After years of record profit growth, tech giant Samsung Electronics looks to be at a commercial crossroads as it searches for a new growth driver to counter slowing sales of its phenomenally successful smartphones.

Alarm bells have been sounding for a while over Samsung's reliance on smartphone sales in increasingly mature markets such as Europe and the United States, and increasingly competitive emerging markets like China.

Riding on its startup success and flush with fresh capital, taxi-hailing smartphone app Uber is making a big push into Asia. There's a twist, though: Instead of being the game-changing phenomena it was in the U.S., Uber faces a slew of competitors using similar technology.

The concept Uber helped pioneer just four years ago has transformed some markets before it even had a chance to enter them. Homegrown taxi apps are already slogging it out for dominance in numerous Asian countries.

The Authors Guild says that Google Inc. is stealing business from retailers and has asked a New York federal appeals court to find that the Internet giant is violating copyright laws with its massive book digitization project.

The Guild filed papers with the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday. The Guild asked the appeals court to reinstate its lawsuit alleging that Google's effort to create the world's largest digital library was violating the rights of authors.

The U.S. National Security Agency on Friday denied a report claiming it was aware of and even exploited the "Heartbleed" online security flaw to gather critical intelligence.

The stern denial came amid growing panic among Internet users the world over about the newly exposed flaw, after a report by Bloomberg News said the spy agency decided to keep quiet about the matter and even used it to scoop up more data, including passwords.

A lot more people are about to get a chance to buy Google Glass, the Internet-connected eyewear that has become the hottest accessory in geek fashion.

Google will sell the "Explorer" version of Glass to any U.S. resident who places an online order for the device beginning at 9 a.m. PDT (1800 GMT) April 15. The product will cost $1,500, the same price that Google Inc. has charged for Glass since sales of the device began last year, the company said Thursday.

Organizers of a search in a New Mexico landfill for a rumored stash of what some call the worst video game ever made by Atari announced Thursday that the dig will get under way this month.

The dig at the Alamogordo landfill where Atari reportedly discarded millions of "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" game cartridges in 1983 is scheduled for April 26, officials with Microsoft-owned Xbox said.

The latest version of Samsung's flagship Galaxy smartphone series went on sale worldwide Friday, days after the electronics giant announced it was facing a second consecutive quarter of profit decline.

The Galaxy S5 has a lot riding on it to steer the South Korean firm's profit-making machine back on track as growth in smartphone sales slows, with mature markets like North America and Europe near saturation.

British physicist Stuart Parkin, one of the brains behind the global "big data" revolution, on Wednesday won Finland's answer to the Nobel Prize, which is awarded by Technology Academy Finland.

"Prof. Parkin receives the 2014 Millennium Technology Prize in recognition of his discoveries, which have enabled a thousand-fold increase in the storage capacity of magnetic disk drives," the independent foundation said in a statement, adding that his innovations paved the way for streaming movies and other media via the Internet.

Dropbox is out to be the hip home in the cloud for photos, documents, video and other digital possessions amassed by Internet-age lifestyles.

Dropbox on Wednesday ramped up services for sharing and collaborating on virtual belongings ranging from Excel spreadsheets to family photos.

The battle of the tech giants is now moving into television.

Following the success of Netflix and a fresh push by Amazon in online video, the latest players looking to get into the gold rush may be Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL, among others.