investments - News, Features, and Slideshows

News

• 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.

• Visa gets behind mobile payment startup Square

  Square, a mobile credit card processing startup, received an undisclosed strategic investment from Visa, the world's largest credit card company. The investment is strategic because Square probably doesn't need the cash. The company was started in 2009 by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, and recently closed a $27.5 million round of funding at a $240 million valuation.

• Huawei open to more US acquisitions

  Huawei Technologies may seek more acquisitions in the U.S. after its ill-fated purchase of assets from 3Leaf Systems, and it thinks an ongoing dialog it has set up with the federal government could help to ease those deals through.

• 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.

• Beijing's IT professionals plunge into startups

  Tyr Chen, a 29-year-old resident of Beijing, is doing what many of his friends won't: He's establishing a startup.

• Taiwan contract makers add to choices for end users

  When it was founded in 1997, a Taiwanese firm with the drab, generic name High-Tech Computer did what almost everyone on the island does: It made its money doing contract manufacturing work for bigger-name brands.

• Networking, telecom leaving VCs cold

  The overall amount of venture capital invested in startups is on the rise, though the networking and telecom industries haven’t been big contributors of late.

• Intel sets up MeeGo research center with China's Tencent

  Intel is establishing a joint innovation center with Tencent, one of China's largest Internet firms, to develop products and services around the chip maker's MeeGo mobile operating system and devices using its Atom processors.

• Dell to invest $1 billion to boost data storage products

  Dell plans to invest US$1 billion over the next three years to bolster its data storage products to business customers, with the money going toward the research of technology like cloud computing and virtualization, along with the development on new data centers.

• NTT DoCoMo increases investment in India

  NTT DoCoMo is investing 8 billion rupees (US$176 million) in Tata Teleservices, a mobile services company in India.

• Nokia plans €200 million factory in Vietnam

  Nokia plans to invest €200 million (US$276.3 million) in a new mobile phone manufacturing site near Hanoi in northern Vietnam along "with further, sizeable investments thereafter," the company said Wednesday.

• Cebit kicks off with talk of openness

  Open democracy, open borders and open standards were the themes to which speakers returned again and again at the opening ceremony for the Cebit trade show in Hanover, Germany, on Monday night.

• Citrix invests in personal cloud management company

  Citrix Systems has invested in Primadesk, a company that is developing a free, Web-based application to help users keep track of content stored in different cloud-based services, the company said on Monday.

• Report: Twitter chased by Facebook, Google for up to $10B

  Executives from Facebook, Google and other companies have held talks with Twitter over a possible acquisition of the micro-blogging service, pushing its estimated value as high as $US10 billion, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

• Lenovo breaks ground on new production center in China

  Chinese PC maker Lenovo has broken ground on a new operations center in southwestern China that will produce computers, as well as bolster the company's research efforts in mobile Internet.