corporate

Sony has sold off one of its most prominent buildings in Tokyo.

The company announced today that the Sony City Osaki building in Tokyo was sold off for 111.1 billion yen ($1.2 billion) to the Nippon Building Fund and a Japan-based institutional investor. The company, which currently has 5,000 employees working in the 25-story building, will lease the facility from the new owner for a period of five years.

Sony was reportedly shopping the building last month. The move is part of a broader strategy on Sony's part to offload assets and increase cash flow. Sony … Read more

Not to be outdone by Apple and its upcoming spaceship HQ, or Facebook and its future complex designed by starchitect Frank Gehry, Google is planning a massive expansion to the Googleplex. And in the company's algorithmic world, form follows data.

The 42-acre expansion was reportedly designed by architecture firm NBBJ using mountains of info gathered and quantified by Google's real estate team and involving everything from where the sun is at different times of day to which way the wind blows to the importance of placing one work group near another to, quite simply, what sort of workspace employees prefer.… Read more

Yahoo's focus on mobile apparently requires its employees to stay in the office.

ATD is reporting that CEO Marissa Mayer let it be known yesterday -- via a memo to employees from HR head Jackie Reses -- that come June, any existing work-from-home arrangements will no longer apply.

"To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side," reads the memo, as published by ATD's Kara Swisher, to whom it was leaked.

Swisher reports that the change has rankled some workers who say they were … Read more

Foxconn Technology Group is implementing a plan to increase employee participation in its labor union, the company said today in a statement obtained by CNET.

"As a part of efforts to implement the Action Plan that was developed together with the Fair Labor Association (FLA) following the assessment they conducted in early 2012, Foxconn is introducing measures to enhance employee representation in the Foxconn Labor Union and to raise employees' awareness of the organization," the company wrote today in a statement.

Apple brought in the FLA last year to inspect Foxconn's facilities and determine if there were … Read more

Billed by Twitter's inventors as a new platform for high-quality public discourse, Branch today opened it doors to anyone who wants to fork off into conversations of more than 140 characters in length.

Branch is essentially a modern, user-friendly version of the Internet forum. People create "branches" to discuss topics or links and invite their friends to participate. Thread participants can also branch off into their own separate but related conversations.

The small, San Francisco-based startup is backed by Obvious, the incubator-investor hybrid machination of Twitter creators Evan Williams and Biz Stone. Obvious announced last March that … Read more

Major tech companies, including Apple and Google, have been the subject of a year-long investigation by a Senate subcommittee into their tax-savings practices, according to a new report.

The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which is spearheaded by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), has been conducting inquiries into Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Hewlett-Packard, among others, to determine how the companies limit their U.S. taxes, The New York Times reported yesterday, citing people who have knowledge of those proceedings.

According to the Times' sources, the subcommittee's investigation is coming to a close and it will deliver recommendations on handling corporate … Read more

A new lawsuit filed yesterday in Texas claims that a majority of Apple's products infringe on four patents held by EON Corporation IP Holdings.

The suit, filed by EON in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas Tyler Division, targets both Apple's software services like iTunes and the App Store, as well as devices that connect to those services. That list includes the Apple TV, the iPod Touch, all iPhones since the iPhone 3G, and all generations of the iPad.

In its complaint, the Texas-based company says these devices infringe on one key patent … Read more

After Yahoo announced that Max Levchin was appointed to its board, the PayPal co-founder and Silicon Valley all-star took to his blog to explain his reasoning for accepting the position.

According to Levchin, his decision centered on three areas -- personal, business, and sentimental. On the personal side, he said that he has for a long time "respected Marissa [Mayer's] talent and tenacity," adding that her decision to take over Yahoo "was a very ballsy move, and when she asked for my help, I was excited about working with her."

On the business side, Levchin … Read more

In an interview with the BBC, Tony Fadell claims that Scott Forstall "got what he deserved" when Apple decided it was time for Forstall to go.

The end to Forstall's tenure at the Cupertino, Calif., company follows on from tensions in the boardroom and accusations of being uncooperative, which reached a head after the mobile software chief refused to sign a letter apologizing for problems with the Apple Maps feature in iOS 6.

The BBC put the Forstall question to Fadell -- known as the "father of the iPod" -- against the backdrop of "… Read more