New improvements to Twitter for Mac  —  Today we're announcing a few improvements to Twitter for Mac: Photos: It's easier than ever to share photos.  Simply click the camera icon in the lower-left corner of the Tweet compose box, and choose a photo to share.  If you prefer, you can still drag and drop photos from the desktop.

Antitrust: Commission seeks feedback on commitments offered by Google to address competition concerns  —  The European Commission invites comments from interested parties on commitments offered by Google in relation to online search and search advertising.  The Commission has concerns …

Tickets for WWDC 2013 Sell Out in Two Minutes  —  After going on sale at 10:00 AM Pacific Time today, tickets for Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco have already sold out in two minutes.  —  WWDC has sold out increasingly quickly in recent years …

Pirate Bay Finds Safe Haven in Iceland, Switches to .IS Domain  —  It has been a busy month for The Pirate Bay's IT department thus far, with the site skipping from domain to domain.  —  Two weeks ago the notorious BitTorrent site traded in its .SE domain for the Greenland-based .GL TLD.

Google: government censorship requests jumped 20% in last six months  —  Google has published its latest Transparency Report and the results are not encouraging for free speech advocates: governments around the world are asking it to remove more content than ever before.

Nokia Plans May 14 London Event to Talk About Its Next Windows Phones  —  Nokia is planning to hold a May 14 press conference in London to talk about where it is headed with its Lumia line of Windows Phones.  —  An invitation to journalists on Thursday offered few details.

Exclusive: Verizon eyes $100 billion bid for Vodafone's Wireless stake  —  (Reuters) - Verizon Communications has hired advisers to prepare a possible $100 billion cash and stock bid to take full control of Verizon Wireless from its partner Vodafone, two people familiar with the matter said.

How Ray Kurzweil Will Help Google Make the Ultimate AI Brain  —  Google has always been an artificial intelligence company, so it really shouldn't have been a surprise that Ray Kurzweil, one of the leading scientists in the field, joined the search giant late last year.

Wi-Fi, Voice Calling Come to More New York City Subway Stations  —  Busy New Yorkers are about to get even more distracted.  —  Today, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the body for New York City's arteries of public transit, had completed the first phase …

MacBook Pro declared ‘best performing’ Windows laptop  —  A PC services company placed Apple computers in the No.1 and No. 6 slots as the best performing Windows laptops.  —  The MacBook Pro 13 was rated the best performing Windows laptop.  One of the biggest reasons: ‘every Windows installation on it is clean.’

LinkedIn Turns Its Contacts Section Into A Personal Assistant, With Google, Yahoo, Evernote & Outlook Apps Integration  —  Make way for another major update to the LinkedIn platform: today the company is relaunching its Contacts section as a smart contact management system that will let users link …

Google Drive gets profile pictures, one-click group chat, and a new look for anonymous users  —  Google on Thursday announced an update to its Drive service featuring the addition of profile pictures, one-click group chat, and a new look for anonymous users.

China court fines Apple $118K for copyright breach  —  Summary: A Beijing court has ordered Apple to compensate three Chinese writers for selling their works via its app store without getting their permission.  —  Kevin Kwang  —  Apple will have to compensate three Chinese writers …

A Messenger for the Internet of Things  —  The vision of the Internet of Things is inspiring, if much-hyped.  Billions of digital devices, from smartphones to sensors in homes, cars and machines of all kinds, will communicate with each other to automate tasks and make life better.

LG promises smartphone with flexible OLED display this year  —  In a call discussing the company's recent financial results, LG announced it will introduce a smartphone with a flexible OLED screen in the fourth quarter of this year.  The company's vice president of mobile Yoon Bu-hyun …

Strategy Analytics: 3 million Windows tablets shipped in Q1 2013  —  Microsoft may not be talking about how many of its Surface tablets it has shipped or sold since the Surface RT launched in late October.  However, a report claims that three million Windows-based tablets shipped worldwide in the first quarter of 2013.

Actian buys Amazon database partner ParAccel  —  Database vendor Actian has acquired ParAccel, a scale-out, analytic database company whose technology underpins part of the Amazon Web Services Redshift data warehouse service.  Terms of the deal are undisclosed.

Next Xbox expected to launch in November, cost $499 or $299 with subscription  —  Without a doubt, the next generation Xbox is the most highly anticipated launch from the company in some time.  While the Surface announcement generated quite a bit of noise, the next generation Xbox …

Microsoft Quietly Shuts Down Bing Deals, Launches Bing Offers As A Replacement  —  The daily deals hype around Groupon, LivingSocial and all of their clones has markedly cooled down over the last few months, but that isn't stopping Microsoft from launching Bing Offers, a new local deals aggregator for the U.S. market, today.

Solar Chargers Advance in Mobile Device Market  —  WHETHER you're comparing restaurant menus while sitting in the park or turning on the air-conditioner before getting home, life is becoming increasingly mobile thanks to smartphones and tablets.  And with new apps appearing constantly …

New York Times issues soft earnings, plans “new strategy for growth”  —  The New York Times Company posted its latest earnings on Thursday morning, and the results show the company moving forward at a plodding pace.  Its earnings per share came in at $0.04, excluding special items …

Square hires former Google exec Francoise Brougher as its Business Lead to help it expand globally  —  Mobile commerce payment service Square announced today that it has hired former Google executive Francoise Brougher to help it in the business development department.