South Korea's Samsung Electronics will this year focus on developing new products and tapping into new businesses to get ahead of competitors amid the global economic slowdown, its chairman said Monday.

Lee Kun-Hee, in a New Year's speech to employees, said existing businesses would experience a stagnation in growth, and that new start-ups would provide the best opportunities even although they will find it increasingly competitive during the downturn.

Hackers launched a series of New Year's day attacks that temporarily shut down several Philippine government websites including the office of the vice-president, officials said Monday.

Vice President Jejomar Binay said hackers calling themselves the PrivateX group brought down his official website for 15 hours Sunday and denied access to mostly migrant Filipinos checking on his office's activities.

Supporting leading educational technology and corporate business innovation, the British Ambassador to Lebanon Tom Fletcher hosted, the British company ‘Promethean’ and its Local partner in Lebanon, Education Technology Manager, IET, at his residence for a reception to present and launch 'Promethean' - the Interactive board to the private sector.

The event was attended by Eugene Viskovic “President Promethean International and Rabih Baalbaki Education Technology Manager, IET, Head of the Catholic schools, father Marwan Tabet, Director General of the ministry of Education Fady Yarak, in addition to representatives from the IT sectors, the military, private businesses and heads of private and public schools.

Online "hacktivist" group Anonymous has released a trove of email addresses and credit card numbers stolen from the website of intelligence analysis firm Stratfor and promised further attacks.

In a statement on Pastebin.com late Thursday, members of Anonymous calling themselves "AntiSec" posted links to what the group said were 75,000 names, addresses, credit card numbers and passwords for Stratfor customers.

Leading U.S. wireless carrier Verizon Wireless backed down Friday on instituting a $2 charge for people paying their bills by credit card after a sweeping popular backlash over the plan.

The reversal just one day after announcing the fee came also after the industry regulator, the Federal Communications Commission, told The New York Times it would investigate the matter "on behalf of American consumers."

A federal grand jury indicted six foreign nationals on charges that they defrauded hundreds of customers out of more than $4 million in bogus Internet car sales, federal prosecutors said Thursday

The 24-count indictment returned Wednesday alleges a scheme in which vehicles were offered for sale on legitimate websites that deal in auto trading, according to a statement from the U.S. attorney's office.

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion's share of the U.S. smartphone market declined during the three months ending in November, while Apple and Google's Android platform both made gains, industry tracker comScore said Thursday.

The Waterloo, Ontario-based RIM saw its share of U.S. smartphone subscribers fall to 16.6 percent at the end of November from 19.7 percent at the end of August, according to comScore.

Google was the most-visited Web destination in the United States in 2011, followed by Facebook and Yahoo!, industry tracker Nielsen said Thursday.

Google received an average of 153.4 million unique U.S. visitors a month from home and work computers, according to Nielsen.

Amazon said Thursday that it sold more than one million Kindles a week in December with the new Kindle Fire tablet computer its top-selling item.

This year saw "the best holiday ever for the Kindle family as customers purchased millions of Kindle Fires and millions of Kindle e-readers," the Seattle-based online retail giant said in a statement.

Here's one way to sum up 2011: I added 71 people as Facebook friends, shared 26 links and commented on 98 of my friends' status updates. I was tagged in 33 photos and added 18 of my own to the site.

I also attempted to keep up with Facebook's endless redesigns, most recently with the introduction of Timeline. With it, your Facebook profile offers highlights from your past, not just your recent happenings. Last week, I urged all of you to carefully curate your Timelines to avoid coming across as vain or revealing forgotten skeletons.