Google is trying to upstage Siri, the sometimes droll assistant that answers questions and helps people manage their lives on Apple's iPhone and iPad.

The duel began Monday with the release of a free iPhone and iPad app that features Google Now, a technology that performs many of the same functions as Siri.

If a new study is to be believed, the "best performing Windows laptop" isn't a Windows laptop at all. It's an Apple MacBook Pro.

The 13-inch Apple laptop claimed the top spot in the study of laptops running Microsoft's Windows operating system, conducted by PC management service Soluto. Apple's 15-inch MacBook Pro also broke into the top 10, ringing in at number 6. Other PC manufacturers in the top 10 are Acer, Dell and Lenovo.

Research firm IDC said more smartphones than "dumb" phones are being made this year, a milestone in a shift that's putting computing power and Internet access in millions of hands worldwide.

Manufacturers shipped 216 million smartphones worldwide in the first three months of this year, compared with 189 million regular cellphones, according to a study IDC released late Thursday. IDC said smartphones made up 51.6 percent of the 419 million mobile phones shipped.

News website The Huffington Post will launch a German edition this year, the U.S.-based company and its media partner Tomorrow Focus, part of the Burda publishing group, said Monday.

A newsroom staffed with German journalists will be set up in the southern city of Munich in the coming months, and the site for Germany, Austria and Switzerland is set to go live later this year, both companies said.

As potentially game-changing as the steam engine or telegraph were in their day, 3D printing could herald a new industrial revolution, experts say.

For the uninitiated, the prospect of printers turning out any object you want at the click of a button may seem like the stuff of science fiction.

Last year, the inaugural Digital NewFronts didn't skimp on the hype.

Google, Hulu, Yahoo and others made brash, glitzy presentations to advertisers trumpeting their ascendancy in a rapidly changing media landscape. Even Jay-Z dropped by.

Consumers can expect to wait a while before they're able to lay their hands on Google's much-hyped Internet-connected eyewear, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt said Friday.

Google recently began shipping Google Glass to software developers who signed on to experiment with the device -- which integrates a tiny camera and voice recognition technology -- at a cost of $1,500 a pair.

Facebook co-founder and chief Mark Zuckerberg scored more than $2 billion worth of stock and $503,000 in base pay last year for running the world's leading social network.

Zuckerberg was also given bonuses that added up to slightly more than $266,000, according to a Facebook filing on Friday with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

Life in authoritarian states is likely to get tougher before it gets better as their citizens gain more access to the Internet, Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt said Friday.

Speaking at a seminar in Washington, Schmidt said hundreds of millions of people in non-democratic nations will be trading in their basic cellphones for Internet-connected smartphones as prices fall over the next few years.

Hackers broke into a daily deals website backed by online retail titan Amazon.com and breached the accounts of 50 million members, according to a report Friday by All Things Digital.

Names, birth dates and encrypted password information was swiped in a cyber-attack at LivingSocial, according to a report at AllThingsD.com.