Google reduces App Engine cloud costs by up to 25% (Amazon, next move is yours)

All that's missing are the streamers, balloons, and cheesy Best Price Ev-ah signs. Because the price competition between Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Rackspace is heating up so fast, the cloud market could be a massive virtual used car lot.

Marissa Mayer and Yahoo are on fire, acquiring gaming company PlayerScale

If I can paraphrase a popular Alicia Keys song, this woman is on fire. Marissa Mayer is clearly moving Yahoo back into the center of the Silicon Valley tech conversation.

Ex-Facebook/Dropbox product guy gets $1.2M for stealth startup (exclusive)

Mystery funding of the day? That'd be YesGraph, a stealthy startup in the recruiting space founded by Ivan Kirigin, a former product manager at Facebook and Dropbox.

Happy Cloud announces $4.25M funding round and new chief executive

Happy Cloud plans to expand its games-on-demand service for PC, console, and Android developers.

OpenStack-powered cloud startup Cloudscaling scores $10M from Trinity, Juniper, & Seagate

Elastic cloud infrastructure startup Cloudscaling has raised $10 million in its second round of funding so it can keep growing at a quick clip and innovating its cloud technology.

Xbox One & Azure cloud computing: A match made in heaven

One aspect of the new Xbox One really gets me fired up: Game developers should now be able to use Microsoft Azure's cloud computing platform to make games more powerful than ever.

Health care is Verizon’s $6 billion business

Verizon is the largest wireless telecommunications provider in the U.S., and the company is using its extensive network and resources to impact health care.

Performance management biz Adaptive Planning nets $45M from BVP & others

Leading corporate performance management (CPM) company Adaptive Planning has raised a massive $45 million in its fourth and final round of funding with a goal to further dominate the CPM space.

Who needs databases? Orchestrate closes massive $3M seed round to turn NoSQL into NoDB

Who needs SQL? In fact, who needs databases?

Salesforce: The cloud is not an ‘all or nothing game’ for health care

Despite the obvious flexibility and cost savings of cloud technologies, health care providers are treading carefully -- largely because of security concerns.

Imaging and lab results are begging for an electronic, cloud-based makeover

Radiology images and lab results are traditionally moved using paper, CD-Roms, or USBs. Surescripts, a leading platform for electronic prescriptions, is leveraging its network of 500K physicians to modernize this area of health care.

Busted: Microsoft intercepts, decrypts, and reads your Skype messages

Skype used to be what you would use to send secure, encrypted, and untraceable messages to friends, family, and business associates all over the world. Not any more.

With $19B in revenue, Microsoft’s server and tools’ chief says he’s just getting started (interview)

Meet Satya Nadella, president of Microsoft’s server and tools division, a division that builds and runs the company’s computing platforms, developer tools and cloud services. Nadella leads a team of over 10,000 employees, and his group alone makes $19 billion in annual revenue – which is more than the combined revenues of Facebook, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Zynga, Netflix, and a few others in the Valley.

Will Google’s new Nexus Q, the H2G2-42, be the answer to life, the universe, and everything?

In Douglas Adams' book The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy, a vast computer named Deep Thought spends several eons constructing an answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.

Schooled by Google: How Google Apps is penetrating education (infographic)

Education is a notoriously slow adopter of technology, but Google Apps is growing quickly, if not virally, doubling over the last two years.

Google App Engine finally supports PHP, the language that runs 75% of the web

The biggest web company on the planet just added support for the most widely used programming language on the planet.