Just in time for the back-to-school season, new laptops with extended battery life are hitting store shelves.

What these laptops have in common are microprocessors that belong to a new family of Intel chips called Haswell. The chips consume less power than previous generations and promise a 50 percent boost in battery life for watching video. The improvements extend to word processing, Web surfing and other computing tasks as well.

Few are more excited about Lego's new Mindstorms sets rolling out next month than Silicon Valley engineers.

Many of them were drawn to the tech sector by the flagship kits that came on the market in 1998, introducing computerized movement to the traditional snap-together toy blocks and allowing the young innovators to build their first robots. Now, 15 years later, those robot geeks are entrepreneurs and designers, and the colorful plastic bricks have an outsized influence in their lives.

Google Glass, a spectacle-like computing device drawing lots of attention, can serve as an automated tour guide with the help of a new application from a little-known startup hatched within the Internet's most powerful company.

The app, called "Field Trip," is being released Wednesday by Google-owned Niantic Labs for the 10,000 people currently testing an early model of Glass known as the Explorer edition. It becomes just the ninth app to be approved by Google Inc. for use on Glass during an experimental phase. The device's mass market release is expected early next year.

Google has been holding talks with the National Football League, raising speculation that the Internet monolith is seeking new inroads into television.

Other tech companies like Apple are reportedly in talks with cable providers to boost access to blockbuster television shows through their devices.

U.S. magazine publisher Conde Nast said Tuesday it would outsource to online giant Amazon the management of both its print and digital subscriptions.

The deal called "All Access" allows consumers to use their Amazon account to purchase, manage and renew their print and digital magazine subscriptions.

"The Sims" are getting in touch with their feelings.

The fourth edition of Maxis' successful life-simulating game will include more emotional versions of the virtual people whose lives players can manipulate.

Google said Tuesday it began integrating into its online maps features from the Waze traffic app it acquired earlier this year in a deal said to be worth some $1 billion.

"No one likes getting stuck in traffic. That's why the Waze and Google Maps teams are working together to harness the power of Google technology and the passion of the Waze community to make it easier to navigate your daily life," said the tech giant's Brian McClendon in a blog post.

News that Samsung will unveil a "smartwatch" next month has sent rumour mills into overdrive within the tech community as it second guesses what the much-hyped gadget will offer.

Wearable computing, including Google's smart glasses, is considered the next frontier in consumer electronics following smartphones.

After discovering a privacy bug on Facebook, unemployed Palestinian programmer Khalil Shreateh said he just wanted to collect the traditional $500 bounty the social network giant offers to those who voluntarily expose its glitches.

But when Facebook ignored his first two reports, Shreateh took his message to the top — and hacked into CEO Mark Zuckerberg's personal page to prove his point.

Apple has asked its Taiwan-based supplier to begin shipping two new versions of the iPhone next month, including a lower-cost model, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

The Journal, citing unnamed sources, said Taiwan-based Hon Hai Precision, the parent company of Foxconn in China, was readying both a standard iPhone with new upgrades and a less expensive model with fewer features.