As Big Investors Emerge, Bitcoin Gets Ready for Its Close-Up  —  Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss have been many things in a short time: Olympic rowers.  Nemeses of Mark Zuckerberg.  Characters on “The Simpsons.”  Now they can add a new label: bitcoin moguls.

Foursquare Gets $41 Million Investment, Time to Grow  —  When Dennis Crowley debuted Foursquare, his location-based social media app, at South by Southwest in 2009, he got rave reviews.  The tech blog Mashable called Foursquare the “breakout mobile app” of the event.  VentureBeat called it “the next Twitter.”

Yep, LinkedIn Acquires Newsreader Startup Pulse for $90 Million  —  LinkedIn announced on Thursday it has acquired mobile news aggregation startup Pulse, as Kara Swisher reported last month that it would, signaling another step by the massive professional network toward becoming an online content powerhouse.

Mark Zuckerberg: Immigrants are the key to a knowledge economy  —  Mark Zuckerberg is founder and chief executive of Facebook and co-founder of Fwd.us.  (Washington Post Co. Chairman Donald E. Graham is a member of Facebook's board of directors.)  —  Earlier this year I started teaching …

Apple, Google Not Interested in Settlement, Judge Says  —  Apple Inc. and Google Inc. (GOOG)'s Motorola Mobility unit are more interested in using litigation as a business strategy than in resolving disputes over the use of patented technology, a federal judge in Florida said.

Production Challenges to ‘Delay’ Launches of iPhone 5S, Lower-Cost iPhone and New iPad Mini?  —  Back in January, reliable KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo laid out a thorough roadmap of his expectations for Apple's product launches in 2013, pointing to a very busy third quarter for the company …

Google's New Inactive Account Manager Gives You Control Over Your Digital Afterlife  —  What will happen to your Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive and Google+ accounts after you die?  That's probably not something you really want to think about, but as more and more of our data now lives online …

BlackBerry 10 launch by the numbers: Over 50% returns, 71% of people don't want under any circumstances, 83% of Americans unaware it even launched (Updated)  —  Six years after Apple took the smartphone industry by surprise with its release of the iPhone, former market leader BlackBerry Limited …

Confirmed: Facebook Has Acquired Osmeta, A Stealth Mobile Software Startup  —  While Facebook is building out a bolder role in mobile in the form of Facebook Home, it looks like it is also continuing to make acquisitions that will help bolster that strategy overall.

Microsoft Plans 7-inch Tablet  —  The personal-computer business is at a crossroads, and Microsoft Corp. isn't sitting still.  —  The software giant is developing a new lineup of its Surface tablets, including a 7-inch version expected to go into mass production later this year, said people familiar with the company's plans.

Google sued for burying ‘Streetmap’ search results  —  A British mapping company named Streetmap is suing Google in U.K. court for what it called “cynical manipulation of search results,” that made its site harder to find in Google searches.  A Google spokesman told Bloomberg he hadn't seen …

Adam Orth, Microsoft game exec who insulted fans on Twitter, has left the company (updated)  —  Update: This story originally featured an image that we used without proper attribution.  We have removed it and apologize to the artist.  —  Microsoft game director Adam Orth …

Pandora with friends: Turntable launches Piki, a social radio app for iPhone and web  —  Can people deliver better music recommendations than algorithms?  —  “We realized early on that Turntable's best feature was also a problem: everybody has to be in a room at exactly the same time,” says Billy Chasen, Turntable CEO.

Hijacking airplanes with an Android phone  —  An extremely well attended talk by Hugo Teso, a security consultant at n.runs AG in Germany, about the completely realistic scenario of plane hijacking via a simple Android app has galvanized the crowd attending the Hack In The Box Conference in Amsterdam today.

Kik Messenger Tops 50M Registered Users, Adding Over 200K Per Day As It Delivers In-App Push For Kik Cards  —  The messaging space is a hot one these days, and early player Kik is no exception.  The Waterloo-based company announced today that its cross-platform messaging app …

Trends in 160+ locations  —  Today, we're introducing Trends in more than 160 new locations.  Included in that list are a number of countries that will be getting Trends for the first time: Belgium, Greece, Kenya, Norway, Poland, Portugal, and Ukraine, plus more than 130 new cities in countries that already have Trends.

eBay's PayPal Acquires IronPearl To Fuel Growth Beyond 123M Users  —  About a month ago, I wrote about a stealthy company called IronPearl, led by Stan Chudnovsky and James Currier.  They were growth hackers before the word “growth hacker” even existed.  In fact, they don't even really like the word “growth hacker.”

Digg Releases Google Reader Survey Results, Aims Replacement at Power Users: Keyboard Shortcuts First, Search Later  —  Digg on Thursday released the results of its Google Reader survey it conducted last week.  In the process, the company used the data to back up some key decisions …