LinkedIn has agreed to buy popular digital newsreader Pulse for a reported $90 million. “The professional social network has been strengthening its news feed both on mobile apps as well as the traditional desktop portal with more content sources, and the addition of Pulse's resources could propel that much further,” ZDNet writes. Pulse currently boasts more than 20 million users.  

Twitter is expected to debut a standalone music application within a matter of days. “The app suggests artists and tracks to users based on a number of personalized signals, including the Twitter accounts a user follows on the microblogging service,” AllThingsD reports, citing sources. “Users will be able to listen to clips of music from inside the app.” 

Reshaping the collective digital experience, consumers are rapidly losing interest in the PC. In fact, “Worldwide shipments of laptops and desktops fell 14% in the first quarter from a year earlier,” The Wall Street Journal reports, citing new data from research firm IDC. “That is the sharpest drop since IDC began tracking this data in 1994 and marks the fourth straight quarter of declines.” 

Illustrating the immense popularity mobile video, Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam said this week that streaming content now accounts for 50% of Verizon Wireless’ network traffic. What’s more, as Fierce Wireless reports, McAdam predicts that video will account for two-thirds of all traffic over Verizon’s network by 2017. 

Desperate for engineering talent, Mark Zuckerberg just announced a new lobbying group focused on immigration reform. Detailing the organization in The Washington Post, the Facebook founder asks: “Why do we offer so few H-1B visas [which let U.S. employers briefly employ foreign workers in specialty occupations] … even though we know each of these jobs will create two or three more American jobs in return?” Named FWD.us, other members of the group include Google’s Eric Schmidt, and Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer. 

A distinct majority of U.S. consumers (82.6%) don’t know that BlackBerry released a new operating system earlier this year, while 68% say they have no interest in buying a BlackBerry 10 smartphone. That’s according to a survey of some 1,500 Americans commissioned by MKM Partners. “If you want to understand the major challenges that BlackBerry faces in the American market, look no further than [the report],” BGR.com notes. 

Despite the best efforts of Samsung and other rivals, Apple remains the most desired smartphone brand among American teens, Fortune reports, citing Piper Jaffray’s latest teen survey. Overall, a full 91% of respondents said they plan to buy a smartphone for their next high-tech device. Within that group, 59% said they are likely to buy an iOS device, while 21% say they are likely to buy an Android device. 

Citing a source close to Yahoo, Business Insider claims to know exactly why the company dropped $30 million on Summly. “Acquiring Summly seems to have been an almost incidental side effect of a deal Yahoo made with SRI [which had equity on the startup] for a piece of ‘summarization technology.’” Adds BI: “CEO Marissa Mayer believes summarization technology is ‘going to be huge for Yahoo’ as it builds ‘personalized news feeds’ into mobile versions of its ‘core experiences,’ including Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Sports.” 

Foursquare today is slated to update its iOS mobile app with a renewed focus on search, location discovery and recommendations. “Over the past year, the company has slowly moved away from its heavy emphasis on badges, mayorships and ‘gamification’ … instead moving toward a mobile discovery service somewhat akin to the space Yelp currently inhabits,” AllThingsD reports. 

CNNMoney.com calls Shodan “the scariest search engine on the Internet.” Why? “Unlike Google, which crawls the Web looking for websites, Shodan navigates the Internet's back channels,” it writes. “It's a kind of ‘dark’ Google, looking for the servers, webcams, printers, routers and all the other stuff that is connected to and makes up the Internet.” Who uses such a service? Mostly penetration testers, security professionals, academic researchers and law enforcement agencies, thought cybercriminals are thought to frequent Shodan, too.