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BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins has said this week that he expects new Q10 device sales to total in the "tens of millions."

The Q10 is the second BlackBerry device to feature the newly revamped BlackBerry 10 operating system. The Q10 also includes a full keyboard, in a throwback to what made the company such a huge hit in the mid-2000s.

"We have very, very good first signs already after the launch in the U.K.," Heins said. "This is going into the installed base of more than 70 million BlackBerry users so we have quite some expectations. We expect several tens of million of units."

The first BlackBerry 10 device, the fully touch Z10, sold 1 million units in its first quarter of availability, a lackluster figure, at best.

BlackBerry's Q10 goes on sale in the U.S. at the end of May through all four major carriers at a price of $250 with contract. This is more expensive than the iPhone and nearly all Android devices so BlackBerry is clearly making a gamble that enterprise users are willing to pay more for a keyboard.

That remains to be seen.

Earlier this month, Dish Network made a large $25.5 billion bid for Sprint Nextel, besting an existing offer from Japanese carrier Softbank.

The company, which has been hoarding cash for a large acquisition, would use Sprint as a compliment to its current offerings, bundling TV, Internet and wireless phone services. Dish offered $17.3 billion in cash and an additional $8.2 billion in stock for complete control of the company. Softbank offered $20 billion for a 70 percent stake and Sprint agreed to the merger last year.

Today, Sprint received a waiver from SoftBank, allowing them to enter into a NDA and preliminary discussions with DISH "for the purpose of clarifying and obtaining further information from DISH regarding its proposal made on April 15, 2013."

What the waiver does not allow, is for Sprint to enter into real negotiations or provide any non-public information.

E-commerce and auction giant Alibaba has purchased a large stake in Sina Weibo, the Chinese equivalent to Twitter.

The company bought an 18 percent stake for $586 million and also retains the right to add another 12 percent in the future.

Monday's deal valued Weibo at $3.3 billion, more than the entire market value of parent Sina. Investors pounced on the opportunity, bringing Sina shares up 10 percent in Monday's trading.

Alibaba also noted it will be working with Sina to improve integration between e-commerce and social networking.

Weibo has about 46 million active users, but recent reports claims that over 50 percent never post.

"We believe that the cooperation of our two robust platforms will bring unique and valuable services to Weibo users, as well as making the mobile Internet a core part of Alibaba's strategy," added Jack Ma, the Alibaba chairman.

According to the CBC, Canada is preparing to tax Bitcoin transactions.

Canada's Revenue Agency says the taxes will be handled in one of two ways. Barter transaction rules apply when Bitcoins are used for goods or services, and capital gains or income tax rules apply when buying or selling as a trade or for other speculation.

The highly volatile currency recently reached all-time highs of over $250 USD per Bitcoin before collapsing to $60. The currency now trades at about $135. The currency first began being used by money launderers and those looking to purchase guns and drugs, but the currency is more mainstream now, with sellers of all types of goods supporting it.

View this great video explaining Bitcoin here:

Bitcoin Explained from Duncan Elms on Vimeo.

Apple took the first steps towards its first ever debt sale, as the company plans to use the money to fund its massive $100 billion share buyback program.

The company filed SEC paperwork and has spoken with Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs.

Because of Apple's brand, it is expected that the company could offer the bonds at rates even cheaper than that of the AAA rated Microsoft, and others. Apple was recently given the second best credit rating, AA+. Apple has $145 billion in cash, but only $45 billion is liquid and available in the U.S. Bringing the funds home would cost the company a mini fortune in taxes.

Investment bankers believe Apple can offer 10 year bonds with an interest rate of 2.2%, 50 basis points higher than Government Treasuries.

The Vermont Telephone Co. (VTel) has begun offering gigabit Internet for just $35 a month, undercutting the only other company that offers such fast speeds, Google.

VTel only has a footprint that covers 17,500 home in the state of Vermont, and the company says 600 homes have signed up.

CEO Michael Guite says he has made it his mission to upgrade the company's phone network to fiber. The company was founded in the 1890s.

Using $94 million in federal stimulus awards for broadband, the company has invested in 1200 miles of fiber.

Vtel is one of 700 rural telephone companies to make a similar switch, but their offering is the fastest. Google offers gigabit fiber in Austin, Texas and Kansas City, for $70 per month or for slightly more bundled with TV.

Sony's Mark Cerny has confirmed this week that the PS4 will have the strongest launch lineup of any PlayStation console.

The exec did not give a title count but did say developer's strong "familiarity" with the hardware led to the large launch lineup.

As revealed, the PS4's architecture will be very similar to the average high-end PC using AMD under the hood. "The launch lineup for PlayStation 4 -- though I unfortunately can't give the title count -- is going to be stronger than any prior PlayStation hardware. And that's a result of that familiarity."

At least two games have been confirmed, blockbusters inFAMOUS: Second Son and Killzone: Shadow Fall.

