InternetNews Staff

An accounting error reportedly led Microsoft to notify some laid off employees last week that they would need to give back part of their severance pay. The world’s largest software maker laid off 1,400 workers last month, the first of 5,000 jobs the company plans to cut over the next 18 months. The error is […]

Everybody at last week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona wanted to be the new best friend of the social networks. From the world’s biggest phone maker, Nokia, to tiny Irish semiconductor start-up Movidia, delegates to the wireless industry’s biggest annual gathering couldn’t stop talking about Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. The majority of visits to such […]

WASHINGTON — A senior Democratic lawmaker will push legislation this year to repeal a U.S. ban on Internet gambling that has hurt trade ties with the European Union, a congressional aide said. “The bill introduction should happen in the next month,” a spokesman for House of Representatives Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank said. On […]

BARCELONA — Copying a few pages from the playbook of Apple’s iPhone strategy, which brings many of the powers of the Internet to mobile phones, is no way to beat the computer interloper at its game, observers say. But that’s exactly what many of the world’s biggest handsets makers are trying to do with new […]

WASHINGTON — BlackBerry maker Research in Motion’s (NASDAQ: RIMM) top executives settled U.S. regulator claims that they illegally backdated millions of stock options over an eight-year period, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said on Tuesday. RIM Co-CEOs James Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis as well as the Canadian company’s former chief financial officer, Dennis Kavelman, […]

SAN FRANCISCO — The electric power industry and manufacturers say $4.5 billion in the $787-billion U.S. economic stimulus package will give a crucial boost to “smart grids” that will help the nation save money and electricity. “This will have long-term results,” said Thomas Kuhn, head of Edison Electric Institute, trade association for privately owned electric […]

NEW YORK — Verizon Communications sees the weak economy helping sales of an on-demand computer hosting service it plans to launch this summer, an executive for the telecom service provider said on Tuesday. Verizon said it would let customers order computing capacity for applications such as retail websites on-the-fly instead of having to commit to […]

Technology firms like Nokia and Microsoft are rushing to open their mobile software stores, hoping to follow the runaway success of Apple’s online App Store. The focus of the mobile phone market has been shifting to software development since Google and Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) entered the mobile market in the past two years. And for […]

The world’s top cell phone maker Nokia unveiled on Monday its new online software and media store, hoping to follow the runaway success of Apple’s App Store. The focus of the cell phone market has been shifting to software development since Google and Apple entered the mobile market in the past two years. Nokia unveiled […]

Cisco Systems’ pursuit of virtualization software maker VMware could be more serious than many on Wall Street believed, as the network equipment maker searches for new sources of growth. Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) has long coveted VMware, whose software helps computer servers run more efficiently and frees companies from having to maintain huge data centers. It […]

Cuba launched its own variant of the Linux computer operating system this week in the latest front of the communist island’s battle against what it views as U.S. hegemony. The Cuban variant, called Nova, was introduced at a Havana computer conference on “technological sovereignty” and is central to the Cuban government’s desire to replace the […]

Qualcomm, MySpace and 12 more companies joined the Symbian camp on Thursday, giving the mobile operating system larger scale than Google’s Android in the handset software battleground. The focus of the mobile phone market has been shifting to software development since Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Apple entered the mobile market during the past two years. […]