Yahoo again ranks as one of the world's 100 most valuable brands.

The Internet company nabbed the 92nd spot in the annual list of global companies from multiple industries including technology, retail and service, released Tuesday by BrandZ, a brand equity database. The ranking gave Yahoo a "brand value" of $9.83 billion, which is based on the opinions of current and potential users as well as actual financial data.

Apple occupied the number-one position on the list, with a brand value of $185 billion. Google was number two, with a value of roughly $114 billion.

The BrandZ ranking, commissioned by the advertising and marketing services group WPP, incorporates interviews with more than 2 million consumers globally about thousands of brands along with financial performance analysis to compile the list. Yahoo last appeared on the list in 2009 at number 81.

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Even great game franchises fall prey to mergers, acquisitions, and the vagaries of the game business. Such was the fate of FreeSpace 2, a space simulator originally released in 1999 to great critical acclaim, as part of the Descent and FreeSpace franchise. Due to business circumstances, it was the last in the series?but it can still be played today for the price of $10. and its source code, released in 2002, has been adopted by an active community of coders and modders.

The original game remains commercially available to this day through GOG, a service specializing in old-time games. While the original FreeSpace 2 offered very impressive graphics for its time, it can't hope to match modern space-sim games in the visauls department.

Fortunately, it has a lot to offer in terms of gameplay and depth. Cockpit and HUD controls are intricate and well thought out, from subsystem targeting, through automatic speed matching, to smart indicators on your HUD showing a target's distance and bearing even when it's out of your field of view. FreeSpace 2 also makes good use of the keyboard, with an interface that expects you to memorize many keys.

If you enjoy FreeSpace 2's detailed gameplay and only wish for some updated graphics, you're in luck: Open-source, free mods dress FreeSpace 2 in updated graphics from franchises you probably already know, and include new storylines and game mechanics to boot. I tried Diaspora, a mod based on the Battlestar Galactica 2004 remake, and was impressed by its slick graphics. It was nice to find myself in the pilot's seat of a Viper, trying to prove myself as a nugget (and badly failing).

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Apple pays a fair share of the taxes it owes the U.S. and other nations, its CEO said Tuesday, despite criticism from U.S. senators that the company is ducking taxes by shifting profits to subsidiaries that the company does not consider tax residents of any nation.

Apple CEO Tim Cook defended the company Tuesday before a Senate subcommittee, saying that Apple uses no "tax gimmicks" in assigning about two-thirds of its worldwide profits to three subsidiaries in Ireland, where the company has negotiated a corporate income tax rate of less than 2 percent.

In reality, Apple has paid a far lower rate than the 2 percent negotiated in Ireland, with one subsidiary paying no income taxes in the past five years, and another paying 0.05 percent in Ireland in 2011, according to a report released Monday by the investigations subcommittee of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

But Cook and two other Apple executives defended their tax decisions before the subcommittee. Apple paid an effective tax rate of 30.5 percent in the U.S. last year and may be the single largest corporate taxpayer in the U.S., Cook said. The company employs 50,000 people in the U.S. and its products support hundreds of thousands of U.S. jobs, he said.

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VMware has launched its long-anticipated public infrastructure as a service (IaaS), touting its virtual networking capabilities as a differentiator from other established hybrid cloud offerings.

VMware's vCloud Hybrid Service will be based on the company's vCloud architecture, allowing customers to shift their VMware encoded workloads between in-house and the VMware hosted service, a practice known as running a hybrid cloud.

"You can write an application and be safe in the knowledge it can be run anywhere," said VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger, in a Web conference announcing the new service, adding that much of the complexity enterprises experience in deploying their workloads in the cloud comes from preparing their in-house applications to run in a new environment.

Those applications that VMware has certified to work with the company's vSphere virtualization platform will also work without modification on the vCloud Hybrid Service, Gelsinger said. The company touts that its software is used by 500,000 customers.

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Well, that didn?t take long. A mere five days after Brian Krzanich took the reins as the new CEO of Intel, he?s shaking things up at an organizational level.

Krzanich has reorganized key business groups and created a new ?New Devices? division to focus on emerging trends, including ?ultra-mobile? devices, reports AllThingsD. Mike Bell, who formerly co-ran Intel?s mobile unit?most notably in the push to bring x86 to Android?will take leadership of the new division.

