Chip maker Qualcomm is introducing six new processors meant for entry-level phones in China and emerging markets.

The processors are part of Qualcomm's Snapdragon 200 class, a chip line that offers support for lower-end specs compared to the company's Snapdragon 400, 600 and 800 chip series, the company said Thursday.

The six new processors lack support for 4G LTE, but are built for HSPA+ networks, and TD-SCDMA (Time Division Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access), a 3G standard used by China's largest mobile carrier, China Mobile.

The Qualcomm chips will be available to vendors in late 2013. The new processors are built using a 28-nanometer manufacturing process, and feature dual and quad-core CPUs. The chips also have support to handle two, or even three SIM cards, a feature that is popular with consumers in Asia.

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Best Buy has recalled about 5,100 replacement batteries for Apple's MacBook Pro laptops, after 13 reports that the battery caught fire, a U.S. consumer safety agency said.

The ATG lithium-ion batteries can catch fire while charging, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission said in a statement Wednesday.

The recall covers both black and white ATG lithium-ion replacement batteries for MacBook Pro laptops. "Model number 'MC-MBOOK13B' is on the label of the black battery and model number 'MC-BOOK13W' is on the label of the white battery," CPSC said. The ATG logo is on both batteries.

Best Buy has received 13 reports that the battery caught fire, including one of a serious burn to a consumer's leg, according to CPSC.

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3-D printer company Stratasys is acquiring desktop 3-D printer maker MakerBot for over US$400 million in an all-stock deal, to shore up its consumer presence.

Privately-held MakerBot has sold more than 22,000 3-D printers since it was founded in 2009, and its printers are increasingly used by a class of "prosumers" that includes individuals using the devices for professional purposes as well as for personal applications, Stratasys said in a statement Wednesday.

MakerBot has also set up a portal Thingiverse.com for the sharing of user-generated digital design content to promote system usage. The portal has more than 90,000 3-D product files available for sharing, and generates more than 500,000 unique visitors and 1 million downloads each month, Stratasys said.

In the transaction, Stratasys will initially issue about 4.76 million shares in exchange for 100 percent of the outstanding capital stock of MakerBot in Brooklyn, New York. The proposed merger has an initial value of $403 million based on Stratasys' closing stock price of $84.60 as of Wednesday. MakerBot shareholders are also entitled to performance-based payouts of more shares or cash.

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There was a largely euphoric reaction online in the hours after Microsoft reversed its policies for the upcoming Xbox One game console, which had restricted resales of used games and required a constant Internet connection.

A Facebook message about the changes gained over 75,000 likes in three hours. On gaming forums and sites like Reddit, most hailed the reversal as victory, though some said the incident would still drive them to rival Sony's upcoming PlayStation 4.

But others mourned new cloud-based features that Microsoft will eliminate as part of its policy changes. As originally planned, the new Xbox would have allowed digital games to be shared with ten friends and family, allowing others to log in and play the titles. A cloud-based system also meant that software would be available from any console, even without a physical disc, and downloaded titles could be shared and sold.

"It sounded pretty awesome to me, far better than the current physical media dominated model," wrote a user on Reddit.

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Despite the promise of portability from service providers, the reality of the cloud for big customers is a similar type of lock-in as they experience with on-premise apps vendors such as Oracle and SAP, two CIOs said Tuesday.

"You're kind of locked in -- it's out with the old boss and in with the new," said Ralph Loura, CIO of The Clorox Company, in a discussion about "what keeps CIOs up at night" at the GigaOm Structure conference in San Francisco on Wednesday.

Companies that buy storage and compute services in small increments might not be tied to one provider, but most big companies sign big, multi-year contracts with cloud suppliers that effectively tie them to one platform, he said.

They also train workers for that platform and build applications and interfaces in a "semi-bespoke model" that further ties them down. "I think we're all trying not to get fooled again with this model, and that's one of the things that keeps me up at night," he said.

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With more than a billion monthly active users, it's easy to imagine that most of the data travelling over Facebook's networks is delivering photos, status updates and "likes" to its end users, but that's far from the case.

The social network moves about 1,000 times as much data between the servers inside its data centers as it does from its servers out to end users, company executives said Wednesday. They talked about the challenges that this creates for Facebook and the network technologies it's developing to overcome them.

"Our traffic going from machine to machine far exceeds the traffic going from the machines out to our end users," said Jay Parikh, vice president of Infrastructure Engineering at Facebook, in an on-stage interview at the GigaOm Structure conference in San Francisco.

That's because of all the processing work Facebook does on the back end to figure out what information it needs to send to end users. The systems analyze data, rank results, and perform a myriad of other tasks to generate the pages Facebook delivers to users' smartphones and Web browsers.

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Twitter has bought Spindle, a search technology company that informs users about what's happening with local businesses and organizations around them.

The deal, the terms of which were not disclosed, could help Twitter beef up its efforts to keep users "in the loop." The company has been rumored to be working on its own location discovery feature to surface certain tweets posted by people nearby.

Spindle's technology was based on delivering social updates from businesses and other sources to users. For example, Spindle users could use interactive maps to see where things were happening nearby and also set alerts to receive notifications from specific places.

Spindle, which has been based in Boston, aims to "help people discover valuable social content they couldn't otherwise find," the company says on its website.

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A company that specializes in Google apps is developing a series of enterprise applications for Google Glass that should be available late this year or early 2014.

?We?re in the early stages of developing for Google Glass,? said Dan McNelis, co-founder of Dito, a company that provides services for Google applications.

