Apple is buying more flair, swagger and song-picking savvy with its $3 billion acquisition of Beats Electronics, a headphone and music streaming specialist founded by rapper Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine, one of the first recording executives to roll with the hip-hop culture.

Wednesday's announcement came nearly three weeks after deal negotiations were leaked to the media. It's by far the most expensive acquisition in Apple's 38-year history, a price that the company is paying to counter a threat posed to its iTunes store.

Global smartphone sales will jump 23 percent this year to more than 1.2 billion units, fueled by growth of low-cost handsets in emerging markets, a research firm said Wednesday.

An IDC survey said smartphone sales will maintain an annual growth rate of 12.3 percent through 2018.

Twitter hopes to eventually find a way to launch a service in China but has no immediate plans in the country, chief executive Dick Costolo said Wednesday.

Costolo told the Code Conference that the messaging service is in the "very beginning stages of conversations about what it would look like or feel like," according to the online news site Re/code, which sponsored the event.

Netflix on Tuesday announced a deal with Sony Pictures Television to stream "Cloudy and a Chance of Meatballs 2" and other animated films in the United States.

The move by the popular online television and film service was seen as a move intended to ramp up its appeal to children considered prime viewers of Sony's hit animation line-up.

Video game publisher Bethesda Softworks on Tuesday delayed release of eagerly awaited horror action title "The Evil Within" to October.

The team at Tango Gameworks wanted more time to "deliver the polished, terrifying pure survival horror experience they set out to create" when the title was originally given an August release date, according to Bethesda.

Online commerce titan Amazon.com on Tuesday said it doubted that it would soon bury the hatchet with book publisher Hachette.

Negotiations between Hachette and the biggest book seller in the United States over pricing, discounting and other terms for selling works have been unsuccessful.

Google has started building its own self-driving car that it hopes to begin testing as early as this year.

"They won’t have a steering wheel, accelerator pedal, or brake pedal because they don’t need them. Our software and sensors do all the work,"  the company said in a blog post Tuesday night.

China's ruling Communist Party is launching a new crackdown on popular instant messaging platforms including Tencent's WeChat, state media said Wednesday, the latest in a series of moves to stifle online speech.

The month-long campaign follows a similar clampdown last year on Sina Weibo, a Twitter-like microblogging service whose popularity has been hit as China's censors have tightened their grip.

A prolific computer hacker who infiltrated the servers of major corporations later switched sides and helped the U.S. government disrupt hundreds of cyberattacks on Congress, NASA and other sensitive targets, according to federal prosecutors.

New York prosecutors detailed the cooperation of Hector Xavier Monsegur for the first time in court papers while asking a judge to reward him with leniency at his sentencing Tuesday. They credited Monsegur with helping them cripple Anonymous, the notorious crew of hacktivists who stole confidential information, defaced websites and temporarily put some victims out of business.

Europe's moves to rein in Google — including a court ruling this month ordering the search giant to give people a say in what pops up when someone searches their name — may be seen in Brussels as striking a blow for the little guy.

But across the Atlantic, the idea that users should be able to edit Google search results in the name of privacy is being slammed as weird and difficult to enforce at best and a crackdown on free speech at worst.