A new modern SkyDrive.com, updated apps, and Outlook.com at 10 million users … Over the past months, we've shared our approach to building versatile personal cloud storage that can scale to a billion people.  Today, we're excited to announce the next step towards that vision …

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.

Bad News For Bieber?  Klout Unveils Redesign And A Scoring System That Looks At Real World Influence  —  Klout, the site that aims to measure your online influence, has made some big changes to its scoring system, and it has a new look to match the new algorithm.

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 …

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 …

Improving Google Patents with European Patent Office patents and the Prior Art Finder  —  At Google, we're constantly trying to make important collections of information more useful to the world.  Since 2006, we've let people discover, search, and read United States patents online.

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 …

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.

Flash for Android dies tomorrow, long live the ‘full web experience’  —  In November of last year, Adobe made a surprising about-face on its popular Flash plugin, announcing that it would stop development of Flash for mobile devices.  Tomorrow, Adobe will disable new installs of Flash on Android …

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 …

Surfthechannel owner sentenced to four years over piracy  —  Anton Vickerman, whose surfthechannel.com had 400,000 users a day, sentenced on two counts of conspiracy to defraud  —  A 38-year-old Briton who made £35,000 a month through a website that linked to pirated copies of films …

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.

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.

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 …

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.

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) …