U.S. technology giant Hewlett-Packard (HP) on Thursday cut the price of its freshly-launched TouchPad tablet computers in a bid to gain traction in a market dominated by Apple's iPad.

TouchPads with 16 gigabytes of memory were offered on the HP website for $400 and models with 32 gigabytes were available for $500 in what amounted to lopping $100 off the original prices.

The weak economy is hitting Americans where they spend a lot of their free time: at the TV set.

They're canceling or forgoing cable and satellite TV subscriptions in record numbers, according to an analysis by The Associated Press of the companies' quarterly earnings reports.

Internet search leader Google Inc. is bringing a little more gamesmanship to its duel with Facebook.

Just like they have been doing for years on Facebook's website, Web surfers will now be able to play games with their friends and family on Google's blossoming social networking service.

German police officers in the northern city of Hanover are using Facebook to catch criminals in an experiment that might be expanded to other forces in the country.

Six months' ago the Hanover police force set up a Facebook account with appeals to the public to come forward to help solve cases.

Taiwan's leading smartphone maker HTC said Thursday it plans to pay about $309 million for a 51 percent stake in a firm run by U.S. star producer Dr Dre that produces high-end headphones.

HTC and Beats Electronics LLC are working together to create a line of HTC headsets offering "high performance sound" to be available this fall, a company statement said.

Online video-streaming service Hulu has announced plans to being streaming television shows and films in Japan later this year in the firm's first move into a market outside the United States.

"Since the very beginning of Hulu, we have had our aspirations firmly set on serving audiences around the globe," California-based Hulu said in a blog post.

Culture-changing technology outshined crude oil on Wednesday with iPhone and iPad maker Apple eclipsing ExxonMobil as the most valuable company in the world based on the value of its stock.

Despite an overall dismal day on the stock exchange, Apple ended trading with its stock priced at $363.69 per share for a total "market capitalization" of $337.2 billion.

American retail giant Walmart will close its online digital music store, Walmart MP3 Downloads, at the end of the month, a spokesman for the company said.

"We recently notified our music partners that we've made a business decision to no longer offer MP3 digital tracks as of August 29, 2011," said Ravi Jariwala.

Research In Motion was threatened with reprisals Tuesday if it released encrypted communications of its British Blackberry users to help British police quell days of violent looting.

A group or person identified only as Team Poison hacked RIM's official blog and posted a message online warning the Canadian firm against assisting police in identifying rioters and looters thought to have used Blackberry instant messaging to coordinate attacks in London and other cities engulfed by rioting.

Facebook launched a mobile messaging application Tuesday for Apple's iPhone and Android devices.

Facebook engineer Lucy Zhang said Facebook Messenger can be used to exchange messages with Facebook friends but also with other people in a user's telephone contact list.