China's e-commerce giant is stepping up its heated rivalry with bricks-and-mortar retailers with the launch of a five-story home furnishings showroom in Beijing.

Alibaba Group's Taobao, an Internet platform through which an estimated 3 percent of all retail sales in China pass, opened the showroom Friday for customers to try out sofas, tables and other big-ticket items before placing an order online with one of its merchants.

Like tens of millions of others, U.S. technology writer Nicholas Carr found the lure of the worldwide web hard to resist -- until he noticed it was getting harder and harder to concentrate.

He set out his concerns in a celebrated essay headlined "Is Google making us stupid?"

U.S. President Barack Obama named Twitter's chief and a high-ranking Microsoft executive among a handful of technology veterans to be appointed as telecommunications security advisors.

"I am proud to appoint such impressive men and women to these important roles, and I am grateful they have agreed to lend their considerable talents to this administration," Obama said in a White House press release available online Friday.

Internet phone service Skype says a small percentage of its 170 million users have been unable to sign in to its service, a problem that it expects to fix with a software update.

Skype said on its website the trouble stemmed from corrupted data affecting computers using Windows, Linux or Macintosh operating systems.

A boom in smartphone sales is changing how Canadians interact with each other as these devices are increasingly used for anything but talking to people, according to a survey Thursday.

Three in 10 Canadians now own a Blackberry, iPhone or other smartphone (up 50 percent over last year) and they spend an astonishing 17.3 hours per week using their device, according to the Ipsos Reid online poll.

Google faced a lawsuit on Friday hours after it unveiled a free mobile application that turns a smartphone into an electronic wallet and is designed to replace plastic credit cards.

PayPal and eBay filed a lawsuit in a California state court Thursday charging that the Internet giant tapped into trade secrets for its newly released Google Wallet. Google did not immediately respond to the allegations.

Skype on Thursday was scrambling to fix a problem that caused the globally popular Internet telephone service to be inaccessible for a "small number" of users.

"A small number of you may have had problems signing in to Skype," Skype engineer Peter Parkes said in an update at the Luxembourg-based firm's blog.

Spain's anti-crisis protesters reject serious comparison with the Arab Spring popular revolts but they do claim a common weapon: online social networks.

Known as the "indignant", or "M-15" after the protest birth date, the activists began May 15 with a few hundred people camped in Madrid decrying Spain's parties for an economic crisis.

Hackers are out to trick Apple computer users into infecting Macintosh machines with malicious code pretending to be legitimate security software.

Apple on Wednesday was warning about a "phishing scam" that stealthily directs Mac users to fake websites which pop-up bogus warnings that computers are infected with viruses.

Facebook and Spotify are collaborating on a streaming music service at the world's largest online social network, according to a report Wednesday by business magazine Forbes.

A Facebook spokesman told Agence France Presse that it had no news to announce on that front, but pointed out co-founder Mark Zuckerberg commenting at a G8 summit that the California company is interested in making the music and film industries more social.