Technology Industry Archive

Amazon today announced its Kindle DX, with the 9.7-inch e-ink display, PDF reader, and automatic display rotation feature. The New York Times, Boston Globe, and Washington Post will offer reduced-rate subscriptions for people not in their usual delivery areas, and Amazon has textbook deals with Pearson, Cengage, and Wiley, which, Amazon claims, cover 60 percent of textbook sales. According to...

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Challenger, Gray & Christmas just came out with its tally of April layoffs, and there’s good news: layoffs continue to drop for the third month running. Sector January February March April Electronics 11,050 11,065 11,500 6,608 Computer 22,330 3,960 5,290 1,702 Telecom 13,056 5,666 250 262 Total 46,436 20,691 17,040 8,572 Layoffs in electronics were down 42.5 percent...

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It’s well known that games are a big seller in Apple’s app store, and you can see why. The question is whether Apple is going to be satisfied with getting a tiny slice of the gaming market. Some evidence is suggesting that there are larger ambitions out in Cupertino. But is it limited to games on the iPhone? Recent hiring and some recent patent applications suggest that Apple is...

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President Barack Obama’s new plan to tax overseas profits is getting heat from technology companies which believe they will be adversely affected. While technology companies are not specifically targeted by the tax package, many, like Cisco, HP, IBM, Microsoft and Dell have substantial overseas activities and profits. Foreign earnings also represent a more significant poriton of the...

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In news that must be welcome to many in high tech, semiconductor sales may have bottomed out and seem to be on the rise again, according to a number of reports and data. That would be good news for high tech in general, given that more chips out the door means more products being purchased. The question is how long might it take for a rebound? Clearly the past year has been a veritable hammer...

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I’ve been looking at a new online tool called StockSmart. The full version is being launched in June, and it will provide some pretty interesting realtime analysis that would normally require a lot of hunting through documents. For example, I took a look at earnings per share growth over the last few years of some name companies, and the results were fascinating. Before the table, a...

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The recent announcement by cloud software vendor Workday that it has raised $74 million in venture capital notwithstanding, venture funding has slowed considerably over recent months and from the looks of things, VCs may be more likely to close up shop than fund new companies. While that means tech ventures had better find alternative ways of raising cash, that not might be such a bad thing,...

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For quite a long time, TechCrunch has been accused of conflicts of interest of various sorts. But a post today on whether a big screen Kindle could aid the newspaper industry fails to note that the company is funding a mobile computing device that could be a competitor, raising the question of whether there are entire categories of technology or devices that the site should avoid covering....

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A look at highlights of the past week in the high tech legal world. DoJ eyes Google Books settlement — The Department of Justice is investigating whether the proposed settlement between Google and book publishers and authors raises antitrust issues. [Source: The Wall Street Journal] Wiki operator sues Apple — As we periodically note, being a litigation attorney for Apple must be as...

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By rejecting Broadcom’s $764 million bid to buy the company, networking component vendor Emulex’s board is showing confidence in its strategy and is willing to go it alone in a market that is becoming increasingly inhospitable to independent players. Ever since Cisco announced plans to manufacture its own servers and compete not only in the traditional networking space but in the...

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