Google hires a senior director at Apple for a top secret project (exclusive)  —  Google has pulled off a coup by hiring an Apple senior director of product integrity for a secret project, VentureBeat has learned.  —  The recruiting feat is historic since Google has never hired such a senior person away from Apple.

Why Apple's A5 is so big—and iPhone 4 won't get Siri  —  Why Apple's A5 is so big and the iPhone 4 won't get Siri Noise-reduction technology from a start-up called Audience accounts for the size of the iPhone 4S chip and keeps Siri off the iPhone 4, analyst Linley Gwennap concludes.

AT&T Starts Throttling Unlimited Data Users after 2GB of Monthly Usage  —  In October, AT&T announced that they would start throttling data usage amongst mobile Unlimited Data Plan users.  While AT&T no longer offers an Unlimited Data plan to new customers, many of the original iPhone purchasers are still grandfathered into that plan.

Facebook Is Using You  —  LAST week, Facebook filed documents with the government that will allow it to sell shares of stock to the public.  It is estimated to be worth at least $75 billion.  But unlike other big-ticket corporations, it doesn't have an inventory of widgets or gadgets, cars or phones.

Motorola wants 2.25% of Apple's sales in return for license to standard-essential wireless patents  —  In my previous post (on Motorola's lawsuits against the German Apple Stores), I said that a statement by Apple's counsel at yesterday's Mannheim trial made me aware of a discovery request …

It's Not Whether Google's Threatened.  It's Asking Ourselves: What Commons Do We Wish For?  —  If Facebook's IPO filing does anything besides mint a lot of millionaires, it will be to shine a rather unsettling light on a fact most of us would rather not acknowledge: The web as we know it is rather …

Zuckerberg's Big Tax Bill May Benefit Facebook  —  Few billionaires are willing to reveal much about their taxes.  —  But the Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has indirectly done so in the documents for his company's public stock offering later this year.

How Does Facebook Make Money?  —  Facebook's IPO filing this week confirmed what we already knew: Facebook makes the vast majority of its money by selling ads on its site.  —  But now we know just how much of its revenue comes from advertising: 85% in 2011, with the remaining 15% coming from payments and other fees.

Yelp Reports Wider Loss for 2011 After Marketing, Development Costs Climb  —  Yelp Inc. (YELP), the user-generated review site that's planning an initial public offering, reported a wider loss in 2011 after increasing spending to attract reviewers and make the service easier to use.

AMD Eyes ARM Alliance in War on Intel  —  Could the low-power chip design that's used in your iPhone someday show up inside the chips built by Intel rival Advanced Micro Devices?  —  Definitely maybe.  Or as AMD's brand new Chief Technology Officer Mark Papermaster put it to us: “The answer is not no.”

Apple Revises Snow Leopard Security Update and Pulls 10.7.3 Delta Update  —  After a couple of issues with some software updates, Apple has made some quiet revisions to address the problems.  —  The first was a Snow Leopard security update which inadvertently caused problems with Apple's PowerPC emulation layer Rosetta.