restructuring - News, Features, and Slideshows

News

• Courts OK Apple group's $4.5B Nortel patent buyout

  U.S. and Canadian courts have approved the sale of thousands of patents from bankrupt Nortel Networks to a consortium including Apple and Microsoft for about US$4.5 billion.

• Vodafone buying out Indian partner in mobile joint venture

  Vodafone ended on Friday a fractious relationship with its Indian joint venture partner, Essar Group, but will end up paying more than earlier planned for the partner's 33 percent stake in the mobile joint venture, Vodafone Essar.

• Apple, Microsoft consortium beats Google for Nortel patents

  Nortel Networks has auctioned off its remaining patents and patent applications to a consortium of key technology companies for a cash purchase price of US$4.5 billion.

• News Corp. unloads MySpace

  MySpace, which dominated the social-networking market in the mid-2000s before Facebook eclipsed it, has been sold by its parent company News Corp. to digital media company Specific Media.

• Skype executives depart after Microsoft buyout

  Eight Skype executives have departed the company following Microsoft's $8.5 billion buyout in May, a Skype spokeswoman confirmed on Monday.

• 100 years of IBM: Milestones

  IBM is celebrating the 100th anniversary of its founding Thursday. Led by American capitalist icons Thomas J. Watson, Sr. and Thomas J. Watson, Jr. until the 1970s, the company grew from a pre-World War I conglomeration of companies making tabulating machines and time-keeping devices into a globe-spanning technology behemoth that pioneered the development of electronic computers and dominated the mainframe era.

• China's Alibaba restructures online retailer Taobao

  Taobao, China's largest online retailer, has split into three separate companies to better address its target markets, parent company Alibaba Group said Thursday.

• Sprint gives up majority vote at Clearwire

  Sprint Nextel has given up its majority voting power at Clearwire to defuse investors' concerns about the danger to Sprint if Clearwire defaulted on its debt.

• Cisco profit fell 11 percent in third quarter

  Cisco Systems' revenue for its fiscal third quarter grew less than 5 percent from a year earlier, while its earnings per share fell 11 percent, the company reported on Wednesday.

• Cisco restructures, streamlines operations

  Responding to criticism of its management structure after consecutive quarters of uninspiring performance, Cisco this week restructured operations in an effort to streamline sales and engineering in five key product areas.

• Cisco's 3 biggest weaknesses

  Cisco has stumbled, realized it needed to change course and has begun to make those changes. This week's management and business unit restructuring is the most recent change.

• US court approves Google's $900M bid for Nortel patents

  Nortel Networks has obtained court approval to accept a US$900 million bid from Google for the entirety of its remaining patent portfolio, it said Monday.

• Yahoo Hadoop spin-off could propel software's growth

  Yahoo's reported plan to spin off its Hadoop engineering unit into a separate company, should it happen, could spur more competition in the already-growing field of providing support for this data processing framework, observers said.

• Nokia hands Symbian OS work and 3,000 employees to Accenture

  Nokia will outsource its Symbian software activities to Accenture, transferring 3,000 employees to the company in the process, as it moves its focus to making phones running on Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system.

• Cloud storage startup Cirtas retreats

  Another cloud storage operation shut down last week when startup Cirtas Systems, which developed a controller for storage in the cloud, announced it was leaving the market to regroup.