New York -- Billionaire, Microsoft Corp co-founder "Paul Allen" yesterday refiled a last-minute revision of a patent infringement lawsuit against 11 popular tech companies namely: Apple Inc., Google Inc., Facebook, Netflix, Yahoo and others, which includes specific allegations of patent violation.

San Francisco -- Giant online retailer Amazon.com has never disclosed sales figures for its e-reader, the Kindle. It still has not, but the company on Monday trumpeted that the latest version of its popular Kindle e-reader, the Wi-Fi and third-generation Kindle, have surpassed its previous all-time bestseller, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," the company said.

New York -- Popular internet telephony service Skype has not had a very good week, which has been dealing with some serious downtime issues, but it looks like there is good news on the horizon. Skype is all set to knock FaceTime off its high chair, Skype is finally going to enter the market of mobile video calls, at the Consumer Electronics Show CES 2011, the VoIP telephony giant announced its video calling abilities is that the company is taking part in a panel called "Video Calling Gets Ready for Primetime".

Los Angeles -- Flash video on an iPad browser? You kidding? Skyfire, the alternative browser that uses some server-based trickery for iPhone and iPad that play back Flash video on the notoriously Flash-blocking devices, was added to the App Store Wednesday night for $4.99.

New York -- Micro blogging site Twitter may have geared up to become a major player in the thriving social Q&A space on Tuesday announced that it has acquired Fluther, a small California-based startup, which describes itself as a “free Q&A collective that specializes in getting fast answers from the right people,” for its engineering talent.

Redmond, Washington -- Software monopolists Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 is the most standards-compliant browser to date. Although, it still dawdles behind the rest of the pack when it comes to supporting the latest and greatest elements of HTML5 and CSS 3. To address that shortcoming, Microsoft has introduced a new HTML5 Labs site to give interested web developers a way to “preview” HTML5 features that would not be supported in Internet Explorer 9, but could make it into future updates.

The HTML5 Labs web-site will function as a virtual space for developers testing unstable web standards from various standards bodies such as W3C. The company mentions that coders can utilize the site in as a foundation-level resource in the knowledge that their sites will continue to work with build updates.

San Francisco -- Internet telephony giant Skype suffered an outage lasting several hours with millions of users around the globe have been hit by an outage Wednesday when the prominent internet telephony system was disrupted by a massive glitch.

The company which prides itself on delivering relatively reliable service last suffered a major outage in 2007. Millions of Skype users globally could not make calls -- or were dropped in mid-conversation -- because of a network connection failure that began about 9 a.m. Wednesday PST. Users as far afield as Japan, Europe and the US have all reported problems.

This outage marks the second time this year that the popular, low-priced calling service has suffered with a major outage, and this one was more widespread than the two-day disruption in 2007.

Skype issued an apology for the outage, which incapacitated millions of people who were unable to log on to the service or connect to any of their contacts and that the program is crashing across all platforms, whether on their mobile device or PC.

Los Angeles -- Found an error on MapQuest? Well, you now have the opportunity to fix it. The AOL subsidiary, making a rebirth tour last weekend harnessing the wealth of OpenStreetMap data, the innovator of online mapping from the 1990s launched a separate website that empowers users to correct factual errors, identify previously unmarked or newly added streets and destinations as well as define the best directions that real drivers know, and otherwise improve the mapped world around them.

This was anticipated, since the online mapping service provider MapQuest recently appointed Hurricane Coast to manage its $1 million open-source mapping investment fund in the United States. Now teaming with OpenStreetMap, MapQuest has unfolded a world where maps are editable by thousands of contributors, making for something akin to Wikipedia of maps.

Los Angeles -- Popular micro-blogging site Twitter, on Wednesday unleashed a revamped page for its business efforts, which prominently features its advertising services of Promoted Tweets, Promoted Trends and Promoted Accounts as well as opens the door to any advertiser who wants to appear on Twitter.

Los Angeles -- This is a day many of you have been waiting for. If you have been feeling neglected of the chatty world of Facebook lately, the latest edition of the social networking site's app should make you warm and fuzzy. The Facebook app for Android has slowly but surely been improving from its formerly awful state, and today it has finally been gifted with features that users have been expecting for quite some time now, adding a Chat interface as well as push notifications to the app.

Previously, Facebook chat was only accessible through apps like previously mentioned Trillian for Android, but the official solution works quite well. Version 1.5.0 is now in the Android Market and is bundled with many gifts including chat support and push notifications, two huge things that had been missing from the software before today.

London -- Popular micro-blogging service Twitter, which has proved a hit with President Barack Obama and Stephen Fry among others, is heading across the pond to establish its first office outside the United States sometime in 2011, with company representatives meeting with London property agents last week, according to British newspaper The Telegraph.

