of the device with a two-year contract, and more than a third of the $650 cost of the phone without a contract.

Jack Dorsey's digital payments company Square expands beyond North America, landing in Japan first  —  Red hot payments startup Square is invading Asia after it announced that its service has launched in Japan, which becomes its third market worldwide in addition to the US and Canada.

Temping fate: can TaskRabbit go from side gigs to real jobs?  —  The errand marketplace hires for longer-term work, and may add benefits  —  Not long ago, Chris Mok worked in the advertising department for Macy's in San Francisco, booking models for the department store's catalogs.

Box acquires Folders technology to enrich iOS offering  —  Box indicated on its blog Thursday that the cloud-storage company has “acquired the technology” for the Folders iOS app enabling users to open many kinds of files on the iPhone.  The deal marks Box's third acquisition, closely following on news of the Crocodoc deal.

Shazam Revamps Its iPad App For Second Screen Action, Can Now “AutoTag” In Background While You Watch TV  —  Although the majority of Shazam's over 93 million U.S. users still use the app on their smartphones to identify, tag and share the songs they're “hearing,” a growing chunk of that user base …

With New Mobile App, Nextdoor Unveils Its Take on the Neighborhood Watch  —  Think of what you're used to in a local neighborhood-watch group: Signs posted around a community with contact information, perhaps monthly meetings to discuss safety issues and concerns.

Twitter Launches TV Ad Targeting, Twitter Amplify For Real-Time Videos In Stream  —  Twitter today made the latest push in its bid to cozy up to Madison Avenue and the world of big-budget advertising, by tapping more into the kind of mainstream mediums where advertisers like to spend their money.

Google brings your Google+ photos right into Search, serves results via computer vision and machine learning  —  Google on Thursday announced a very interesting integration between its main search service and Google+ Photos.  The company now lets you find your photos both on Google+ and Google Search just by, well, searching for them.

Lenovo Quarterly Profit Rises 90% on Market Share Gains  —  Lenovo Group Ltd. (992), the world's second-biggest maker of personal computers, reported a 90 percent gain in fourth-quarter profit after increasing its market share and boosting smartphone sales.  —  Net income climbed to $126.9 million …

Surprise!  Mozilla can produce near-native performance on the Web  —  In a bid to make JavaScript run ever faster, Mozilla has developed asm.js.  It's a limited, stripped down subset of JavaScript that the company claims will offer performance that's within a factor of two of native …

Jeff Bezos grilled over violent games, movies during Amazon shareholder meeting  —  Amazon just wrapped up its annual meeting of shareholders at Seattle Center, with Jeff Bezos giving a broad overview of the company's business and fielding questions from shareholders.