Flying cars? Colonizing Mars? Whatever it is, analysts are pressing Google on its next big investment. The tech giant said this week that better monetizing mobile search remains a huge priority.  “Google reported that ‘other revenue,’ a large portion of which is Google’s Play Store, increased 50 percent from the same quarter of last year, to $1.8 billion,” The New York Times reports. Still searching for the next big thing, “research-and-development costs have soared, to $2.7 billion from $1.8 billion from the same quarter a year ago.” 

In London, BuzzFeed is assembling a new development team to come up with new ways of storytelling and audience engagement. The team will be “explicitly focused on being experimental and trying out new formats,” Tom Phillips, BuzzFeed’s recently named UK editorial director, tells Journalism.co.uk. “That’s going to range from everything from games that are incredibly entertaining and go viral, to interactives … and new ways of laying out stories.”

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is still mending fences a week after suggesting that industry women rely on “karma” rather than ask for raises. In an employee memo released on Wednesday, Nadella tried to put his comment into context. “I had received this advice from my mentors and followed it in my own career,” he explained. “But my advice underestimated exclusion and bias -- conscious and unconscious -- that can hold people back.” 

HBO plans to begin offering Web-only subscriptions sometime next year. Yes, “the company will start selling a digital version of its service that won’t require a pay TV subscription in 2015,” Re/Code reports, citing comments this week from HBO CEO Richard Plepler. “Plepler said the company will go ‘beyond the wall’ and launch a ‘stand alone, over the top’ version of HBO in the US next year.” 

Twitter, Google, AOL and Vice Media are taking center stage, this week, during the UK’s inaugural “digital upfronts.” As The Guardian reports: “The week-long event takes a leaf from the US TV industry’s long-established annual TV industry ‘upfronts’ presentations in New York every May, when the networks give advertisers a preview of their programming for the coming year.” 

Google is reportedly ready to lead a $500 million funding round in virtual reality startup Magic Leap. “They say they can deliver a more realistic 3-D experience than the kind offered by current technologies, including [that offered by Facebook’s] Oculus Rift,” Re/Code reports. “Andreessen Horowitz may be one of the other investors in the consortium.” 

As part of an aggressive effort to keep top content creators happy, Google spared no expense building YouTube Space New York -- its new 20,000-square-foot production facility.  “It’s part production facility, part lab and a bit of a video university,” David Carr writes in The New York Times. “And not coincidentally, it will let YouTube receive a larger chunk of the ad spending that used to flow to more traditional media companies.” 

Salesforce.com is getting serious about Web analytics with Wave -- a new service that the entire industry saw coming. “It was one of the worst kept secrets in technology, as just about everyone I talked to knew about this,” TechCrunch’s Ron Miller writes. Either way, “the general consensus is that this is something that Salesforce had to do, even though the market is crowded with competitors and they are very late to the game.” 

What is Atlas Obscura? For one, it’s the new home of former Slate editor-in-chief David Plotz, Capital New York reports. Around since 2009, it’s also a Web site that catalogs “extraordinary, weird, and fascinating places -- both around the world and around the corner," Plotz explained in a recent email. With too few monthly unique visitors to show up in comScore’s Web rankings, “Plotz plans to relaunch atlasobscura.com next year and expand its staff to 10 to 20 employees, among them developers, writers, editors, video producers and a data analyst,” Capital reports. 

Rather than ask for a raise, women in tech industries should rely on “karma” to achieve their goals, Satya Nadella said this week. Soon after, Microsoft’s CEO released a memo in which he apologized for the comment, and stressed his support for equality in the workplace. “When it comes to career advice on getting a raise when you think it’s deserved … If you think you deserve a raise, you should just ask.”