Facebook on Friday is to make the richest-ever share offering for a technology firm, raking in billions of dollars it could wield to dethrone Google as king of the Internet.

Facebook stock priced at $38 per share was to begin trading under the symbol "FB" on the Nasdaq, giving the world's leading social network a dizzying value of $104 billion at its initial public offering (IPO) of stock.

Three Russian computer whizzes were crowned the world's top collegiate programmers Thursday, when they clobbered 111 other teams from across the globe to win the 36th annual "Battle of Brains" in Warsaw.

Students Eugeniy Kapun, Mikhail Kever and Niyaz Nigmatullin from St. Petersburg State University of IT, Mechanics and Optics managed to solve nine of 12 problems in the allotted five hours, displaying the mental gymnastics required in the field.

Twitter on Thursday took a stand for online privacy by backing a Firefox web browsing feature that lets people signal that they don't want their Internet activity tracked.

Nonprofit foundation Mozilla added a "Do Not Track" option last year that tells websites when visitors don't want online behavior noted by snippets of code typically planted to target advertising or streamline services.

South Korea's LG Electronics on Thursday unveiled a new version of its Optimus smartphone with greater memory and a more powerful battery, in an attempt to catch up with its rivals.

The company said the Optimus LTE 2 -- which will be released in the domestic market "soon" -- offers as much memory as a notebook computer, allowing consumers to use several applications simultaneously.

Google on Wednesday began making its search engine smarter, in what the Internet giant called a major upgrade that looks beyond query words to figure out what people are actually seeking online.

"Knowledge Graph" technology built to recognize people, places or things signified by keywords took its fledgling steps in the United States with the hope of eventually extending it to Google searches worldwide.

Mobile phone sales worldwide suffered a rare dip in the first three months of this year on softened demand in Asian markets, industry tracker Gartner reported Wednesday.

Approximately 419.1 million mobile phones were bought worldwide during the quarter in a two percent decline from the same period a year earlier, Gartner said. It was the first quarterly decline since early in 2009.

Facebook is about more than connecting with friends. It can be about finding a lost relative, saving a life or overthrowing a regime.

Here are examples, some drawn from "Best of Facebook Stories," a compilation of anecdotes that appears -- where else -- on Facebook, and others from the news media:

Leading Japanese mobile operator NTT DoCoMo on Wednesday unveiled its first smart phone specially designed for elderly users, as the company bids to tap into an ageing consumer population.

The touch-screen handset, to go on sale by August, will show large fonts and icons with simplified steps for emails and taking pictures, it said.

China Mobile, the world's biggest mobile operator by subscribers, said Wednesday the company is in talks with Apple to offer the popular iPhone to its users in the Asian nation.

The company's domestic rivals -- China Unicom and China Telecom -- already offer the iPhone to their subscribers.

Japanese technology titan NEC has unveiled a gadget that allows users to control their TV, mobile phone or tablet computer using a virtual input device.

The company said a camera that recognizes three-dimensional shapes and their movements will combine with a projector that could show the image of an input device -- such as a keyboard -- on almost any surface.