Business Tech

The Opera Browser will be rebuilding its mobile browsers using WebKit and a new interface that nearly entirely ditches the traditional browser buttons called Opera Ice, according to a leaked video acquired by Pocket-Lint.com.

Ice is not Opera's first dalliance with WebKit, as its current iOS offerings are also built with the WebKit engine. However, the current iOS Opera runs its server-side compression with Opera's Presto engine. It's not clear that that will continue with Ice, which apparently will debut at Mobile World Congress in February.

The video shows off Opera Ice, a browser that looks … Read more

BitTorrent Surf is a new Chrome add-on (download) that turns the browser into a torrent client. While that's not an innovation on its own, this is the first time the company has built a complete torrent-manager for the browser.

In development for the past six months, according to the BitTorrent blog announcing the add-on, Surf lets you find torrents on the Web and download them.

Still in rough alpha, Surf goes beyond that. It allows for automatic torrent detection when you navigate to a site, and you can save favorite sites to "create your own combined engine," … Read more

Intel is betting a chunk of its PC future on so-called convertibles. So far, financial analysts aren't convinced these are designs that will win the day.

Newfangled laptops that perform mechanical acrobatics to convert to tablet mode, like Lenovo's Yoga convertible and Dell's XPS 12, aren't impressive enough yet to revive PC-market doldrums, according to a growing chorus of financial analysts who follow Intel.

On Thursday, Intel CEO Paul Otellini, speaking during an earnings conference call, tried to depict convertible PC designs as the best of both worlds: the laptop and the tablet. In essence, he … Read more

Facebook unveiled a new tool this week it touts as helping find people, photos, places, and interests that are most relevant to Facebook users.

Graph Search is the social network's newest way for users to make sense of its massive base of 1 billion users, 240 billion photos, and 1 trillion connections. The tool is meant to provide people the answers to their questions about people, photos, places, and interests. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Graph Search is launching to a small number of people and is available only on the desktop and in English for the time being.

People … Read more

Google is ready to drop a significant sum of cash into a London plot of land that will one day be home to its U.K. headquarters, according to a Reuters report.

Google is investing 650 million pounds (about $1 billion) in a 2.4-acre plot at the Kings Cross Central development in London, Reuters reported yesterday, citing developers involved in the purchase. The company plans to build a one-million-square-foot building on the plot that will become its U.K. headquarters when it's finished in 2016.

Google currently operates U.K. offices in the Victoria and Holborn districts. Those … Read more

Box is poised to go public as soon as next year, following in the footsteps of other recent and successful Wall Street debuts for enterprise software companies.

The company's co-founder and CEO, Aaron Levie, told Bloomberg in an interview that Box is aiming to declare an initial public offering in 2014. He hinted that 2013 is still a possibility, but he described it as a "long shot."

Levie added that Box will "have to go public" as company leaders have no intention to be acquired by a larger competitor, perhaps Google or even Microsoft.

Expectations … Read more

Sony announced today that it is selling its U.S. headquarters building located on Madison Avenue in New York City to a real estate consortium headed by The Chetrit Group. The sale price for the 37-story building is $1.1 billion.

"Given the opportunities and challenges in the current economic and real estate landscape, selling 550 Madison now is a timely and logical strategic move," Sony Corporation of America President Nicole Seligman said in the statement, according to Bloomberg.

The sale of Sony's assets is a longtime coming. The company has struggled over the past few years … Read more

E-mails reveal that executives at Apple and Google saw a substantial financial benefit to a mutual agreement not to recruit each other's employees, a federal judge said today.

The comments came in relation to a lawsuit brought by five former employees at various tech companies, alleging that an illegal conspiracy eliminated competition for talent. The lawsuit, filed in 2011, accuses Apple, Adobe Systems, Google, Pixar, Intel, and Intuit of conspiring to keep workers' salaries artificially low.

U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh, who is pondering whether to award class action status to the lawsuit, also ordered Apple CEO Tim … Read more

The latest version of the Dolphin mobile browser debuts a slick new feature for sharing, desktop sync, and Evernote Web Clipper integration.

The Dolphin browser for Android (download), Dolphin browser for iPhone (download), and Dolphin browser for iPad (download) all come with one-tap sharing, a multi-faceted option for getting the Web site you're looking at to your friends as efficiently as possible.

One-tap sharing currently works with Twitter, Facebook, and e-mail, but it also includes an option called Wi-Fi Broadcast. Wi-Fi Broadcast will let you share an item with anybody on the same Wi-Fi network who is also running … Read more