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One of the best things about owning an Apple TV is the ability to share everything on your Mac’s screen with the flatscreen in your living room. It works perfectly. If there’s video on the Internet that you can’t find on one of the Apple TV apps, you don’t have to worry about it; you just screen share and enjoy.

Google and Netflix are tired of Apple having all the fun with wireless video streaming between devices, so they’ve brewed up their own solution to compete with AirPlay. The new protocol is called DIAL, and like Android, it’s free and already has some big companies backing it.

Apple co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs threatened Palm CEO Edward Colligan with patent litigation if he did not agree to stop poaching Apple employees, according to a court filing that was made public on Tuesday.

Confidential emails between the pair, along with documents from Adobe and Google, have surfaced in a civil lawsuit that claims a number of major companies in Silicon Valley violated antitrust rules by entering into agreements not to recruit each other’s employees. Five employees are now fighting for class action status and damages for lost wages as a result of the “no-hire” agreements.

Google just announced its earnings for Q4 2012, and guess what? They made a ton of money. We’re shocked.

Actually, Q4 2012 was really great for Google. The company earned $14.4 billion in revenue, which is 36% better than what they did last year. While we tend to think of Google as an American company, only $5.99 billion of that revenue came from the U.S. while the rest was made in international markets.

Amazon has today announced that its in-app purchasing service, which is already available on the company’s Kindle Fire tablet and other Android devices, is coming to Mac, PC, and web games. This will allow developers to take advantage of Amazon’s service on those platforms to provide their customers with a new way to purchase additional content using their credit card or virtual Amazon currency.

While Amazon isn’t the first company to offer an in-app purchasing system, its service does come with some advantages that developers may not get from its rivals. One of those advantages is that their content will be available via Amazon.com.

Just a few weeks ago, we reported that Samsung and Apple were the only two smartphone manufacturers seeing growth in the United States, and that the pair were slowly eating away at their rivals’ market share. But when you take old-fashioned feature phones into account, the situation looks a little different.

New data from Counterpoint Research suggests that strong December sales have helped LG overtake Apple to claim the second-largest stake of the U.S. phone market. As you might expect, Samsung is still way ahead in first.

Tired of welcoming our Google overlords? Have a free Gmail account, and just lose your contact sync via Exchange? Well, why not put your contacts over on iCloud for easy synchronization across all your Apple products? Makes sense to me.

Here’s how to do it.

Apple CEO Tim Cook must provide a deposition in a lawsuit that claims the Cupertino company, along with other major firms in Silicon Valley, violated antitrust rules by entering into an agreement not to recruit each other’s employees. Apple’s lawyer, George Riley, had objected to the order handed out by U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California, on Thursday.

According to Google engineer, Frank Petterson, on his own Google+ profile page, the search giant’s social network iOS apps just got a little more international, as the app just became available in 48 new countries and territories.

Steve Jobs used to like Larry Page and the guys at Google, until they went and made their own smartphone operating system by copying iOS. Steve Jobs was livid. He threatened “to go thermonuclear war” on Google over Android, and the relationship obviously soured.

Now that Larry Page is the CEO of Google, he’s got a lot to worry about, but Steve Jobs’ thermonuclear threats haven’t seemed to bother him. In an interview with Wired’s Steven Levy, Page was asked about competition, and Jobs’ threats of war, but rather than going on an anti-Apple rant, Page’s answer was pretty calm, cool, and collected.

The iPad may be the king of tablets in some markets, but Apple’s device cannot compete with the Nexus 7 in Japan. Its premium price tag is causing tablet buyers to opt for Google’s 7-inch slate instead, despite its smaller display and lack of a rear-facing camera. One survey of Japanese electronics stores has found that the Nexus 7 has claimed 44.4% of the tablet market.

Amidst rumors of a mysterious smartphone and new iPad apps, Facebook held a big press event today at its headquarters in Menlo Park, California. The topic was search, or more specifically, social search. It’s a new feature Facebook is calling “Graph Search,” and the beta has started rolling out already. It will be available for all of Facebook’s one billion users soon.

Think of Graph Search as Google with a more personal touch. Facebook is leveraging everything it knows about you to help you connect with people who like what you like. Instead of leaving Facebook.com to get your results, all of your social data and timeline history is mined and collated inside Facebook’s walls. That’s good news for Facebook, and bad news for Google.

Facebook is set to hold a press event later today, and it appears the whole thing’s going to be a massive kick in the teeth for Google. Not only is the social network expected to unveil its own smartphone, possibly powered by its own platform, but it’s also expected to hit Google where it really hurts — in search. Rumor has it the company will unveil its own search engine, which will rollout to users “very soon.”

Back in early December, Apple and Google joined forces to purchase a patent trove from Kodak, the once-reigning photography king. Kodak’s collection includes 1,100 imaging patents that can be used to diffuse litigation between big companies in the tech industry.

