An official announcement was expected on Monday.

The Yahoo board of directors unanimously approved an all-cash deal worth 1.1 billion dollars, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The two companies were in serious talks last week and the deal was now a foregone conclusion, according to US technology blog AllThingsD.

Experts say the acquisition of Tumblr shows Yahoo’s desire to attract younger users, especially in the 18-24 age bracket. The Tumblr acquisition would also give Yahoo a fast-growing social networking hub.

Founded in 2007 by entrepreneur David Karp, Tumblr allows users to write blogs and share picture and video content. The site hosts over one hundred million blogs.(dpa)

Google Inc announced on Thursday a half-dozen apps specially designed to work on its Glass devices. News network CNN, fashion magazine Elle, as well as online apps Tumblr and Evernote were among the half-dozen new apps for Glass unveiled during Google’s annual developer conference in San Francisco.

Google Glass is a stamp-sized electronic screen mounted on the left side of a pair of eyeglass frames which can record video, access email and messages and retrieve information from the Web.

Google began distributing the devices last month to a limited number of developers, but it has yet to specify when a version will be available for consumers or at what price.

The futuristic-looking devices have been a common sight at the Google conference this week, with many of the attendees and staffers wearing Glass. But Google executives gave Glass short shrift during the more than three-hour keynote talks on Wednesday, barely mentioning Glass among the litany of new products and services discussed on stage.

”EBay Inc is participating in the beta of Google Glass and we are exploring the various use-case scenarios,” said eBay spokeswoman Amanda Miller.

EBay’s Innovation and New Ventures group, run by former eBay mobile executive Steve Yankovich, is taking part in the Google Glass trial program, she added.

EBay’s online marketplace has been revitalized in recent years by the success of apps the company developed early for Apple Inc’s iPhone, the first mobile computing platform to really take off commercially.

EBay wants to make sure that, if Google Glass becomes the next big mobile platform, its apps will be on there early too.

Some of eBay’s existing mobile apps already let shoppers point smart phone cameras at products to check online prices and buy related items. The price-checking capabilities have sparked a new trend in retail known as show-rooming, the practice of looking at items in physical stores and then buying them online.

Google unveiled a half-dozen apps on Thursday designed to work on Glass, a stamp-sized electronic screen mounted on the left side of a pair of eyeglass frames that can record video, access messages and retrieve information from the Web.

Glass apps from social networking services Facebook Inc and Twitter were among those announced on Thursday.

Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services, announced the milestone in a press release Thursday in which he said that an Ohio man who downloaded the 50 billionth app had won a 10,000-dollar gift card for the App Store.

”The App Store completely transformed how people use their mobile devices and created a thriving app ecosystem that has paid out over 9 billion dollars to developers,” Cue said.

Customers download over 800 apps per second from the App Store at a rate of two billion apps per month.

The App Store opened in July 2008 with 500 apps and now offers over 850,000 apps for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

The milestone keeps Apple just ahead of rival Google, which announced on Wednesday that it had reached 48 billion app downloads for its Android operating system. Google is likely to take the lead soon as Android controls 74 per cent of the world’s smartphone market compared with 18 per cent for Apple.

It is the first time the former Microsoft chief executive has held the title since 2007. He took the title away from Mexican telecommunications billionaire Carlos Slim.

The 57-year-old Gates’ net worth grew in recent weeks thanks to a rally on Wall Street. His fortune climb about 10 billion dollars this year, hitting a five-year high Thursday when the stock market closed.

Slim, 73, owns a fortune valued at 72.1 billion dollars, according to Bloomberg, whose billionaires index is updated every day.
It dropped more than 2 billion dollars this year after Mexico’s Congress passed a bill to end the market dominance of his America Movil.

The bill would allow regulators to break up phone companies with more than 50 per cent of the market or force them to share their networks. America Movil has 70 per cent of Mexico’s mobile-phone subscribers and 80 per cent of the country’s landlines.

Gates has stakes in more than a dozen publicly traded companies, including the Four Seasons hotel chain, and several closely held operations, Bloomberg said. Less than a quarter of Gates’ fortune is held in Microsoft.

Gates has donated 28 billion dollars to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a charity working largely in poor countries to improve health and education.

The Forbes list of the world’s richest people is better known than the Bloomberg list. It was last published in March, and at the time Slim was number one, Gates was number two, Spanish fashion mogel Amancio Ortega and US financial wizard Warren Buffet was fourth. (dpa)