By Nicola Leske NEW YORK | Thu Oct 25, 2012 1:47pm EDT NEW YORK (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp launched its new Windows 8 operating system and Surface tablet on Thursday in a bid to revive interest in its flagship product and regain ground lost to Apple Inc and Google Inc in mobile computing. "We've reimagined Windows and we've reimagined the whole P...

NEW YORK | Thu Oct 25, 2012 11:15am EDT NEW YORK (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer expects the Windows 8 operating system to open a new chapter in the company's history and thrust it back into the forefront of technology. "We've reimagined Windows and we've reimagined the whole PC industry," Ballmer told Reuters Television ...

By Steve Stecklow LONDON | Thu Oct 25, 2012 4:47am EDT LONDON (Reuters) - An Iranian partner of Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, a Chinese company that has denied breaking U.S. sanctions, last year tried to sell embargoed American antenna equipment to an Iranian firm, according to documents and interviews. The buyer - an Iranian mobile-phone operator ...

Wed Oct 24, 2012 10:48pm EDT (Reuters) - U.S. wireless carrier Sprint Nextel Corp said it will introduce new rate plans for 4G tablets that offer customers up to 20 percent more data than rivals for the same price. Competition is heating up among wireless carriers to meet growing customer demand for data as more people buy handheld devices with Internet browsing ...

By Poornima Gupta SAN FRANCISCO | Wed Oct 24, 2012 8:45pm EDT SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Amid the fanfare accompanying the noisy launch of the iPad mini this week, Apple Inc also took the wraps off new Mac computers. The facelift may help revitalize an important lineup that -- while seeing growth tail off in the early part of 2012 -- yields 14 per...

By Bill Rigby SEATTLE | Wed Oct 24, 2012 7:32pm EDT SEATTLE (Reuters) - Firm sales numbers for Microsoft Corp's Windows 8 and its new Surface tablet will not be available for three months, but it may be clear long before then if it has a hit on its hands. "We can definitely gauge it by chatter," said Emily Chan, an analyst at Bernstein Research. ...

By Diane Bartz WASHINGTON | Wed Oct 24, 2012 5:59pm EDT WASHINGTON (Reuters) - South Korea's Samsung Electronics, the world's top maker of smartphones, infringed Apple patents to make its smartphones and tablets, a U.S. trade panel judge said in a preliminary decision issued on Wednesday. Apple had filed a complaint in mid-2011, accusing Samsung ...

By Gerry Shih SAN FRANCISCO | Wed Oct 24, 2012 4:29pm EDT SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Zynga Inc raised the lower end of its 2012 earnings outlook on Wednesday as the company reported a slight uptick in revenue that beat the Street's rock-bottom expectations. Quarterly revenue rose to $317 million, a...

BOSTON | Wed Oct 24, 2012 4:26pm EDT BOSTON (Reuters) - Symantec Corp, the top maker of computer security software, reported a 6 percent jump in quarterly profit as its new chief executive conducted a strategic review of the company's operations after his predecessor's firing in July. The company, which has seen its stock languish for years, reported net...

Wed Oct 24, 2012 11:31am EDT (Reuters) - Apple Inc's "iPad mini" will attract new customers but the higher-than-expected price is unlikely to make it a threat to low-cost tablets such as Amazon.com Inc's Kindle, analysts said, in a muted reaction to the new tablet. Only a few analysts revise their price targets for Apple's shares ahead of the company's quarterly ...

By Roberta Cowan AMSTERDAM | Wed Oct 24, 2012 11:06am EDT AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - A Dutch court has ruled Samsung Electronics does not infringe an Apple Inc patent by using certain multi-touch techniques on some of the Samsung Galaxy smartphones and tablet computers. Samsung and Apple, the world's top two smartphone makers, are locked in patent dis...

By Alexei Oreskovic SAN FRANCISCO | Tue Oct 23, 2012 9:44pm EDT SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Facebook Inc grew mobile advertising revenue several times in the third quarter, a faster-than-expected pace that helped drive shares in the world's No. 1 social network nearly 13 percent higher. Facebook sai...

By Poornima Gupta and Noel Randewich SAN JOSE | Tue Oct 23, 2012 9:01pm EDT SAN JOSE (Reuters) - Apple Inc will begin to sell an 8-inch version of the iPad on Friday to compete with Amazon.com Inc's Kindle and other smaller tablets, but it set a higher-than-expected price tag of $329 that Wall Street fears could curb demand. The 7.9 inch "iPad mi...

