What We're Reading

Alphabet's investment arm, Google Capital, has quietly made an investment in Snapchat parent company, Snap Inc. 

The investment was only revealed after Google Capital rebranded itself to CapitalG on Friday and added the Snapchat logo to its portfolio page. Business Insider confirmed that it is a portfolio company of the growth equity arm of Alphabet. Snap Inc did not immediately respond to comment. 

The two companies have had a cozy relationship. In 2013, it was rumored that Google once tried to buy Snapchat for $4 billion after it turned down a Facebook acquisition. To this day, Snapchat remains one of the largest users of Google's cloud infrastructure, although it's recently brought a data center specialist in house. 

Before it renamed itself to Snap Inc in September, Snapchat had most recently raised $1.81 billion in a May 2016 round of funding. That funding round valued the company around $20 billion. 

Courtesy of BusinessInsider

When Microsoft introduces its long-awaited Windows 8 operating system Friday, it will be the first Windows rollout to face real competition since, well, forever. Today, smartphones and tablets do almost all of the day-to-day tasks a PC does -- including sending e-mail, surfing the Web, and editing photos -- and do some of them better. Already, tech investors, long accustomed to a lift from Windows, are primed for disappointment.

At the same time, big data -- massive data centers that can marshall tremendous computing power -- is upending the traditional network, pushing information-processing into the palm of your hand. And it's happening faster than almost anybody expected, as last week's spooky earnings surprises at Microsoft (ticker: MSFT) and chip makers Intel (INTC) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) made clear.

So who are the winners and losers in a post-PC world? Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOG), and Samsung Electronics (005930.Korea) certainly stand to gain, and EMC (EMC) will be a