Articles by Jim Offner

Japan-based Toshiba reported a 95 percent drop in profit in the January-March fiscal fourth quarter, blaming its loss in the high-definition format war that pitted its HD DVD format against Sony's Blu-ray Toshiba reported a 1.25 billion yen (US$12 million) profit for the quarter, compared with 26.17 billion yen ($250 million) a year earlier. Its qu...

Shares of Motorola tumbled as the company reported a first-quarter loss on Thursday, based largely on lean mobile phone sales and an eroding share of the competitive sector Motorola shares have lost more than half their value in the last year. On Thursday, they were trading at US$9.23, down 3.35 percent from their previous close on the New York Sto...

Subscribers toMicrosoft's defunct MSN Music service will lose access to songs they purchased from the store in a few months Microsoft informed MSN Music's customers via e-mail Tuesday that it plans to turn off the store's license servers, and that Aug. 31 will be the last day to move purchased music to another computer. Customers won't lose the mus...

Big business likely will be spending US$4.6 billion a year on Web. 2.0 technologies by 2013, according to a new study by Forrester Research Spending on Web-based enterprise technologies, including social networking, RSS (really simple syndication), blogs, wikis, mashups, podcasting and widgets, will grow by 43 percent each year within the next five...

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based network security company Blue Coat Systems has reached an agreement to purchase Cupertino, Calif.-based bandwidth management company Packeteer for approximately US$268 million, or $7.10 per share -- a 15 percent premium on Packeteer's closing price Friday of $6.18 The acquisition and the subsequent combination of operations ...

Take-Two Interactive Software on Friday slammed Electronic Arts' lower bid for the company. EA on Thursday decreased its offer by 26 cents per share after Take-Two shareholders voted more shares for its top management, ZelnickMedia, at their annual meeting. EA also extended its tender offer by a month The deadline for Take-Two to accept EA's bid at...

Sales of personal computers continued their growth trends in the first quarter despite the U.S. economic slowdown, according to studies released simultaneously by the Gartner and IDC research firms Notebook sales are driving the PC market worldwide, according to the reports, and there are sharper PC sales in developing markets, such as India and th...

eBay is killing off the part of its site that allows users to place bids on items up for sale at live auctions. The company will no longer offer eBay Live Auctions after Dec. 31 "This announcement will represent a significant change for the small number of partners, buyers and sellers involved with Live Auctions, which is why we're giving eight mon...

Hard drive maker Seagate Technology is taking solid state drive manufacturer STEC to court over patent infringement In a suit filed Monday in Northern California's U.S. District Court, Seagate claims STEC has violated four patents that Seagate had registered between 2002 and 2006....

Phil Hester has exited the chief technology officer post at Advanced Micro Devices, according to reports, and there won't be a replacement The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based manufacturer of computer processors, which reported more than US$6 billion in revenue in 2007 and trails only Intel in that market, reportedly announced Hester's resignation last week...

Navigation device maker TomTom reportedly hasn't offered any remedies to the European Commission's antitrust worries over its bid of more than US$4 billion to take over the digital map firm Tele Atlas. The commission's deadline to rule on the deal is May 21 TomTom had until Thursday to present a solution to the group. The Dutch company still can su...

Spurned in an earlier buyout attempt, data storage vendor EMC came back with a US$213 million offer that Iomega accepted Tuesday The all-cash deal -- a 20 percent increase over a March bid of $178 million -- opens the way for EMC to target small businesses and consumers....

Motorola has selected David Dorman, a former AT&T chief executive, as its non-executive chairman Motorola, which has experienced a market share loss in the smartphone business in competition with rivals like Nokia and Apple, recently announced a plan to break into two independent publicly traded companies....

Motorola has selected David Dorman, a former AT&T chief executive, as its non-executive chairman Motorola, which has experienced a market share loss in the smartphone business in competition with rivals like Nokia and Apple, recently announced a plan to break into two independent publicly traded companies....

Motorola has selected David Dorman, a former AT&T chief executive, as its non-executive chairman Motorola, which has experienced a market share loss in the smartphone business in competition with rivals like Nokia and Apple, recently announced a plan to break into two independent publicly traded companies....

Amid a barrage of troublesome economic reports, a study released Tuesday suggests online sales are expected to take a dramatic turn upward in 2008 Purchases made over the Internet will shoot up 17 percent and account for 7 percent of retail sales of items ranging from clothing to televisions and computers, reports Forrester Research in "The State o...

The European Union, as a bloc, may be backing Digital Video Broadcasting Handheld (DVB-H) as its preferred mobile TV technology, but whether European consumers embrace that platform remains to be seen There are other options that could in the not-too-distant future enable consumers to access TV in individualized, interactive formats such as podcast...

The Nielsen Co., based in New York and the Netherlands, has signed a definitive agreement to purchase privately held New York-based IAG Research for US$225 million IAG measures consumer engagement with advertisements and product placements across television and online. The company counts some of the largest firms across the business world among its...

On Monday, Yahoo previewed Amp, its new online ad management platform. The platform will allow advertisers to precisely target audiences within geographic, demographic and interest-based categories across a network that includes Yahoo's inventory and that of more than 600 U.S. newspapers within the Newspaper Consortium, the company said Yahoo will ...

Yahoo has launched its next-generation mobile search service and also appears determined to get a jump on competitors by making it readily available to third-party developers Yahoo's oneSearch 2.0, the new iteration of the company's year-old mobile search service, will deliver a number of improvements that will allow users to perform quicker, more ...