NEC is considering raising funds to strengthen its capital base, which has suffered during the economic downturn, according to sources familiar with matter.

Chip equipment maker ASM International (ASMI) has announced that it is accelerating its cost reduction and restructuring of worldwide front-end operations.

Barnes & Noble, the largest bookstore chain by revenue, just became the latest company to launch its own eBook store to compete with Amazon and its increasingly popular Kindle family of electronic readers. It joins Sony and other companies that aim to capture a piece of this young, but fast-growing market.

In George Orwell's "1984," government censors erase all traces of news articles embarrassing to Big Brother by sending them down an incineration chute called the "memory hole." On Friday, it was "1984”and another Orwell book, "Animal Farm," that were dropped down the memory hole — by Amazon.com.

Bargaining is much more than a team sport in China -- it's also a way of life that has been ingrained in the psyche of Chinese society for centuries.

The giant South Korean company Samsung Electronics has said it will invest more than US$4 billion to cut emissions from its plants.

The Economist Intelligence Unit forecasts that Taiwan's real GDP will contract by 6.5% in 2009. The poor economic and financial environment abroad will continue to undermine Taiwan's growth prospects in 2010, when the economy is forecast to expand by just 0.6%.

Lazard Capital Markets analyst Daniel Amir said he believes SanDisk gained market share of about 3% at the expense of rivals in the MicroSD memory card market during the second quarter.

Converge also reports that demand for DDR3 modules remains strong, with supplies limited, and that Xeons and AMD Opterons are the drivers for cost savings in the CPU space.

Exactly a year and five months after Toshiba brought an end to the high-definition disc format war, the Japanese consumer electronics company confirmed its plans to produce its own Blu-ray Disc player.

Beijing now expects China to achieve 8% growth for 2009 as a whole, which compares with a predicted contraction of between 1% and 1.5% in the US. However, the Chinese government warned that some economic challenges remain.

German computer chipmaker Infineon Technologies AG said Thursday that its revenue for the most recent quarter fell 18 percent as customers placed fewer orders.