Cerny also noted that he believes devs will use most of the console's GPU on graphics at first but eventually share it equally between graphics and computation. "There are many, many ways to control how the resources within the GPU are allocated between graphics and compute. Of course, what you can do, and what most launch titles will do, is allocate all of the resources to graphics. And that's perfectly fine, that's great. It's just that the vision is that by the middle of the console lifecycle, that there's a bit more going on with compute."

Over the past weeks, it has been reported that Verizon has been considering buying out the other half of its Verizon Wireless joint venture.

Vodafone currently owns a 45 percent stake in the thriving carrier.

Reuters spoke with six of Vodafone's major investors, who said the asking price would have to be above $120 billion to be acceptable. The six shareholders control 1.3 billion of the 5 billion outstanding Vodafone shares making them huge players.

The recent reports had claimed Verizon was preparing a $100 billion bid, 50:50 in cash and stock.

These investors would also prefer a complete merger between the two companies, as Verizon Wireless is the major profit center for Vodafone.

Now that the company has sold off its remaining assets via auction, THQ creditors have made claims in the bankruptcy case, seeking over $200 million.

The smallest claim is for $2.98 from a Tennessee tax advisor and the largest is for $39 million from THQ Holdings.

A few of the big name claimants are Codemasters at $1 million over unpaid royalties, Double Fine is seeking $595,000 in royalties over PS Plus promotions and Microsoft is seeking $1 million over licensing fees. A few top execs from the company are seeking $2 million, as well, in unpaid salary and severance.

Employees and devs are also seeking outstanding payments for their work on major games like Saints Row 4 and Metro: Last Light.

THQ recently auctioned off the last of their IP including Darksiders, Red Faction and Homeworld, raising over $6 million.

Jeff Bleich, the U.S. Ambassador to Australia has made it his mission to stop 'Game of Thrones' piracy.

Coinciding with the annual UN World Book and Copyright Day, Bleich urged fans of the show to stop illegally downloading the show. He even went as far as to say that the huge amounts of piracy is "as epic and devious as the drama."

Reads the full post:

The file-sharing news website TorrentFreak estimated that Game of Thrones was the most-pirated TV series of 2012. One episode was illegally downloaded about 4,280,000 times through public BitTorrent trackers in 2012, which is about equal to the number of that episode's broadcast viewers. In other words, about half of that episode's viewers stole the program from HBO.

Sony has updated its PSN web store, enabling remote downloads.

The update allows users who purchase PS3 and Vita content to remotely download said content.

Says Sony:

After making a purchase on the Web Store, you will now be able to place your content into a download queue for remote download to your PS3 or PS VITA device.

PlayStation Plus subscribers will be able to take advantage of the automatic update function available through the Plus service to remotely download content purchased from the Web Store to your selected device during the regular automatic update. If you do not have a Plus subscription, any content queued for remote download will automatically begin downloading and installing when the device is manually turned on.

Major video game publisher Activision Blizzard's CEO Robert Kotick was one of the highest paid executives of 2012.

The CEO made $65 million in compensation, thanks to a major stock award.

Kotick's base salary jumped to $2 million, and he received a $56 million stock award. Additionally compensation was performance based.

The company's revenues and net income only saw low single digit growth for 2012, much slower than 2011 when the exec made a much smaller salary and bonus.

Kotick has been a director and CEO of the company since 1991.

Samsung has announced this week that under a new branding scheme, all of the company's Windows PCs will use the Ativ name seen currently on their Windows Phone and convertible offerings.

The first devices will be the Ativ Book 5 Ultrabook and the Ativ Book 6 laptop.

Additionally, previous products have also been renamed. The Series 7 All-In-One is now the Ativ One 7, and the Series 9 is now the Ativ Book 9.

The Ativ Book 5 has a 14-inch 1366 x 768 touchscreen, is powered by a 1.8-GHz Intel Core i5-3337U processor with integrated Intel HD 40000 graphics, and runs on 4GB RAM with 500GB internal storage. The ultrabook starts at $900 in the basic configuration.

Book 6 notebooks have a 15.6-inch 1080p touchscreen, an Intel Core i7 CPU, a Radeon HD 8770M GPU, 8GB RAM and a 1TB hard drive for $1200.

Although the company experimented with it internally, the company has decided against adding any multiplayer components for their upcoming Witcher 3.

The game will now be an "epic, story driven, single player open world RPG experience."

In fact, the developers say they believe the final chapter of the popular series "has no place for meaningful multiplayer."

Added CD Projekt marketing head Michal Platkow-Gilewski: "There's no place for multiplayer in so strongly a story-driven game as The Witcher 3. We want to focus on the single-player experience, delivering more than 100 hours of truly immersive gameplay."

Although the Sony Xperia Z has not found a carrier in the U.S., Best Buy has begun selling an unlocked version of the smartphone.

The phone is selling for $900, however, easily the most expensive phone available. By comparison, the new Galaxy and even the iPhone sell for less unlocked, even in premium configurations.

Even worse, the device will not even work with LTE networks, and only supports 3G.

The device runs on Android 4.1.2, has a 1080p 5-inch display, a 1.4GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor, 2GB RAM and a 13MP camera.