Live streaming video from a smartphone may soon be known as "meerkatting" thanks to a new app which allows anyone with an iPhone to become a roving reporter.

The free application called Meerkat has become a virtual overnight sensation since its low-key arrival on Apple's online App Store late last month, winning over journalists, politicians, self-anointed pundits, social media celebrities and others.

Global sales of tablet computers will see only slim growth in 2015, in a further cooling of a segment that was red-hot two years ago, a market tracker said Thursday.

IDC said it expects tablet sales growth of just 2.1 percent this year, after an increase of 4.4 percent in 2014 and more than 50 percent in 2013.

Twitter has become the latest online platform to ban "revenge porn," or the posting of sexually explicit images of a person without consent.

In updated terms of service released Wednesday, Twitter explicitly banned "intimate photos or videos that were taken or distributed without the subject's consent."

South Korea has developed smartphone apps to help bring down its high student suicide rate by warning parents when their children might be at risk, the education ministry said Friday.

The government-developed apps, which the ministry hopes to introduce immediately, are programmed to detect "suicide-related" words used by children on social networks or in messages or Internet searches on their phones.

Apple has restored service to its widely used iTunes and app stores after a rare breakdown Wednesday.

The outage vexed the iPhone and iPad maker for more than five hours, disrupting some of the world's most widely used and profitable services and frustrating millions of music lovers and mobile device owners around the world.

Get ready to see more red warning signs online as Google adds ammunition to its technological artillery for targeting devious schemes lurking on websites.

The latest weapon is aimed at websites riddled with "unwanted software" — a term that Google uses to describe secretly installed programs that can change a browser's settings without a user's permission. Those revisions can unleash a siege of aggravating ads or redirect a browser's users to search engines or other sites that they didn't intend to visit.

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba will invest $200 million in Snapchat, the vanishing-image service, Bloomberg News and a person familiar with the deal said Thursday.

U.S. media reported last year that Snapchat -- which allows the sending of text and photo messages that disappear seconds after being viewed -- had held discussions with Alibaba.

Nokia says it has started providing mapping services for free download in Apple's App Store, after a successful launch of the service on Android devices.

The HERE offline maps, with navigation and search features covering more than 150 countries, is immediately available for devices using the iOS operating system, such as iPhones and iPads.

Google launched a virtual tour of Nepal's Everest region on Thursday, allowing armchair tourists a rare glimpse of life in one of the toughest and most inaccessible places on earth.

The Street View project takes viewers into the heart of the Sagarmatha national park, home to the world's highest mountain, where icy blue rivers run below snow-capped peaks, monks play traditional music and yak-herders navigate precipitous stone-strewn trails.

Google chief financial officer Patrick Pichette is retiring after nearly seven years as one of the Internet titan's top executives.

His pending departure was disclosed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing available online Tuesday.