Google Glass is the wearable device that the search giant announced in 2012. Since then the system has been in beta with developers and will likely be released to the public in late 2013 or early 2014.

McNelis said Dito is developing both ?Glassware? or the apps on top of Google?s API (application programming interface), and figuring out specific use cases to develop custom apps for Glass.

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Microsoft and cellphone maker Nokia were in advanced talks about an acquisition of the Finnish company's device business, but the discussions have broken down, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

Such a deal might have improved both companies' ability to compete in a world dominated by smartphones offered by Apple, which makes both hardware and software, and by Google, which relies largely on third parties for devices that run its Android OS.

But the talks, which took place as recently as this month, have faltered and aren't likely to be revived, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. The discussions were held in London and the companies were close to an oral agreement about a combination, the report said.

The deal hit snags regarding price and the market position of Nokia, which trails far behind both Apple and Samsung, the Journal said.

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A good YouTube app makes it impossible to stop watching videos when what you should be doing is writing that program's review. And this is exactly what happened to me as I attempted to sit down and write about Minitube, a YouTube desktop app that's going to change the way you consume your dose of daily videos. At ?9 ($12 on 6/19/13), it's not cheap?but if you spend much time on YouTube, Minitube is well worth the price.

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The traditional clamshell laptop will always be with us, but thanks to the innovation of the Intel-inspired Ultrabook, a wide range of new mobile computer designs has recently hit the market. Offering a vast amount of flexibility, these new designs offer considerable freedom, letting you choose the Ultrabook? that works best for you.

Here's a guide to the various types of Ultrabook designs you'll find available today.

Don't fret if you just want the basics and don't want to reinvent the wheel: Ultrabook systems with a standard clamshell design are widely available. These systems look and operate just like any laptop computer, except they?re often much thinner and lighter.  Also, many now come equipped with touchscreens, so you can use the keyboard and touchpad to navigate Windows, or draw on the screen with your fingertip.

At first these Ultrabook systems appear to be pretty standard, except they're equipped with new hinges that allow the screen to rotate around a full 360 degrees. In other words, you can push the screen back so that it lies flat against the table, and keep going another 180 degrees so that the screen is facing outward from the bottom of the laptop. Next just flip the Ultrabook over so that the keyboard is on the bottom of the machine and the screen is facing you. Presto, you've turned your laptop into a keyboard-free, slate-style tablet.

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Intel has joined the Alliance for Wireless Power (A4WP), a consortium founded by Qualcomm and Samsung, as the chip maker looks to bring wireless charging to tablets and laptops.

Another member of A4WP is Integrated Device Technology, which is developing wireless charging chipsets for laptops, tablets and hybrids running on Intel chips. Intel hopes to make wirelessly charging a smartphone and tablet as easy as putting the device close to a laptop. Intel has dubbed its wireless power offering as Wireless Charging Technology (WCT).

?Although we are not yet giving out timeframes for consumer products with WCT enabled, IDT has stated they will be delivering their full chipset solution for reference design work in early 2013,? Intel representative Dan Snyder said in a blog entry in August last year.

A4WP in January this year released wireless charging specifications based on near-field magnetic resonance technology, in which users can recharge multiple mobile devices without placing them in direct contact with charging pads.

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Microsoft Wednesday announced several new apps that have arrived or will arrive within the Windows Store, including the Vevo app for music videos and an updated version of Where?s My Water?

But if you?re still hoping for a Facebook app for Windows 8, keep waiting.

Really, ever since Windows 8 was released last October, many have wondered when Microsoft?or Facebook?would release an app supporting the over 1 billion users who use the Facebook service.

While many apps?such as Pandora, for example? still haven?t made the transition over to the Windows 8 platform, Facebook seems like a significant omission.

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Intellectual Ventures, a large patent-licensing firm, has filed a second patent-infringement lawsuit against Motorola Mobility while its first patent lawsuit is still pending in a Delaware count.

The patent-licensing firm filed its second lawsuit against Motorola in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, the company announced Wednesday. The second lawsuit alleges that Motorola, owned by Google, has infringed seven different patents than the six named in the Delaware lawsuit.

Intellectual Ventures ?has been unable to reach an agreement with Motorola? in the Delaware case, the company said in a statement.

The company also filed a patent-infringement lawsuit against banking firm Capital One in Virginia, Intellectual Ventures aid.

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Intel said Wednesday that is has joined the board of directors of the Alliance for Wireless Power (A4WP), a consortium developing technology for wirelessly charging electronic devices. However, Intel said last year that Ultrabooks capable of wireless charging would arrive in 2013?a promise the company has yet to make good on.

Virtually all of the major chipmakers have now joined A4WP, a spokesman for the group said, including Broadcom, Qualcomm, and Samsung, among others. A4WP uses near-field magnetic resonance technology to charge a nearby device, like a cell phone, if both the power source and the target device support the technology.

?Intel believes the A4WP specification, particularly the use of near-field magnetic resonance technology, can provide a compelling consumer experience and enable new usage models that make device charging almost automatic,? said Navin Shenoy, vice president, PC client group and general manager, mobile client platform division at Intel, in a statement. ?In joining A4WP, we look forward to working alongside other member companies and contributing to standards that help fuel an ecosystem of innovative solutions capable of simultaneously charging a range of devices, from low-power accessories to smartphones, tablets, and Ultrabooks.?

At its Intel Developer Forum last year, the company said that it would add wireless charging capabilities to its Ultrabook platform sometime this year.

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