Stories by Sarah Jacobsson Purewal

Extreme gear for extreme business

These tablet-optimized apps bring your business one step closer to going tree-free and totally mobile.

These useful widgets should be on your Android home screen.

The tech world moves so fast that you've probably forgotten about at least some of the big flops that have already happened this year. Here's a quick rundown to keep you in the loop.

The Samsung Series 5 Ultra is the company's first foray into the Ultrabook market (if you don’t count the Series 9, which predates the Ultrabook brand). There's just one problem: It weighs nearly 4 pounds, and measures 0.82 inch thick. In other words, this 14-inch laptop is closer to a regular ol' ultraportable than it is to an Ultrabook.

It's finally official: Microsoft will no longer be producing Zune HD music and video players.

Zynga has acquired mobile games start-up Astro Ape, according to Business Insider, which notes that Astro Ape employees are changing their place of employment on LinkedIn.

A California district attorney's office has decided not to press charges against either Gizmodo or former Gizmodo editor Jason Chen for purchasing an iPhone 4 prototype in March 2010 and exposing it to the world.

With the IM+ multi-messenger app for Android, you can talk with all of your contacts in one place. Currently IM+ supports AIM, Facebook chat, Google Talk, ICQ, Jabber, MSN, MySpace, Skype, VKontakte, Yahoo, and Yandex IM.

Since the beginning of 2010, a whopping 200,000 BitTorrent users have been sued in mass file-sharing lawsuits by copyright trolls, according to TorrentFreak.

Video chat is all the rage these days, thanks to new services such as Google+ Hangouts and Skype/Facebook integrated video chat. Video chatting is a great way to stay in touch with family and friends--seeing loved ones' faces on a computer screen is almost like actually being there.

Hollywood may have <a href="http://mashable.com/2008/12/19/riaa-lawsuits-2/">stopped its massive litigation campaigns</a> against illegal file swappers in 2008, but the piracy lawsuits are still flying. Now teams of lawyers working for certain small businesses are going after illegal file swappers. These businesses, often referred to as "copyright trolls," are attempting to turn the <a href="http://www.pcworld.com/article/201335/filesharing_suits_about_fear_not_cash.html">threat of suing pirates</a> into a profitable cottage industry.

What's the biggest "overhang on Microsoft's stock," according to hedge fund manager David Einhorn? The continued presence of Microsoft's CEO, Steve Ballmer.

Twitter is finally acquiring the third-party Tweet organizer TweetDeck, for the neat (rumored) sum of $40 million. But what does this mean for small businesses that use Twitter?

Voltage Pictures, producers of the Oscar-winning 2009 film "The Hurt Locker," is suing 24,583 BitTorrent users for downloading the film.