The London newspaper stated that Twitter's London office will manage all of the company's European operations. “It would essentially be used as a sales office as Twitter strives to turn its popularity into cash via advertising and sponsored tweets,” the Sunday Telegraph reported.

Los Angeles -- Moving closer to the world of Hulu and other premium TV sites, and as the copyright concerns fading thanks to Content ID advances, Google owned video-sharing site, YouTube on Thursday said that it was discarding the 15-minute limit on uploaded videos, beginning with a subset of users.

The change appears as more companies, like Hulu and Netflix, are offering people full-length television shows and movies over the Web, and as YouTube attempts to get people to watch its videos on bigger screens via Google TV.

Los Angeles -- Facebook's mobile presence has long been an essential part of the site, and if you use Facebook on your smartphone, you now have one less reason to visit the site on a regular browser, as the social networking giant is taking privacy issues more seriously and making these same controls available on mobile phones, so users can update and manage the info they share from wherever they are at.

Facebook now caters to more than 200 million users between its various mobile websites and smartphone applications. And due to excessive content gets posted from phones, Facebook has seen fit to port over its extensive privacy controls to mobile. The company just unveiled dashboard controls for mobile, which lets you tweak how apps interact with your profile right from your phone.

New York -- Amazon is not conceding defeat with the recently launched Google's eBookstore without a fight: Amazon executives on Tuesday demonstrated a new version of “Kindle for the Web” as it tries to play catch-up with search engine leader's new e-book effort, at a Google press event, which introduced a new, swifter version of the California technology giant's Chrome software for navigating the Internet, according to a Computerworld report.

New York -- Over the weekend, rumors are swirling around as to what might be taken as a reaction to Google integrating their competing Google Voice VoIP service directly into GMail, popular VoIP provider Skype is becoming more user friendly and could be gearing up to come up with a web-based voice service in the near future, possibly one that integrates video and chat services too.

Skype may be months away from launching web-based service that will allow users to use browser plugins rather than a dedicated client as was done in the past. According to job postings on Skype's website, the company is looking to form a team that will build an infrastructure capable of supporting hundreds of millions of users, a product which will deliver voice, video, chat and presence to the Internet and enable radically new Skype applications.

Los Angeles -- Netflix is currently the big monster of the movie streaming game but offerings from several established companies might put up a bit of fight. The WSJ is reporting that Amazon, the online shopping site is working on another streaming service with subscription feature similar to Netflix, which will somehow be bundled with the Amazon Prime service that is currently priced at $79 a year.

Los Angeles -- Social networking website Facebook, which has never been shy about tweaking its design, on Sunday unveiled a new set-up for profile pages that complements photos center stage, allow users to highlight important friends and go into far more detail on their jobs.

Some of the enormous changes include a new capsule at the top of a user's profile page that culls information they have already recorded in order to describe them in a few phrases, highlighting their job, relationship status, location, education and recent photos.

“And since there is often no better way to learn about a person than through photos, the profile now includes a row of recently tagged photos of you,” says Facebook engineer Josh Wiseman. “In my case, my profile features pics from my engagement and wedding, two of my life's most recent and happiest moments.”

Redmond, Washington -- Software monopolist Microsoft's MSN, which has unleashed a series of very successful sites with major magazine publishers over the last two years, is now joining hands with health and fitness publisher Rodale to launch a new interactive, multimedia online channel, Fitbie, devoted to fitness, nutrition and weight loss.

San Francisco -- eBay Inc. on Thursday announced that it has acquired local shopping search engine Milo, a website that lists real-time inventory for more than 50,000 U.S. retail stores across the nation in a move that will help the struggling e-commerce giant bridge the gap between online and in-store shopping, a market that others -- including notably Google -- are eyeing as well.

Milo is a local shopping search engine where consumers can look for products in stock at stores in their area. For retailers, Milo is a platform for driving online shoppers to offline stores. On its website, the Palo Alto company said its “mission is to bring every product, on every shelf, of every store in the physical world onto the Internet.” Milo currently has 140 retail partners and can deliver search results for some 3 million locally available products in about 52,000 stores across the U.S.

New York -- Online video viewers can rejoice now -- Google-owned video-sharing website YouTube on Thursday unveiled a new ad format dubbed “TrueView,” which allows users to select an ad-skipping button in the first 5 seconds and only charges advertisers for viewed ads. TrueView ad format should please users, advertisers alike.

Simply running ads with online video annoys most people without bringing much value to the advertiser. YouTube is trying to correct that by giving users the option of skipping ads, so only interested viewers will choose to watch. The new TrueView ad format also allows users to choose between ads, as Hulu.com does.

YouTube anticipates the ad format as a win-win for viewers and advertisers. The newly released TrueView video ads allow users to skip the ad in the first five seconds. The viewers can skip ads they have no interest in, and the latter gets to see who is watching the ads. Demographic and other information YouTube gathers on users can be used by advertisers to learn more about the people interested in the products or services promoted.