This week tech firms ponied up for more M&A, as Intel and AMD settled their differences.
HP bought 3Com for $2.7 billion, aiming to take the networking battle to Cisco at the high end.
Peripherals firm Logitech will take on Cisco in videoconferencing after snapping up LifeSize.
Motorola sought a buyer for its wireless networking and set-top box division, which it values at $4.5 billion. Vendors or private equity firms are the most likely new owners.
Electronic Arts bought social gaming firm Playfish for $274 million.
Clearwire’s owners said they would tip another $1.5 billion into the loss-making Wimax operator.
Intel paid $1.25 billion to bitter rival AMD to settle all their outstanding disputes.
AAG, a 2Tbps trans-Pacific club cable, opened for service one year behind schedule.
Samsung’s bada became the latest mobile handset platform.
Huawei and ZTE were the only vendors to boost sales of optical gear in Q3.
A Philippines senate committee called for criminal charges to be laid over the awarding of a $329 million next-gen broadband contract to ZTE. The contract was subsequently canceled.
Rupert Murdoch threatened to remove News Corp content from Google search. Microsoft added Wolfram Alpha to Bing’s search results.
Facing limited growth, Vodafone said it would strip another £1 billion ($1.7b) in costs out of operations over the next three years.
Bharti Airtel chief Manoj Kohli warned that low prices could drive players some out of the Indian market. SingTel boosted net earnings by 19%.
Apple overtook Nokia to become the world’s most profitable handset vendor. Nokia put its faith in the Maemo-powered N900, which shipped this week.
Analysts said early Droid sales appeared strong, while sales of the Palm Pre have fallen sharply.
Orange UK claimed a national record after selling 30,000 iPhones on its first day.
3 UK said it would begin throttling mobile bandwidth in congested cells.
Just five months after opening, Ericsson’s new UK R&D center closed down, with 700 staff losing their jobs. Adobe let go of 9% of its workforce.
And Microsoft cut off as many as a million Xbox gamers from Xbox Live because of copyright violations.