Facebook stock plunge slashes $34 bn of mkt value

Facebook Inc has lost about $34 billion in market value since its May initial public offering, as the operator of the world’s largest social-networking service fails to assuage concerns about how it can make more money from almost a billion users. Facebook’s stock dropped 12 per cent on Friday, its biggest one-day loss on record, after its first quarterly earnings report as a public company. That brought the plunge to 38 per cent since the May 17 debut, which at $16 billion was the largest ever for a technology company.

Handwriting for web searches
You can now scribble your search words when using Google on a smartphone or tablet after the Internet company introduced handwriting as a new method of input. Users need to head to the settings menu and then enable the handwriting option but after that web browsers can scrawl the word or words their searching for anywhere on the screen.

Facebook widens ‘bug bounty’
Facebook is becoming the first big technology provider to reward hackers who uncover vulnerabilities on its own corporate network — a risky proposition considering that’s where the company stores data on its more than 900 million users. Facebook, based in Menlo Park, California, plans to announce the broadened programme this week at the DefCon Hacking Conference in Las Vegas.

Google says did not delete data
Google Inc on Friday said it had not kept its promise to delete all the personal data, such as emails, its Street View cars collected in Britain and other countries in 2010.

The US company admitted in May 2010 that its vehicles, which photograph neighborhoods to create street level images, had accidentally collected data from unsecured wireless networks used by residents in more than 30 countries.

Apple wins delay on web notice
Apple Inc won’t have to publish a notice telling customers that Samsung Electronics Co didn’t copy its tablet designs until after an appeal in the intellectual property dispute is heard in October, a UK court ruled. Apple had been ordered on July 18 to put a message on its UK website and take out advertisements in British newspapers describing a London court ruling that Samsung’s Galaxy devices didn’t imitate the iPad.