Corporate & legal

Hitachi executive Sakae Someya was indicted Tuesday by a federal grand jury in San Francisco for his role in a conspiracy to fix the prices of LCD screens.

Someya is accused of conspiring with others in the LCD display business "to suppress and eliminate competition" by fixing the price of the panels sold to Dell for notebook PCs. Someya is accused of participating in the scheme between January 2001 through December 2004. That would be a violation of the Sherman Act, which can result in a $1 million fine and a 10-year prison sentence.

Someya's indictment brings … Read more

Sprint Nextel's CEO is getting a big bonus for 2008, despite the fact that the beleaguered cell phone operator is still losing customers.

A proxy filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission filed this week shows that CEO Dan Hesse will receive a bonus of $2.6 million for 2008, which is about 30 percent higher than his targeted payout, according to The Wall Street Journal. Hesse's total compensation package is valued at $15.5 million, including a base salary of $1.2 million and equity grants.

The proxy also indicates that Hesse received additional corporate perks valued … Read more

Hewlett-Packard is considering using Google's Android operating system on its low-cost Netbooks, an executive at the company told The Wall Street Journal.

In a story posted Tuesday, the Journal reported that Satjiv Chahil, a vice president of HP's PC division, confirmed that the company was studying the Google software.

"We want to assess the capability Android may have for the computer and communications industries, and so we are studying it," Chahil was quoted as saying in the Journal article.

Chahil declined to say for certain whether HP plans to sell Android devices, the article stated.

Android is a Linux-based operating system … Read more

IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, the IEEE/ISTO, and key members of the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum met recently to address how they could work with the community to drive cloud computing markets and technologies forward. Jesse Silver, one of the CCIF's four co-creators, spoke to me after the meeting, and Reuven Cohen released a single paragraph of minutes on his blog Tuesday morning:

Yesterday representatives of CCIF, CloudCamp, Cisco, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and the IEEE-ISTO met while attending the Cloud Computing Expo in New York. Other companies were invited but were unable to attend, generally due to the short … Read more

A freeway overpass connecting two parts of Microsoft's Redmond headquarters has become a well-traveled road for critics of how the federal government is spending its stimulus dollars.

The "Microsoft Bridge," as it has been dubbed, is slated to receive $11 million in stimulus dollars--money that critics say is a waste, but local and state officials have praised as a prudent use of transportation dollars.

The overpass indeed connects two parts of Microsoft's campus. But as proponents point out, it also connects two parts of Redmond's business community with each other and with the local … Read more

File swappers in Sweden, land of the world's largest bittorrent sharing site, The Pirate Bay, are facing a tougher future.

The so-called IPRED law, scheduled to go into effect Wednesday, will in some instances require Internet service providers to reveal subscribers' Internet Protocol addresses to copyright holders--including the film, music, and game industries--that charge users with illegal file sharing.

The Swedish law stipulates that property rights holders can take their grievances to a court, which will examine the evidence, including the extent of the file sharing, and decide whether the IP address will be released. The copyright holder then … Read more

We've barely unpacked our bags from GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February, and we're on the road again to Las Vegas for CTIA Wireless, the U.S. trade show and conference held every spring where the biggest and most influential players in the U.S. mobile market gather.

While there will be some cell phones announced at this year's show, most of the excitement will center on software applications and the virtual storefronts that are popping up to distribute these new applications. Since the success of Apple's App Store, which provides easy access to third-party applications for iPhones, other companies have jumped on the bandwagon announcing their own application stores.

Everyone from Google to Microsoft to Nokia to Research In Motion has announced plans for a new application store. And at this year's CTIA, some of these new app stores will come to life. RIM is expected to announce that its BlackBerry AppWorld is open for business, and Microsoft will start showing off its Marketplace for the first time.

But application markets aren't the only thing that will be talked about. Carriers like Verizon and Clearwire will also be touting faster broadband wireless networks that will help make these applications a reality. And of course handset makers will be showing off new products, some of which have already been announced, such as the Palm Pre.

But this year's spring CTIA Wireless show will likely be smaller than in years past. The economic downturn has taken its toll on the mobile market. Even Nokia, the world's largest and strongest maker of cell phones, has slashed expectations for 2009. And the company has already begun laying off employees and closing facilities to cut costs.… Read more

As expected, Google launched Google Ventures on Monday, following other Silicon Valley firms with a division to invest in promising start-ups.

"This is Google's effort to take advantage of our resources to support innovation and encourage promising new technology companies," said Google Ventures managing partners Rich Miner and Bill Maris in a blog post announcing the effort. "By borrowing the best practices of top-tier, financially focused venture capital firms and bringing to bear Google's unique technical expertise and brand, we think we can find young companies with truly awesome potential and encourage their development into … Read more

Software services in the U.S. helped temper the overall sequential decline in technology jobs during the fourth quarter, allowing the industry to minimize jobs losses compared to the private sector, according to a TechAmerica report released late Monday.

Tech jobs, overall, dipped 0.6 percent, or by 38,000 positions, sequentially in the fourth quarter, while U.S. private sector jobs declined 1.3 percent during the same period, according to TechAmerica, a technology advocacy trade group.

"The tech sector weathered the storm longer and stronger than other parts of the economy," Phil Bond, TechAmerica president, said … Read more