Facebook said Friday it had switched off the facial-recognition tool that prompts users to "tag" photographs uploaded to its website following a privacy investigation.

The feature was identified by regulators as one of the main privacy threats posed by the social networking site.

YouTube on Friday was searching for education "gurus" with knowledge to impart to fast-growing ranks of students turning to online videos for lessons.

The globally popular Google-owned video-sharing venue teamed with Internet education innovator Khan Academy to find, train and promote 10 "super-talented and engaging content creators."

Twitter chief Dick Costolo said Friday that the Internet Age one-to-many text messaging service is turning out to be a boon for good old television.

"There is a fascinating relationship between Twitter and tune-in, and Twitter and TV," Costolo said during an on-stage chat at an Online News Association gathering in San Francisco. "We are just scratching the surface of that."

Google Inc. says it plans to close a music download service in China due to a disappointing response from users.

The move announced Friday will further reduce Google's presence in the world's most populous Internet market two years after it closed its mainland search engine in a dispute over censorship and computer hacking.

Facebook said Thursday it was revamping its "Offers" service, by making companies pay for what had been free advertising until now.

Withe the social network giant struggling to prove it can boost revenues, the change requires payments, starting at $5 per ad, for the deals offered through Facebook.

A grey market for the iPhone 5 sprang up on the doorstep of Hong Kong's Apple store Friday as it hit shelves for the first time, with resellers offering to pay more than 50 percent above retail price.

As Apple staff cheered the latest purchases inside the store, new iPhone owners were approached outside with offers to buy the hot new gadget at attractive premiums.

Google has become the U.S. market leader in online display ads, and now leads all categories for Internet advertising including search and mobile, a market research firm said Wednesday.

The firm eMarketer said Google will top the market for online display advertising with $2.31 billion in revenues -- 15.4 percent of the market -- in 2012.

Samsung Electronics said Thursday it was "disappointed" at a U.S. judge's refusal to lift a ban on U.S. sales of its tablet computer as it fights a long-running global legal battle with arch-rival Apple.

A California jury declared on August 24 that the South Korean electronics giant should pay Apple $1.049 billion in damages for illegally copying iPhone and iPad features for its flagship Galaxy S smartphones.

Sophisticated gameplay and cheap downloads that are fuelling a boom in software for smartphones and tablets were on display Thursday at the Tokyo Game Show, the biggest of its kind in Asia.

Developers from all over the world flocked to the town of Makuhari outside the Japanese capital to showcase their latest offerings as the world readied for Friday's launch of the iPhone 5.

An Australian-led research team said Thursday they had made a technological breakthrough in the race for a quantum supercomputer that could revolutionise data encryption and medicine.

Engineers from Sydney's University of New South Wales said they had created the first working quantum bit or qubit -- the fundamental unit of a quantum supercomputer -- with the findings published in the latest edition of Nature.