Instagram on Thursday broke its square mold with an update that adds portrait and landscape formats to the image-sharing smartphone application.

"Square format has been and always will be part of who we are," Instagram said in a blog post.

Apple on Thursday sent out invitations to a Sept. 9 media event, hinting that Siri virtual assistant software in its mobile devices will play a role.

In trademark enigmatic style, the emailed invitations provided little more than the time and place of the event. Beneath graphics based on the Apple logo was written "Hey Siri, give us a hint."

Facebook boasted of a new benchmark Thursday in its seemingly inexorable march to Internet ubiquity: a billion people used the social network in a single day.

"We just passed an important milestone," chief executive and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg declared in a post on his Facebook page.

Popular Japanese messaging app Line said Friday it was still considering plans for an initial public offering, after a report said it had shelved the sale for a second year in a row.

Line's owner, South Korean Internet firm Naver, was preparing an IPO for the company in 2014, but reportedly postponed it to focus on the messaging app's expansion.

Samsung's new smartphones and tablets might not offer enough to entice current iPhone and iPad users to switch, but they keep Samsung at the head of the class among Android gadget makers.

The new Galaxy devices come weeks before comparable updates from Apple are expected. In a sense, if Samsung can't beat the competition in sales, it can at least beat it to store shelves.

U.S. prosecutors said Tuesday that a staff member of video game maker Machine Zone has been charged with stealing trade secrets after learning he was to lose his job.

Jing Zeng, 42, could be sentenced to a maximum of ten years in prison and a fine of $250,000 if convicted in the case filed in U.S. federal court in San Francisco.

It's OK to use your smartphone walking down the street or on public transportation. But not at a family dinner. And definitely not in church.

Users of mobile devices are struggling to find the rules of the road for how and when to use the devices around others, but a survey out Wednesday shows a surprising consensus.

Roving construction crews - the kind you see blacktopping a road, painting lines, inspecting a bridge or installing a traffic signal - are often protected from oncoming traffic by a specialized truck outfitted with a crash barrier.

The crash trucks, fitted with a device called a truck-mounted attenuator, have been credited with saving lives. But the workers who drive them are inevitably placed in harm's way, "literally waiting to be struck," said Robert Roy, president of Royal Truck & Equipment Inc. in Coopersburg.

Microsoft (NasdaqGS: MSFT - news) said Monday its Cortana virtual assistant software was available to users of Android mobile devices.

Cortana is Microsoft's answer to Apple (NasdaqGS: AAPL - news) 's Siri and Google Now, which respond to voice commands on mobile devices.

Russia's media watchdog said Tuesday it had lifted a short-lived ban on Russian-language Wikipedia over an entry on a form of cannabis.

Roskomnadzor said Wikipedia had complied with a court order and edited an entry about charas, a substance made from the resin of the cannabis plant.