A few of the details on the the history of Siri, including Steve Jobs' move to contact the company just three weeks after the independent app's launch, have surfaced over the last several years, but The Huffington Post has now published an extensive history of the technology and company that reveals a few other interesting details. The report outlines how Siri grew out of a Department of Defense project to integrate with 42 different web services to perform its virtual assistant services, many of which were discontinued when Apple scaled back the platform for inclusion in iOS

Last month, research firm Kantar Worldpanel reported that Apple had retaken the lead in U.S. smartphone sales from Android over the August-October timeframe, topping Android by a 48.1%-46.7% margin on the strength of the iPhone 5 launch

Apple has released an iOS update for the iPhone 5 and iPad mini, bringing the iOS version for those devices up to 6.0.2. The release notes for the iPhone note only that an unnamed Wi-Fi bug has been fixed

Apple has opened its new Third Street Promenade Apple Store in Santa Monica, CA. The store has the same design as the new Palo Alto location , with a slightly smaller implementation as the Upper West Side store in Manhattan. Apple's old Third Street Promenade location was one of the early Apple Stores and was an extremely popular location that was almost always crowded to capacity.

Along with an announcement that the Ashton Kutcher-led jOBS [sic] will premiere this winter at the Sundance Film Festival, the festival has also released the first official image of Kutcher as Steve Jobs. From Vanity Fair magazine : Courtesy of the Sundance Film Festival, which, just moments ago, announced that jOBS—weird capitalization choice theirs, not ours—would premiere at this year’s festival, the photo shows the Two and a Half Men lead in a cubicle

Apple is hiring "dozens" of laid off Texas Instruments engineers to beef up its chip-making R&D operations in Israel, according to a report by The Next Web . According to sources close to the situation, Apple has been hiring "dozens" of engineers from Texas Instruments after the company begun cutting around 250 jobs from its Ra’anana development center as it looks to lay off around 1,700 employees (about 5 percent of its total workforce) globally. Many of the engineers working at the development center were focused on the development of TI’s OMAP and radio (including WiFi and Bluetooth) chips, which are used a number of new smartphone and tablet devices.

In line with reports of an Apple media event in Moscow tomorrow where the company has been rumored to be officially introducing the iTunes Music Store for Russia, it now appears that the store has started to go live in both Russia and Turkey .

Last week, a rumor surfaced claiming that Apple had "decimated" its pro audio group, calling into question the future of Logic and other audio-focused software from the company. The rumor was, however, quickly dismissed by Jim Dalrymple and his impeccable sources at Apple, with Dalrymple noting that there was "no truth" to the rumor that Apple had slashed its pro audio team

iFixit has released a comprehensive teardown of Apple’s new 21.5" iMac.

Apple captured the number two slot in all U.S. mobile phone makers, both smartphone and non-smartphone, for the first time, according to a new report by research firm comScore. Samsung maintained their lead with 26.3% in overall mobile phone userbase, with Apple coming in second at 17.8% and LG .2 points behind in the number three slot with 17.6%.