The iconic designer behind the simulation video games "Sim City" and "The Sims" wants people to tell stories visually on their mobile phones.

Will Wright has created a mobile app called Thred. The idea is to "explore and share visual ideas with friends" — through "threds" of images and links. For some, this can mean a collection of Internet jokes; for others, travel photos and articles. If you give Thred permission, it will access your phone's photos and track your location so that you can post a thread of the day's meals, or the snapshots of flowers you shot on a Sunday trip to the botanical gardens.

Google on Friday added a feature that lets people in the U.S. order food directly from mobile searches for local restaurants.

The move came as the Internet titan maneuvers to stay in tune with the trend of smartphones being used to seek out local venues and weave itself into online commerce.

During more than a decade as a ticketing agent, Jean-Sebastien Gosuin over and again saw empty seats at sold-out events from FIFA soccer matches to the Olympics.

This inspired him to team up with two other Belgian entrepreneurs to create Seaters, a ticket-fielding platform and app designed to give fans second shots at seats that become available at events that are technically sold-out.

Swedish telecoms group Ericsson announced Friday it was stepping up its pursuit of Apple for alleged unlicensed use of its technology in iPhones and other wireless devices by filing lawsuits in Britain, Germany and the Netherlands.

"Apple continues to profit from Ericsson's technology without having a valid license in place," Kasim Alfalahi, Ericsson's chief intellectual property officer, said in a statement.

Social media networks like Facebook are not putting users in an ideological information bubble, despite fears to the contrary, a new research report said Thursday.

The study published in the journal Science, based on an analysis of 10 million Facebook users and seven million web links, found many of the shared stories allowed people to get viewpoints different from their own.

Fitbit on Thursday filed paperwork with U.S. regulators to go public with a stock offering on the New York Stock Exchange.

The San Francisco-based company known for wearable devices designed to promote healthy lifestyles by tracking activity gave a preliminary target of about $100 million for the initial public offering, but the figure will likely change by the time shares are released.

Google's first campus for startups and entrepreneurs in Asia opened on Friday in a glitzy neighborhood of South Korea's capital Seoul.

Google cited South Korea's flourishing startup scene and pervasive smartphone use as the reasons for picking Seoul after opening similar sites in London and Tel Aviv.

A startup company wants to make your emails vanish forever -- but in a good way.

The firm, Confidential CC, has created an application that lets people send self-destructing messages from whatever email accounts they fancy.

Bogota-based startup Biko is out to make bicycling pay off for riders in traffic-choked cities around the world.

The creators of a mobile app that lets bicyclists track their routes and then rewards them with discounts or deals at local merchants, was at a Collision technology conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday seeking investors to help it spread beyond Colombia.

A Google toolbar to streamline tasks -- such as searching the Internet or bookmarking online pages with Web browsing programs -- made its debut in Cuba on Wednesday.

The U.S.-based Internet colossus updated its Spanish-language blog to put out word that people in Cuba could download the toolbar, which can be affixed atop browsers for quick access to Google services or capabilities when venturing online.