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More bumps in the road are probably in store for Bitcoin. The virtual currency has seen some massive swings in value over the last several weeks, but that volatility is not likely to end soon, its lead developer suggested on Saturday.

"We've been on a rollercoaster ride," said Gavin Andresen , chief scientist at the Bitcoin Foundation, which provides much of the core backend development for the currency.

"I expect for the next few years we're going to remain on a rollercoaster ride," he said, speaking in front of a packed room of developers, enthusiasts, venture capitalists and other industry players at Bitcoin 2013, the first conference in Silicon Valley to be held on the topic.

Bitcoin is a digital currency that is managed and traded on a peer-to-peer computer network. Often referred to as a form of "crypto-currency," it is intended to be a decentralized form of payment not regulated by any financial institution or governmental body. A variety of online retailers and a growing number of brick-and-mortar stores are now accepting Bitcoins, which can either be purchased through exchanges on the Internet or "mined" by using specialized hardware.

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The FBI has reportedly briefed bank executives on a wave of cyberattacks that have lashed the industry since last summer as part of a new policy designed to foster cooperation between the state and private sectors.

According to comments made at a Reuters event by FBI executive assistant director Richard McFeely, the Bureau had carried out a large videoconference with dozens of bank heads across the U.S. in April to urge them to share data on the attacks they are experiencing.

In the past the organization had conducted its investigations without keeping victim firms—in this case banks—informed, he admitted.

"That's 180 degrees from where we are now," Reuters reported him as saying of the FBI's change of approach.

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The "Bring Your Own Devices" trend has a dual-personality problem on its hands.

How can corporate data and personal data exist on a single smartphone? Companies don't want their deep secrets to get out, while employees don't want to be told how to use their precious mobile gadgets that they bought with their own money.

It's a problem that has stumped the BYOD crowd.

"Companies don't trust that information is contained properly" on a BYOD smartphone, says Nanci Churchill, vice president of operations at Mobi Wireless Management, a software and services provider helping companies navigate mobile adoption.

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As data-transfer shifts increasingly to the cloud, the servers stacked in datacenters handling the data become increasingly crowded. Virtualization means multiple users can share a single server.

This has positive aspects: servers don't sit idle, scalability is less of a concern, and datacenter efficiency improves. But there's a problem with too many users on a single server.

And it's going to get worse.

It's called "the noisy neighbor problem," and here's what happens: disk I/O for one user starts to interfere with the operations of another user on the same server.

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The nation's critical infrastructure is vulnerable to cyber attacks and better information sharing is needed to strengthen defenses.

That's the message Charles Edwards, deputy inspector general for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, told a Congressional committee at a public hearing on Thursday.

Since 1990, Industrial Control Systems, which are used to manage components of the country's critical infrastructure, have been connecting to the Internet to improve their operations, Edwards explained in written testimony submitted to the House Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Protection and Security Technologies.

However, companies hooked their control systems into the public Internet with little regard for security. "[Security] for ICS was inherently weak because it allowed remote control of processes and exposed ICS to cyber security risks that could be exploited over the Internet," Edwards said.

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Bitcoin is growing up. The virtual currency that caught the public's attention last month when its value zoomed briefly past US$200 kicked off its first Silicon Valley conference Friday evening and shows no sign of losing momentum.

The event is small by Silicon Valley standards, with about 1,000 attendees expected and 19 exhibitors, but it's bustling with startups launching new exchanges, software developers looking to strengthen the Bitcoin network, and venture capitalists seeking places to invest.

There's now $45 million a day being traded on the Bitcoin network, or $16 billion a year, according Peter Vessenes, chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation, who talked at the start of the event in San Jose, California.

The volume of activity is accelerating, he said. There have been 18 million transactions in the four years since bitcoins were introduced, and the figure is expected to reach 20 million next month.

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Forget Glass, self-driving cars or a smartwatch. Developers, not physical consumer products, were Google's darlings at the company's annual I/O conference this week.

Google brands I/O as a conference for developers, and this year, with a range of new tools unveiled to attract more outside developers -- and boost the revenue from their services -- the company sought to deliver the goods to I/O's intended audience.

"Giving back to the developer community was a big theme," said Andrew Levy, CEO at Crittercism, an app performance management company, who attended the conference.

It was a stark contrast to last year's show, which saw a group of skydivers wearing Glass, the company's closely watched augmented reality system, land on top of San Francisco's Moscone convention center during a lively keynote address delivered by Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

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Yahoo has called a mystery press event in New York City on Monday afternoon, hot on the heels of rumors that it plans to buy Tumblr for US$1 billion.

"Join us as we share something special," says the invite, sent to members of the press Friday afternoon.

Citing unnamed sources, All Things D reported earlier Friday that Yahoo may be in talks to partner with Tumblr, invest in it, or make an outright purchase. It notes that Yahoo's CFO talked earlier this week about the need for Yahoo to bring back its "cool."

Adweek, in another report citing unnamed sources, put the value of the deal at $1 billion.

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A strong stock market could open the floodgates for more tech IPOs in the wake of Friday's solid debut of Marketo and Tableau, but not all segments of IT may be able to ride the wave.

Marketo, which sells cloud-based marketing software, jumped 78 percent to close at US$23.10, up $10.10 from its opening on the Nasdaq. Tableau, a business intelligence and data visualization company trading under the eye-catching ticker "DATA", rose 64 percent to close at $50.75, up $19.75 from its opening on the New York Stock Exchange.

Tableau originally was set to offer 7.2 million shares but added another million shares thanks to an institutional investor that underwrote more of the float at the last moment. As a result, the company raised $254 million, rather than the $150 million it originally sought.

The promising debuts came as major markets and indexes rose for the fourth straight week, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the Standard and Poor's 500 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq exchange all closing up for the week. The Dow and the S&P have both hit nominal (not adjusted for inflation) record highs recently, having surpassed the milestone round figures of 15,000 and 1,600, respectively, three weeks ago.

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Hop on an Emirates flight in Dubai and get up to cruising altitude. You realize you forgot to tell your assistant to make some crucial plans when you arrive at your destination. No problem: Just take out your cell phone and make a quick phone call.

Say what? Emirates is one of just a handful of airlines that let passengers make calls in flight, not through a funky seat-back phone (though the airline offers those, too), but through a system that relays regular wireless phone calls through a satellite and back down to the ground. Provided by either OnAir or AeroMobile, the service is available on 300 Emirates flights every day.

And a single plane has yet to crash because of it.

The technology behind in-flight phone calls isn't all that complicated. Calls are handled by a picocell on the plane, which is basically the same technology behind Gogo Inflight Internet, which relays Wi-Fi signals to ground-based cell towers, and which is now included on 1,600 commercial aircraft.

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