Sunnyvale

A former Intel Corp. engineer has been charged with stealing trade secrets worth $1 billion from the chip maker while he worked for its main rival, Advanced Micro Devices Inc.

Advanced Micro Devices, which has been struggling to regain its footing in competition with rival Intel, announced Tuesday that it will split into two companies. One of the companies will be a global enterprise focused on semiconductor manufacturing, temporarily called The Foundry Company. AMD itself will focus on designing microprocessors.

Abu Dhabi Investment

With Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s cash reserves dwindling and the chip maker's overall financial health deteriorating to dangerous levels last year, the company was thrown a lifeline by Lehman Brothers, the investment bank now in bankruptcy.

The $1.5 billion in AMD debt that Lehman scooped up in August 2007 demonstrates the important role that banks like Lehman and other investment firms play in helping prop up wobbly companies by pouring money into them when they're down.

Mobile Web traffic is where it's at, according to Yahoo. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Internet company announced this week significant enhancements to its mobile-development platform, Blueprint, along with a new iPhone app.

Partnering with several wireless-application developers, Yahoo is promoting easy mobile-optimized Web site development and debuted its oneConnect social-networking software application for the iPhone at the CTIA trade show.

iPhone oneConnect Social-Networking App

Some big names have been sniffing around at Aliso Viejo's SiliconSystems Inc., a privately held maker of flash memory drives for industrial uses. Disk drive makers Scotts Valley-based Seagate Technology LLC and Lake Forest's Western Digital Corp. have been arranging chats with Chief Executive Michael Hajeck for some time now.

Routers, switches, servers ... the nuts and bolts of every data center -- regardless of architecture complexity -- it all begins here. [Here are some] infrastructure solutions from several of the key players.

High-Availability Server

The Fujitsu PRIMEQUEST 580 server offers mission-critical capability for hosting Microsoft Windows Server (Enterprise Edition and Data Center Edition), Red Hat Advanced Server or Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux 64-bit operations, and incorporates numerous redundant and hot-plug components for system availability.

Struggling device-maker Palm Inc. introduced its new Windows Mobile-based, touch-screen Treo Pro Wednesday. The business-targeted smartphone will be released in Europe and Australia, although an unlocked version will be available directly from Palm in the United States and Asia Pacific, as well as in some parts of Europe.

The Sunnyvale, California-based company called the sleek new device an "effortlessly usable smartphone for businesses that want to simplify their IT infrastructures and lower costs," as well as for users looking for a way to manage their professional and personal lives.

Picture whipping out your cell phone and catching up with "Lost" or "Jeopardy," or watching the local 11 o'clock news, all for free. You can do this with an imported Chinese phone, but you can't with any phone sold in the U.S. -- at least not without monthly charges.

This is one of the reasons the United States is behind several other countries when it comes to making television an attractive option for cell phones. Carrier business models are partly at fault, but choices about TV technology made long ago are largely to blame.

Yahoo Inc. said Thursday it will add the former chief executives of Viacom and Nextel Partners to its board of directors as part of the company's deal to ward off a proxy fight with billionaire investor Carl Icahn.

The company, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., selected Frank Biondi Jr. and John Chapple, former chief executives of Viacom Inc. and Nextel Partners, respectively, from a list of nine recommendations from Icahn.

Yahoo Inc. shelled out $36 million in the first half of 2008 to the outside advisers that helped the company navigate stormy buyout talks with Microsoft Corp. and the ensuing proxy threat from activist investor Carl Icahn.

Yahoo leaned on investment banks Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and Moelis & Co., and the law firm Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom, after Microsoft made its initial $44.6 billion offer, which was made public in February.