To keep bidding wars from escalating, Apple and Google teamed up for the purchase. After filing for bankruptcy, Kodak said that its patent trove was worth $2 billion, but the U.S. court approved a $527 million price tag instead.

What the companies involved with this deal plan to do with the acquired patents remains to be seen.

Source: Bloomberg

Next week at CES every tech company in the world is going to cram under one roof and show off all their products that they hope will change the world. Well every company except Apple that is.

Even though Apple won’t have a presence at CES this year, we’ll see their influence everywhere, from ultrabooks to smartphones. But the biggest influence Apple will have on CES 2013 is with a product they haven’t even released yet – the mythical iTV.

Everyone is scared of what will happen if Apple launches an iTV because it will give them a virtual monopoly on all consumer screens (smartphones, laptops, tablets, and televisions). So naturally we’re going to see a lot of Smart TVs as everyone attempts to predict what Apple’s going to do, and then try to get there first.

The battle for smartphone supremacy between iOS and Android has been going on for years now, and even though a host of other manufacturers and operating systems have been introduced, no one has been able to slow down the popularity of the iPhone and Android.

The iPhone continued to increase its marketshare at the end of 2012 according to the latest analysis from comScore. While other platforms shrank in size, Apple’s iPhone now accounts for 35% of the U.S. smartphone marketshare, with Android smartphones taking 53.7%.

While iOS may not be as flexible or as customizable as Android, on the whole it looks a whole lot nicer. Android is steadily improving, that’s for sure, but it’s hard to deny that iOS developers appear to spend more time making their apps prettier, even if you’re a diehard Android fan.

And that was proven when Chris Hulbert, an iOS developer, went to work at Google for three months. In a post on his blog, Hulbert reveals the differences in attitude towards design for iOS and Android, which help explain why Android apps aren’t quite as pretty as they could be.

Apple and Samsung are the only two smartphone manufacturers currently seeing any growth in the United States. The pair are slowly eating away at the market share held by their rivals, including LG, Motorola, Research in Motion, and HTC. In the three months leading up to November 2012, Samsung increased its market share from 25.7% to 26.9%, but Apple is catching up with the Cupertino company enjoying slightly more growth.

Microsoft has beaten Apple and Google to the acquisition of R2 Studios, a small home entertainment technology startup from the founder of Sling Media. R2 is famous for an Android app that allows users to control things like lighting and appliances throughout their homes, and its thought the company’s technology will help Microsoft push its Xbox console even further into home entertainment.

Thanks to affordable offerings like the Amazon Kindle Fire HD and the Google Nexus 7, Android tablets continue to increase their market share and claw away at the iPad’s lead. However, Apple’s tablet remains king of the web, accounting for a whopping 87% of tablet web traffic in North America.

Picking up a new skill is a very popular new year’s resolution. And this Cult of Mac Deals offer will go a long way in helping you pick up a skill that can bring both pleasure and profit – designing iOS apps.

The iOS App Design Course bundle is just $79 for a limited time, and if you have beginner level knowledge of Photoshop and a desire to learn iOS app design, this course trio will help you quickly learn how to design both iPhone and iPad apps and icons.

While Apple fans will argue that Android copied iOS, it’s hard to deny that Apple didn’t take a little bit of inspiration back from from Android, too. Its Notification Center is an almost identical copy of Android’s — that’s easy to see no matter which side of the fence you’re on. In fact, Samsung’s now using this as another reason to sue Apple in South Korea.

Blake Krikorian, the guy who made the Slingbox, founded a new startup last year called “id8 Group R2 Studios.” Since then, R2 Studios has released an Android app for controlling a home’s heating and lightning with Cestron. The firm also owns some secretive patents relating to remote device and interface control.

According to a new from The Wall Street Journal, a number of big tech companies (including Google and Apple) have been in talks with R2 Studios about a possible buyout:

As Apple slowly but surely turns its back on Google, Siri, its intelligent digital assistant, is doing the same. If you’d have asked Siri a question back in June, there’s a 60% chance the data it came back with would have been from Google. Ask it a question today, however, and that chance is reduced to just 30%. Not only has Apple given YouTube and Google Maps the boot, then, it’s shunning Google’s search data, too.

Apple’s App Store is widely considered the king of mobile marketplaces — even Android fanatics will admit that it offers a greater selection of high-quality apps and games. But it’s Google Play that’s currently seeing the most growth, according to the latest data from app analytics firm Distimo, while the App Store enjoys more than four times as much revenue.

It seems Apple’s problematic new Maps app was discouraging a lot of people from upgrading to iOS 6, the Cupertino company’s latest software. But now that Google Maps is official available as a native iOS app, there’s nothing to stop users from finally performing the upgrade. In fact, its arrival boosted iOS 6 adoption by 29%.