AMD comes to grips with the ATI merger fallout
Investors and consumers were warned the bad news would come, and it came as predicted. AMD took a stunning charge of $1.6 billion in one quarter, to account for value from the ATI merger it now realizes may not materialize.
The term is "goodwill," and it's used in evaluating the potential value that a merged entity brings to the acquiring company, over and above its tangible assets and the present value of its current contracts. At the time AMD and ATI merged in July 2006, AMD's financial team estimated the total value of the merger at $5.4 billion. $3.2 million of that was projected to be goodwill, how much more valuable AMD is as a company just for having ATI as a division.
Sprint Nextel to cut workforce, close underperforming stores
In response to an increasingly difficult retail environment, Sprint Nextel says about 4,000 employees will be laid off and about one out of every eight retail stores will close.
Expecting a slowdown in both revenue and subscriber growth in 2008 amid an economic downturn, the move could be seen as a preemptive strike in order to keep the carrier profitable.
Wii continues video game dominance in December
The Wii continued to lead video game console sales in December, but the Xbox 360 wasn't far behind. Also, the PS3 showed significant improvement.
Data from NPD showed that overall software sales increased 36 percent over last year. Hardware sales gains were a little more modest at 17 percent, however that is still a significant gain considering consumers pulled back on holiday spending.
Microsoft sued over Chinese character conversion technology
Zhongyi Electronic Ltd., a small Chinese company, is suing Microsoft over a product which turns words typed in the Roman alphabet into Chinese characters.
The software in question is called Zhengma, and has been used by Microsoft since 1998. In a statement from the company, Zhongyi's general manager says it has received no money from Microsoft since that time. In a statement on Friday, Microsoft said that it has the full right to use Zhongyi's product since it has paid all fees that were detailed in the licensing agreements.
Oracle wants to be king of the content management hill
Oracle is gunning to spin into a more powerful kingpin in the hotly contested content management system market, not merely in the more amorphous middleware space -- as shown by its multibillion dollar buyout of BEA Systems along with a much quieter acquisition of a small CMS company called Captovation, both on Wednesday.
The move makes sense because, at the end of the day, content management is simply a vast extension of the database technology that was Oracle's original claim to fame.
Sears.com offers the cheapest desktop PC at $185
Another low-end PC hit the market today, this time it is a machine by Mirus equipped with Freespire 2.0, available at Sears' online shop for $185.
The Mirus desktop system is equipped with an Intel Celeron D 420-1.6Ghz, 1GB of RAM, 80GB HDD, CDRW optical drive, and Freespire 2.0.
Early Q4 PC sales numbers point to Dell's comeback
The Michael Dell reformation strategy evidently paid off for his company in the last quarter of the year, according to the first numbers from IDC. Market share has stopped falling, and shipment growth is finally outpacing the average.
The SEC hadn't stopped Christmas from coming for Dell Computer. It came! Somehow or other, it came just the same.
Library of Congress publishes historical photos on Flickr
The Library of Congress has published over 3,000 photographs from two of its most popular collections on Flickr in "The Commons," a project aimed at creating a rich database of photos from public collections and civic institutions.
Photos from the George Grantham Bain Collection and the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information were chosen for display online due to their popularity on the Library of Congress site, and their freedom from copyright restrictions.
Bluster keeps the ODF / OOXML debate afloat
In anticipation of an international debate over the viability of Microsoft's OOXML document format still slated for February, the company makes a key policy adjustment while leaving third parties to take their argument outside, as it were.
It is a little over a month away from the next meeting of the International Organization for Standardization's JTC1 committee in Geneva, where the matter of whether Microsoft has adequately addressed concerns raised by 29 member countries as to whether its Office Open XML format should be granted international standard status. Some 11 of those countries were actively opposed to the measure when the question first came to a vote last September.
Microsoft looks to monetize SEC filings with advertising
The Redmond company announced Thursday that it had penned a deal with financial data provider EDGAR Online to bring the reports to its service.
While EDGAR will supply the actual data to MSN, Microsoft will present those reports in context along with advertisements from its own network. The revenues would likely then be used to balance out any expenses for bringing the content to its users.
TiVo, Jaman in deal to bring indie movies to set-top box
One of the largest distributors of independent films online said Thursday it had struck a deal with the DVR maker to offer thousands of titles from its catalog to subscribers.
The deal would be very much like the Amazon Unbox service that is already available to TiVo customers. Movies from Jaman will be downloadable to the DVR and would be in high definition, the companies said.
Why are Windows products moving to Apple's Mac OS?
Although you can run Windows applications on Apple's Leopard anyway, many vendors at Macworld are debuting Mac OS editions of products originally designed for Windows.
This, in spite of the vaunted Windows/Mac cross-platform capabilities of Apple's new Leopard operating system. And regardless of Mac fans' claims of relative security versus Windows, some of the new products for Mac OS are geared toward virus protection and Web filtering.
Yahoo to embrace OpenID standard for validating users
In a move that will apparently open up its quarter-billion-user database to cross-platform username validation across Web sites, Yahoo announced this morning it is embracing the Web's most endorsed open validation standard.
"All Yahoo IDs will be OpenIDs on January 30," a Yahoo spokesperson confirmed to BetaNews late this morning, in a change-over that may elevate the whole issue of users' online identities to a new level.
Time Warner tests Internet bandwidth caps
There may be limits coming to high-speed Internet from Time Warner Cable, according to details of a memo obtained by Broadband Reports.
While the new policy is expected to affect about one out of every 20 subscribers, it is aimed at collecting revenue from those who apparently "utilize over half of the total network bandwidth."
AT&T to replace U-verse batteries after several explosions
While AT&T was hoping for its U-verse service to catch fire, it was certainly not in this manner.
The communications company is recalling about 17,000 batteries due to a fire hazard. The batteries are housed in outdoor cabinets that are primarily used as a backup power source, which in some occasions either caught fire or exploded. AT&T said it will replace all of them as a safety precaution.
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