Apple Puts New Engineers On Fake Products Until It Can Trust Them  —  Apple is so obsessed with secrecy, it sometimes puts new hires on fake products until they can be trusted.  —  Adam Lashinsky reported this tidbit in his new book “Inside Apple,” and a former Apple employee confirmed …

How Americans used their phones to assist with purchasing decisions this holiday season  —  Main Findings  —  How Americans used their phones to assist with purchasing decisions this holiday season  —  More than half of adult cell phone owners used their cell phones while they were in a store during …

Verizon shared data plans show up in employee training materials, still on track?  —  Verizon said it was working on a shared data solution for 2012, and according to an anonymous tipster, the new packages could be rolling out soon.  We've been told that training material for an update …

Apple predicted to sell up to 40M iPhones on China Mobile, China Telecom in 2013  —  Investment bank Morgan Stanley believes Apple will partner up with both China Telecom and China Mobile “over the next year” to make its iPhone available on all three Chinese carriers, a move …

Microsoft Office 15 technical preview kicks off  —  Summary: Microsoft is making available to select testers the technical preview of Office 15 client, server and services as of January 30.  —  Microsoft is kicking off the technical preview for its Office 15 client, servers and cloud services today, January 30.

Attorney General set to destroy tens of millions of users' legitimate MegaUpload files  —  An attorney for MegaUpload — which was shut down by the US government earlier this month, and whose assets have been frozen, following copyright complaints from the entertainment industry …

Where's the Fire?  Kindle Sales Pushing Six Million for the Quarter.  —  Has anyone seen one of Amazon's new Kindle Fires in the wild?  I haven't.  But evidently they're everywhere.  You just need to know where to look to find them — like Stifel Nicolaus analyst Jordan Rohan.

The Real Story of How Dick Costolo Kicked Investors Off Twitter's Board  —  The dribs and drabs of news about the shakeup of Twitter's board last year has produced a confusing picture.  The message I was hearing from sources while I was out on maternity leave amounted to: “Nothing to see here.

Meet Bill Gates, the Man Who Changed Open Source Software  —  The meeting took place a week before Bill Gates retired from Microsoft, and the topic was open source software.  —  It was the summer of 2008, and for years, the open source community had viewed Microsoft as public enemy number one.

Twitter could block super-injunction tweets  —  Twitter could bar British users from reading tweets that break future celebrity super-injunctions, a senior executive from the web firm has told MPs and Lords.  —  Ryan Giggs was named by tens of thousands of Twitter users as the holder of a super-injunction

The Obama Campaign Is Now Using Mobile Payments Device Square For Fundraising  —  The latest technology to be adopted by the Obama campaign—Square.  The mobile payments device is now being used by the Obama for fundraising, says the company.  Staff, fundraisers and others are being equipped …

FDA staffers sue agency over surveillance of personal e-mail  —  The Food and Drug Administration secretly monitored the personal e-mail of a group of its own scientists and doctors after they warned Congress that the agency was approving medical devices that they believed posed unacceptable risks to patients, government documents show.

AT&T to launch Samsung Galaxy Note on February 19th for $299.99 [video]  —  AT&T announced Monday that the Samsung Galaxy Note smartphone will be available in stores on February 19th for $299.99 on contact, a day after we recently reported.  Pre-orders are set to begin this weekend …

Web Second, Mobile First  —  Fred Wilson wrote two posts in 2010 that were very influential with the startup community.  —  The titles were:  —  Mobile First, Web Second  —  Mobile First, Web Second (continued)  —  If you're in the minority that never read these posts - you should.

Buffalo Studios blasts Zynga for copying Bingo Blitz social game  —  Nimblebit drew some blood last week when the developer of Tiny Tower cast a stone at Zynga, via an infographic, for copying Tiny Tower in an upcoming mobile game called Dream Heights.  —  Buffalo Studios is using …

Facebook (Eye)PO: Tracking the Truth of the Biggest Deal of Web 2.0  —  As AllThingsD.com wrote two weeks ago it would be — Facebook is close to filing its documents for a long-expected public offering that is on track take place in late May.  —  The Wall Street Journal said last week …

Streaming held back  —  Over the last couple of weeks, I've looked at availability of movies and TV shows that came out in the past year.  But what about movies that came two years ago?  Are those more available today than they were a year ago?  Let's look at the data.  —  2010: Box Office Winners availability

Google Fires Kenya Lead Over Mocality  —  Google has reportedly fired its Kenya country manager, Olga Arara-Kimani, over a fraudulent use of Mocality's data.  —  Nairobitech reported: … Sponsor  —  Nelson Mattos, who had earlier made a statement expressing the company's mortification …

Farewell, Yahoo Apps, We Hardly Knew Ye: Deals, News Plus Eight Others Gone  —  Looks like new CEO Scott Thompson is wasting little time starting to get Yahoo's house in order: just a few weeks into the new CEO's tenure, the internet company is pulling support for 10 of its less-popular mobile apps.

BlackBerry Under Siege in Europe  —  The iPhone has taken a big bite out of the BlackBerry in a market where the older phone once dominated: business customers in North America.  —  Meanwhile, in Europe, Samsung is poised to do the same to Research in Motion, BlackBerry's maker …

Facebook: Over 5 billion songs have been shared since September's f8  —  Whether you like the idea of “frictionless sharing” or not, Facebook has made a strong case for the service on stage at the Midem conference.  Dan Rose, the VP of Partnerships for the company, says that over 5 billion songs …

Amazon unit may be moving into sporting goods  —  (Reuters) - Amazon.com Inc's Quidsi unit may be getting into sporting goods, challenging retailers in this niche, including Dick's Sporting Goods, Hibbett Sports and Cabela's, analysts at Credit Suisse said Monday.