Facebook on Tuesday announced a $2-billion deal to buy a startup behind virtual reality headgear that promises to let people truly dive into their friends' lives.

Facebook co-founder and chief Mark Zuckerberg said that the acquisition of Oculus was a long-term bet that making the social network's offerings more immersive would pay off.

Google on Monday said it is joining forces with the frame giant behind Ray-Ban and other brands to create and sell Glass Internet-linked eyewear in the U.S.

The California-based technology titan billed the partnership with Luxottica as its "biggest step yet into the emerging smart eyewear market."

Text messaging may be dying out as a means of communication in many parts of the advanced world, but it may yet prove to be a vital life-saver in flood-prone African villages.

An early-warning system that aims to capitalize on the explosive growth of mobile phone penetration in Africa could soon be in place to broadcast alerts to all users at risk from natural disasters such as flooding or hurricanes.

King Digital, the company behind the wildly mobile game "Candy Crush Saga," is scheduled to make its debut on the New York Stock Exchange this week.

The company could be valued as high as $7.6 billion if its initial public offering prices at $24 per share, the upper end of its expected range. That's nearly twice as much as its closest rival Zynga Inc., the creator of "FarmVille."

Control of the Internet should be handed from U.S. supervision to a diverse group of stakeholders, and not to governments that could limit freedoms, a meeting on the web's future heard Monday.

Organizers also said that a U.S. decision to relinquish control was not the result of any one event -- after speculation it came under pressure from snooping disclosures from former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

Apple is in talks with U.S. cable and Internet giant Comcast about a streaming-television service that would use an Apple set-top box, a report said Sunday.

Talks are in their early stages but any deal would allow Apple to get special treatment on Comcast's cables to ensure it bypasses congestion on the web, The Wall Street Journal said, citing people familiar with the matter.

Finnish telecom company Nokia on Monday said the sale of its handset business to U.S. technology giant Microsoft would be delayed by a few weeks until April 2014.

Nokia said that it continued to make progress with Microsoft in the closing conditions and the integration planning, but was still waiting for the approval of "certain antitrust authorities in Asia which are still conducting their reviews".

Sitting in his office in Bhutan's sleepy capital, newspaper editor Tenzing Lamsang muses on the dramatic impact of cell phone technology on a remote Himalayan kingdom known as the "last Shangri-La".

"Bhutan is jumping from the feudal age to the modern age," said Lamsang, editor of The Bhutanese biweekly and online journal. "It's bypassing the industrial age."

The E-Trade baby will finally stop talking.

In the investor site's new ad, the baby — who looks like a harmless, adorable tot but talks like a character out of "The Wolf of Wall Street" — is upstaged by a cat named Beanie that sings. The tot quits in disgust at the end of the ad.

Who would have expected a toilet to one day filter water, charge a cellphone or create charcoal to combat climate change?

These are lofty ambitions beyond what most of the world's 2.5 billion people with no access to modern sanitation would expect. Yet, scientists and toilet innovators around the world say these are exactly the sort of goals needed to improve global public health amid challenges such as poverty, water scarcity and urban growth.