Silicon Valley nobility and political heavyweights paid tribute to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs on Sunday at a private memorial service at Stanford University, local media said.

Security teams from Apple and Stanford along with local police officers cordoned off the main quad on campus, only granting access to those with invitations to the event in honor of Jobs, who died earlier this month.

The longest BlackBerry outage in many years left customers outraged this week, threatening to cost the granddaddy of all smartphones more business when it's already struggling to keep up in a crowded marketplace.

The three-day blackout interrupted email and Internet services for tens of millions of frustrated users and inflicted more damage on an already tarnished brand.

Cliff Blezenski was initially hesitant to think of "Gears of War" as a trilogy. The design director at Epic Games and mastermind behind the chainsaw-slicing video game shooter series knew that gamers were a particularly judgmental bunch, especially when it comes to the interactive industry's gluttonous strategy of constructing franchises from the ground up.

"I think if you come out and say, 'This is the start of a trilogy,' gamers get defensive, cross their arms and say, 'We'll see,'" said Blezenski. "You have to play it game by game. We had ideas of where each game could go in the series, but until we had confirmation, we never really started work on a sequel, except for coming up with pie-in-the-sky ideas."

Apple's iPhone 4S was available in several Beijing shops Saturday, despite not officially being for sale in China.

"Today we have got two from Canada, they're 11,000 yuan ($1,720) each. If you're interested, you need to come straight away," a saleswoman at a mobile phone shop at Hailong market told Agence France Presse.

Google on Friday said it will kill its Buzz social networking tool in favor of young but fast-growing Google+ online community.

"We aspire to build great products that really change people's lives, products they use two or three times a day," Google product vice president Bradley Horowitz said echoing words spoken by chief executive Larry Page.

Scientists in Singapore said Friday they have discovered a process that can expand the data storage capacity of computer hard disks six-fold using a common kitchen ingredient -- table salt.

The discovery was made by Singapore's national research institute the Agency for Science, Technology and Research, in collaboration with the National University of Singapore and the Data Storage Institute.

Internet search engine Google insisted on Friday it was not stealing business from the print media even if it has become an increasingly important source of news on the Web.

"We are not making money on the back of newspapers," Stefan Tweraser, head of Google Germany, told a media industry conference in Vienna.

Apple fans in Australia on Friday became the first in the world to get their hands on the latest iPhone as the US technology giant unleashed its first device since the death of co-founder Steve Jobs.

In a party atmosphere, hundreds of people queued outside the technology giant's four-storey flagship Sydney store, filming the experience on their iPhones and iPads as staff inside clapped, cheered and chanted.

BlackBerry service has been restored worldwide after several days of outages, the head of the company that makes the smartphones said Thursday.

"All of the services are back up globally," Research in Motion (RIM) founder and president Mike Lazaridis told a press conference.

Facebook, Twitter and other social media websites boost public awareness of disease outbreaks but also make it more difficult to separate fact from fiction, world health officials said on Thursday.

World Health Organization (WHO) director-general Margaret Chan said the Geneva-based U.N. body scans websites and online forums in different languages for indications of outbreaks across the world.