San Jose

With video and other rich media growing by leaps and bounds on the Internet and in corporate networks, Cisco has decided it's time to optimize. On Monday, the San Jose, Calif.-based company introduced new technologies and solutions it said will better enable "medianets" in home networks, businesses and through Internet service providers.

The company said "data-based communications are being replaced by video and rich media," and this is straining networks originally designed primarily for data.

'Immersive New Experiences'

Facebook's leaders are smiling as the company announced an antispam victory. The popular social-networking Web site was awarded more than $873 million in damages Friday against a Canadian spammer who was sending sexually explicit images to Facebook users.

Adam Guerbuez and Atlantis Blue Capital were ordered to pay Facebook the damages by U.S. District Court Judge Jeremey Fogel in San Jose, Calif. And Guerbuez can no longer access Facebook. The ruling came after four months of court arguments.

The mayors of San Jose, San Francisco, and Oakland, Calif., have joined with the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, the Bay Area Council, and mobile network-technology provider Better Place to foster the development of plug-in electric vehicles and other elements of green infrastructure.

IBM, in collaboration with five universities, announced plans Thursday to create computing systems that simulate and emulate the brain's abilities for sensation, perception, action, interaction and cognition while rivaling its low power consumption and compact size. The goal is to solve the problem of information management.

The Internet is a little less jammed with spam after a cybercrime group blew the whistle on one of the biggest offenders. HostExploit, an alliance of volunteers who work at Google, McAfee and Arbor Networks, has been tracking and documenting cybercrime activity and its latest effort slashed worldwide spam by 50 percent and junk e-mail by 75 percent.

Cisco Systems warned that a sharp drop in sales could push quarterly revenue down by as much as 10 percent.

The computer networking giant, the first major technology company to report earnings that include October, when the credit crisis spread beyond financial companies, said Wednesday that its sales had fallen 9 percent from the same month a year earlier.

Cisco expects sales for its current quarter to drop 5 percent to 10 percent from the $9.8 billion reported in the same period a year ago.

If the past week is any indication, Americans may soon enter the era of always-on, always-available Internet. While the full rollout of new broadband technologies may be two or three years away, the nation is closer to catching up with its access-rich Asian counterparts than ever before.

Ever since the credit crunch first gripped the financial world, Silicon Valley has watched from the sidelines, secure in the faith that it was insulated from the coming storm.

With the stock market in turmoil, a U.S. bailout up in the air and recession seemingly inevitable, that faith is now being seriously undermined. High-tech entrepreneurs, investors and executives now believe the question is when, not if, the financial chaos will have an impact on the cradle of innovation in the United States.

Forget the switches and routers that built Cisco Systems into a giant, albeit somewhat boring, company at the core of the Internet.

These days, the company is peddling e-mail software, video conferencing systems, cable TV boxes -- even furniture -- as it tries to break out of the data center and get its products in front of ordinary office workers.

"Cisco is kind of like the Madonna of networking," said Mark Sue, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets. "It is continuously trying to reinvent itself."