Articles by Keith Regan

Taking aim at one of the strong suits of rival Intel, AMD today released two new mobile processors, one meant to appeal to performance-hungry laptop users and one to target the tablet PC niche. AMD said new mobile computers sporting its Athlon 64 3400+ model chips will be available for the back-to-school computer shopping season from Epson Direct....

IBM today said net income rose nearly 17 percent in the second quarter as server sales boosted both its bottom line and its profits. The tech giant also reassured nervous investors by affirming its outlook for the rest of the year and by saying that business conditions continue to improve.

Intel posted healthy second-quarter profits on Tuesday, but concerns about the company's revenue growth, growing and shrinking profit margins quickly overshadowed the strong performance Intel said profit nearly doubled in the quarter that ended in June, rising 96 percent to US$1.76 billion compared to $896 million a year ago. Sales for the quarter ...

Google's choice to take a spot alongside other tech heavyweights by staging its hotly anticipated initial public offering on the Nasdaq market has left analysts speculating about the thinking behind the decision. Being listed on the Nasdaq will put Google in the company of rivals such as Yahoo and Microsoft and a host of other Internet companies a...

Microsoft said it will release a long-awaited service pack containing a host of security upgrades for its Windows XP operating system next month At its annual partner conference in Toronto, Microsoft announced that engineering work is wrapping up and that XP Service Pack 2, which has been in beta testing since late last year, will be released to ma...

China has agreed to phase out a tax that drove up the prices of U.S.-made semiconductors sold in that fast-growing country, settling a complaint from the World Trade Organization (WTO) and handing U.S. chip makers a key victory The WTO filed a complaint against China on March 18th after the United States and others had complained about a value-adde...

The United Nations has launched a push to curtail the vast majority of spam e-mail within two years. The push by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the telecom arm of the UN, began this week with a meeting of scores of regulatory agencies from around the world in Geneva, Switzerland....

Hoping to stay competitive and avoid more drastic measures in the future, Microsoft plans to reduce costs by US$1 billion this fiscal year by trimming employee benefits and cutting other expenses The savings will come from a more coordinated marketing effort among the company's various divisions and other measures, but will not require any salary c...

Veritas Software lowered its second-quarter revenue and profit guidance, becoming the latest tech company to say the quarter did not measure up to expectations. Saying enterprise sales were down, particularly in the U.S., the storage software maker lowered its revenue targets to US$475 million to $485 million and per-share earnings to 18 cents to ...

Employers added 112,000 workers to their payrolls in the U.S. during the month of June, a figure that fell far short of expectations and left the national unemployment rate unchanged as more people joined the ranks of those actively seeking work. In its monthly report released early Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) said the unemploymen...

Microsoft's long-rumored push deeper into the search-engine business officially kicked off Thursday when the company unveiled an upgraded search "portal" it says will return better results. The company also did away with paid inclusion and suggested that sweeping technology improvements to the overall search experience were coming soon The upgrade ...

Hoping a narrow focus on product development and customer service will help it turn itself around, Nortel sold most of its major manufacturing plants to Flextronics, which will make Nortel's hardware on an outsourcing basis. Nortel said the sale, which involves plants in Canada and Brazil, will net the struggling company as much as US$725 million ...

All economy watchers have turned their gaze to the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee today and tomorrow as the central bank weighs how much to boost interest rates in an effort to stem inflation without squelching the economic recovery Most economists expect the Fed to hike the overnight lending rate by a quarter point when it issues its decisi...

An unusual Web virus that was spread to user computers through infected Web site servers might be a Trojan capable of sending financial information back to the attacker. Microsoft said it helped law enforcement agencies identify and shut down the Russia-based site where the attacking code -- known as "Scob," "Download.Ject" or "Toofer" -- was emerging...

Salesforce.com soared on its first day of public trading Wednesday as the second-most hotly anticipated technology IPO of the year -- behind only Google's still-to-come initial public offering -- gained 56 percent and valued the company at US$1.7 billion. Salesforce.com's strong first-day gains came despite two last-minute increases in the offerin...

MasterCard International said it would launch an aggressive campaign against identity theft schemes that use phony Web sites to collect personal information from Internet users. The credit card company said it tapped NameProtect, a digital fraud-detection company, to scour the Web for so-called "phishing" schemes that attempt to dupe consumers into revealing personal information, such as credit card data, to sites that appear to be legitimate...

In its fourth quarter and as a result of higher demand for its handhelds and smartphones, PalmOne posted its first profit in its short history as a standalone company PalmOne, created last year when Palm separated its hardware and software units, said it brought in US$267.3 million in the quarter ending in May, up 23 percent from a year ago and up ...

IBM computers and Intel processors run the bulk of the world's 500 most powerful supercomputers, according to an annual ranking, which also found the performance of the top machines increasing quickly. IBM extended its lead in the latest top-500 list and can now claim ties to 44.8 percent of the systems and just over half of the total computing po...

The deficit in the broadest measure of overseas trade tracked by the U.S. government grew to record levels in the first quarter as increased demand for foreign goods by American consumers far outstripped an increase in goods being exported The deficit on goods and services increased to an all-time high of US$144.9 billion in the first quarter from ...

U.S. lawmakers considering a bill that would let Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) communication services expand with minimal government regulation were told the technology could become an underground network for terrorists and other criminals to communicate without detection In a hearing on a bill filed by Sen. John Sununu (R-New Hampshire), mem...