Google on Friday said it will kill its Buzz social networking tool in favor of young but fast-growing Google+ online community.

"We aspire to build great products that really change people's lives, products they use two or three times a day," Google product vice president Bradley Horowitz said echoing words spoken by chief executive Larry Page.

Scientists in Singapore said Friday they have discovered a process that can expand the data storage capacity of computer hard disks six-fold using a common kitchen ingredient -- table salt.

The discovery was made by Singapore's national research institute the Agency for Science, Technology and Research, in collaboration with the National University of Singapore and the Data Storage Institute.

Internet search engine Google insisted on Friday it was not stealing business from the print media even if it has become an increasingly important source of news on the Web.

"We are not making money on the back of newspapers," Stefan Tweraser, head of Google Germany, told a media industry conference in Vienna.

Apple fans in Australia on Friday became the first in the world to get their hands on the latest iPhone as the US technology giant unleashed its first device since the death of co-founder Steve Jobs.

In a party atmosphere, hundreds of people queued outside the technology giant's four-storey flagship Sydney store, filming the experience on their iPhones and iPads as staff inside clapped, cheered and chanted.

BlackBerry service has been restored worldwide after several days of outages, the head of the company that makes the smartphones said Thursday.

"All of the services are back up globally," Research in Motion (RIM) founder and president Mike Lazaridis told a press conference.

Facebook, Twitter and other social media websites boost public awareness of disease outbreaks but also make it more difficult to separate fact from fiction, world health officials said on Thursday.

World Health Organization (WHO) director-general Margaret Chan said the Geneva-based U.N. body scans websites and online forums in different languages for indications of outbreaks across the world.

EBay set the stage for shops large and small to tap into Internet age techniques for taking payments with PayPal technology at the heart of cashless transactions.

A PayPal Access online identity program and an X.commerce platform for payments were launched as eBay opened its Innovate Developer Conference in San Francisco.

U.S. technology giant Apple on Thursday won a temporary ban on Samsung selling its Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Australia, the latest victory in its global battle over patents related to the iPad.

The Federal Court of Australia granted an interim order against the sale of the Galaxy 10.1, ruling that Apple had established a prima facie case that the South Korean company had breached touchscreen technology copyrights.

Robots that learn from experience and can solve novel problems -- just like humans -- sound like science fiction.

But a Japanese researcher is working on making them science fact, with machines that can teach themselves to perform tasks they have not been programmed to do, using objects they have never seen before.

Sony said Wednesday it suspended 93,000 accounts on its online entertainment networks after a large number of unauthorized sign-in attempts, months after a huge breach forced it to halt some services.

The attempts took place between October 7 and 10 and succeeded in verifying valid sign-in IDs and passwords of about 93,000 accounts on its PlayStation Network, Sony Entertainment Network and Sony Online Entertainment services.