Japan's electronics giant Panasonic will sell the plant where it first got into the television business half a century ago as it shifts away from the money-losing division, a report said Saturday.

Google's Nest Labs said Friday it was buying video monitoring startup Dropcam for a reported $555 million in cash.

The deal comes amid huge growth in the smart home sector. One such example is Nest, which began as a smart-thermostat startup and Google bought in January in a deal valued at $3.2 billion.

Facebook took the blame Thursday for a brief outage that resulted in a flood of comments -- chiefly on rival social network Twitter.

The problem began late Wednesday when "we ran into an issue while updating the configuration of one of our software systems," a Facebook spokesman told Agenece France Presse.

Twitter announced plans Thursday to buy SnappyTV, a service which allows for the clipping, editing and sharing of video over the messaging platform.

The deal, terms of which were not disclosed, will help Twitter step up efforts to become more visually engaging as it struggles to grow its user base.

Google has taken down a blog that listed ways to harass Singapore's Filipino population, drawing praise from Internet users appalled by growing racial tensions in the city-state.

Police said Thursday that they are investigating the anonymous "Blood Stained Singapore" blog, which suggested Singaporeans should refuse to be served by Filipinos in restaurants, or "accidentally" shove them in crowded places.

Facebook, which recently bought Whatsap for $19billion (£11.4bn), went down Thursday frustrating users from across the world.

On logging in to Facebook.com, a message appears that reads: "Sorry, something went wrong. We are working on getting this fixed as soon as we can."

Canadian smartphone maker BlackBerry announced Wednesday a deal with Amazon giving its users access to more than 240,000 software applications from the online retailer's Appstore.

The deal triples the number of apps available on BlackBerry smartphones, including popular apps such as Groupon, Netflix, Pinterest, Candy Crush Saga and Minecraft.

A new instant messaging app that only allows users to send a single word to their friends is quickly becoming a hot commodity, raising $1 million in two months, U.S. media reported Wednesday.

The Yo app lets users say "Yo" to their friends, sending them a text notification accompanied by a recorded voice shouting the greeting. But co-founder Or Arbel insisted the deceptively simple app has a lot of potential.

Amazon unveiled its first smartphone ever on Wednesday, a device that assists shoppers by using six cameras that can make sense of its user's face and the world around it.

The phone's most significant feature, called "Firefly," employs audio and object recognition technology to identify products and present the user with ways to purchase the items through Amazon. Users can simply snap a photo of a book, for instance, and Firefly will offer up its title and author, give more information about it and provide ways to buy it.

Global automakers are locked in a showdown evoking the video format wars of the 1980s, as they bet on what eco-friendly vehicles will prevail in the battle for dominance of the burgeoning low-emissions sector. 

In a contest reminiscent of the scrap for pre-eminence in the home video market, which pitched Betamax against VHS, huge auto firms are going all out for very different technologies.