?The group will be tasked with turning cool technology and business model innovations into products that shape and lead markets,? Intel said in a statement to AllThingsD.

Reuters first reported the changes after an anonymous source came forward with the information. Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy confirmed to Reuters that Krzanich had sent out an internal email outlining the changes, but didn?t elaborate further on shake-up details.

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Plenty of applications help you show off your photos, and plenty help you show off your videos. But too few tools exist that allows you to show them off together. Enter Fantashow Pro, a $50-per-year application allows you to combine still photos with videos to create a custom video slideshow.

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Microsoft is making a big play for the living room with a new Xbox console that marries games with live TV, Internet browsing, music and Skype.

The Xbox One could considerably expand Microsoft's presence in consumer electronics but is expected to compete with Internet TV devices from companies such as Intel, interactive set-top boxes from cable TV companies, and Sony's PlayStation 4. There's also a possible set-top box from Apple.

It was unveiled during an event at Microsoft's Redmond campus. A launch date was not immediately announced.

"Xbox On," said Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft, as he began to demonstrate the device. The Xbox sprang to life and presented Mehdi with a home screen.

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In an effort to streamline the development of wireless charging technology, Duracell subsidiary Powermat Technologies will merge with the Helsinki-based company PowerKiss.  Together, the two companies are responsible for thousands of public stations used to wirelessly charge mobile phones in the United States and Europe.  Until now, the conflicting systems used by each company have eliminated any benefit wireless charging technology might have for overseas travelers who rely on their smartphones.

The statement released today explains that eliminating those ?incompatible standards? is the primary motivation of combining under the Powermat umbrella. With their forces joined, the two pioneers will be pushing forward with Powermat?s ?PMA? standard, which has already been accepted by global leaders like General Motors, Starbucks, and Duracell.  Adding Powerkiss? European presence to the PMA standard may well define it as the unofficial international standard for wireless charging.

Powermat has instituted PMA wireless charging stations in more than 1,500 retail locations including Starbucks and AT&T stores.  Likewise, Powerkiss has enabled wireless charging in more than 1,000 European locations, including McDonalds restaurants.  In a remarkable commitment to the future of the technology, the merging of these two companies will ultimately ensure consistency across international borders. 

This is a huge step for the burgeoning industry of wireless charging.  Our smartphones are heavily burdened with improving nearly every detail of our daily lives.  It?s a difficult task, even with vastly improved battery life aided by the efficient performance of processors like the Qualcomm Snapdragon.  For international travelers who already face issues with different outlets and service providers when they?re overseas, the introduction of seamless, consistent formats for wireless charging across the globe will be a big relief.

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If you have any expectations about the privacy of your Skype communications, you may want to reassess them.

Microsoft appears to be peeking into Skype messages for security reasons, according to Ars Technica.

The owner of Skype regularly scans the contents of messages sent on the service for signs of fraud, but what?s done with the information from those scans?whether it?s stored indefinitely or destroyed?is unknown.

Similar findings were published by The H Security last week.

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Yoking cognitive computing with customer service, IBM has launched a system that can reference large amounts of unstructured data to help companies better field customer phone calls.

The IBM Watson Engagement Advisor uses IBM?s Watson, the artificial intelligence software the company developed to compete on the Jeopardy game show two years ago.

According to IBM, the field of customer service is in dire need of improvement. Of the 270 billion customer service calls that are handled annually, approximately 50 percent go unresolved. ?Many customers engage with a brand through the call center,? and because call centers tend to frustrate customers, the company?s brand suffers as a result, said Craig Hayman, general manager of industry solutions for IBM?s Software Group, during a teleconference announcing the package.

The Engagement Advisor can help answer questions, offer suggestions to aid in the purchasing process, or to help customers troubleshoot issues. Just as it was able, in a few seconds, to scan, review and select the best answer for Jeopardy questions, so too should the Watson technology be able to quickly provide relevant information for customer inquiries, drawing from a large amount of information.

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Donations to WikiLeaks since January have only been enough to cover expenditures in essential infrastructure, such as servers, according to a transparency report.

Donations have been declining substantially over the last two years, the report said. Last year, WikiLeaks had almost ?69,000 (US$88,700) in incoming donations while its expenses were a little over ?392,000, according to the report, released Monday by the Wau Holland Foundation, a nonprofit foundation in Germany that handles transfers and donations to WikiLeaks.

