Browsing: World

Troubled phone maker Nokia is attempting to unload its luxury mobile-phone brand, Vertu, for a reported $265 million (€200 million), the Financial Times is reporting. Nokia is being advised by Goldman Sachs on the deal and is currently in talks to sell the brand to private equity group Permira. For the baller

Can reality trump art? That was the question hovering over the launch on 24 April, at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, of a plan by a firm called Planetary Resources to mine metals from asteroids and bring them back to Earth. It sounds like the plot of a film by James Cameron — and, appropriately, Cameron is indeed one of the company’s backers. The team

There is a certain Darwinian poetry in the fact that Cable & Wireless Worldwide, a remnant of a once mighty telecommunications empire based on telegraph wires and established in the 1850s, looks set to be eaten up by Vodafone, a contemporary telecoms industry giant born only in 1985. Even as late as 1999, C&W (CWW’s predecessor

Apple announced its second quarter earnings Tuesday, turning it US$39,2bn in revenue, beating analyst estimates of $36,8bn. The company raked in $11,6bn in net income. Year over year, Apple’s net profit increased by 94%. Last quarter, Apple announced $13,1bn in net profit, blowing Wall Street estimates out of the water

Apple announced it has sold 11,8m iPads since the company debuted the tablet in early March. The number reflects a 151% increase over iPad sales during the same quarter a year ago. The company released its third version of the iPad this quarter, starring the new “Retina” display (2048-by-1536 resolution), which quadruples the amount of pixels packed

Facebook’s amended US Securities & Exchange Commission documents filed on Monday revealed the social network is bigger than ever — 901m monthly active users, to be exact. At this rate of acceleration (there were 845m active users just a couple weeks ago), Facebook will have 1bn monthly active users strong before you know it

Intel’s just-unveiled Ivy Bridge processor family promises faster processing power and better graphics, thanks to a massively-enhanced integrated graphics system. The news has prompted some analysts to say that Ivy Bridge could mean doom for manufacturers of dedicated graphics cards, such as Nvidia and AMD, because Ivy Bridge is just that

Research in Motion (RIM), the company behind the ailing BlackBerry platform, has hired a law firm to help it with a company-wide restructuring plan aimed at making the company profitable again. The plan could include selling off resources, seeking joint ventures, or licensing its patents. After losing a significant portion of

Outside the sprawling Frankfurt Messe, home of innumerable German trade fairs, stands the “Hammering Man”, a 21-metre kinetic statue that steadily raises and lowers its arm to bash a piece of metal with a hammer. Jonathan Borofsky, the artist who built it, says it is a celebration of the worker using his mind and hands to create the

Larry Ellison and Larry Page, the bosses of Oracle and Google, share a name. But they clearly do not share the same view of a particular intellectual property (IP) matter. On 16 April, a jury began hearing arguments in a trial to determine whether Google’s Android operating system infringes copyrights and patents owned by Oracle. The