From PC World: As expected, the axe fell at Microsoft on Thursday, but the depth of the cut is surprisingly brutal: 18,000 Microsoft employees will find themselves without jobs over the next year, and the company is "moving now" to eliminate the first 13,000 positions. The job cuts are by far...

From CNET: Samsung will challenge Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world's largest contract chip manufacturer, as a supplier of processors to Apple next year, a Reuters report claims.

"TSMC will be supplanted by Samsung" for the production of next-generation 14-nanometer...

From DailyTech: Sprint Corp. (S) -- the third largest cellular carrier in the U.S. -- has added support for Wi-Fi calling and HD Voice (wideband audio) for the HTC One M8, the flagship smartphone of Taiwan's HTC Corp. (TPE:2498). The One M8 is one of the top high-end Android phones at Sprint, who...

From InfoWorld: Mozilla has released an updated version of its JPEG compression tool that shaves down file sizes by 5 percent, a small figure but one that is significant for image-intensive Web services such as Facebook.

The tool, called mozjpeg 2.0, will ultimately "reduce page load times and...

From PC World: Intel has started shipping Xeon E5 chips based on the Haswell microarchitecture to server makers, and the chip will be in servers this quarter.

The Xeon E5 chips typically go into two-socket and four-socket servers and are the company’s biggest-selling server products. The new chips...

From CNET: Following close behind T-Mobile, AT&T announced Tuesday it will offer the Lumia 635 beginning July 25.

AT&T customers can pick up the 4G LTE-ready budget handset on the carrier's prepaid wireless service GoPhone for $99. Versions of the 4.5-inch handset sporting black and orange back...

From DailyTech: Microsoft may have recently announced its intentions to become a “productivity and platform company for the mobile-first and cloud-first world,” but it looks like longtime rival Apple has plans of its own in addressing the needs of enterprise customers and has brought in the big guns...

From InfoWorld: Oracle is hoping to turn heads in the crowded data analysis market with Big Data SQL, a software tool that can run a single SQL query against Oracle's own database as well as Hadoop and NoSQL data stores.

The software is an option for Oracle's Big Data Appliance, which incorporates...

From PC World: Gamemaker Electronic Arts dismissed a rumor on Tuesday that its download client called Origin secretly collects data from users’ computers.

A supposed screenshot, posted on Reddit, claimed that Origin is “still snooping files.”

Origin collects a limited amount of information from...

From CNET: Microsoft is planning its largest round of layoffs in five years as the software giant looks to integrate Nokia Oyj's handset unit, Bloomberg reported Monday, citing people with knowledge of the company's plans.

The job cuts, expected to be announced as soon as this week, will likely...