Verizon sold 2 million iPhone 5s, 4 million iPhones in total during 2013 Q1

During Verizon's quarterly financials call, company CFO Fran Shammo let slip that of the 7.2 million smartphones that the company activated, 4 million of them were iPhones. He added that half of them were LTE-ready, which we can take to mean the iPhone 5, while the other half was mixed amongst the older devices in Apple's smartphone pantheon.

Quick-Thinking Netizen Builds Simple Site To Stop A Boston Marathon “Conspiracy Theory Kook”

Conspiracy theorists have a habit of revealing the darkest side of the Internet when they snatch up important website names after national tragedies. Slate‘s Dave Weigel highlights one quick-thinking Californian who wasn’t about to see conspiracy ‘kooks’ desicrate the memories of those killed in the recent Boston Marathon bombing. Jaimie Muehlhausen bought BostonMarathonConspiracy.com before anyone could use it as a search-engine optimized sounding board for their crazy views. The website now just has a simple message:

WhatsApp “Bigger Than Twitter” With Over 200M Monthly Active Users, 8B Inbound And 12B Outbound Messages Daily

WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum was on stage today at the AllThingsD Dive Into Mobile conference in New York City, where he said that the app is now larger than Twitter by monthly active users. He wouldn’t say exactly how many the company had, just that it was north of 200 million users.

Snapchat Now Sees 150M Images Shared Each Day, But Questions Of Profitability Still Linger

Snapchat has been picking up steam like crazy over the past weeks and months, and today at the D: Dive Into Mobile conference co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel gave us a brief update on just how much traction the transient messaging app has picked up lately.

Main One Cable Partners Microsoft On Imagine Cup 2013

VENTURES AFRICA – African wholly-owned communications Services Company, Main One, has once again reinstated its commitment to locally developing innovative software, as it partners software giant Microsoft, on Imagine cup 2013 – a premier technology challenge competition for students.

Imagine cup competition allows student innovators all over the world compete to produce various ground-breaking app ideas, create products, set clear business plans and take such products to the marketplace.

Nigeria Invests $1 Billion In New ICT Incubation Centres

VENTURES AFRICA – The Nigerian government has made available $1 billion for the construction of incubation centres throughout the country to stimulate growth in local software content. Late on Monday, Business Day Nigeria reported that two of the centres at Yaba in Lagos and Tinapa in Calabar will be unveiled this week.

Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing Shows Enterprises Finding Value in Big Data, Virtualization

Enterprises are beginning to change their buying behaviors based on the deployment speed, economics and customization that cloud-based technologies provide. Gartner cautions however that enterprises are far from abandoning their on-premise models and applications entirely for the cloud.

Microsoft and Salesforce are over 60% of all Gartner CRM Inquiries

Every year Gartner receives an average 100,000 inquiries from their valued end-user clients on a wide variety of IT topics. Their most recently released series of statistics is included in Inquiry Analytics Statistics: Topic and Vendor Mind Share for Software, 4Q12 published March 13thof this year. Ten geographic regions and eight industries are also tracked, in addition to seven evaluation levels of end-user clients.

$15 million iPhone shows off rare black diamond

New York (CNN) -- Family heirlooms are often packed away for safe keeping. For one man from China, hiding a 26-carat black diamond worth $14.5 million was not in his plans. A businessman from Hong Kong commissioned craftsman Stuart Hughes of Liverpool to help him show off his family treasure.

Last December in this space I published a column titled "The Most Damaged Big Brand of The Year Is…" -- with the answer being Apple. I dwelled on some of the tech giant's problems in 2012, including its Apple Maps catastrophe and the growing scandal over the brutal conditions at the factories of its China-based subcontractors.

At the time, I noted that Apple's stock was trading at around $540 a share, down from a 52-week high of $705.

As of this writing, it's at $435.

Should we blame Steve Jobs' successor, CEO Tim Cook? I say no, absolutely not. As I argued in December, a correction in our collective attitude toward high-flying Apple was surely a long time coming, and the reality is that much of the bad karma Apple has been earning payback on was built up during Steve Jobs' reign.

Twitter Music goes from “Invite Only” to “Coming Soon”

It’s nearly time for Twitter to launch their own music service – with today’s updates letting us know that not only is this rumored project real, it’s right around the corner. If you head to https://music.twitter.com/right this minute, you’ll even be able to connect the service to your own Twitter account – as odd as that sounds, the service hosted by Twitter itself. This service shows up as “Twitter #music web by Twitter, Inc.” when you sign up, the tagline “The best new music in the world right now” shining brightly.

Apple to reportedly secure licensing agreements for iRadio next week

We’ve known for a little while that Apple is trying to launch a music streaming service of its own, reportedly called iRadio, that will rival the likes of Pandora and Spotify. According to The Verge’ssources, Apple may be extremely close to securing a music streaming licensing agreement with Universal Music Group next week. The same sources say that Warner Music an Apple are very close to securing a deal as well.

Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.3 and 5.8 official

Samsung has officially revealed the Galaxy Mega, its latest sizable smartphone, with a choice of 5.8- or whopping 6.3-inch screen sizes as the lines between phones and small tablets continue to blur. Packing a 1.7GHz dualcore chip running Android 4.2 Jelly Bean on the Galaxy Mega 6.3 (or a slightly slower 1.4GHz dualcore on the Galaxy Mega 5.8), the new handsets each have 8-megapixel main cameras and up to 64GB of storage support.

BlackBerry Wants Investigation Into 'False' Analyst Report on Z10

BlackBerry has asked U.S. and Canadian regulators to investigate what it considers to be a "false and misleading" analyst report about returns of its new BlackBerry Z10 smartphone. That report, from Detwiler Fenton, said that "key retail partners have seen a significant increase in Z10 returns to the point where, in several cases, returns are now exceeding sales, a phenomenon we have never seen before."

Microsoft makes Bing image search more social with one-click sharing to Pinterest

Companies know how important it is to make their products as friendly as can be with third-party social websites, and Microsoft, for one, has done a pretty fantastic job at making sure the team behind Bing's doing exactly that. To wit, the Surface maker is, as of today, also starting to cater to the Pinterest crowd, announcing that it's now allowing users of the recently redesigned site to share Bing image search findings via a simple click -- assuming you're logged in, naturally. The new sharing feature might seem like a rather minor one on paper, but for avid Pinners, it'll certainly come in handy as they can keep their precious boards stocked up with a little less effort. And, well, you know what that means: more cats.