The European Union says Google Inc. must in "a matter of weeks" outline steps it is willing to take to ease concerns about alleged abuses of its dominant position in the online search market.

EU antitrust chief Joaquin Almunia said Monday that after a 1 ½ year investigation it had pinpointed four specific areas of concern and insisted the problems needed to be dealt with swiftly.

Alibaba, China's top e-commerce player, will re-purchase a 20-percent state in itself from U.S. portal Yahoo! for at least $7.1 billion, the companies announced Sunday.

"At the minimum price and assuming the initial repurchase of the full 20% stake, Yahoo! would receive from Alibaba consideration of approximately $7.1 billion, composed of at least $6.3 billion in cash proceeds and up to $800 million in newly-issued Alibaba preferred stock," the firms said in a statement.

Yahoo! stock price climbed Friday on renewed rumors that it was close to a multibillion-dollar deal to sell half of its stake in Alibaba.com back to the Chinese online shopping portal.

Yahoo! shares were up nearly four percent to $15.42 on the Nasdaq exchange by the close of trading due to unconfirmed reports that the only hurdle remaining was for the boards of the companies to sign off on the deal.

A U.S. commission on Friday sided with Microsoft by moving to ban the import of Android-powered Motorola smartphones based on patent infringement complaints by the software colossus.

The ruling issued by the International Trade Commission (ITC) will take effect in late July if President Barack Obama does not overrule it.

Facebook on Friday is to make the richest-ever share offering for a technology firm, raking in billions of dollars it could wield to dethrone Google as king of the Internet.

Facebook stock priced at $38 per share was to begin trading under the symbol "FB" on the Nasdaq, giving the world's leading social network a dizzying value of $104 billion at its initial public offering (IPO) of stock.

Three Russian computer whizzes were crowned the world's top collegiate programmers Thursday, when they clobbered 111 other teams from across the globe to win the 36th annual "Battle of Brains" in Warsaw.

Students Eugeniy Kapun, Mikhail Kever and Niyaz Nigmatullin from St. Petersburg State University of IT, Mechanics and Optics managed to solve nine of 12 problems in the allotted five hours, displaying the mental gymnastics required in the field.

Twitter on Thursday took a stand for online privacy by backing a Firefox web browsing feature that lets people signal that they don't want their Internet activity tracked.

Nonprofit foundation Mozilla added a "Do Not Track" option last year that tells websites when visitors don't want online behavior noted by snippets of code typically planted to target advertising or streamline services.

South Korea's LG Electronics on Thursday unveiled a new version of its Optimus smartphone with greater memory and a more powerful battery, in an attempt to catch up with its rivals.

The company said the Optimus LTE 2 -- which will be released in the domestic market "soon" -- offers as much memory as a notebook computer, allowing consumers to use several applications simultaneously.

Google on Wednesday began making its search engine smarter, in what the Internet giant called a major upgrade that looks beyond query words to figure out what people are actually seeking online.

"Knowledge Graph" technology built to recognize people, places or things signified by keywords took its fledgling steps in the United States with the hope of eventually extending it to Google searches worldwide.

Mobile phone sales worldwide suffered a rare dip in the first three months of this year on softened demand in Asian markets, industry tracker Gartner reported Wednesday.

Approximately 419.1 million mobile phones were bought worldwide during the quarter in a two percent decline from the same period a year earlier, Gartner said. It was the first quarterly decline since early in 2009.