Selling a gold-colored iPhone could be popular in countries like China and India, where Apple and Google are fighting it out to be the dominant player in their still-booming smartphone markets.

A craze coming out of Japan is now catching on in Silicon Valley: stickers. In the last few months, Facebook and Google have added digital stickers, basically oversize emoticons, to their chat applications. Venture-backed startups such as MessageMe and Path are also chasing the sticker fad.

In an average day, more than 60% of all Web-enabled devices exchange traffic with the tech giant's servers. That means Google is now bigger than Facebook, Netflix, and Twitter combined.

Google filed a court petition Tuesday demanding it be allowed to share information about government surveillance programs with the public.

Google is on the cusp of paying more than US$1 billion for navigation and traffic application Waze, said a person familiar with the negotiations, as the Internet giant looks to boost its own navigation offerings around the world.