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Apple, with just a few products, managed to account for 20 percent of all 2012 U.S. consumer tech revenue.

The data comes via NPD, which says Apple grew to its current share from a 17.3 percent share in 2011.

Samsung took second place at 9.3 percent, followed by HP at 8.2 percent, Sony at 4.4 percent and Dell at 3 percent. Samsung saw strong growth while everyone else in the top five fell.

Apple and Samsung combined to account for $6.5 billion in increased sales last year while the rest of the industry saw a decline of $9.5 billion combined.

"While sales fell in consumer technology for the second consecutive year, there was an uptick in Q4 which is cause for optimism," added Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis at NPD (via AI). "After struggles with declining categories, and increasingly saturated markets over the last few years, fourth quarter's results may be the first sign that even as a mature industry consumer technology can grow again, albeit with a very different dynamic than in previous growth spurts."

Infamous file sharing king Kim Dotcom has boasted about the early stats and milestones for his new Mega adventure.

Dotcom even went as far as to say Mega is a "belief" and "a guardian angel of your rights, freedom, and privacy."

After just one month, the site has hit 3 million users. These users have uploaded 125 million files. The service reached 1 million users in its first 24 hours of availability.

Earlier in the week, Dotcom announced Mega would start accepting Bitcoins as currency and also that mobile apps for Android and iOS were on the way.

France and Spain saw the highest traffic to the service, followed by Brazil, Germany and U.S., adds Dotcom.

Perhaps more importantly than its file sharing capabilities is the cheap pricing for cloud storage. Mega offers the first 50GB for free, matching Box and beating Dropbox, Google Drive and Amazon significantly. Purchasing a £9.99 per month Pro package gets you 500GB of storage and 1TB bandwidth rate. A Tier-2 Pro account for £19.99 gets you 2TB and 4TB of bandwidth. The Tier-3 account, for £29.99 per month, gets you 4TB storage and 8TB bandwidth, huge numbers for the price.

According to the WSJ, Google has developed touchscreen Chromebooks for release later this year.

Chromebooks run on the company's own ChromeOS operating system.

It remains unclear which hardware manufacturer will build the devices or when they will go on sale. Samsung and Acer currently sell Chromebooks and would likely be willing partners.

ChromeOS is different from established operating systems like Windows, Mac and Linux variants because it runs almost exclusively out of the Chrome browser, using Web-based applications. Due to their lower-end specs, Chromebooks sell for between $199 and $249, pressuring prices on traditional laptop makers.

Although Google has long said they do not mind some competition between their own platforms, a touchscreen laptop with ChromeOS would compete with their own Android tablets in many ways.

UK regulator Ofcom has raised over a billion pounds less than it expected to make from its long-awaited 4G auction in the country.

It had forecast a haul of about £3.5 billion, but ended up netting £2.34 billion instead. In 2000, when mobile operators bid on 3G spectrum in the UK, the regulator raised £22 billion. Ofcom chief executive, Ed Richards, said the figure is much lower because we are now in very, very different times.

"What we were trying to do was ensure that a valuable economic resource was brought into productive commercial use," he said.

The winners of the UK's 4G auction were Everything Everywhere; Hutchison 3G UK; Niche Spectrum Ventures, a BT subsidiary; Telefonica (O2); and Vodafone.

The shortfall might cause headaches for Chancellor George Osborne, as he had included £3.5 billion worth of 4G auction receipts in his Autumn statement in December. He had predicted that the UK's budget deficit would fall in 2012-13, but now with a shortfall of over a billion in the 4G auction, all bets are off.

UK pay TV giant BSkyB has extended their movie output deal with Disney, the fourth such renewal since their original deal 24 years ago.

BSkyB will keep "first subscription pay TV rights to Disney films, including Pixar, Marvel and Lucasfilm releases," and get additional rights on other platforms.

Additionally, the companies will launch a new "Sky Movies Disney" channel which will play both new and classic films in the UK and in Ireland. BSB will allow continue to broadcast Disney Channel, Disney XD and Disney Junior, including their HD versions.

Sky Movies Disney will have first run rights for new films like Wreck-It Ralph, and Pixar's Brave. They will be exclusive, as well, blocking out rivals like Netflix and Amazon's LoveFilm.

Some users of Sony's PlayStation Network got a surprise on Wednesday with a free PSN code for $10.

Sony sent out messages to some of its users giving them a free $10 voucher to use. The gift giving was likely linked to the PlayStation Event that Sony held in New York on Wednesday, where it announced the PlayStation 4 (PS4) console.

"Thank you for being a loyal customer and fan of PlayStation Network," the message reads. "As a token of our appreciation, we've sent you $10.00 to spend on the PlayStayion Store!"

Sony has run promotions in the past where some credit was given back to users for spending in the PlayStation Store, but it usually had those advertised.

The operator of an Italian file sharing website has been filed €6.4 million, or about $8.5 million.

ItalianShare had about 300,000 users and reportedly had 30,000 links to copyrighted material available through file lockets, BitTorrent and eD2K. The site operator, identified only as PG, was arrested in July last year on charged of copyright violations, tax fraud and others.

Italian authorities said that the defendant made €580,000 from advertisements and donations to the site.

He has been fined €6.4 million euros by the Salermo provincial judicial authority, after a case was brought against him by the Finance Guard's local office in Agropoli, which is responsible for investigating cybercrime, financial crime, smuggling, Intellectual property infringement and more.

EA, Warner Bros and Ubisoft have announced they will be partnering to sell games from their respective digital game stores.

Ubisoft has been looking to bring in more publishers to their popular digital service Uplay, which has just under 50 million users.

On the other end, Ubisoft games will now appear in EA's Origin service.

