Business Tech

Updated at 12:40 p.m. PST with Dell's comments and historical perspective on Apple iMac shortages due to lack of LCD flat panel displays.

LG Display, Sharp, and Chunghwa Picture Tubes agreed to plead guilty to criminal charges for participating in a liquid crystal display price-fixing conspiracy and pay $585 million in fines, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Wednesday.

The three companies worked in concert to set prices on thin-film transistor LCDs, which are used in computer monitors, notebooks, televisions, mobile phones, and various electronics, according to the antitrust unit of the Justice Department.

Apple, Dell, … Read more

Best Buy lowered its fiscal-year earnings forecast on Wednesday, citing fears that consumers will keep their wallets under lock and key during the holiday-shopping season.

Best Buy, which saw its archrival Circuit City file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Tuesday, said uncertainty surrounding consumer spending has made it difficult to project revenue for the rest of fiscal 2009, which ends February 28, 2009.

Uncertainty usually scares investors, who pushed Best Buy's shares down a steep 10.85 percent to $21.29 a share in early morning trading.

Best Buy CEO Brad Anderson sized up the current situation with this … Read more

Advanced Micro Devices' new graphics chips are taking market share from Nvidia, a report issued Wednesday confirmed.

"AMD has by all accounts exceeded expectations with its Radeon HD 4000 series," according to report issued by market researcher Jon Peddie Research (JPR).

Aggressive pricing by AMD's ATI graphics unit made the difference, bringing down prices on add-in graphics boards. "Priced aggressively yet delivering solid performance, AMD's new line not only took back some market share--jumping up to 40 percent from 35 percent the quarter prior--it forced Nvidia (and partners) to cut prices on its recently released … Read more

Updated throughout at 2:30 p.m. PST.

A crush of warnings are descending on Intel, AMD, and the PC industry this week.

First up, Avian Securities. The brokerage company said that PC makers "are being very conservative with their build plans for Q4."

Market researcher IDC is equally pessimistic. "The supply chain is telling us that there is strong concern for demand decline," according to Shane Rau, an analyst at IDC. He is cutting his processor forecast "probably into the low to mid single digits on a unit basis for total PC processor growth … Read more

This autumn has not been kind to name-brand companies like AIG, General Motors, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch. But the tech industry seemed to be cruising along without any major disasters--until Monday that is.

Venerable networking giant Nortel Networks announced a third-quarter loss of $3.4 billion, or $6.85 per share. As of this writing, the company's stock is trading around 80 cents with a market cap just over $400 million. Yikes!

Why is a company that did over $10 billion last year worth so little? The primary reason is liquidity. Financial analysts estimate that the company is … Read more

Longtime Oracle executive John Wookey joined SAP on Monday as executive vice president of Large Enterprise On Demand, in a move that will pit him directly against his former employer.

Wookey, who served as Oracle's senior vice president of applications development for 12 years, left the enterprise software applications maker 13 months ago. Prior to his departure, he was responsible for Oracle's Fusion initiative, which seeks to take the best features of its acquisitions and meld them together to create new offerings.

Under his new role, Wookey will work with several large SAP enterprise on-demand offerings, such as … Read more

The Intel Core i7 processor is being bid up at online retailers--about a week before its official launch.

Though Intel isn't slated to launch the Core i7 processor until November 17, processors are ready for order at online retailers. The Core i7 represents the vanguard of Intel's new Nehalem microarchitecture.

PC Connection is selling the 2.66GHz Intel i7-920 processor with 8MB of cache memory for $334. The sales status is currently "on order." The official pricing from Intel--its pricing will likely be updated early next week--is expected to be lower at about $285 for the … Read more

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