Facebook denied a story published this weekend that says the company is "building a mobile phone," but CNET has confirmed that the social-networking giant has reached out to hardware manufacturers and carriers seeking input on a potential Facebook-branded phone.

Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Kun-hee has signaled that the company's component businesses have reached a peak, suggesting that profit may fall in 2011 from this year's record level.

"Memory fundamentals have slipped more rapidly than we had anticipated due to weak PC and consumer electronics demand," Auriga USA told clients, adding later: "It now seems highly likely that MU's gross margin will dip over the next several quarters as DRAM and NAND pricing continues to weaken."

The world's major industrial economies can't all export their way to prosperity.

LG Group said on September 17 it will not buy Hynix Semiconductor, dismissing market speculation that the group will join a bidding race for the purchase of a major stake in the memory chipmaker.

Nokia executives says "Nokia is back!". Everyone else "Sure?"

Koo Bon-joon, the head of trading firm LG International, will take over from Nam Yong, who resigned from the top job to take responsibility for poor management, LG said on Friday.

"The SiT8503 leverages its silicon MEMS technology and programmable architecture to offer many unique features that are not available from quartz, such as frequency and voltage configurability, small size, low power and extreme ruggedness," said Piyush Sevalia, VP of marketing at SiTime.

Peter Lehner, a blogger for Natural Resource Defense Council, recently visited China and Trina Solar. An interesting article on his visit.

The executive also said the outlook for chip demand remains solid for the remainder of this year, but cautioned another cyclical downturn could be in store next year as industry capacity continues to increase.

Apple has quietly announced that it would stop offering free cases to all iPhone 4 buyers at the end of September, which Consumer Reports said it "unacceptable".

Motorola chief has been counting on smartphones running Android to help turn around the Illinois-based company's flagging fortunes but didn't consider the latest generation of the mobile software ready for use in tablets.

Research firm ComScore reported that of top 5 platforms, only Google Android grew in market share, from 12% to 17% of the US smartphone market in May to July. Microsoft, RIM, and Apple all lost shares, while Palm hovered at 4.9 percent.

"China took the very important step in June of signaling that they're going to let the exchange rate start to reflect market forces. But they've done very, very little, they've let it move very, very little in the interim," said US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

"We have put on hold the purchase of copper wire bonders," said Byron Chiang, spokesperson for Siliconware Precision Industries (SPIL), on the phone. "Orders are not coming along as strong as we originally thought."