Korea

By Namit Arora

Samsung Electronics Co., the largest maker of cell phones for the U.S. market, on Sunday revealed the first phone running Samsung's own "smart" software system, bada.

With bada, Korea-based Samsung is taking the TouchWiz system used on its touch-screen non-smart phones and making it the basis of a smart phone platform to take on Apple Inc.'s iPhone and Research In Motion Ltd.'s BlackBerry. Samsung also makes phones based on other competing smart phone systems: Android, created by Google Inc., and Symbian, of which Nokia Corp. is a major backer.

While the technology world continues to focus on Apple's yet-to-be-launched iPad, it seems iPhone sales may be slowing. Apple lost market share in the global smartphone market in the fourth quarter, ABI Research reports.

Apple's share fell from 18.1 percent in the third quarter to 16.6 percent in the fourth quarter, according to ABI's data. This comes despite the fact that Apple posted record iPhone sales for the quarter of 8.7 million units, up 100 percent from the year-ago quarter and up 18 percent from the third quarter.

By Usha Alexander

Sony has had a rough time in recent years, with the global recession especially acute in Japan and currency issues making it difficult to match competitors in other Asian countries. But Sony CEO Howard Stringer, speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show, said things are looking up as the company delivers innovation while cutting costs.

"We are handicapped because of the recession in Japan, and we are handicapped -- as are all of Japanese CE (consumer electronics makers) -- by the high yen, which give us a disadvantage against China and Korea," Stringer said at a press conference.

Tomorrow morning, General Motors will take a significant step in furthering the country's EV industry.  It will start operations at the nation's first battery pack plant run by a U.S. automaker.  The plant in Brownstown Township, MI will assemble the battery packs for the Chevy Volt.

By Evert Cilliers

Not only is the Internet just turning 40 years old, it's truly going global with new extensions that will someday make it possible for entire web-site addresses to be written in every language in the world. On Friday, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers agreed to introduce a number of internationalized domain names. IDNs allow scripts such as Chinese, Korean or Arabic to be used in the last portion of an address name -- the part after the dot, such as dot-com and dot-org.

The 10-year search-engine deal between Microsoft and Yahoo is under scrutiny. The July 29 deal between the two behemoths is being closely monitored by U.S. antitrust regulators, and both companies are in talks with officials in the European Union.