Business Tech

The venture capital industry took another big hit in the first quarter of the year, according to new data from Dow Jones VentureSource.

Venture capitalists invested just $3.90 billion in U.S. companies during the quarter, a 50 percent decline from the almost $7.78 billion invested during the same quarter last year, according to VentureSource. In terms of actual venture deals, 477 were completed, well below the 706 completed last year and the lowest quarterly deal total since 1996.

Hit particularly hard was the information technology industry, which saw its lowest level of investment since 1997, with $1.… Read more

Toshiba said Friday it expects to lose 350 billion yen for the fiscal year just ended on March 31, and will cut more temporary workers.

The company plans on letting go 3,900 temporary employees in its Japanese offices, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, as well as reducing its capital spending this year by 180 billion yen ($1.8 billion) to 250 billion yen from the previous year. Almost 4,500 temporary workers were laid off previously.

The company now expects a net loss of 350 billion yen in the fourth quarter of its fiscal year … Read more

In a highly watched legal ruling, a court in Sweden on Friday found all four defendants in the high-profile Pirate Bay case guilty of having made copyright-protected files accessible for illegal file sharing.

The defendants were each sentenced to a year in jail and also ordered to pay a total of 30 million Swedish kronor ($3.6 million) in damages to copyright holders, among them a number of American media giants.

The four men--Peter Sunde, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Fredrik Neij, and Carl Lundström--were found guilty of having made 33 copyright-protected files accessible for illegal file sharing via the … Read more

Updated at 9:25 p.m. PDT: correcting for expected Clarksfield and Lynnfield availability.

Intel has been talking a lot about Westmere chips lately. So, here's a quick look at Intel's first chips based on 32-nanometer technology.

Chief Executive Paul Otellini addressed Westmere during the company's first-quarter earnings conference call this week, saying the Westmere chip design will ship later this year, earlier than expected. "We have shipped thousands of Westmere samples to over 30 customers already," Otellini said in the conference call.

Intel's current lineup is made up of processors based on 45-nanometer … Read more

The Ubuntu project has published a release candidate, or final testing version, for the upcoming 9.04 version of its popular Linux distribution.

"We consider this release candidate to be complete, stable and suitable for testing by any user," Ubuntu developer Steve Langasek said late Thursday in an e-mail.

When release candidates prove stable, they sometimes end up being final production versions, although Ubuntu 9.04 still has a small number of bugs to be fixed. The software, nicknamed Jaunty Jackalope, can be downloaded from Ubuntu's site.

For this release, the project has focused on faster boot … Read more

One of the features that set Chrome apart from rivals on its debut, the array of Web page thumbnails that greeted users when they launched the browser or opened a new browsing tab, is becoming optional.

In the Chrome 2.0.174.0 update Google released Thursday to those signed up for the raw software available through the preview channel, the browser now includes the "ability to remove thumbnails from the New Tab Page," said Google Chrome Program Manager Anthony Laforge in a blog post.

Personally, I like the feature overall, since it makes some constructive use of … Read more

Waste heat from a new data center being built in London Docklands will power nearby homes and businesses, the company behind the project says.

The Telehouse West facility, which is due for completion in 2010, is being built by Telehouse Europe alongside the WSP Group, a sustainability consultancy. Work has started on the new data center, which will be nine stories high and provide 19,000 square meters of floor space.

In its announcement on Wednesday, Telehouse Europe said the $91 million data center would provide up to 9 megawatts of power for the local community by exporting the heat … Read more

Microsoft reportedly is juggling two extensions involving its antitrust woes with regulators in the U.S. and Europe.

The U.S. Department of Justice announced Thursday that Microsoft has agreed to remain under its watch for up to another 18 months, designed to allow antitrust regulators to continue monitoring the company's efforts to share interoperability information with its rivals, who develop products that use the software giant's Windows operating system.

The Justice Department is exercising its right to extend its monitoring ability through May 12, 2011, rather than letting it expire on November 12 of this year.

According … Read more

The business intelligence firm QlikTech International has released an application for the iPhone that uses the multitouch and GPS functionalities of Apple's popular handset.

QlikView for iPhone, which was made available on Thursday, enables users to swipe and pinch their fingers to interact with business data. The application also uses the iPhone's Coverflow feature--usually meant for flipping through album covers--as a means of cycling through analyses.

The client software taps into the user's main QlikView business intelligence software to access data, such as that relating to sales, competitive analysis, and inventory.

The phone's GPS functionality is … Read more