Business Tech

Updated at 12:30 p.m. PDT: Added comments from Andy Bechtolsheim.

Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim is shifting to a reduced role at the Silicon Valley stalwart as he turns his attention to getting yet another start-up off the ground.

He'll be taking on a new full-time gig as chairman and chief development officer at Arista Networks, which is focusing on 10-gigabit Ethernet switches. But Bechtolsheim believes that the company he helped found and build will do just fine without his day-to-day involvement.

Earlier Thursday, there had been some confusion about where exactly Bechtolsheim stood, following a report in The New York Times … Read more

Electronics and entertainment giant Sony warned investors on Wednesday that its yearly profits will be far below what the company anticipated.

The Japanese company said it expects to record $1.5 billion (150 billion yen) in profit for the current fiscal year, which is a 59 percent drop from the previous year.

In July, Sony said it expected to post profits of $2.4 billion, or 240 billion yen.

One of the main culprits has been the increasingly unfavorable yen-to-dollar conversion rate. The company's headquarters are in Tokyo, but the bulk of its business is in the United States … Read more

Updated on October 24 at 10:20 a.m. with corrected image of Intel laminar jet technology.

Intel wants a laptop to live up to its name.

A computer that sits comfortably, coolly on your lap. The world's largest chipmaker expects a crush of ultrathin laptops from PC makers in 2009 and unveiled cooling technology this week to make sure these svelte air-flow constrained designs stay cool.

To date, cooling technology has focused on keeping the internal components from getting too hot but not the outside of the computer, according to Mooly Eden, general manager of Intel's Mobile … Read more

Correction: The month of the company's IPO has been fixed.

Rackspace Hosting, flush with cash post IPO, announced Thursday it has acquired two companies as part of a retooled cloud hosting strategy.

Rackspace, a hosting services provider based in San Antonio, Texas, snapped up Xen-based virtual machine hosting company Slicehost and cloud storage company Jungle Disk. Terms of the deals were not disclosed.

"Cloud computing offers tremendous benefits to our customers that complement our traditional managed hosting services," Lanham Napier, Rackspace Hosting CEO, said in a statement.

With the acquisitions and deeper dive into cloud computing, Rackspace … Read more

Netbooks using ARM's next-generation processor architecture will be announced soon, according to a senior executive at the company.

Rob Coombs, director of mobile solutions at the U.K. processor design company, told ZDNet UK on Wednesday that Cortex-A8- and Cortex-A9-based application processors would find their way not only into smartphones--as with most ARM architecture--but also into small, low-cost subnotebooks.

"In the future, we're going to be in Netbooks," Coombs said. "Expect announcements in the next few months." … Read more

A central part of Amazon's online computing foundation is growing up.

The Elastic Compute Cloud, a service that gives customers on-demand access to Linux servers, is now out of beta testing, said Jeff Barr, evangelist for the collection of online options collectively called Amazon Web Services.

"Amazon EC2 is now in full production," Barr said in a blog post Thursday. And as promised, EC2 now offers Windows in a beta test, joining Sun Microsystems' OpenSolaris and Solaris Express Community Edition.

Along with those moves, EC2 now comes with a service level agreement, a formal commitment that the … Read more

Communications provider Comcast on Wednesday announced two new tiers of service for heavy residential downloaders, along with speed upgrades for subscribers of its existing services.

The two new plans, dubbed "Extreme" and "Ultra" clock in at 50 and 22 Mbps of downstream respectively and 10 and 5 Mbps of upstream. Comparatively, customers of Comcast's "performance" plans are getting a big jump from 8 to 16 Mbps on the downspeed, however, upload performance remains at 2 Mbps.

The speed bumps, which are being rolled out to 10 major markets between now and next year … Read more

Trusteer, a provider of Web security services, has raised $6 million in Series B venture capital funding, the company announced on Wednesday.

The round was led by U.S. Venture Partners. Steve Krausz, general partner for the VC firm, is joining Trusteer's board of directors.

The timing might seem odd for funding a company that serves the financial industry given the economic downturn propelled by the credit crisis. But Krausz said the market opportunity is significant for Trusteer's software, which protects online banking, brokerage, health care and retail applications from fraud, even when a user's computer is … Read more

Sun Microsystems' largest shareholder, Southeastern Asset Management, has upped its stake and taken a more aggressive attitude toward its investment, indicating that it will take an active role in maximizing shareholder value through talks with management and third parties, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday.

Southeastern, an investment advisory service and self-described value investor in large-cap, mid-cap, and small-cap companies, increased its stake to 21.2 percent from its previous investment in September of 17.3 percent.

In noting the increased stake and change in its status as a passive investor to … Read more