Facebook was working on a "beautiful" and "groundbreaking" phone designed by Yves B矇har in 2010, but it didn't yet have the money to make a big bet.

Google has quietly been building a new livestreaming app called YouTube Connect, VentureBeat has learned. This service highlights the company's efforts to double down on live video while also placing it in a position to compete directly against Twitter's Periscope and Facebook Live. YouTube Connect will be available on both iOS and Android devices.

Speaking on stage in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress, the Facebook CEO said he doesn't think requiring back doors would be "the right thing to do" nor would it be an effective way to get data from the iPhone of deceased San Bernardino shooter, Syed Farook.

That has analysts weighing in on how the Rift might perform this year, and at least one expert thinks the device will catch on in a big way.

Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg says a new computing platform comes around every 10 years. This year, he says, the next one arrives: virtual reality. Zuckerberg is trying to will that prediction into reality with Oculus VR, a Facebook subsidiary that in March begins shipping its $600 virtual-reality headsets, dubbed the Rift.

One of China's largest internet companies is intensifying its efforts to crack the African market with a bid to disrupt Facebook's WhatsApp with a rival messenging service.

2015 was the beginning of the end for SSDs in the data center. Why? Because researchers have delved deep into their actual behavior and found multiple problems.

Artificial intelligence is the next big frontier in technology.

Oculus, the virtual-reality headset maker that Facebook bought last year, said Pebbles "will be joining the hardware engineering and computer vision teams at Oculus to help advance virtual reality, tracking, and human-computer interactions."

In select countries, users can now sign up for Messenger with a mobile telephone number

Facebook showed the world its first commercial version of virtual reality on Thursday - and offered tantalizing hints of how it hopes to turn three-dimensional goggles into a new kind of computing and communications device.

WhatsApp's jaw-dropping US$19 billion price tag took the world by surprise. But Facebook might have actually gotten WhatsApp for cheap.

WhatsApp co-founder and CEO Jan Koum will join Facebook's board of directors.

Facebook has so many users - more than a billion, or roughly the population of India - that squeezing them all into one Web page seems almost impossible. And yet someone has done just that.

Facebook, the world's largest social networking company, is planning to test a new mobile payment feature.

A craze coming out of Japan is now catching on in Silicon Valley: stickers. In the last few months, Facebook and Google have added digital stickers, basically oversize emoticons, to their chat applications. Venture-backed startups such as MessageMe and Path are also chasing the sticker fad.

In an average day, more than 60% of all Web-enabled devices exchange traffic with the tech giant's servers. That means Google is now bigger than Facebook, Netflix, and Twitter combined.

Hoping to tame the blizzard of information that has turned off many users and discouraged some advertisers, Facebook on Thursday unveiled a major makeover of the home page that greets users when they log into the site.

Facebook was expected to be the poster child of success when it went public two weeks ago but since its May 18 debut, shares have slid 33% from the initial public offering price of US$38.

"In five to eight years they are going to disappear in the way that Yahoo has disappeared," said Eric Jackson, founder of Ironfire Capital while appearing on CNBC's Squawk on the Street.

Facebook is paying Microsoft US$550 million for some of the patents it recently bought from AOL.