An incubator for entrepreneurs flying the colors of the Nasdaq opened in San Francisco on Thursday, promising to strengthen ties between Silicon Valley startups and the electronic exchange.

The nonprofit Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center billed its mission as being a hub where entrepreneurs from all industries can learn to build successful businesses and connect with experts, mentors, backers and more.

Facebook users experienced a brief outage of the huge social network Thursday, with many turning to Twitter to vent frustration or joke about the incident.

The monitoring website Currentlydown showed Facebook offline for around 14 minutes from around 1630 GMT. The news website TechRadar pegged the outage at 22 minutes, and others gave varying estimates.

Virtual reality is a dream of video game lovers, but it is poised to blast far beyond play to education, medicine, architecture and other learning arenas. 

Thanks to head gear from Facebook-owned Oculus VR (Rift) and Sony's "Project Morpheus" -- now renamed PlayStation VR -- virtual reality is expected to hit the mainstream next year.

He has 30 million fans on Facebook and tweets multiple times a day -- but as Narendra Modi visits Silicon Valley this weekend, it is Indian technology that will be center-screen.

India's social media-addicted prime minister is looking to tap investors' pockets on the trip and win support from the Valley giants to burnish his Digital India campaign.

Oyster, the startup seeking to be the "Netflix for e-books" by offering unlimited reading for a monthly fee, says its story is coming to an end.

The company announced in a blog late Monday it "will be taking steps to sunset the existing Oyster service over the next several months."

Microsoft launched its new Office suite, touting the key software as a collaborative tool which can work across multiple devices.

The new software, one of the key products from the U.S. tech giant, is being adapted to Microsoft's strategy shifting away from one-time sales to an Internet cloud-based system that can be accessed from PCs as well as mobile devices.

The Washington Post said Tuesday it would provide all its content for Facebook's "Instant Articles" service as the social network expands efforts to partner with news organizations.

The US daily, owned by tech entrepreneur Jeff Bezos, was among the latest high-profile partners added to the program, which aims to deliver news articles over the social network, where many people already get news.

Instagram has rocketed past the 400-million-user mark, with more than 80 million pictures shared daily at the Facebook-owned service.

The number of people sharing pictures and videos each month using Instagram soared from 300 million at the start of this year and tops the number of people using Twitter monthly by nearly 100 million.

It's not just another iPhone launch. This time, Apple is pushing not only a new device, but what it says is a new relationship with its customers.

By offering for the first time monthly installment payments on direct sales and a new lease option for U.S. customers, Apple is moving to help break the stranglehold of mobile carriers as it launches its new iPhones on Friday.

Micha Benoliel grew up in France and launched his first technology startup there, but he never forgot the atmosphere of adventure and optimism in San Francisco, where he studied in the early 1990s.

So when he came up with an idea for a smartphone app that could send messages without Internet or cellular connections, he went back to California in 2011 to pursue his dream.