South Korea

Samsung Electronics Co. said Wednesday it has withdrawn a $26 a share bid to acquire SanDisk Corp., but suggested it was still interested in buying the U.S. flash memory card maker at a lower price.

In a letter dated and released Wednesday, Samsung Vice Chairman and CEO Lee Yoon-woo informed SanDisk's board that "we are no longer interested in acquiring SanDisk at $26 a share."

The letter said the offer was being withdrawn "after nearly six months of efforts to pursue a transaction with no meaningful progress."

SanDisk could be worth $34 to $36 a share if Samsung Electronics were to sweeten its offer to reflect the value of royalties it pays to the U.S. flash memory maker, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter.

South Korea-based Samsung, the world's top maker of memory chips, made public an offer to buy SanDisk for $5.85 billion, or $26 a share, on Sept. 16, after SanDisk rebuffed the offer in private.

Last spring, the International Organization for Standardization voted to certify Microsoft's Office Open XML format as an international standard. The decision came at the end of a long and contentious worldwide vote, a process that featured complicated rules, confusing proposals, and last-minute vote switches by delegations from Denmark, Britain and South Korea.

A $5.85 billion bid by Samsung Electronics Co. to take over SanDisk Corp., a wounded competitor that also serves as a partner, reflects the turbulence in the market for flash memory, a key ingredient in digital cameras, music players and other devices.

TNC, a Korea-based software company also known as Tatter and Company, has been Googled, according to Chang Won-Kim, TNC's cochief executive.

Chang announced Google's acquisition of TNC, which occurred Friday, in his personal blog.

Chang, who shares the CEO title with TNC's founder, Chester Roh, said he believes the reason for the acquisition is because Google has very little market presence in Korea and Asia.

"We will commit ourselves to increasing Google's market share in Korea," Chang wrote.

Perhaps it was the resounding howls of pain from AT&T international business travelers when they opened their monthly 3G phone bills, or a fit of corporate generosity, but AT&T unveiled new international roaming data plans on Tuesday. While still pricey, they cut the cost of iPhone Web surfing overseas a great deal over previous rates. The new rates to into effect as of Wednesday, for the asking.

Package Cuts Rates Significantly

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.

The U.S. may be winning world speed records in swimming at the Olympics, but not in average Internet speeds. According to a new report, the country that invented the Internet has now sunk to 15th worldwide in the percentage of the population subscribing to broadband.

According to the recently released Second Annual Speed Matters report from the Communications Workers of America (CWA), the U.S. has "not made significant improvements in the speeds at which residents connect to the Internet" over the past year, and continues to fall behind other countries.

A Sample of 230,000

In a sign that it may be finally turning its fortunes around, Motorola Inc. posted a small surprise profit for its second quarter and shipped more cell phones than in the first quarter.

The Schaumburg, Illinois-based cell phone company said Thursday that it earned $4 million, or less than 1 cent per share, in the three months ended June 30. That includes charges of 2 cents per share.

Analysts polled by Thomson Financial had been expecting a loss of 3 cents per share.

In the same quarter a year ago, Motorola lost $28 million, or 2 cents per share.