Business

Many businesspeople have thought about the thrill of going public: the challenge, the excitement, the bragging rights and the "pot of gold" at the end of the rainbow. But what should you know about the downside and cost of such a venture? Are there important things you absolutely must be aware of be...

Google's choice to take a spot alongside other tech heavyweights by staging its hotly anticipated initial public offering on the Nasdaq market has left analysts speculating about the thinking behind the decision. Being listed on the Nasdaq will put Google in the company of rivals such as Yahoo and M...

China has agreed to phase out a tax that drove up the prices of U.S.-made semiconductors sold in that fast-growing country, settling a complaint from the World Trade Organization (WTO) and handing U.S. chip makers a key victory. The WTO filed a complaint against China on March 18th after the United ...

Whether they have just graduated from college or business school, or already have spent years climbing the corporate ladder, ambitious individuals with their eye on the corner office can take several steps to improve their chances of success. Businesses are looking for executives who excel in managi...

The United Nations has launched a push to curtail the vast majority of spam e-mail within two years. The push by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the telecom arm of the UN, began this week with a meeting of scores of regulatory agencies from around the world in Geneva, Switzerland.

Cisco Systems today announced a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Parc Technologies of London, United Kingdom. Parc develops traffic-engineering technologies and software for routing optimization. Parc is a spin-off that originally began as a research center focusing on search algorithm...

Thirty-six percent of the software installed on computers worldwide was pirated in 2003, representing a loss of nearly US$29 billion. These are the key findings of a global software piracy study released today by the Business Software Alliance, an international association for software manufacturers...

Veritas Software lowered its second-quarter revenue and profit guidance, becoming the latest tech company to say the quarter did not measure up to expectations. Saying enterprise sales were down, particularly in the U.S., the storage software maker lowered its revenue targets to US$475 million to $4...

Investor worry that the oil supply to the United States could be disrupted heading into the long holiday weekend reverberated on Wall Street Thursday, when stocks went sharply lower. Oil prices were up more than 3 percent Thursday after gaining 4 percent on Wednesday when the U.S. announced a surpri...

Stock markets reacted favorably after the Federal Open Market Committee boosted interest rates by a quarter point and issued a statement that seemed to indicate gradual future increases were in the offing. The Fed did what most were expecting when it raised its target rate to 1.25 percent, the first...

Hoping a narrow focus on product development and customer service will help it turn itself around, Nortel Networks sold most of its major manufacturing plants to Flextronics, which will make Nortel's hardware on an outsourcing basis. Nortel said the sale, which involves plants in Canada and Brazil, ...

All economy watchers have turned their gaze to the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee today and tomorrow as the central bank weighs how much to boost interest rates in an effort to stem inflation without squelching the economic recovery. Most economists expect the Fed to hike the overnight lendin...

Oil prices marked their largest one-week price drop in three months after a work stoppage at key Norwegian oil fields was resolved on Friday. Crude prices fell 41 cents a barrel to US$37.52 on the New York Mercantile Exchange and fell nearly 4 percent for the week. Oil was trading for $42 a barrel, ...

Hitachi and NEC announced Friday that they are joining forces to develop routers and switches for networks of telecommunications carriers, government and public sectors, and large enterprises. The joint venture will be formally established in October. The router market is currently dominated by Cisc...

Salesforce.com soared on its first day of public trading Wednesday as the second-most hotly anticipated technology IPO of the year -- behind only Google's still-to-come initial public offering -- gained 56 percent and valued the company at US$1.7 billion. Salesforce.com's strong first-day gains came...