Instead of paying attention in high school, Nick Cammarata preferred to read books on whatever interested him. He also has a gift for coding that got him into Carnegie Mellon University's esteemed computer science program despite his grades.

But the 18-year-old programmer won't be going to college this fall. Or maybe ever.

Computer manufacturers of all sizes and descriptions have been pushing to get a piece of the ever-expanding tablet market created by the launch of Apple's iPad in April 2010.

The obsession with tablet computing will be on full display Tuesday as Computex, the world's second-largest computer show, begins its annual five-day run in Taipei. The prominence of tablets underscores a dramatic shift under way in the personal computer industry — and keenly felt in Taiwan, which is home to some of the world's biggest PC manufacturers — as many consumers opt to buy a tablet rather than a new PC.

China's e-commerce giant is stepping up its heated rivalry with bricks-and-mortar retailers with the launch of a five-story home furnishings showroom in Beijing.

Alibaba Group's Taobao, an Internet platform through which an estimated 3 percent of all retail sales in China pass, opened the showroom Friday for customers to try out sofas, tables and other big-ticket items before placing an order online with one of its merchants.

Like tens of millions of others, U.S. technology writer Nicholas Carr found the lure of the worldwide web hard to resist -- until he noticed it was getting harder and harder to concentrate.

He set out his concerns in a celebrated essay headlined "Is Google making us stupid?"

U.S. President Barack Obama named Twitter's chief and a high-ranking Microsoft executive among a handful of technology veterans to be appointed as telecommunications security advisors.

"I am proud to appoint such impressive men and women to these important roles, and I am grateful they have agreed to lend their considerable talents to this administration," Obama said in a White House press release available online Friday.

Internet phone service Skype says a small percentage of its 170 million users have been unable to sign in to its service, a problem that it expects to fix with a software update.

Skype said on its website the trouble stemmed from corrupted data affecting computers using Windows, Linux or Macintosh operating systems.

A boom in smartphone sales is changing how Canadians interact with each other as these devices are increasingly used for anything but talking to people, according to a survey Thursday.

Three in 10 Canadians now own a Blackberry, iPhone or other smartphone (up 50 percent over last year) and they spend an astonishing 17.3 hours per week using their device, according to the Ipsos Reid online poll.

Google faced a lawsuit on Friday hours after it unveiled a free mobile application that turns a smartphone into an electronic wallet and is designed to replace plastic credit cards.

PayPal and eBay filed a lawsuit in a California state court Thursday charging that the Internet giant tapped into trade secrets for its newly released Google Wallet. Google did not immediately respond to the allegations.

Skype on Thursday was scrambling to fix a problem that caused the globally popular Internet telephone service to be inaccessible for a "small number" of users.

"A small number of you may have had problems signing in to Skype," Skype engineer Peter Parkes said in an update at the Luxembourg-based firm's blog.

Spain's anti-crisis protesters reject serious comparison with the Arab Spring popular revolts but they do claim a common weapon: online social networks.

Known as the "indignant", or "M-15" after the protest birth date, the activists began May 15 with a few hundred people camped in Madrid decrying Spain's parties for an economic crisis.