From cancer-busting ultrasound techniques to ways to boost vitamins in tomatoes, Dutch tech-hub Eindhoven's avalanche of patents has just earned it the crown of "most inventive city in the world."

Despite the Dutch economy hobbling through its third recession since 2009, this southern city of around 750,000 has become a beacon of high-tech hope and is even compared to Silicon Valley in the United States.

Beauty is in the eye of the Google Glass wearer.

At least that's what the Internet search giant hopes a handful of young filmmakers will discover. Google is enlisting film students from five colleges to help it explore how its wearable computing device can be used to make movies.

A labor rights group Monday accused a Chinese company that makes iPhones for Apple Inc. of abuses including withholding employees' pay and excessive working hours.

China Labor Watch said it found violations of the law and of Apple's pledges about working conditions at factories operated by Pegatron Corp., a Taiwanese company.

Russian video game publisher 1C Company boarded a former U.S. aircraft carrier to re-write the Cuban Missile Crisis that had super powers on the brink of nuclear war in 1962.

The tense Cold War stand-off has an apocalyptic outcome in the "Nuclear Union" computer game showcased late Thursday amid vintage fighter jets on the hangar deck of the USS Hornet docked at a one-time Naval Air Station on the island city of Alameda across the bay from San Francisco.

With the shift to mobile Internet gaining pace, some of the big tech firms are adapting and others are not.

The latest earnings from the sector show that mobile is hitting the bottom line, either in positive or negative ways, at giants like Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Apple.

When Turkmen mother Selbi Dzhafarova wanted to buy a toy car for her son's birthday, he burst into tears. "He asked us to buy him a computer instead," she said.

Her son Arslan's wish was hardly different from the wishes of young boys all over the world except that the nine-year-old lives in the hermit ex-Soviet state of Turkmenistan where Internet access for most private users was banned until just a few years ago.

Leading mobile phone chip maker Qualcomm said Thursday that the next generation of smartphones will take another stride forward as the company reported robust quarterly earnings.

"We still think the next smartphone is going to surprise you with the things it can do," Qualcomm director of CPU product management Travis Lanier told Agence France Presse. "There is a way to go in innovation."

Flying cars. Waterproof living rooms that you clean with a hose. A pool on every rooftop.

Many of the old dreams and schemes about daily life in the 21st century didn't come true — at least not yet. Author Gregory Benford has gathered them — along with more successful predictions — in a book, "The Wonderful Future that Never Was" (Hearst, 2012). Some of the imaginative ideas just weren't imaginative enough, he says.

Google on Wednesday unveiled a slimmer, more powerful tablet computer on its Nexus brand and a thumb-sized device that lets popular mobile gadgets feed online content wirelessly to television sets.

The ramped-up second-generation Nexus 7 by Taiwan-based Asus made its debut along with a Chromecast dongle that plugs into television sets to let people easily route online content to big screens.

Facebook surprised Wall Street by showing it can make money from folks on smartphones and tablets, causing the leading social network's stock to rocket.

"The work we've done to make mobile the best Facebook experience is showing good results and provides us with a solid foundation for the future," said Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg as the social network reported a quarterly profit of $331 million.