German newlywed Sandra Scharf entered a bar in the tourist town of Key West earlier this week looking for her wedding dress. Thanks to some fast thinking by the owner of a different bar and the wonders of social networking, she managed to get it back.

Around noon Tuesday, the co-owner of Key West's popular Island Dogs Bar was standing outside his watering hole when two tourists ran up carrying a garment bag they said had just fallen off a sport utility vehicle.

Internet giant Google said Friday that it is pulling the plug on its online news reader Fast Flip and closing Aardvark, a "social search" service it bought last year.

Google said it is winding down Fast Flip, which was unveiled in September 2009, and shutting down Aardvark as part of the closure announced last month of its experimental test bed Google Labs.

The brother of former U.S. president George W. Bush has opened an account with the most popular micro blogging service in China, where his musings on his daughter's wedding have attracted tens of thousands of followers.

Neil Bush, who runs an oil company in Texas and is nine years younger than his better-known sibling, only opened his account with Sina's Weibo -- China's answer to Twitter -- on Tuesday, with the help of a Chinese-speaking assistant.

When it comes to mobile shopping, so far there's more buzz than buy.

As the number of people who use iPhones and other smartphones grows, companies selling everything from hardware to high fashion are touting all the new applications they're rolling out that enable shoppers to do anything from check a store's inventory while in the dressing room to order prescriptions.

Sony Corp. said Thursday it wants to become the biggest player in Japan's growing Android tablet market by changing the way the devices are used.

The Japanese electronics and entertainment giant unveiled its first tablets to the rest of the world Wednesday, diving into the intense race at home and abroad to catch Apple's iPad.

Netflix's negotiations to keep a key piece of its Internet video library have collapsed, dealing a major blow to the largest U.S. video subscription service as it raises the prices for most of its 25 million customers. The setback triggered a nearly 9 percent drop in Netflix Inc.'s stock price.

Starz Entertainment delivered the bad news Thursday in a terse statement announcing that it won't renew a contract that allows Netflix to show a lineup of recently released movies and TV shows over high-speed Internet connections.

The Obama administration has explained its effort to block AT&T's purchase of T-Mobile USA by saying it will fight mergers that would reduce competition and hurt consumers.

Yet few think the lawsuit the administration filed Wednesday signals a more aggressive stance toward acquisitions in other industries. Rather, experts say, the administration's challenge of AT&T's purchase comes down to this: Telecom is dominated by just a few big companies. Reducing the number of major players could all but kill competition and drive prices up.

Turkmenistan gave away thousands of free Chinese-made laptops to first-grade students who will start school this year, a source in the ministry of education told Agence France Presse on Thursday.

"Around 100,000 first-grade students were given priceless gifts from our honorable president -- computer notebooks for the new school year," the source said.

Facebook is preparing to bolster the programming tools it offers to licensed music services like Rhapsody, Spotify, MOG and Rdio to make it easier for users of the social network to find out what songs their friends are digging.

The tools won't amount to a unique music service on its own, since Facebook has not negotiated licensing deals with major music companies, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Hewlett-Packard said Tuesday it plans one last production run of the TouchPad, which has become a hot seller following a price cut and the announcement the company was killing the tablet computer.

Citing disappointing sales, HP, the world's largest personal computer maker, announced on August 18 that it was ending production of the TouchPad, its rival to Apple's iPad, after just seven weeks on the market.