Business

Bolstered by a 20 percent increase in mobile product revenues, Intel late Tuesday issued a strong third-quarter earnings report that discussed record-level shipments of processors, chipsets and flash memory. The Santa Clara, Calif., company's Q3 revenues came in at $10.1 billion, a 15 percent increa...

IBM's hardware sales fell in its third quarter, but stronger software sales and service contracts helped the company post positive results. Big Blue attributed the drop in hardware sales -- revenue fell 10 percent in total and 6 percent when adjusted for the sale of its printing line to $4.9 billion...

Have you seen the "change of plans" commercial? I can't remember what it's an advertisement for, but the ad consists of a series of clips of two businesspeople in a series of airports talking to each other via cell phone. Every time they talk they say things like "change of plans, going to Singapore...

Media company EW Scripps announced a plan to split into two separate public companies: one for national media efforts and the other for local and community brands. The proposed split, expected to be completed early next year, is designed to allow the two separated companies to bring "sharpened strat...

Time Warner's AOL unit will reduce its workforce by 2,000 more workers as the once massive Internet company continues a transformation designed to better enable it to compete in the current Web marketplace. This time, the 2,000-person reduction in headcount amounts to a 20 percent cut and will bring...

Two men have been successfully prosecuted for sending out millions of unsolicited e-mail messages promoting pornographic Web sites, and reaping millions of dollars as a result. Jeffrey A. Kilbride of Venice, Calif., was sentenced to six years, and James R. Schaffer of Paradise Valley, Ariz., was sen...

The U.S. Supreme Court Monday declined to take up an appeal brought by Microsoft and Best Buy, who wanted the high court to overturn a lower court decision that allowed a lawsuit alleging fraud and racketeering to move forward. Without comment and with no apparent dissent, the justices refused to he...

Chinese Internet company Alibaba.com will try to raise as much as $1.33 billion in an initial public offering slated for next month, according to reports. In what promises to be the largest such offering in history by a Chinese technology firm, the business-to-business operator will reportedly sell ...

Bolstering its online portfolio of informative offerings, Discovery Channel owner Discovery Communications is buying HowStuffWorks.com and planning to merge content to create a sort of "video Wikipedia." Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but Silver Springs, Md.-based Discovery noted HowSt...

While many companies are focused on their business online, they tend to put up sites that turn off rather than turn on potential customers. Because there are so many potential options, a business needs to be careful about how it designs its e-commerce site. For instance, a visitor can't purchase wha...

Electronic Arts will pay more than $800 million to buy two video game studios from the private equity firm that purchased them two years ago. EA, the largest publisher of video games worldwide, will acquire VG Holding from Elevation Partners. VG consists of BioWare and Pandemic Studios, each of whic...

Two committees within the U.S. House of Representatives have approved a bill put forth by Democrats this week as an alternative to the broad surveillance legislation rushed through in August to update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. Known as the "Restore Act," short for the Respon...

This past July, a joint FBI/Chinese effort seized about $500 million worth of counterfeit Microsoft and Symantec software. The seizure and arrests came at a time when our government was pressuring China to do something about its traditional tolerance of software piracy. This was no small seizure and...

Virgin Mobile USA staged its long-anticipated initial public offering Thursday, raising more than $400 million in the process, but investors gave the shares a fairly modest boost out of the gate. Shares of the virtual network operator, which focuses on selling pay-as-you-go mobile services to a larg...

Sony Ericsson posted quarterly results that show it continues to gain market share against some competitors but is doing so at the expense of its bottom line. The fourth-largest handset maker posted its first year-over-year profit drop in two years, saying third quarter net earnings fell 10 percent ...