SAN FRANCISCO | Tue Oct 23, 2012 6:34pm EDT SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Zynga Inc on Tuesday said it is closing its offices in Boston, has cut 5 percent of its full-time work force and will "sunset" 13 older games. The company provided Reuters with a copy of a memo to employees in which it announced the news, wh...

By Alexei Oreskovic SAN FRANCISCO | Tue Oct 23, 2012 6:06pm EDT SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Facebook Inc posted a 32 percent jump in third-quarter revenue to $1.26 billion, as the company reignited advertising growth with the help of larger-than-expected gains in mobile. The company's shares leapt 9 percent to $21.22 in after-hours trading on Tuesd...

By Noel Randewich and Poornima Gupta SAN FRANCISCO | Tue Oct 23, 2012 5:34pm EDT SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Apple marketing wizard Phil Schiller defended the $329 price of the new iPad mini tablet, saying consumers will be willing to pay for quality not found in less expensive devices from rivals like Google and Amazon. With competition growing fr...

By Alistair Barr SAN FRANCISCO | Tue Oct 23, 2012 4:04pm EDT SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Amazon.com Inc is grappling with a problem that eBay Inc has struggled with for years: the proliferation of unauthorized third-party sellers that undercut the world's top consumer brands. The sellers offer online shoppers goods ranging from Guess watches to LG ...

By Ritsuko Ando HELSINKI | Tue Oct 23, 2012 1:29pm EDT HELSINKI (Reuters) - Mobile phone maker Nokia plans to raise 750 million euros ($972 million) from bonds convertible into shares, seeking a cheap way to help finance its fight to claw back market share lost to Apple and Samsung. Once the world's biggest mobile phone maker, the Finnish firm ha...

By Diane Bartz WASHINGTON | Tue Oct 23, 2012 1:28pm EDT WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, which is battling Apple Inc across the globe for dominance of the smartphone market, dealt the California company a setback by winning a preliminary invalidation of a key Apple patent, according to a court filing. The fight is related to App...

By Maria Kiselyova MOSCOW | Tue Oct 23, 2012 10:43am EDT MOSCOW (Reuters) - EBay Inc expects its Russian business to skyrocket if it can overcome logistical hurdles and is seeking a local partner to help it do so, its country head told Reuters. EBay launched a Russian-language site in 2010 and has hired former Google Inc manager Vladimir Dolgov t...

By Sarah White LONDON | Tue Oct 23, 2012 8:55am EDT LONDON (Reuters) - In the high-tech, gadget-addicted world of investment banking, layoffs are becoming more complex and brutal as firms try to stop sensitive data leaving with employees. Sackings are usually swift, with bankers escorted out, a few belongings thrown into boxes and Blackberries an...

By Junko Fujita and Tim Kelly TOKYO | Tue Oct 23, 2012 7:13am EDT TOKYO (Reuters) - Sony Corp plans to shut operations in a Tokyo office building that houses 8 percent of its Japan staff, one of the first concrete moves by the electronics and entertainment company to pave the way for 4,000 job cuts. The move, part of a still-unfolding restructuri...

By Paul Sandle LONDON | Tue Oct 23, 2012 6:28am EDT LONDON (Reuters) - British chip designer ARM beat quarterly profit forecasts on Tuesday, helped by the adoption of its most powerful processor technology in smartphones and tablet computers from the likes of Apple and Samsung. The Cambridge-based firm said on Tuesday its third-quarter pretax pro...

By Alexei Oreskovic and Gerry Shih SAN FRANCISCO | Mon Oct 22, 2012 11:07pm EDT SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Yahoo Chief Executive Marrisa Mayer promised to modernize Yahoo's websites and make them more smartphone-friendly in her debut appearance at the helm of the struggling company, faulting it for...

By Poornima Gupta SAN FRANCISCO | Mon Oct 22, 2012 10:00pm EDT SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Apple Inc is expected to make its biggest product move on Tuesday since debuting the iPad two years ago, launching a smaller, cheaper tablet into a market staked out by Amazon.com Inc and Google Inc. Apple hopes to beat back their charge onto its home turf of...

By Sinead Carew and Noel Randewich NEW YORK | Mon Oct 22, 2012 8:22pm EDT NEW YORK (Reuters) - Texas Instruments Inc's quarterly revenue fell as demand for its chips slipped on economic concerns, and the company forecast more weakness this quarter in all its customer segments. The U.S. chipmaker, which supplies companies ranging from computer mak...

