Billionaire buys $10.7bn IBM stake

Warren Buffett - one of the world's most closely watched investors - has disclosed buying a 5.4% stake in IBM, reports the BBC.

Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway fund started buying shares in the firm in March, eventually spending around $10.7 billion.

The billionaire had steered away from technology firms in the past. However, Buffett said he had been impressed by IBM's roadmap for how it planned to attract IT firms outside the US to sign up to its services.

Ilya Zhitomirskiy, a co-founder of the start-up social networking site Diaspora that put an emphasis on privacy and user-control, has died, a company spokesman said yesterday. He was 22, reveals the Associated Press.

The cause of Zhitomirskiy's death in San Francisco wasn't immediately known, and neither the company nor the San Francisco Medical Examiner's office would release details.

“Ilya was a great guy. He was a visionary, he was a co-founder of a company that hopes to bring a better social networking experience,” said Peter Schurman, a Diaspora spokesman. “We are all very sad that he is gone. It is a huge loss for all of us, including his family.”

Hackers say they have reverse-engineered the Siri personal assistant that debuted in last month's release of the iPhone 4S, a feat that allows them to make it work from virtually any device, notes The Register.

To back up their claim, the hackers - from the mobile-application developer Applidium - released a collection of tools yesterday that they say can be used to build Siri-enabled applications on devices that were never authorised to offer the proprietary Apple feature.

The tools, written in the Ruby, C, and Objective-C languages, are the result of painstaking sleuthing into the way Siri communicates with a remote server Apple dedicates to the service.

Amazon's Kindle Fire has managed to do what many other Android tablets have failed to do - drum up interest from developers in North America, says Cnet.

Among developers surveyed by Appcelerator and IDC, 49% said they considered the Kindle Fire their primary target.

It narrowly beat Samsung Electronics' Galaxy Tab, which garnered 48% of the vote.