Lower global prices for iron, copper and coal forced the world's leading miner BHP Billiton to report its first profit fall in around three years.

BHP Billiton on Wednesday said it suffered a fall of 6 per cent in half-year profit. Nevertheless, it pocketed $US9.94 billion as profits in six months through December 2011, more than the $US90 billion commodities trader Glencore and miner Xstrata would together have generated in all of the last year.

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Mobile phone operator O2 will carry out a one-day remote working trial on Wednesday to see how it could avoid any possible disruption during upcoming London Olympic Games.

Under the trial, a total of 2,500 employees at the network provider’s Slough, Berkshire-based headquarters will work from home, cafes and O2 stores.

Ben Dowd, business director at O2, said the Olympic Games would bring operating, travel as well as business challenges.

He added that the trial would help O2 and others companies in planning for contingency plans to meet the potential challenges.

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Close on the heels of the resignation of Yahoo's founder Jerry Yang from the company's board, and the January appointment of ex-PayPal/eBay executive Scott Thompson as the CEO, there has been yet another Yahoo board shakeup which has led to the departure of the company's chairman Roy Bostock.

According to reports, Yahoo board chairman Roy Bostock has agreed to set down from his role at the next meeting of the shareholders. Along with Bostock, three more directors - Vyomesh Joshi, Arthur Kern, and Gary Wilson - have also decided to call it quits at the company.

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Bringing together its two most successful products - the Android operating system and the Chrome web browser -, Internet search giant Google Tuesday released a Chrome app for its Android `Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS)' mobile OS.

Serving as an alternative to the Android's web browser - which has been rather drably dubbed as `Browser' -, the newly-released Chrome app for Android ICS will essentially bring a horde of features to the Android-based handsets and tablets, from the Chrome's desktop version.

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Apple's iPhone dominated the US as well as worldwide smartphone markets during the three months to December, a fresh report by NPD and IDC revealed.

Apple sold a record 37 million iPhones during the last quarter of 2011. Released figures show that Apple grabbed 23.5 per cent of the worldwide smartphone market during the three months through December, up from 15.9 per cent in the corresponding period of the previous year.

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Software giant Microsoft yesterday filed a motion the US International Trade Commission (ITC) to remove the so-called "522 patent" from the list of patents that it claims Barnes & Noble's Nook e-readers violates.

The patent withdrew by Microsoft covers the technique of showing tabs, for instance in a browser.

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Internet search giant’s attempts to design a website which would serve as a communication channel for "moonshot thinking" have taken the form of its newly-unveiled project called "Solve for X" --- a dedicated website aimed at encouraging problem-solving and teamwork for finding “radical” solutions to some of the world’s biggest problems.

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Facebook, the world’s most popular social networking site that recently filed papers to become a public-listed company, is now seeing developing countries like Brazil and India as major growth markets.

In developed countries like America and Britain, the social networking firm’s user-base has already reached saturation point. But developing countries are still promising huge consumer bases to tap.

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Facebook, the world’s most popular social networking site that recently filed papers to become a public-listed company, is now seeing developing countries like Brazil and India as major growth markets.

In developed countries like America and Britain, the social networking firm’s user-base has already reached saturation point. But developing countries are still promising huge consumer bases to tap.

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In its Thursday letter addressed to Google CEO Larry Page, a European regulatory group - the Article 29 Working Party – has sought the postponement of the Internet search giant’s planned move in the direction of privacy policy consolidation.

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In a development first reported by ZDNet, one of Microsoft’s key Windows Phone employees, Brandon Watson, has quit the software giant to join the online retail biggie Amazon, where he would work on Kindle apps.

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On Friday, computer hacking group Anonymous said in a notably haughty announcement that it had eavesdropped on a conference call – concerning how to tackle the cyber-pirate group - between the FBI, Scotland Yard and other overseas law-enforcement agencies, including those in Ireland, Germany, France, Sweden, and the Netherlands.

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In what apparently is a move aimed largely at preventing the present users of BlackBerry devices from switching over to other competing platforms, the Canada-based mobile biggie Research in Motion (RIM) has come up with a new recycling/trade up scheme.

The scheme, which RIM has introduced recently, will essentially give the current owners of Blackberry handsets an advantage of £106 when they upgrade to another BlackBerry device. The mentioned amount will be sent to them as a cheque, by post.

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In its recent warning of a ballooning full-year loss, Sony said that a weak economy, natural calamities, and a strong yen have apparently taken a toll on the company's earnings, with its annual loss figures likely to touch Y220 billion
(or $2.86 billion).

Citing reasons like the cost of streamlining its losses-ridden TV business, the supply-disrupting Thailand floods, and the surging yen, Sony said that all these factors contributed to the company's products becoming more expensive in overseas markets.

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With social networking giant Facebook having filed for initial public offering to the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday, the company's CEO Mark Zuckerberg released somewhat of a quasi-philosophical letter in coincidence with the high-profile event.

Touching upon a number of issues, ranging from the nature of personal relationships to the role that technology can play in political cataclysm, Zuckerberg's letter strangely contained a rather bizarre ode to "the hacker way."

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The retrieval of Megaupload users' data will apparently not be an easy process because of the fact that the possibility of a clash of interests of the users with those of copyright owners may pose some notable legal hurdles.

Even though a temporary respite has come for Megaupload users in the form of the consent by the two host servers - Carpathia Hosting and Cogent Communications - about avoiding deletion of data for another two weeks, it still will be quite an uphill task to enable the users to actually retrieve the files that they have uploaded on the shuttered file-sharing site.

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The European Union (EU)'s anti-trust agency, the European Commission, disclosed on Tuesday that it has initiated a formal probe to ascertain whether any competition laws have been violated by South Korean tech biggie Samsung by disallowing fair licensing of 3G-related patents to its competitors.

The 3G patent licensing practices adopted by Samsung have come under the scanner of the EU regulators in the wake of the ongoing legal scuffles between Samsung and Apple as well as with other rival companies.

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With reports saying that social networking giant Facebook may likely file its initial public offering (IPO) with the Securities and Exchange Commission as early as Wednesday, one pertinent question which is probably crossing the minds of some of the over 800 million Facebook users is whether they would be able a part of what will apparently be a truly historic deal.

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That the online social networks are witnessing extraordinary popularity is evident from the fact that while Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are already being widely used all across the world, two other social networks – the fast-growing Google+ and Pinterest - have also been making big leaps of late!

According to the statistics forthcoming from several reports, Internet search giant’s last-summer-launched Google+ social network already boasts over 90 million users; and, going by some estimates, it is likely to touch the ‘400 million users’ milestone this year.

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According to the findings of a recent survey by computer security firm Sophos, a lot of Facebook users are concerned about the changes which the popular social network is currently in the process of bringing about via its new Timeline feature.

Sophos, which surveyed more than 4,000 Facebook users, found that nearly 51 percent of the users were apprehensive about the Timeline feature which Facebook is rolling out; while 32 percent of them admitted that they did not know whether the changes were a cause for worry.

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