Nissan's Leaf electric car can feed power from its battery back into a family home and run appliances for up to two days under a new project the Japanese car-maker unveiled Tuesday.

Using the "Leaf to Home" system, the lithium-ion batteries of the zero tailpipe emission Leaf can be used as an emergency power backup for the home during a natural disaster or a power blackout, Nissan said.

Twitter announced on Monday it has closed a deal for a "significant" round of new funding led by Russian investment company Digital Sky Technologies (DST).

Twitter did not reveal the amount raised for the wildly popular real-time micro-blogging service but the technology blog All Things Digital reported last month that the deal would be worth $800 million and value the company at $8 billion.

Google, which is offering an online bargain service in three US cities, has acquired The Dealmap, a company that aggregates local deals.

"We are impressed with what The Dealmap team has accomplished and excited to welcome them to Google," a Google spokeswoman said in a statement.

Australia's government plans to post video on YouTube and Facebook of the first group of asylum seekers sent to Malaysia under a pact between the countries to swap refugees, in an attempt to deter others from taking dangerous boat journeys to Australia.

Releasing video of the asylum seekers at Christmas Island — an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean — boarding a plane, and arriving in Malaysia will help raise awareness of Australia's new policy, Immigration Minister Chris Bowen said Tuesday.

The German industrial group Siemens said Monday it will form a joint venture focused on gas turbines with the Russian firm Power Machines, as Siemens moves away from nuclear energy activities.

A Siemens statement said it would own 65 percent of a joint entity, and would in exchange give back a stake of 25 percent plus one share that it owns in Power Machines to the firm's dominant shareholder, Highstat.

Tucked away in a small warehouse on a dead-end street, an Internet pioneer is building a bunker to protect an endangered species: the printed word.

Brewster Kahle, 50, founded the nonprofit Internet Archive in 1996 to save a copy of every Web page ever posted. Now the MIT-trained computer scientist and entrepreneur is expanding his effort to safeguard and share knowledge by trying to preserve a physical copy of every book ever published.

Digital music service Spotify, which recently arrived in the U.S., has been sued by music and video streaming software maker PacketVideo for allegedly violating a patent it holds for digital music distribution.

In court documents filed this week in U.S. District Court in the Southern District of California, PacketVideo said it believes Spotify's free and paid music-streaming service violates its patent for a "device for the distribution of music in digital form." The patent covers methods for streaming copyright-protected music from a central device over data networks.

At a weekend conference for online video, one might expect cute puppies or unlucky skateboarders to be in attendance. Perhaps a "Twilight" cast member or teenage viral video star Rebecca Black would be there?

Yet none of the above is present, though one panel — "I Got This, You Got This, Now You Know It" — is named after a lyric from Black's viral music video sensation "Friday."

When the English Defense League sprang to life two years ago, it had fewer than 50 members — a rough-and-tumble bunch of mostly white guys shouting from a street corner about what they viewed as uncontrolled Muslim immigration.

Now, the far-right group mentioned by confessed Norway gunman Anders Behring Breivik as an inspiration says its ranks have swollen to more than 10,000 people, a spectacular rise its leaders attribute to the immense global power of Facebook and other social networking sites.

Apple and Samsung have overtaken long-time leader Nokia for the top two spots in the global Smartphone market, a report said Friday, underscoring the Finnish handset maker's ongoing struggles.

U.S.-based research firm Strategy Analytics said the U.S. and Korean Smartphone makers outpaced Nokia in the second quarter, with the sector posting record quarterly shipments of 110 million units, or a 76.3 percent year-on-year rise.