British physicist Stuart Parkin, one of the brains behind the global "big data" revolution, on Wednesday won Finland's answer to the Nobel Prize, which is awarded by Technology Academy Finland.

"Prof. Parkin receives the 2014 Millennium Technology Prize in recognition of his discoveries, which have enabled a thousand-fold increase in the storage capacity of magnetic disk drives," the independent foundation said in a statement, adding that his innovations paved the way for streaming movies and other media via the Internet.

Dropbox is out to be the hip home in the cloud for photos, documents, video and other digital possessions amassed by Internet-age lifestyles.

Dropbox on Wednesday ramped up services for sharing and collaborating on virtual belongings ranging from Excel spreadsheets to family photos.

The battle of the tech giants is now moving into television.

Following the success of Netflix and a fresh push by Amazon in online video, the latest players looking to get into the gold rush may be Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL, among others.

Facebook has hit more than 100 million users in India, making it only the second country after the United States to achieve the milestone, the social network company has said.

The mobile phone market was driving growth in India along with better Internet coverage across the country of 1.2 billion people, said Kevin D'Souza, Facebook India's head of growth and mobile partnerships.

Trust in the Internet took a major blow on Tuesday as alarm spread that software commonly used to encrypt and secure online transactions could wind up giving away the store.

Computer security specialists, website masters, and fans of online privacy were worriedly abuzz with word of a freshly-discovered flaw in online data-scrambling software that hackers can turn to their advantage.

As Twitter looks to broaden its appeal beyond its 241 million users, the company is introducing a redesign of profile pages that includes bigger photos, more user controls and a distinct resemblance to Facebook.

"Moment by moment, your Twitter profile shows the world who you are," the company wrote in a blog post Tuesday. "Starting today, it will be even easier (and, we think, more fun) to express yourself through a new and improved Web profile."

An Israeli startup said on Tuesday that it was working to develop a bio-organic system that can recharge a smartphone battery in just 30 seconds.

Tel Aviv-based StoreDot's prototype battery and charger is currently being tested with Samsung's Galaxy phones, but the startup's founder and CEO Doron Myersdorf told Agence France Presse that a product compatible with all makes of smartphone should be on the market by 2016.

Nokia has received regulatory approval from Chinese authorities to sell its mobile phone unit to Microsoft Corp., removing one of the last major hurdles to the 5.4 billion-euro ($7.3 billion) deal.

The Finnish company says it expects the transaction to close by the end of the month, having acquired the necessary approvals from regulatory bodies including in the U.S., the European Union and other jurisdictions.

A critical blog post could land you in jail in communist Vietnam, but a satirical image of Cinderella which mocks the ruling elite? Likely to slip past the censors.

The country's roughly 33 million Internet users, armed only with laptops and a sense of humor, are driving broader social change in the authoritarian nation than scores of imprisoned firebrand bloggers, experts say.

Microsoft will end support for the persistently popular Windows XP on Tuesday, and the move could put everything from the operations of heavy industry to the identities of everyday people in danger.

An estimated 30 percent of computers being used by businesses and consumers around the world are still running the 12-year-old operating system.