San Francisco,California,United States

Hitachi Displays Ltd. has agreed to plead guilty to conspiring to fix prices on the sale of LCD panels.

The Japan-based electronics firm agreed to pay a $31 million fine as part of its deal with the U.S. Justice Department.

Three other major producers of liquid crystal display panels have already admitted their involvement in price-fixing.

Hitachi admitted to fixing prices of the screens sold to Dell, Inc. for use in desktop monitors and notebook computers from 2001 to 2004.

Estate planning took on a new meaning Tuesday as a San Francisco-based startup announced plans to offer an online will of sorts. Legacy Locker is tapping into a new segment of estate planning by offering to manage a person's digital assets once they die.

Similar to the way a written will designates what happens to a physical estate and assets, Legacy Locker's service will take care of digital assets, including e-mail, digital photos, and online accounts.

For users of computers and mobile phones in big U.S. cities, Yelp has become a popular Web site for ranting, raving or just reading about local businesses, from the auto mechanic to the neighborhood bar.

Built almost entirely on five million reviews by zealous volunteers, the five-year-old San Francisco company shows how the Internet can amplify the voices of individuals to provide useful information to the community.

by Colin Marshall

By Gerald Dworkin
 
It is improbable that more nonsense has been written about aesthetics than anything else: the literature of the subject is not large enough for that.

Being a newbie to the sphere of employee communications, I knew I was in good company at a session OPR hosted last night about the importance of clear messaging within organizations when I saw the following note on each table: “Employees are on the front line of brand and reputation creation. What they tell their friends and families and post on YouTube and Facebook can define a company more quickly and more surely than anything the CEO tells The Wall Street Journal.”

The auditions are over. The first YouTube Symphony Orchestra -- selected by viewers of the Web site -- will consist of more than 90 musicians from some 30 countries.

More than 3,000 videos were submitted by amateur and professional musicians from 70-plus countries. Musicians from professional orchestras including the London and San Francisco symphonies and the Berlin, Hong Kong and New York philharmonic orchestras picked 200 finalists. The winners were then selected by voters on YouTube.

It is not exactly an economic climate conducive to rolling out new, and often costly, technology. Or is it?

In fact, the crisis might be just the impetus companies need to help clean up the environment. Faced with the need to cut costs, some companies are turning to ecologically friendly technologies that could streamline production and save money in the long run, industry insiders and environmental activists said.

New technology at the nation's busiest border crossing can read chip-enabled travel documents up to 30 feet from an inspection booth, promising shorter waits but raising concerns about targeting by computer hackers.

San Diego's San Ysidro border crossing is a key test for the devices, known as radio frequency identification readers, because the facility is used by about 150,000 people daily.

It's the 13th land crossing to get the technology in recent months, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection plans to have it in place by June at the 39 busiest crossings with Mexico and Canada.

The Microsoft-Yahoo drama isn't over yet. There's a possible deal to be done in the form of Yahoo outsourcing or selling its search business to Microsoft.

At the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, Yahoo CFO Blake Jorgensen gave the audience reason to believe the search company is still open to negotiation.

"Key to any deal we might do would be full access to the data for intent," Jorgensen said. "We're not opposed to doing a deal that would maximize the business one way or the other, be it a partnership or a sale."