Twitter appeared to be grappling with technical troubles on Tuesday, disabling a new home page as well as a "Trends" feature at the popular microblogging service.

"We're disabling #NewTwitter," the startup's support team said in a message tweeted at 4 pm (2300 GMT). "Our engineers are working on re-enabling it."

Startup Reppler launched a service Tuesday to help people shine on Facebook pages that have become resources checked by employers, college recruiters and even potential mates.

Reppler warns Facebook users about pictures or written posts that might hurt their images, highlights public information best kept private and rates how members of the leading social network look online.

As startups rush to offer smartphone users coupons for discounts at nearby shops, Dealpulp.com is out to woo the bargain hunter inside online shoppers across the United States.

DealPulp is based on the premise that online shoppers have been neglected in an Internet Age fusion of smartphones and coupons so hot that it will be the focus of a first-ever Daily Deal Summit kicking off in New York City on Wednesday.

Think twice next time you get an email from Chase or Citi asking you to log in to your credit card account. The bank may not have sent it.

A security breach that exposed the email addresses of potentially millions of customers of major U.S. banks, hotels and stores is more likely than traditional scams to ultimately trick people into revealing personal information.

Computer security firm Websense on Friday was warning that hackers have infected a huge number of websites with malicious code crafted to dupe Internet users.

Hundreds of thousands of legitimate websites have been booby-trapped to redirect visitors to "lizamoon" addresses where they are greeted with bogus warnings that their computers have been compromised, according to Websense.

Google on Thursday revealed that an army of citizen cartographers is behind its widely used mapping service, helping the Internet search giant chart the world, including often inaccessible places.

Volunteers from various countries post updates on their neighborhoods or travel to remote places to map the area before uploading their findings to Google Map Maker, the company said at a conference in Singapore.

Nestle is out to boost its share of the global breakfast cereal market with a dose of augmented reality supplied by French technology firm Dassault Systemes.

A marker printed on 26 million Nestle cereal boxes being sold in 53 countries lets people with Web cameras linked to computers play an augmented reality game starring the main character of the animated film "Rio."

Computers may soon understand people better than their spouses do, courtesy of innovations from startup Affectiva that expand on groundbreaking sensing research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Affectiva co-founder and MIT professor Rosalind Picard showed off the fledgling firm's feelings-sensing applications at a Web 2.0 Expo that ended Thursday in San Francisco.

The advent of 3D television and a new wave of smart mobile devices are energizing the four-day MIPTV audiovisual entertainment industry show that gets underway Monday on the French Riviera.

"I have a sense that the digital economy hasn't had an opportunity to really explore the truly trans-media experiences offered by broadband Internet and its connection to TV," said Gary Carter, chief operating officer of FreemantleMedia, a major international entertainment production company.

The worldwide smartphone market will grow nearly 50 percent this year and Google's Android will take over as the leading operating system, a technology market research firm said Tuesday.

International Data Corp. (IDC) said smartphone vendors are expected to ship more than 450 million smartphones in 2011 compared to 303.4 million last year.