From ComputerWorld: Microsoft quietly updated its Office 2016 Preview apps for early adopters over the past two weeks with a slew of new features the company announced in a round-up Wednesday.

The new features let people who have installed the public beta of Microsoft's forthcoming productivity...

From PC World: Chinese smartphone vendor Xiaomi has hopes of selling at least 80 million smartphones this year, but that goal may harder to reach than originally thought.

On Thursday, the fast-rising company announced it had sold 34.7 million smartphones for the first six months of 2015. Although...

From CNET: The UK's biggest technology retailer is crossing the Atlantic to provide the know-how for new Sprint stores. Just in time for Independence Day, British retail group Dixons Carphone and the US carrier today announced a joint venture that could see up to 500 new Sprint stores open their...

From CNET: PayPal unveiled its plans to buy money-transfer company Xoom on Wednesday, keeping up PayPal's effort to touch just about every aspect of the digital payments world.

The deal, with an enterprise value of $890 million, will expand PayPal's global money-transfer services, likely giving...

From PC World: Microsoft’s end of support for Windows XP is having its desired effect, with Windows 8.1 pulling ahead in usage share.

While Windows 8.1 overtook XP last year according to StatCounter, that lead is now undisputed with Netmarketshare posting similar findings in June. Statcounter now...

From CNET: Facebook's increasingly popular messaging platform has had a payments feature for months. But it hasn't been available to everyone in the US -- until now.

Facebook on Tuesday announced that its Messenger payments service is available to all users across the US. Facebook Messenger's...

From DailyTech: Apple, Inc.'s (AAPL) latest update to its mobile platform -- iOS 8.4 -- landed today(build string: 12H5143). The finished iOS update comes roughly a week after the release of the GM ("Golden Master") build. The biggest feature of this update is, without a doubt, the new Apple Music...

From InfoWorld: As foreshadowed on Twitter yesterday, a new R Consortium of major vendors launched today aimed at "strengthen[ing] both the technical and user communities," according to a Linux Foundation announcement.

Founding members include Microsoft, Google, Hewlett-Packard, and Oracle, along...

From PC World: Microsoft will be handing over its display advertising business to AOL in nine markets as part of a new partnership between the two companies that was announced Monday.

Under the deal, AOL will use Bing to power search through its website, and will operate display advertising...

From CNET: Microsoft has released a new preview build of Windows 10 with just one month left before the OS's official launch.

Released on Monday, Build 10158 offers updates to the Cortana voice assistant and the Edge Web browser. It also stirs in a few refinements to the Start menu and other areas...