Business

Sony Entertainment has reached a settlement with George Hotz, aka "GeoHot," the hacker who jailbroke Sony's PlayStation 3 gaming console. The settlement was reached on March 31, according to a Sony blog post. The terms were not fully disclosed, but Hotz has apparently agreed to a permanent injunctio...

Level 3 has announced plans to buy Global Crossing for $3 billion in a stock-for-stock transaction. Level 3 will also assume Global Crossing's $1.1 billion debt. This transaction creates a company with pro forma combined 2010 revenues of $6.26 billion, the companies said. The merging of the two comp...

Time Warner Cable and Viacom are countersuing each other over whether Time Warner Cable has the right to live stream Viacom content to its Apple iPad app, which it released in March. In short, Time Warner Cable says the rights it already obtained from Viacom entitle it to distribute the content in t...

Larry Page took the wheel as Google's CEO this week, and he's already shaking things up. On Thursday, Page reportedly placed key executives in charge of individual business units, indicating he wanted to simplify product and engineering structures with one executive leading each functional group. Th...

Many economists, including Paul Krugman and Nouriel Roubini, have argued that the European Monetary Union is in trouble because of the fiscal difficulties of a few of its member countries. Some have predicted that the euro will fail. Because the prospects for a future single global currency depend ...

New technology may be cool, but it can also be a double-edged sword. Different industries are starting to overlap, and even though the blending of different technologies can be very exciting, it can also be very confusing. One example is how cable television companies have been starting to use the A...

Blockbuster -- once the king of video rentals -- has reached an ignoble end. The carcass of the once-sterling company has been snatched up for nothing, for its bones. Dish Network announced on Wednesday that it was the winning bidder in the bankruptcy court auction for the assets of Blockbuster. The...

For the past two years, media and vendors alike have proclaimed the cloud to be the next wave of IT -- promising to change computing as we know it. The reactions of many IT veterans who have lived through similar marketing barrages in the past have ranged from a cautious wait-and-see attitude to out...

Texas Instruments announced on Tuesday that it has signed an agreement to acquire its rival, National Semiconductor, in an all-cash transaction totaling US$6.5 billion. This will merge two leading analog semiconductor companies. National's shareholders will receive $25 a share, 78 percent higher tha...

The IT industry purely loves digital information and with good reason. Creating, storing and archiving documents consisting of 1's and 0's provides the foundation for thousands of business computing solutions and billions of dollars in annual sales. While the gospel of the "all-digital enterprise"...

The IT industry purely loves digital information and with good reason. Creating, storing and archiving documents consisting of 1's and 0's provides the foundation for thousands of business computing solutions and billions of dollars in annual sales. While the gospel of the "all-digital enterprise"...

The IT industry purely loves digital information and with good reason. Creating, storing and archiving documents consisting of 1's and 0's provides the foundation for thousands of business computing solutions and billions of dollars in annual sales. While the gospel of the "all-digital enterprise"...

There are several investors positioning themselves to snap up Blockbuster at its bankruptcy auction, scheduled for Monday. They are lining up in competition against Cobalt Video, a venture formed by some of Blockbuster's bondholders, which made an opening bid, or stalking horse offer, of $290 millio...

It's difficult to find an industry that has had a harder time transitioning to the digital age than the print news media. It also would be tough to find an industry that inflicted so much damage on itself by making a single bad decision. When readers started gravitating to electronic platforms, most...

Microsoft is filing a formal antitrust complaint with the European Commission as part of the commission's investigation into possible Google violations of European competition law. Google holds about 95 percent of the European search market. The complaint involves Google restraining competition by...