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An event employee displays a Samsung Electronics Co. Galaxy S4 smartphone at the World IT Show 2013 in Seoul, South Korea, on Tuesday.

Samsung Galaxy S4 laps HTC One in sales

On its way to becoming the fastest-selling Android smartphone, the Galaxy S4 has been sold twice as many times as the HTC One in their first few weeks on the market.

Samsung announced this week that it has sold 10 million Galaxy S4 phones. Currently in either black or white, the phone manufacturer plans to sell the smartphone in more colors, such as blue, red, purple and brown, later this year. An HTC executive told the Wall Street Journal its device had been purchased 5 million times, but that production remains behind schedule because of parts shortages.

The One had been expected to hit the market ahead of the Galaxy S4. Instead, the phones came out at nearly the same time because of delays by HTC suppliers.

The One still isn’t available for Verizon Wireless. The Galaxy S4 became available for Verizon customers Thursday.

PHOTOS: The top smartphones of 2013

Reviewers generally credited the One with having top-of-the-line hardware and the S4 with containing innovative software...

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Apple introduced the iPhone 5 in September 2012. Unlike previous generations of the phone, the cost to fix it has not gone down after a few months.

Repairing iPhone 5 more costly than for past iPhones

Repairing the iPhone 5 costs far more than fixing its predecessors because of Apple’s tight control over the parts that make up its newest phone, according to a new report.

In some cases, just repairing an iPhone 5 screen can cost $30 more than the entire phone that's been purchased for $200 with a two-year service contract.

Normally, users can turn to third-party shops to fix their iPhones. But many phone shops are not willing to repair the latest iPhone because of the high costs of parts, Marketwatch reported. The repair firms that do work on the iPhone are charging as much as Apple, or even more, to fix the phone.

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Apple’s $99 warranty plan remains the cheapest option to fix an iPhone 5 screen. The company charges a $49 fee each time to fix up to two incidents of accidental damage during the two-year warranty term. Apple is rumored to be planning changes to the warranty that would make repairing phones a default step instead of...

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UCLA Health professionals ready a patient for a procedure to implant a brain pacemaker.

UCLA surgeons using Vine, Instagram to video tweet brain surgery

Even as hospitals struggle with keeping patient information secure in the digital world, more and more are finding that some patients are willing to publicly share intimate moments.

UCLA’s Health System became the latest healthcare provider to turn to social media to invite the public into an operating room.

Since 6:24 a.m. Thursday, the @UCLAHealth Twitter account has been using Vine and Instagram to chronicle the implant of a brain pacemaker. The device counteracts Parkinson’s disease, according to UCLA Health’s Facebook page. In one Vine, Dr. Nader Pouratian said it’s the 500th time that the operation has been done at UCLA.

PHOTOS: Top smartphones of 2013

The event marks yet another achievement for the 5-month-old Vine application, Twitter’s service for posting short videos to the Web. It’s quickly becoming Twitter’s answer to Facebook’s photo-sharing service Instagram. The patient is expected to awake during the surgery and play his...

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Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Khosla Ventures.

Google insider Ben Ling joins Khosla to unearth great Web ventures

SAN FRANCISCO -- Khosla Ventures is adding to its roster of top Internet executives with the addition of Ben Ling, a veteran of Google, Facebook and YouTube.

Ling, most recently the chief operating officer at Badoo, has joined the venture capital firm to invest in Internet companies, he said in an interview Thursday.

Khosla has been cleaning up on talent lately. Keith Rabois, the former chief operating officer at Square, recently joined the firm.

Rabois, one of Silicon Valley's best known and most accomplished executives and investors, resigned from Square after accusations of an improper relationship with a colleague emerged. He denied the allegations and no lawsuit has been filed.

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Ling and Rabois share a common trait: They are seasoned executives who have been inside fast-growing companies and have for years invested in them too, earning them a strong reputation as go-to advisers among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

Ling has an impressive track...

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Lyft, a ridesharing app famous for the big pink mustaches on its drivers' cars, has raised $60 million in funding, led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

Lyft lands $60 million in funding, led by Andreessen Horowitz

Coming up on the one-year anniversary of its ridesharing service, Lyft is celebrating with a new round of funding worth $60 million.

Known for the bright pink mustaches on the grill of its drivers' cars, Lyft is a service that lets smartphone users call drivers to their locations for rides. Using their own cars, the drivers take users wherever they need to go, much like a taxi service. At the end of the ride, the Lyft app suggests how much money users should donate to their driver. The transaction happens electronically through the app.

The service launched last June in San Francisco, but has been growing and expanding to more cities. In January, it launched in Los Angeles, and most recently, it launched in Chicago earlier this month. Lyft also operates in Seattle.

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But now with the funding, led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Lyft may be able to expand to more cities and add more drivers faster than before. The company's chief...

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Twitter adds two-step verification option to help fend off hackers

Twitter adds two-step verification option to help fend off hackers

Twitter has rolled out a two-step verification, a feature users can turn on to give themselves more protection against would-be hackers.

The verification method makes it harder for hackers to take over Twitter accounts that don't belong to them by requiring that users enter their password as well as a special code that is sent to their phone when they try to log in. The code does not generate until the user attempts to log in, and it changes each time they do. You can see how the feature works in the video above.

