Business

Motorola performed better than analysts had expected in Q2, delivering net earnings of $4 million on Thursday. Revenue was $8.1 billion, beating expectations by Wall Street analysts of $7.5 billion for the handset manufacturer. Motorola's Home and Networks Mobility and Enterprise Mobility Solutions ...

A recent advertising campaign has eBay exhorting consumers to "Shop Victoriously," and, it's true, winning an online auction can be fun. My recent score -- vintage hand carders to process wool for spinning, won for a mere $15 -- was a hoot. I got solid tools for an obscure craft at less than one-thi...

Hope springs anew for the more than 500,000 "Scrabulous" fans mourning the demise of their beloved Facebook game. Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla have launched a "new" word game, "Wordscraper." The new game, which bears a striking resemblance to its banned predecessor, made its Facebook debut as early as...

Search engine giant Google is setting up a new venture capital arm and has hired William Maris, a 33-year-old former entrepreneur, to help coordinate the venture fund, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. Google is the latest in a long line of large companies across several sectors to c...

Beginning on Friday, Reuters can no longer use a critical piece of technology in its widely used Reuters Messaging Network, a court ruled Wednesday. Instead, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York entered judgment in favor of FaceTime Communications, owner of the inst...

Sprint Nextel sustained a harsh legal blow this week that could have wide-ranging effects across the entire mobile telephone industry. A judge in California ruled that it is illegal for Sprint to charge so-called early termination fees when customers discontinue their wireless phone service before t...

Markets responded favorably to Tuesday's news that the chairman and CEO of Paris-based Alcatel-Lucent would be leaving the merger-troubled company. The telecommunication company's stock was up nearly 6 percent by market close following the announcement that CEO Serge Tchuruk and CEO Pat Russo will b...

Year-over-year profits at Tokyo-based consumer electronics giant Sony fell 47 percent to $326 million during the first quarter, and company officials predict a further decrease in profits later in the year. Several factors contributed to the massive drop in Sony profits: lower-than-expected earnings...

Facebookers hoping to get in on a game of Scrabulous on Tuesday were left disappointed. Instead of linking to the game, designed by brothers Rajat and Jayant Argarwalla for play on the Facebook social networking platform, players found the following message: "Scrabulous is disabled for U.S. and Cana...

The idea was simple: Build a large catalog of consumer items and make it accessible in a structured format, unlike what already exists in wide-open search engines like Google. Give users tools similar to what they get on financial Web sites. Give a unique online business experience to both the buyer...

Reports continue to circulate that the FCC has enough votes to rule that Comcast illegally blocked traffic between peer-to-peer Internet applications and that the government will soon set down guidelines for the Internet service provider that could serve as a precedent regarding the hotly debated to...

Verizon Communications beat Wall Street expectations on Monday, thanks to a strong showing by its wireless business. Second-quarter revenue grew to $24.1 billion, a 3.7 percent increase compared with the same period a year ago. Second-quarter earnings grew to $1.88 billion, up from $1.68 billion dur...

The two giants of satellite radio are about to become one. The FCC has approved the merger of XM and Sirius, ending a year-and-a-half struggle to finalize the deal. The move will give the newly combined company unprecedented power in the world of satellite communications; however, it will come wit...

If you told Rhett Frandsen 10 years ago he'd end up being a professional widget-maker, he probably would have called you crazy. "Back then, widgets were only something you read about in your economics book," Frandsen laughed. "Until Apple coined the phrase, everybody had sort of agreed upon the fact...

Microsoft is forging ahead with plan B, now that its proposed merger with Yahoo is all but dead. It is expanding its relationship with Facebook to broaden exposure of its Windows Live Search as well as increase its own search ad business. This latter goal, of course, had been the point behind the fa...