Business Tech

Google wants to take you places you have never been before, and it's coming along for the ride.

Google Earth upped the cartographic ante, incorporating even more data from NASA, the BBC, National Geographic, and other proprietary sources to create one of the most unique map offerings ever, meshing comprehensive real-time data on Earth's surface with information on the oceans, the stars that we see, historical maps, and topographical information on Mars.

With Google Earth 5.0, users can now explore Mars in the same way they've been able to instantly view 3D images of much of … Read more

Now that the leadership of Lenovo is back in the hands of Chinese executives, the PC maker says it plans to pay more attention to its home market of China and other emerging markets, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

It cut ties with its American CEO Bill Amelio earlier this week after a dreadful financial quarter in which the company lost $97 million. Chairman Yan Yuanqing has taken over as chief executive and company co-founder Liu Chuanzhi is returning to become chairman of the board.

Liu blames the company's current woes on the worldwide financial … Read more

Update at 9:03 a.m. PST: Comments from Sun added.

Barclays Global Investors has signed aboard as a new shareholder in Sun Microsystems, taking a 3.18 percent stake in the struggling hardware maker, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing Thursday.

Sun, whose stock closed up 10.3 percent on Thursday, at $5.48, after heavy trading volume of 21.6 million shares, has seen its stock on the rise since January 30, when it traded at $4.16 a share.

On the day before Sun's shares started their northward trek, the company's … Read more

Intel's newest Atom processor has slipped out of the starting gate sooner than expected.

Though the Atom N280 had been expected later this year, it is now shipping to Intel customers. "Asus is already taking preorders for the 1000HE with the N280," Intel spokesperson Bill Calder said Thursday.

Intel doesn't expect the rollout to be as big as the Atom N270, introduced back in June, but the N280 is expected to appear in a few systems, Calder said.

The N280 brings a minuscule clock frequency improvement to the N270, bumping up the speed to only 1.… Read more

Intel has delayed a high-end server chip, billed as the world's first 2 billion transistor microprocessor, originally expected as long ago as 2007.

Tukwila is a quad-core update to the Itanium processor, which has had a less-than-promising run since the original version was announced back in 2001. The chip's architecture--based on explicit instruction-level parallelism--is a radical departure from the x86 design used in PCs today. It was believed at one time that Itanium would replace x86 chips in many Intel-based computers.

So, what's delaying it this time? Intel has "made some engineering enhancements to the Tukwila … Read more

Intel said Thursday it is consolidating its manufacturing operations in China and moving 2,000 jobs out of Shanghai.

"We are consolidating our manufacturing operations in China consistent with actions we announced a couple of weeks ago," Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy said Thursday.

Intel said on January 21 that it would close chip plants to align its manufacturing capacity to current market conditions. At that time, Intel said between 5,000 and 6,000 employees would be affected.

"Assembly and testing facilities will be closed in in Pudong outside of Shanghai. This will take place between now … Read more

Chrome programmers have switched out a third-party software package in favor of their own as part of Google's attempt to speed its open-source browser up more.

The change came with a key component for processing JavaScript text called regular expressions. "As we've improved other parts of the language, regexps started to stand out as being slower than the rest. We felt it should be possible to improve performance by integrating with our existing infrastructure rather than using an external library," according to a Chromium blog post by programmers Erik Corry, Christian Plesner Hansen, and Lasse Reichstein … Read more

Updated at 5:45 p.m. PST with additional comments from Microsoft.

Nvidia's Tegra chip will be used in an upcoming Microsoft smartphone, according to an analyst at Broadpoint AmTech.

The San Francisco-based research firm also is speculating that Apple will eventually use the Nvidia ARM-based chip in a future iPhone.

Broadpoint's Doug Freedman said the Microsoft-branded phone would be the second Nvidia Tegra design win after HTC. "We believe the HTC ramp in '09 is the more material of the two as we have some concerns on the channel for Microsoft's handset distribution given the … Read more

In an animated--and sometimes tense--conversation with bloggers, SAP co-CEO Leo Apotheker said the software giant would step over a systems integrator if it would save an IT project.

That comment, which was in response to multiple questions about the triangle between consultants, SAP, and customers, illustrates how the enterprise application vendor is trying to end the days where it's a whipping boy for failed implementations.

"I don't give a s**t if it's Accenture or IBM. I care about the customer. I find it shocking people are walking around talking to customers and have no experience … Read more