The feature comes after a number of news organizations, most notably the Associated Press, fell victim to hackers who took over their account to send out tweets with false information. If news sites turn on the new feature, it should make it more difficult for hackers to compromise accounts, the company said.

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To enable the feature, users should head to their account settings and scroll down until they find a new option that reads...

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Nextdoor is like Facebook but for neighbors: a private network to find a baby sitter, borrow a cup of sugar, organize a block party or spread word of a break-in.

Nextdoor, the social network for neighbors, rolls out iPhone app

SAN FRANCISCO -- Nextdoor, which wants to be the go-to social network for neighborhoods, is rolling out an app for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Nextdoor co-founder and Chief Executive Nirav Tolia said he expects the mobile app to fuel growth and increase the amount of activity in neighborhoods.

Nextdoor is being used by more than 12,600 neighborhoods in 50 states, he said. Some 30% of visits to the Nextdoor website come from mobile browsers.

Nextdoor is like Facebook but for neighbors: a private network to find a baby sitter, borrow a cup of sugar, organize a block party or spread word of a break-in.

It's not the first time a start-up has tried to network neighbors, but Nextdoor is one of the first to gain momentum.

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An app for the iPhone and iPod Touch was the most requested feature from Nextdoor users, Tolia said, and took about eight months to build. The company is working on an Android app that should be out this summer, he said.

Neighbors...

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Six in 10 employees use computers at work for personal business, according to a survey conducted by a manufacturer of computer monitoring software.

Employees assume bosses track their work computers, survey finds

Workers spend more than half an hour each day shopping for new clothing, exchanging instant messages with friends and taking care of other personal matters on their work computers.  

That was one of the findings of a survey of 300 full-time workers by SpectorSoft Corp., which sells computer monitoring software to employers. About 60% of workers surveyed said they used their computers at work for non-work activities. A Salary.com survey last year found a similar percentage of workers use their work computers to browse the Web for personal reasons.

Privacy advocates have tried unsuccessfully during the last decade to gain more protections for employees as the use of monitoring software in work-site computers has grown. SpectorSoft’s survey showed few employees are happy about it, but 9 in 10 said they expected to have their employer watching over their shoulder at work.

MORE: What privacy rights do I have in the workplace?

Courts have generally allowed companies to monitor...

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Mailbox has a new app for the iPad.

Mailbox hits send on new iPad app

SAN FRANCISCO -- Mailbox is coming to the iPad.

The new app will be available starting Thursday and reflects the accelerating shift to tablets from laptops, especially among younger people, said Mailbox Chief Executive Gentry Underwood. An iPad app was one of the top requests from Mailbox users, and it's the first new product from Mailbox since it was bought by Dropbox in March.

"It's so hard for people like us who spend a lot of time in front of laptops to realize how many people use the iPad as a full-time computer," Underwood said. "People love the advantages of carrying a much lighter device and not being weighed down by a bunch of clunky hardware when you just want to do something simple like read a book or watch a video."

Photos: Top 10 Southern California companies

With more apps like Mailbox, which enables people to do more on a tablet, "I think more and more people are going to get won over to it," he said.

The new iPad app is much like the one for the iPhone. It's designed to...

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Shazam's updated iPad app can now tag audio on its own.

Shazam revamps iPad app, adds auto-tagging feature

Shazam, the app that identifies a song's name and artist, is being updated for the iPad, giving tablet users many of the tools already found on the iPhone app as well as a cool new feature: automatic tagging.

The feature comes turned off by default, but if users choose to turn on auto-tagging, the app will automatically identify songs, TV commercials and other audio that your iPad picks up.

Previously, if users heard a song or saw a commercial they wanted to tag with Shazam, they had to unlock their device, launch the app and touch the tag icon. The auto-tagging feature is intended to eliminate that process.

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For now, the feature will not be available on the iPhone version of the app or for Android devices, but Shazam hopes to add auto-tagging to more devices.

Aside from auto-tagging, the update to be released Thursday will give Shazam's iPad app an entirely new look.

Currently, the company has an iPad app that is very basic and that it admits...

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Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer at an announcement that the company's photo and video storage website, Flickr, would receive a new design and allow 1 terabyte of free storage.

Flickr photo-printing service could bring more revenue to Yahoo

This week’s flashy redesign of Flickr shifts the Yahoo-owned photo-sharing website away from subscription revenue and more toward ad revenue. But Yahoo also could look to monetize another Flickr feature: printing hard copies of photos.

Flickr reached a deal with printing service Snapfish in 2009 that made it easy for users to order photos on paper and other items such as mugs and clothing. Several other services use Flickr’s data stream for free to make prints, though only Snapfish is integrated into the website.

But with Yahoo Inc. Chief Executive Marissa Mayer seeking to put her stamp on Flickr, one possibility would be launching its own printing feature and taking aim at a growing number of mobile apps that allow users to buy prints through their phones. A Yahoo spokesperson said in a statement that Snapfish remains on board.

"Yahoo strives to be partner friendly, and we enjoy working with Snapfish as our printing partner for Flickr," the statement said.

PHOTOS: The top...

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World's First Bionic Eye

This is a video on the manufacturer of the world's first bionic eye, which resto...

This is a video on the manufacturer of the world's first bionic eye, which restores some sight to the blind.