The Pope. President Barack Obama. Queen Elizabeth. Oprah Winfrey.

When Twitter started seven years ago as an obscure medium for geeks, critics dismissed it as an exercise in narcissism. Some thought it would be as intriguing as watching people gaze at their bellybuttons. But it quickly matured into a worldwide messaging service used by everyone from heads of state to revolutionaries to companies trying to hawk products.

Libya will launch a tender in 2014 for the award of the country's first private mobile phone license, Communications Minister Usama Siala told Agence France Presse on Monday.

The country's two publicly-owned providers have more than eight million subscribers, one of the highest penetration rates in Africa, but Libya has no private mobile telecoms operators.

A semiofficial news agency in Iran says hackers gained access to the Facebook page of the country's foreign minister and made comments about the country's 2009 election.

The report Saturday by Fars quotes Marzieh Afkham, a foreign ministry spokeswoman, saying Mohammad Javad Zarif's Facebook page had been hacked.

Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran's media savvy foreign minister, has become the first Iranian official to have a verified account on Twitter, although no one inside the country can legally read his tweets.

In fact technically it is illegal for Zarif to have a Twitter account at all.

Twitter announced Thursday, in a tweet, that it has submitted papers for the most hotly anticipated stock offering in the tech sector since Facebook's last year.

"We've confidentially submitted an S-1 to the SEC for a planned IPO. This Tweet does not constitute an offer of any securities for sale," the company tweeted.

Japan Display, the world's biggest maker of LCD screens for smartphones and tablet computers, plans to raise $2.0 billion in an initial public offering, reports said Friday.

The IPO would be the biggest on the Tokyo Stock Exchange so far this year after drinks giant Suntory's food-and-beverage unit raised $3.9 billion.

With the swipe of a finger, Apple could jumpstart a new era of smartphone security and strip away fear of tending to banking or other business on mobile devices.

Fingerprint recognition technology built into a sophisticated iPhone 5S set to hit the market on September 20 was hailed by computer security specialists as a welcome move that rivals will likely rally to match.

A fire at a giant Chinese factory making almost one sixth of the world's supply of a key high-tech component shows how vulnerable global manufacturing chains can be to an unexpected event, analysts say.

The vast SK Hynix facility in Wuxi city produces dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips, used to store data in personal computers and mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.

Internet radio titan Pandora on Wednesday appointed a digital advertising star as its chief executive in the increasingly competitive online music business.

Brian McAndrews took the helm of the Oakland, California-based firm as Apple was poised to launch an iTunes Radio service with the Sept. 18 release of new iOS software for powering iPhones, iPads, and iPod touch devices.

NASA scientists are using former military surveillance drones to help them understand more about how tropical storms intensify, which they say could ultimately save lives by improving forecast models that predict a hurricane's strength.

The unmanned Global Hawk aircraft were designed to perform high-altitude, long-endurance reconnaissance and intelligence missions for the Air Force. Two of the original Global Hawks built in the developmental process for the military have found new life as part of NASA's research mission, studying storms that form over the Atlantic Ocean. NASA planned to launch one of the drones from its Wallops Flight Facility on Wednesday to study Tropical Storm Gabrielle, which re-formed in the Atlantic on Tuesday.