Cricket Communications said Thursday it would be the first U.S. carrier to offer the iPhone to customers under a prepaid plan, a move expanding the footprint of the wildly popular Apple device.

Cricket, a unit of Leap Wireless International, will offer the iPhone 4S and iPhone 4 with its $55 per month, all-inclusive plan.

One out of seven Americans who go online use Twitter and eight percent do it every day, a survey showed Thursday.

The survey by the Pew Research Center found the number of Twitter users has doubled in the past two years to 15 percent of online adults.

Microsoft on Thursday released the final test version of its next-generation Windows software crafted to power devices ranging from tablets to desktop computers.

"We're thrilled to be at this milestone with the Windows 8 Release Preview," said Windows and Windows Live division president Steven Sinofsky.

Microsoft's Skype Internet telephone service hopes to quadruple the number of users to get to one billion, division president Tony Bates said Thursday.

Bates, who heads the unit that was acquired by Microsoft last year but operates autonomously, said growth will come from mobile users and from partnerships like the one Skype has with Facebook.

The boom in the number of mobile Internet devices and tablet computers in use will help quadruple Web traffic in the coming years, a study said Wednesday.

The Cisco Visual Networking Index said global Internet traffic by 2016 will be 1.3 zettabytes. A zettabyte is one trillion gigabytes, or one sextillion bytes.

Google on Wednesday added the Zagat restaurant review content to its Google+ social network, as it rolled out a new local search feature that takes on services such as Yelp.

The Internet giant added a "Local" tab to its Google+ social network to allow users to search for specific places or browse for nearby businesses or services.

Silicon Valley stars on Wednesday argued that the mobile-focused Internet startups will shine despite the dim stock market debut by leading social network Facebook.

Facebook, which ended the trading day almost $10 below its Nasdaq debut price of $38 a share, has sparked worry that technology startups are overprice in risky scenario reminiscent of the dot-com bubble burst some 12 years ago.

Oracle boss Larry Ellison said Wednesday that he is out to dethrone IBM in the realm of business network hardware, including high-end computer servers.

"Our biggest competitor is IBM," Ellison said during an on-stage chat with Kara Swisher at the prestigious All Things Digital conference hosted by the Rupert Murdoch-owned technology news website.

Samsung on Tuesday released the first Chrome desktop computer that essentially shifts work into Internet "cloud" using a version of the Google Web browser as its operating system.

Staunch Google partner Samsung unveiled Series 3 Chromebox along with a beefed-up Series 5 Chromebook that is the latest in a line of Chrome-powered laptops introduced last year by Google.

Online retail powerhouse Amazon.com on Tuesday announced a collaboration with Microsoft to begin streaming films and television shows to Xbox 360 videogame consoles.

An "app" was made available for free download to let people with subscriptions to Xbox Live Gold view Amazon Prime video using Microsoft's popular videogame consoles linked to Internet.