Sprint Inks Deal to Bring Games to Cell Phones
Thanks to a new deal, Sprint PCS customers will soon be able to play popular arcade games on their handheld cellular phones.
The company, which operates the largest all-digital nationwide wireless network, signed an agreement with THQ to develop and publish wireless games for Sprint's PCS division
THQ, the fourth largest game publisher in the United States and Europe, will take some of its popular games mobile as it develops games for both the Sprint PCS Wireless Web and Third-Generation (3G) Sprint PCS Phones.
The first of these 3G games is expected to include a number of popular titles such as WWF Mobile Madness, Moto GP and several Intellivision brands including Astromash, Skiing and Snood that will be developed using the Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition.
Windows XP Nearing 20 Million Units Sold
Microsoft Corp. said it has sold more than 17 million copies of Windows XP since the new operating system went on sale two months ago.
"This is our best-selling release of Windows ever, and one that is creating great opportunities for PC manufacturers and our other partners in the industry," Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said Monday at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. "We've seen a significant upturn in sales of digital cameras, printers and other peripherals and software that enable people to experience their PC in a new way."
Gates Rolls Out High-Tech Home Device
Microsoft Corp. has unveiled its latest gadget for in-home entertainment--a tablet-like device that is a cross between a handheld computer and a TV remote control.
"Entertainment will never be the same,'' Gates said in a keynote address Monday night to kick off the International Consumer Electronics Show, the world's largest consumer technology trade show.
Code named Mira, the device puts a home PC onto a mobile platform. It wirelessly delivers Internet content, accesses music files and serves as a portable game player when used with Microsoft's Xbox video game console.
The content will be displayed on the tablet, or in later versions of the technology, on new flat-screen televisions.
Another Software Company Files for Chapter 11
Software leader USInternetworking Inc. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Monday as part of an agreement with a private investment firm that has pledged to invest $106 million in the company.
USI erases roughly $120 million of debt through the bankruptcy filing--a move the company said was endorsed by the majority of its creditors. Boston-based Bain Capital Partners will initially sink $81 million into Annapolis-based USI and will spend $25 million more if the company's financial outlook brightens. USI had to reduce its debt with the bankruptcy filing to obtain the investment. The investment firm eventually will own USI. Trading of USI shares was halted Monday on the Nasdaq Stock Market as part of the filing.
AOL Takes Major Financial Hit
AOL Time Warner Inc. said Monday it would take a non-cash charge of up to $60 billion this quarter in order to comply with new accounting rules on how goodwill is measured.
AOL also cut its forecasts for 2002 and said it would pay Bertelsmann $6.75 billion in cash for its half-share of AOL Europe. AOL said the one-time accounting charge, which would fall between $40 billion and $60 billion, was due to overall market declines since the AOL merger with Time Warner was announced in early 2000. AOL shares have fallen by about half in that time.
The charge is a result of the company adopting a new standard governing the measurement of goodwill, a kind of financial yardstick that companies use on their balance sheet to show the value of businesses they've acquired.
AOL said its operations wouldn't be affected by the charge, and that it would save more than $7 billion a year in accounting adjustments from writing down the value of goodwill
Former Employees Buy Back Product
Three young entrepreneurs who struck it rich during the dot-com boom took a stab at capitalizing on the high-tech crash Friday by paying $2.4 million for online photography site Webshots--the same service they sold to ExciteAtHome for $82.5 million in late 1999.
Webshots co-founders Andrew Laakmann, 32, Narendra Rocherolle, 33, and Nicholas Wilder, 29, reclaimed ownership of the service when U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Thomas Carlson approved the sale as part of ExciteAtHome's liquidation. Redwood City-based ExciteAtHome plans to go out of business in March.
For ExciteAtHome, Friday's deal represented another humiliating reminder of how badly the Internet economy has crumbled since the company went on a multibillion-dollar shopping spree in the late 1990s.
Before selling Webshots at a 97 percent discount from the price it paid in October 1999, ExciteAtHome sold Excite.com for $10 million and let go of online greeting card service Blue Mountain for $35 million. ExciteAtHome paid $6.7 billion and $780 million, respectively, for those two sites in 1999.
Cornell Suing Over Processing System
Cornell University is seeking more than $100 million in damages in a federal lawsuit accusing Hewlett-Packard Co. of infringing on a patent for a high-performance data processing system.
The Ivy League school alleges that Hewlett-Packard has since 1995 infringed on a 1989 patent obtained by Cornell Professor Emeritus H.C. Torng for a technique that greatly accelerates a computer's processing speed.
The nation's second-largest computer company uses the technique in its central processing units, Cornell alleged in a lawsuit filed last week in U.S. District Court in Syracuse.
Hewlett-Packard, based in Palo Alto, Calif., doesn't believe the lawsuit has merit and will contest it vigorously, a spokeswoman said Friday.
AT&T Cuts 5,000 Jobs
Long-distance carrier AT&T Corp. announced Friday it will cut another 5,000 jobs and take a related $1 billion fourth-quarter restructuring charge to cover the cost of those staff cuts as well as 5,100 others that were already planned.
In a brief statement, the company said the charge, which it announced in October, will fund severance packages and other costs of cutting the 5,100 employees it laid off in 2001 and an additional 5,000 jobs it plans to cut in 2002.
Employees affected are mainly in the company's business, consumer and corporate units, which are scattered across AT&T's U.S. facilities. About 20 percent of the cuts will take place in and around AT&T's headquarters in Basking Ridge, N.J., said AT&T spokeswoman Eileen Connolly.
Motorola Laying off 1,500 in Asia
A unit of U.S.-based Motorola will lay off about half of the 1,500 workers at its Hong Kong factory, shifting their jobs to plants in Malaysia and China, the company said Monday.
The layoffs at Motorola Semiconductor, which will come by the end of this year, are part of a restructuring that will refocus the Hong Kong operation mainly on research and development, said Gloria Shiu, Motorola's senior communications manager for the region.
The work now done by the 700 to 800 workers to be laid off will be transferred to Motorola Semiconductor's plants in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Tianjin, China, Shiu said. She said the cuts were also intended to slash costs.
Intel and AMD Competing for High-Speed Processors
Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. on Monday will begin selling the fastest models yet of their flagship processors, the electronic brains of personal computers.
Intel's new top Pentium 4 chips run at 2.2 Gigahertz and 2 Gigahertz, or 2.2 billion and 2 billion cycles per second. AMD's latest, the Athlon XP 2000+, clocks in at 1.67 GHz. Despite the speed difference, AMD says its Athlons are more efficient and perform better than faster Intel chips when it comes to running many of the most popular applications.
But Intel's new chips are the first to be built using a new process that allows smaller transistors and other features, including doubled on-chip memory and a 30 percent reduction in overall processor size.
That means the chips have a performance boost of roughly 10 percent, in addition to the boost that comes from increased processor speed, said Louis Burns, general manager of Intel's Desktop Platform Group.