Wau Holland StiftungDonations to Wikileaks have declined substantially, according to the Wau Holland Foundation.

?Better support for the project will only be possible with increasing donations,? the foundation said.

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The Livescribe Sky pen marries old-school pen-and-ink with the cloud. If paper remains a core part of your workflow, this is the best pen of its kind on the market. You can save notes and audio recordings to your Evernote account via Wi-Fi, or you can plug in a Micro-USB cable and save your work to a PC or Mac.

The pen is fairly bulky, but it's pretty comfortable to hold. It would stick out from inside a pocket but it slips easily into a travel bag. The pen cap is easy to lose and hard to put on, so I usually left it off (and the tip didn't suffer from the exposure). Livescribe makes smart use of its tiny LCD screen, displaying Wi-Fi and battery indicators as well as the time and date. Dive deeper and you can play with the display: Use your handwriting and the interactive "buttons" in its supported paper notebooks to play simple games, run equations on a calculator, and translate words. There's even an ecosystem of apps, including dictionaries.

Other smart pens, such as the Adapx Capturx, let you write on any type of paper, but I've found those better for paper-form input versus freehand writing. Livescribe requires special (and pricey) paper, with tiny dots on the page that track your writing with precision.

The Livescribe Sky pen is designed to be paired with Evernote, so it won't be of much interest if you don't use that app. It's a plus, though, if you enjoy Evernote's productivity features (and you get an Evernote Premium account for a year). Use tidy penmanship with your Livescribe pen, and Evernote's optical character recognition can translate that into digital text.

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Sprint Nextel has increased its offer to buy out Clearwire, bidding $3.40 per share, to counter a competing offer by Dish Network.

The new bid marks a significant boost from its earlier offer of $2.97 per share and beats Dish?s $3.30 bid. Clearwire shareholders had been scheduled to vote on Sprint?s offer at a special meeting Tuesday, but that meeting has now been postponed until May 30.

Sprint already owns roughly half of Clearwire, which has been its partner for 4G WiMax service since 2008. After Softbank agreed to invest $20 billion in Sprint and take a 70 percent share in the company, Sprint moved to complete its ownership. It plans to use Clearwire?s spectrum to beef up its new LTE network.

But Dish, a satellite TV and broadband provider, has made offers for both Sprint and Clearwire in an attempt to get into the relatively fast-growing mobile business. On Monday, Sprint announced it had received permission from Softbank to negotiate with Dish on its $25.5 billion offer, though Sprint said it still favored the Softbank deal.

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Windows 8 was rebuilt from the ground up with a finger-friendly focus. That proved to be a problem during the operating system's early days. In the months immediately after launch, touchscreen Windows devices cost an arm and a leg, and that's if you could even find one; during the 2012 holiday season shoppers were hard-pressed to find a touch-based laptop.

Now, however, Microsoft?s touchy-feely thrust is starting to shake up the laptop market, according to a recent report. Nearly 10 percent of all laptops shipped worldwide during the first three months of 2013 were touch enabled, according to IHS DisplayBank (and as reported by DigiTimes).

Even though a push into Windows 8 touch devices was expected, DisplayBank?s numbers are surprising. Other research firms were expecting a much slower adoption rate.

For example, NPD?s DisplaySearch said in April that it expected touch-enabled touchscreen notebooks to surpass 12 percent by the end of 2013. If DisplayBank?s numbers are accurate, notebook touchscreen shipments could be on their way to beating early projections of 15 percent for all of 2013, IDC research director David Daoud told PCWorld. (IDC and PCWorld are both owned by International Data Group.)

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Leap Motion doesn't have to replace your PC's mouse, but it certainly can.

A new video from Leap shows how hand and finger gestures may be used to point, click, zoom, and scroll your way through Windows 8. Although Leap wants developers to create applications specifically for the 3D motion controller, mouse emulation will allow the controller to work across entire Windows operating system, even with legacy software.

However, it's hard to tell from the video exactly how the motion controls work. A simple nudge forward with an outstretched finger appears to simulate a mouse click, and pinch gestures control zooming, but it seems there are some subtle differences between pointing, scrolling and dragging that are tough to discern from the video. (We've reached out to Leap to see if we can find out more about specific gestures.)

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