LONDON | Mon Oct 22, 2012 7:03pm EDT LONDON (Reuters) - Mobile operator EE said Britain's first 4G service will cost from 36 pounds ($57.72) a month under a pricing strategy designed to lure smartphone customers to its superfast network before rivals are able to launch competing products. Chief Executive Olaf Swantee said the company's tariffs, which ran...

By Himank Sharma Mon Oct 22, 2012 6:39pm EDT (Reuters) - Western Digital Corp's first-quarter profit topped lowered Wall Street expectations but the company said slowing PC sales and falling IT spending would hurt current-quarter sales and eat into margins. The company's shares, which rose after the quarterly beat, reversed course and were trading down 5 ...

By Alistair Barr SAN FRANCISCO | Mon Oct 22, 2012 5:46pm EDT SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Amazon.com Inc said on Monday that its $199 Kindle Fire HD tablet has been the best-selling product on the company's website since the gadget went on sale more than a month ago. Amazon started selling a range of new Kindle Fires on September 6 and the company s...

By Nicola Leske Mon Oct 22, 2012 5:32pm EDT (Reuters) - The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) said it will end its contract with BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd in favor of Apple Inc's iPhone, dealing a new blow to RIM just months before it launches a vital new device. The agency said in a solicitation document posted last week...

Mon Oct 22, 2012 2:39pm EDT (Reuters) - Genealogy website operator Ancestry.com agreed to be acquired for $1.6 billion by a group led by Europe-based private equity firm Permira Advisors LLC, four months after it put itself up for sale following the cancellation of a TV show based on its research. The company, whose website...

SAN FRANCISCO | Mon Oct 22, 2012 2:30pm EDT SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Hewlett-Packard will honor an agreement to sell solid-state storage devices made by Violin Memory but has no plan to extend the deal to future products, a source familiar with the situation said on Monday. On Friday, Bloomberg reported that HP was planning to end its agreement selling ...

NEW YORK | Mon Oct 22, 2012 12:18pm EDT NEW YORK (Reuters) - Isis, a venture of three of the top U.S. mobile providers, said on Monday it has kicked off its much-delayed mobile payments service in two U.S. cities and promised that as many as 20 phone models would support the service by year end. Isis, formed by Verizon Wireless, AT&T Inc and T-Mobile...

LONDON | Mon Oct 22, 2012 6:30am EDT LONDON (Reuters) - The London Stock Exchange's technology system supplier Millennium IT said on Monday it had signed an agreement to provide the London Metal Exchange (LME) with surveillance software which will allow it to analyze trading patterns. With trading weak this year, top stock exchanges such as the LSE and N...

TAIPEI | Mon Oct 22, 2012 6:24am EDT TAIPEI (Reuters) - Taiwanese PC maker Acer Inc reported third quarter net profit of T$68 million ($2.32 million), well below estimates. A poll of 18 analysts by Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S produced a mean estimate of T$756 million profit.The company did not explain why its profit undershot expectations so dramatically, bu...

By Natasha Baker TORONTO | Mon Oct 22, 2012 5:05am EDT TORONTO (Reuters) - Text messaging is fast and efficient but a new video-sharing application aims to put users in the picture. The London-based company Six3 has launched a new video-sharing app by the same name that will enable users to send short video messages as easily as sending a text. W...

By Bill Rigby SEATTLE | Mon Oct 22, 2012 12:11am EDT SEATTLE (Reuters) - There was once a time when the launch of a new Windows operating system was a huge deal for the technology departments in many businesses. Not anymore. Microsoft Corp's release of Windows 8 on Friday is likely to be a non-event for most companies -- and some experts say many...

By Bill Rigby SEATTLE | Mon Oct 22, 2012 12:11am EDT SEATTLE (Reuters) - There was once a time when the launch of a new Windows operating system was a huge deal for the technology departments in many businesses. Not anymore. Microsoft Corp's release of Windows 8 on Friday is likely to be a non-event for most companies -- and some experts say many...

By Nadia Damouni and Alexei Oreskovic SAN FRANCISCO | Sun Oct 21, 2012 8:35am EDT SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Marissa Mayer, who earned a reputation for decisive action and intensity during her 13-year stint at Google Inc, has spent her first months as Yahoo Inc CEO quietly moving the Internet pioneer back to its roots in technology. Long torn betw...

SAN JOSE, COSTA RICA – October 19th, 2012 – Phone companies now have approval to charge for prepaid mobile phone Internet service by the amount of data consumed, instead of the current flat-fee model based on the speed of connection. Last week, the Telecommunications Superintendence Council (SUTEL) approved the new rate model. The maximum rate will be 0.0076 colons (plus sales tax) for each Kiloby...