Whitman stated to be planning big HP job cuts
New(ish) HP CEO Meg Whitman has been at the helm for long enough to come up with a longer-term plan for the company, and according to various rumors, her plan will look eerily familiar to HPers who remember the early years of ex-CEO Mark Hurd: job cuts, predominantly in services. According to a report on CNBC television, HP is looking to cut anywhere from 8 to 10 per cent of its 324,600-strong workforce, and will make the announcement next Wednesday, ...
LightSquared files for bankruptcy
Just hours before the expiration of a deal designed to keep it from defaulting on its debt, 4G wannabe LightSquared announced on Monday that it was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. “The filing was necessary to preserve the value of our business and to ensure continued operations,” stated the company’s interim co-COO and CFO Marc Montagner in a statement. “The voluntary Chapter 11 filing is intended to give LightSquared sufficient breathing room to continue working through the regulatory process ...
Facebook co-founder renounces US citizenship pre-IPO
Eduardo Saverin, a co-founder of Facebook, has abandoned his American citizenship ahead of the social networking company’s possibly oversubscribed IPO in May. “Eduardo recently found it more practical to become a resident of Singapore since he plans to live there for an indefinite period of time,” his spokesman Tom Goodman told Bloomberg. Brazilian-born Saverin made the initial investment of $1,000 in Facebook when he and Zuckerberg were students together at Harvard, in exchange for 34 per cent of the company.
Nokia sues HTC, RIM, Viewsonic over patent infringement
By Mikael Ricknäs | IDG News Service Nokia has filed claims in the U.S. and Germany saying that products from HTC, Research In Motion (RIM) and ViewSonic infringe a number of the company’s patents, it stated on Wednesday. Nokia has filed actions against all three companies in Mannheim’s and Munich’s respective regional courts. [ Stay ahead of the key tech business news with InfoWorld’s Today’s Headlines: First Look newsletter.
Balsillie planned to bust open BlackBerry network before leaving
Ousted RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie spent his last few months at the helm developing a radical strategy to transform the fortunes of the trouble Canadian company by opening up its network to provide basic data plans to non-smartphone users. Two contacts with knowledge of the deal told Reuters that the plan called for the company to break its long-held exclusivity and open up its network to other carriers. They claim Balsillie was speaking to AT&T and Verizon for the US ...
Sony to cut 10,000 jobs in quest for profitability
Sony is planning a major restructuring, with around 10,000 jobs – about 6 per cent of the company’s global workforce – expected to get the chop after a press conference this Thursday. Japanese newspaper Nikkei has reported (from behind a paywall) that the new chief executive Kazuo Hirai, who took the helm of the loss-making electronics giant in on April 1, plans to cut jobs in an effort to bring the company back to profitability. Nikkei also reports that senior ...
Visa shows off data centre “moat”
Credit card company Visa has boasted that one of its US data centres possesses the ultimate security feature – a moat designed to trap would be ram-raiders from accessing the facility. As reported by USA Today and Fast Company, which both seem to have been invited to the facility, the company’s Operations Centre East (OCE) can be found “somewhere on the eastern seaboard” of the USA. The site is apparently nondescript, so as not to draw attention to itself. We’re ...
NEC shows off ultra-thin battery
NEC has announced the development of an ORB (organic radical battery) which it states can be printed into circuit boards as thin as 0.3mm – making it suitable for applications like credit cards and bendable screens. The company anticipates to have the batteries ready for production in 2013. The new ORB, part of an on-going project at NEC’s research labs, is also thin enough to be incorporated onto electronic papers. A 3cm square form of the 0.3mm battery can deliver ...
Cisco pays $5 billion for video software company
Cisco this week stated it will acquire NDS Group Ltd., a provider of video software and content security systems for service providers and media companies, for $5 billion. NDS is the most significant acquisition for Cisco since it purchased videoconferencing leader Tandberg in 2009. It’s indicative of the company’s intent to lead the service provider video market, where its Videoscape initiative and Scientific-Atlanta set top boxes are targeted.
APT in action: The Heartland breach
In late 2008, a group of hackers succesfully broke into the network of Princeton, N.J.-based payment processing giant Heartland Payment Systems. The hackers stole data from more than 100 million credit and debit cards on the company’s network that serves the card-processing needs of restaurants, retailers and other merchants. The hackers spent weeks gathering intelligence on Heartland’s networks, systems, corporate structure and employee roles, according to Kris Herrin, the company’s chief technology officer.
