Apple

NEW YORK -- The economy may be improving, but many U.S. companies are still hanging on to record amounts of cash, something they usually do in times of economic turmoil. U.S. companies held $1.45 trillion in cash in 2012, up 10% from the $1.32 trillion they held in 2011 -- which at that time was a record level, according to a new report from Moody's Investors Service. Apple is sitting on $137 billion in cash, a fact not lost on investors, who have sued in an effort to get Apple to give some of that cash to shareholders.

The NCAA men's basketball tournament, aka March Madness, kicks off in earnest with 16 matches Thursday and 16 more Friday. How do you keep up with all the games -- let alone watch them all? Here are some apps to help cope with all the madness. NCAA March Madness Live If you want to watch the tournament from your smartphone or tablet, you can do so with NCAA March Madness Live. The app is free to download and lets you watch games shown on CBS at no charge. Users have to sign in with their cable provider in order to watch games broadcast on TBS, TNT and truTV.

Google has released Keep, a convenient note-taking app for Android smartphone and tablet users. The app, which is available now on Google Play , is designed to make it easy for users to take notes and sync them across their mobile devices and on the Web with Google Drive, the company's service for storing files in the cloud. "With Keep you can quickly jot ideas down when you think of them and even include checklists and photos to keep track of what's important to you," Google said in a blog post Wednesday announcing the app. "Your notes are safely stored in Google Drive and synced to all your devices so you can always have them at hand.

Apple is famous (or notorious, depending on your point of view) for going it alone on some technologies rather than joining the rest of the tech crowd. For example, its iTunes store sold downloadable songs for years in a copy-protected format that only Apple's devices could play, and even today it eschews the de facto industry standard for downloadable tracks (MP3) in favor of a far more obscure one (AAC). And although its Apple TV devices can stream video from several sites, they can download them only from iTunes.

Last spring, the creators of the Pebble smartwatch shocked the tech community when their Kickstarter campaign raised $10 million .  It was still a long road from when the campaign closed in May to when Pebble finally started shipping its first smartwatches to backers in January. And while the initial batch of watches came out in a slow trickle, the pace kicked up in late February and early March. And now, 10 months later, Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky is thrilled with the reception the product is receiving and to finally be getting feedback from users.

Just like Apple, Samsung is working on a smart wristwatch that it hopes to begin selling as soon as possible. “We've been preparing the watch product for so long,” Lee Young Hee, Samsung's executive vice president of mobile business, told Bloomberg . “We are working very hard to get ready for it. We are preparing products for the future, and the watch is definitely one of them.” The South Korean tech company did not delve into the...

In the wake of Samsung's unveiling of the Galaxy S4, Apple has increased its own marketing efforts by creating a Why iPhone site.  Prior to the Samsung launch event last week, Apple executive Phil Schiller gave a series of interviews criticizing Android , the mobile operating system that the Galaxy uses. The iPhone site doesn't mention Android or Samsung by name.  PHOTOS: Tech we want to see in 2013   Still, the timing and the message seem like a clear attempt to remind consumers what Apple believes sets its phone apart from the competition.

With Apple's stock hobbling and questions lingering about its ability to innovate in the post-Steve Jobs era, investors and fans are latching on to hopes that the tech giant's next big thing will be the iWatch. While little is known of the mythical gadget that has recently become the hottest topic of Silicon Valley's rumor mill, boosters envision a device that would let users read emails, Facebook notifications or caller ID by simply glancing down at their wrists. The smartwatch, connected wirelessly to the iPhone, would tap the power of the voice assistant Siri to control music, dictate messages or get directions.

In a case of David vs . Goliath, the Mexican Supreme Court has upheld a lower court ruling that iFone , a small IT company in Mexico City, is the rightful owner of the iPhone name in that country. The company registered the name in 2003, four years before Apple rolled out the smartphone it dubbed the iPhone , according to the Wall Street Journal. The case goes back to 2009, when Apple tried to register the phone brand name in Mexico and the Mexican Industrial Property Institute said it was already taken.

Samsung Electronics Co.'s latest smartphone intensifies the rivalry that has developed with Apple Inc., and depending on whom you ask, it also illustrates just how dramatically perceptions surrounding each company have changed. At a theatrical, over-the-top launch event at New York's Radio City Music Hall on Thursday, Samsung finally debuted the Galaxy S4, a smartphone with a 5-inch screen, eye-tracking and gesture controls. The South Korean electronics giant live-streamed the event - which featured live actors and performers - on YouTube; more than 423,000 viewers were watching as the phone was unveiled.