Business Tech

VMware has announced a major push into the mobile market, with a new virtualization platform tailored for handheld devices.

VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform, or MVP, announced Monday, builds on technology VMware bought from Trango Virtual Processors last month. According to VMware, the platform will "help handset vendors reduce development time and get mobile phones with value-added services to market faster" through the use of virtual machines.

Business users were also a focus in VMware's announcement, which suggested that MVP would let IT departments roll out a "corporate phone personality" across employees' personal handsets, leading to … Read more

Sun Microsystems unveiled Monday its Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems line, as it seeks to turn around its ailing business by once again turning to open source.

The Sun Storage 7000 line, formerly known as "Amber Road," is intended to bolster the company's storage business by adding open source to its hardware, in a move to make it easier for customers to install and configure the systems and reduce costs. The line will be part of the company's Unified Storage Systems.

Sun's three open-source storage are designed to increase the performance while lower cooling … Read more

IBM is now offering 45-nanometer chipmaking "foundry" services based on its silicon-on-insulator technology.

Foundries have become a big business in the chip industry. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the largest foundry in the world, builds chips for Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia. AMD announced in October that it was spinning off its manufacturing operations into a foundry.

Most of the advanced manufacturing technology offered to date at foundries has been based on a 65-nanometer process. Typically, the smaller the chip geometries, the faster or more power-efficient the chips are.

On Monday, IBM said that 45-nanometer (nm) silicon-on-insulator (SOI) foundry services … Read more

Struggling electronics chain Circuit City announced Monday that it has filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Chapter 11 allows a company to hold off creditors while it attempts to restructure its finances. Circuit City said Monday that it has negotiated a commitment for a $1.1 billion debtor-in-possession revolving credit facility to supplement its working capital.

Circuit City announced earlier this month that it would shutter 155 stores and lay off 17 percent of its workforce. The retailer said Monday that it will eliminate an additional 700 positions in addition to the reductions resulting from the store closings, bringing the total … Read more

Looking for signs that netbooks are catching on? And even morphing into notebooks? Here's a few.

Netbooks were the big end-user gadget on display at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference that ended Friday.

And all the Netbooks at a Microsoft booth were running Windows 7, Microsoft's next-generation operating system due next year.

A Microsoft person on the floor said that a lite version of Windows 7 will run on 1GB of memory and 16GB of (solid-state drive) storage. Higher-end Netbooks will have a 160GB hard disk drive, according to Microsoft "guidance."

This person also said something … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--The cloud was omnipresent at the Web 2.0 Summit as industry executives discussed the migration from the client to millions of virtualized servers as the information pipe.

"There is a lot of hype. We think about the cloud as the next evolution in computing," said Cisco Chief Technology Officer Padmasree Warrior. "It's a way of abstracting the services and applications from the physical resources and using a more on-demand layer."

Warrior believes that cloud computing will evolve from private and stand-alone clouds to hybrid clouds, which allow movement of applications and services between … Read more

Google is letting Yahoo go it alone.

Bowing to federal regulators' antitrust concerns, Google pulled the plug on a search-ad partnership with Yahoo that would have given the latter major new revenue.

"After four months of review, including discussions of various possible changes to the agreement, it's clear that government regulators and some advertisers continue to have concerns about the agreement," David Drummond, Google's chief legal officer, said in a blog post Wednesday.

The 10-year deal would have placed Google ads on some Yahoo search results, and the companies would have shared resulting revenue. The deal … Read more

During a whirlwind visit to Sydney, Australia, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer this week said he has confidence in President-elect Barack Obama's leadership.

Obama's decisive victory this week over Republican rival John McCain in the U.S. presidential elections has been broadly hailed by technology leaders as potentially beneficial to the country's technology and communications industries.

"I have a lot of faith in our system and our electoral process, and I think President-elect Obama understands that there's a deep set of economic issues, and I have confidence in his leadership," Ballmer said on the … Read more

Updated at 5:20 p.m. throughout. Also, correction made for earnings per share.

In the third quarter of its fiscal year, Nvidia's profit dropped sharply from last year's levels, but revenue came in above forecasts.

For the three months that ended October 26, profit sank 74 percent to $61.7 million, or 11 cents a share, from $235.7 million a year earlier. Excluding costs from stock compensation and other expenses, earnings were 20 cents a share. This exceeded the average estimate of 11 cents projected by First Call.

Revenue for the world's largest graphics chip … Read more