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Update at 1:15 p.m. PDT April 18: Google ends trading day up 20 percent, capturing largest one-day gain

Update at 10 a.m. PDT April 18: Google's gains have now reached 21 percent.

Google's shares closed with a 20 percent gain Friday, marking the largest-ever one-day gain for the Internet giant.

Google's stock closed at $539.41 per share, up $89.87 from the previous day when Google reported after the market's close its first-quarter earnings and blew past analysts' estimates.

During intra-day trading Friday, Google's stock rose as high as $545.11 … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Jan Chipchase is a cell phone modification guru. A researcher at Nokia Design in Tokyo, he's seen cell phones modified to hold up to 16 SIM cards and plenty more in his role at the company.

Chipchase is a member of a team at Finnish cell phone giant Nokia that's trying to lower the cost of phones for emerging markets, an effort that's part market development and part recycling. The group of 15 has scanned bazaars and street shops in places as diverse as Ghana, Brazil, Iran, India, Egypt, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, China, and Mongolia to learn … Read more

Whether marking printers or produce, the increasing number of "green" claims on products can make it hard to separate sincere efforts at sustainability from marketing fluff.

Environmental watchdogs warn that corporate "greenwashing" will lead jaded consumers to abandon efforts to shop responsibly.

However, individuals can counteract the confusion and police the marketplace using online tools, according to Joel Makower, executive editor of GreenBiz.com.

"In this age of the Web, the blogosphere, and social media, I don't think greenwashers are going to get very far or that fraudulent, hugely misleading companies are going to … Read more

Nvidia CEO and co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang let rip with a diatribe against Intel at Nvidia's financial analyst day on Thursday. Huang cited frustration with recent Intel comments stating that discrete graphics cards will become "unnecessary."

Because Intel, the world's largest chipmaker, includes integrated-graphics silicon in most of its chipsets the company has become the world's largest supplier of graphics chips. Its upcoming Nehalem processors will move the graphics from the chipset onto the same piece of silicon as the main processor. A design that is expected to result in vastly better performance.

(Note: A contrarian … Read more

More than a mere rival to Microsoft Office, the open-source OpenOffice.org (for Windows and Mac) includes the powerful applications for creating text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, diagrams, and databases that make it a serious Office competitor. It lets you edit basic documents and save them in a variety of formats, it's robust enough to handle equations and complex multipart documents with bibliographies, reference tables, and indexes, and on top of all that, it's extensible and uses less RAM than MS Office. What's not to love?

Wikipedia might not take too kindly to pranks any other day of the year, but the anyone-can-edit encyclopedia sure had some fun with April Fools' Day.

The site revamped its "On This Day" section with events that actually did happen on April 1, but with the wording cleverly tweaked to make them sound ridiculous. "(In 1969) The British-born model Hawker Siddeley Harrier was introduced at a Royal Air Force event, becoming the only one in the 1960s to successfully perform on a short runway," Wikipedia's front page read. The Hawker Siddeley Harrier is actually an … Read more

Eric Litman from WashingtonVC joins us to talk crap on idiotic startup founders, we invent a new social network for plants and apparently elephants can paint portraits, no joke. Oh, and by the way, your April Fools' joke isn't that funny.

Listen now: Download today's podcast

The word of the day is "prank." Unless maybe you're one of the ones who got taken in hook, line, and sinker, in which case it's "doh!"

If you haven't already noticed, today is April Fools' Day, but you probably have, since most pranksters seem to get an early start. No single April 1 hoax may have the heft of Orson Welles' War of the Worlds stunt the night before Halloween in 1938, and there aren't usually chores involved like the ritual post-Halloween clean-up of splattered egg whites, but nothing comes close … Read more

Happy April Fools' Day!

As expected, Google's Gmail rolled out a fake "custom time" feature, which purports to let users send e-mails into the past and consequently never miss important deadlines again. The new feature "utilizes an e-flux capacitor to resolve issues of causality," Google wrote.

"I just got two tickets to Radiohead by being the 'first' to respond to a co-worker's 'first-come, first-serve' email," a fake testimonial on the Custom Time site read. "Someone else had already won them, but I told everyone to check their inboxes again. Everyone sort … Read more