Reuters - Samsung Electronics Co Ltd said on Friday that a German court has ruled against it in a patent suit with Apple Inc over mobile technology, the latest verdict in an intensifying global legal battle between the two technology giants.

Reuters - Nintendo President Satoru Iwata dismissed the idea that the age of the dedicated handheld games device was over and said he aimed to return the company to substantial profit in 2012/13, after it warned of its first ever operating loss this year.

AP - Nintendo's chief is determined to get right the launch of its next game machine, Wii U, set for this year's holiday shopping season, and acknowledged Friday some mistakes with selling its 3DS handheld.

AP - Samsung Electronics Co. reported a 17 percent jump in fourth quarter profit on the strength of smartphone sales even as the company battled claims it had copied Apple's iPhone.

AP - Twitter has refined its technology so it can censor messages on a country-by-country basis.

Digital Trends - Launched earlier this week and announced on the Steam site, Valve has started a closed beta for Steam Mobile on the iPhone and Android phones. The mobile application brings a vast amount of core functions found within the PC and Mac version of the Steam software, the most notable being the ability to make purchases through the application. This will allow any mobile Steam user to take advantage of the frequent sales that cut popular games up to 90 percent off. Assuming the user agrees to notifications from the application, Steam will also be able to feed mobile alerts to the user when a game on a user’s wishlist goes on sale. The interface offers the familiar Steam categories of new, featured, popular and specials. In addition, there’s a search interface allowing the user to find games by price, title or genre. 

The Ticket - At Thursday's Republican debate in Jacksonville, FL (the last for nearly a month, for those of you following closely!) Newt Gingrich's proposed moon colony briefly took center stage. Unsurprisingly, members of the Twitterverse were ready with the punchlines. We've included the five funniest (that we saw) below. Did you spot something better? Leave it in [...]

Yahoo! News - Welcome to Just Show Me on Tecca TV, where we show you tips and tricks for getting the most out of the gadgets in your life. In today's episode we'll show you how to clear your history in the Safari web browser. Clearing your …

Reuters - DirecTV and Sunbeam Entertainment have broken bread and ended the carriage dispute that caused customers in Boston and Miami to miss both the Packers-Giants NFL playoff game and the Golden Globes earlier this month.

Mashable - A gathering of entrepreneurs in the Bay Area on Thursday offered a window into how ambitious techies' visions become reality. It started with a presentation from a go-getter named Adam Ghetti. Dressed casually in a dark tee-shirt, Ghetti stepped to the front a conference room at the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz on Thursday afternoon. He launched into an intense, rapid-fire pitch and test drive of his cloud security startup Social Fortress.

Mashable - Jason Keath is the CEO of Social Fresh, the leading social media education company for marketers. He works with industry leading brands, agencies and vendors to produce social media conferences and online social media training programs. Follow him on Twitter @jasonkeath. Human beings are social by nature, and not surprisingly, we choose to spend much of our talkative time on Facebook.

AP - Facebook is partnering with Washington state to combat a type of spam called "clickjacking" that is plaguing the social networking site, company and state officials announced Thursday.

Digital Trends - Now that tablet devices like the Apple iPad, Samsung Galaxy Tab, and Amazon Kindle Fire are becoming commonplace in everyday society, researchers have started examining some of the possible ergonomic impacts of these devices. After all, almost every other technological gizmo and device that has become ubiquitous in society seems to have an impact on our bodies, from desktop computer users suffering carpal tunnel syndrome and circulation problems to gamers and “Generation Text” experiencing thumb and wrist injuries. Before then, centuries of people wore down their bodies on telephone and telegraph gear, industrial machinery, looms, and countless other devices. Why should tablets be any different?

Reuters - Security software maker McAfee rejected a claim that several large corporate customers had recently switched over to using products from rival Symantec Corp.

Yahoo! News - The race for the Republican presidential nomination is about to blast off into outer space: Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich announced that, if elected, he'd establish a colony on the moon by 2020. In a speech to supporters on the Florida space …

Reuters - A New Zealand court granted bail on Thursday to two associates of the founder of online file-sharing website Megaupload, accused of being involved in a scheme that allegedly made more than $175 million from Internet piracy and illegal file sharing.

Appolicious - Last year, streaming movie service Netflix finally got its Android app released and working reliably on lots of different devices that run Google’s mobile operating system. More than six months later, Netflix has announced that viewing on tablets has surpassed viewing on PCs.

Mashable - European Internet users may be getting better control over information posted online, thanks to some proposed sweeping reforms lawmakers proposed Wednesday designed to protect digital privacy. The suggested law calls for a "right to be forgotten" and a "right to data portability." The former would require Internet companies such as Facebook and Google to completely wipe all of a user's info from their servers if such a request was made. The latter demands users be allowed to easily transfer data from one online service to another, a currently difficult task.

Reuters - Cellphone makers are set to struggle with slow sales growth this year as a weaker global economy discourages consumers from replacing older handsets.

AP - January 18 is a date that will live in ignorance, as Wikipedia started a 24-hour blackout of its English-language articles, joining other sites in protesting pending U.S. legislation aimed at shutting down sites that share pirated movies and other content.