At a press event in New York City on Friday, Acer announced new mobile products running Google Android (s goog) and Microsoft(s msft) Windows 8. The company showed off the $169 Aspire A1, which runs Android and is meant for one-handed use. The new Aspire P3 is a convertible Windows 8 Ultrabook that works as a tablet or laptop due to a unique hinged dock with keyboard.

Square is looking to build a recommendation engine in addition to its payments system that could challenge the likes of Foursquare and Yelp as the company moves into the local recommendation space, The Verge reported Friday.

"I think we can do something a lot better" than those other apps, Ajit Varma, Square's director of discovery, said in the interview.

Google(s GOOG) already has some really compelling apps that are meant to replace core services on the iPhone: apps like Gmail, Drive, Google Maps, Chrome, Capture and others. Now with an update to the Google Search app for iOS(s AAPL), the company has effectively trained its sights on Siri by adding Google Now to iOS.

Google Now has been an integrated feature of Android 4.1 since June 2012, but starting Monday, it will, for the first time, be available on the iOS platform.

Attendees of the annual Google(s goog) I/O developer event are looking forward to the conference, which takes place in two weeks. Sure, they'll get to hear details of Google's latest Chrome, Chrome OS and Android efforts, but that's only part of the story. Often, Google introduces a new Nexus device to showcase its software. Last year the Nexus 7 tablet arrived…

I've long been a fan of Orange Amps, the pricey-but-excellent-sounding tube amplifiers. Recently, IK Multimedia released Amplitube Orange: it costs $99, and individual amps are also available in IK Multimedia's in-app Custom Shop Store, but with AmpliTube running natively on OS X, you can record with them in GarageBand via a plug in. Now, given that most of these amps retail between $800 and $2,100, it's asking a bit much to presume a $99 amp package will sound at all close.

Enlighted, a startup using sensor and big data software to control lighting and power in large commercial buildings has hit a few milestones this week. The company, which we put on our 12 smart grid startups to watch in 2012, has raised a sizable $20 million round, and has also doubled the size of the building space under management over the last five months, to hit 10 million square feet of commercial real estate.

Big data isn't just about Hadoop distributions and analytics software -- you also need servers to process it and disks on which to store it. On Tuesday, research firm IDC quantified the market for the latter aspect, predicting that the business of selling storage into big data deployments will be worth nearly $6 billion in 2016, up from just $379.9 million in 2011.

Apple (S AAPL) is still dominating the digital download business, with eight out of ten digital music buyers getting their tracks from iTunes in the fourth quarter of 2012, according to new numbers released Tuesday by the NPD Group. Volume-wise, Apple sold 63 percent of all digital tracks in that quarter, followed by Amazon (s AMZN) as a distant second with 22 percent.

In what would be an inevitable push for the company building toward a TV-centric future, Twitter is reportedly in talks to add live video to its platform through deals with Viacom (s via) and NBC (s cmcsa), Bloomberg reported Tuesday.

Such a move would make perfect sense considering Twitter's current trajectory, as the company has worked to build up support for visual media and partnerships with companies in the television industry.

Facebook(s fb) has further refined its ad-targeting capabilities, announcing on Wednesday the launch of "partner categories." This new feature will allow advertisers to target more specific groups of people on Facebook and serve them ads based on their activity across the web, rather than just their activity on Facebook, using data from third-party providers.

It's no secret that Facebook is working…