Trying to hold its own against Samsung, Apple is reportedly testing larger screens for the iPhone and iPad. In contrast to Apple’s rigid design approach, Samsung has experienced great success with an “all things to all people” strategy, The Wall Street Journal reports. “The move has allowed Samsung to leapfrog Apple in the smartphone market even though Apple still leads in tablets.”

Yahoo plans to repurchase 40 million shares from Third Point LLC for nearly $1.2 billion. “Looks like Yahoo is trying to take control of its own destiny once again,” TechCrunch reasons. “As a result, Third Point, led by activist investor Daniel Loeb, will own less than 2% of the internet company, and the three people it appointed to the board last year -- Loeb, Harry J. Wilson, and Michael J. Wolf -- will resign.”

With $1.6 million in seed funding in his pocket, Facebook alum Ari Steinberg is moving ahead with travel-planning startup Vamo. In Steinberg’s humble words, Vamo is “the holy grail for travel…a site where you can book a full vacation” or business trip. Notes TechCrunch: Priceline, Expedia, and TripAdvisor may have something to worry about.” 

With $1.6 million in seed funding in his pocket, Facebook alum Ari Steinberg is moving ahead with travel-planning startup Vamo. In Steinberg’s humble words, Vamo is “the holy grail for travel…a site where you can book a full vacation” or business trip. Notes TechCrunch: Priceline, Expedia, and TripAdvisor may have something to worry about.” 

“When presented with data like this in the past, Google has typically explained the numbers by saying that most sharing on Google+ happens privately, making such sharing invisible to data crawling,” Marketing Land notes. “But rather than data crawling, Gigya would be measuring clicks via its social tools that are embedded on client sites -- so the charts above show that very few visitors to those sites are clicking to share content on Google+.” 

A deteriorating PC market and disappointing sales of its Surface tablets resulted in Microsoft reporting poor fourth-quarter earnings on Thursday. “Microsoft posted lower-than-expected quarterly earnings on Thursday, hit by a $900 million write down on its Surface tablets after it cut prices,” Reuters reports. Microsoft launched Surface tablets last year in attempt to take on Apple’s iPad. 

Apple recently acquired crowdsourced location-data startup Locationary, AllThingsD reports, citing sources. “It closed recently and includes Locationary’s technology and team, both,” according to AllThingsD. “Apple’s plans in this case are fairly obvious: Beef up its new mapping service.”

Microsoft is expanding Bing’s People Autosuggest feature beyond people. “The search engine will now automatically suggest brands, movies, albums, places, software, sport teams, animal species, and more,” The Next Web reports. “When Microsoft first unveiled the feature in May, it let users find the person they were looking for directly within the search box.” 

After being broadly criticized for aiding the government’s domestic surveillance efforts, a number of technology leaders are seeking more transparency around such tactics. Along with various civil liberties groups, Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and others are calling on President Obama and congressional leaders to let Web, phone, and Web-based service providers report security-related requests for information with greater specificity, AllThingsD reports. 

In the United States and Great Britain, the number of Facebook members using the social network with their mobile phones increased about 20% in June. So Reuters reports, citing internal Facebook figures. As a result of the company’s related efforts, mobile ad revenue accounted for about 30% of overall ad revenue in the first quarter.