"We have about 15 partners with about 25 to 30 titles that will be available at launch," Stephanie Perotti, Ubisoft's worldwide Uplay director said (via GI).

"We've been working on this for some time. We've been launching our own Uplay shop, and we wanted to make sure we offer a good experience from the start so we had to work on both the technical setup and all the negotiation with partners, and we thought the timing was good after the release of very strong PC titles from Ubisoft but also from partners."

Outside of EA and WB, Ubisoft has also confirmed games from Interactive Entertainment, 1C Company, Interactive, Freebird Games, Iceberg Interactive, Nordic Games, Paradox Interactive, Recoil Games, Robot Entertainment, Telltale Games, and Torn Banner Studios.

At the Sony PlayStation event in New York, it was announced that Diablo III would be made available for the PS3 and PS4.

Diablo III was released last June and is only available for Windows and Mac. That's going to change however, as Blizzard Entertainment's VP of development, Chris Metzen, said that they had teamed up with Sony to take over the world.

He revealed that Diablo III is already running on PS3 hardware, and that it was amazing. He didn't give details about it working on prototype PS4 hardware, but confirmed it would be available for both the PS3 and PS4 soon.

Striking a deal with Blizzard is a big win for Sony, and one can only wonder if it will extend beyond Diablo into other franchises over the lifespan of the PS4.

Sony announced the PS4 on Wednesday.

Sony has officially announced the PlayStation 4 console at an event in New York, confirming many previous rumors and leaks.

Andrew House, CEO and President of Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE), gave some hardware details for the upcoming console. It will use an x86 CPU as a nod to easier development for the console, and will pack 8GB of RAM.

It will include local storage - no information on how much just yet - and has a high performance graphics card with GDDR5 memory. The system allows you to simply Suspend it - mid-gameplay - and Resume it later. The state of your console will be stored in RAM, so you do not need to wait for the console to boot, and then load the game and load your save.. it will just continue from where it left off.

The new DualShock 4 controller has the Share button that we all already knew about, enhanced rumbling, a headphone jack and is tracked by a camera that is still in development. PlayStation Move will be supported on PS4.

Thanks to Gaikai, if you have a PSVita, you will be able to use it for Remote Play from the PS4, and eventually will be able to stream older PlayStation titles to the PS4 from the cloud.

The PlayStation 4 will allow you to play games as you download them, and has dedicated hardware that will handle game updates and other such annoyances in the background. The console makes it easy to connect directly with friends, building social networking right into the experience.

At the PlayStation event, Sony has unleashed some of the details of the PlayStation 4's interaction with the cloud and what it means for gamers.

The PS4 has integrated technology acquired from Gaikai last year, according to Gaikai CEO David Perry. It will allow the PS4 to stream games directly to the PSVita handheld. The functionality was shown streaming Knack to a PSVita.

The PS4 acts as a server, feeding the video footage directly to the handheld console. and the PSVita can be used to remotely control it.

Gaikai will also power a form of backwards compatibility, eventually bringing all older PlayStation titles to the PS4, but not a lot of details were given beyond that promise. Given the CPU differences, and the resources demanding nature of software emulation, it is safe to assume that this kind of streaming will have to be put in place of actual backwards compatibility.

At the PlayStation event, Sony has shown off the DualShock 4 controller, and it looks very familiar if you have been following the leaks and rumors.

As rumored, the DualShock 4 brings social to your hands with a Share button, that makes it easy to capture and share clips of gameplay with friends and the PlayStation community. The DualShock 4 also has the touchpad on the front as previously seen.

Mark Cerny, lead system architect, showed that like the PlayStation Move, the player is identified by a color which is located on top of the controller between the should buttons.

The DualShock 4 is also tracked by a camera that is still under development.

On Tuesday, Google's stock price hit $800 for the first time as confidence in the search and mobile giant is booming.

In 2007, Google stock hit $700 but then joined the rest of the market in a decline during turmoil years after the financial crisis hit. In April 2011, it was decided that Google co-founder Larry Page should take over the role of CEO from Eric Schmidt.

Since then, Google stock has risen around 35 percent, with most of the gains occurring in the past seven months.

Analysts see Google as one of the best position tech companies for the forseeable future. It's Search service continues to dominate in its field, and over 600 million devices now run the Android operating system. It also owns other huge services, like YouTube, which is gaining more confidence from advertisers.

It is also overhauling its ad system to address concerns about the revenue that can generated for mobile ads.

Apple Inc. has pushed out a security update to Mac users after admitting that the company itself has been subject to a hack attempt in recent weeks.

Just as was the case with Twitter and Facebook, Apple employees were targeted using Java security flaws that had previously been unknown. Apple said this week that it had been targeted in recent weeks by hackers of an unknown origin.

"We identified a small number of systems within Apple that were infected and isolated them from our network," the company said.

"There is no evidence that any data left Apple. We are working closely with law enforcement to find the source of the malware."

The Mac update brings the installed version of JRE up to the latest release, which fixes several serious security bugs. Oracle pushed out an update with fixes earlier this month, so Apple's procrastinated response was criticized by Graham Cluley, of Sophos, who said Apple has a history of being a "little laid back on patches."

Google has posted a video to show you how it feels to use its ambitious Glass prototype.

All the footage in the video is actually recorded through Glass. The video shows a variety of different scenarios, including sky diving, a rollercoaster ride, horse riding and more. You interact with Glass by simply instructing it to do something, like "record a video."

It also shows sharing images that you've just taken with contacts, and requesting that it shows you certain types of pictures.

Another part shows how you can ask Glass to translate words for you, and get a response pretty quickly. Glass is still very much a work in progress, but it is headed in the right direction.