A post on the Website of employee group Alliance for IBM said the company may cut 16,000 jobs, which would top the 15,600 eliminated by CEO Sam Palmisano in 2002. The worldwide slump has tightened companies' technology budgets and IBM may report a 1.6% drop in sales last quarter to US$28.4 billion, based on the average analyst estimate.

Apple has agreed to start selling digital songs from its iTunes store without copy protection software.

Hynix Semiconductor, the world's No. 2 maker of computer memory chips, is set to raise $249 million in a new share issue this month under a shareholder-led support package, an executive said on Tuesday.

Texas-based Freescale Semiconductor has a prototype low-cost notebook using ARM-designed chips is the latest evidence that the UK company could play a major part in the next wave of computing.

The palm-sized device in a larger 500GB capacity is on sale from various online retailers now for around £120.

China faces surging protests and riots in 2009 as rising unemployment stokes discontent, a state-run magazine said in a blunt warning of the hazards to Communist Party control from a sharp economic downturn.

Toshiba, a company best known for making laptops and consumer electronics, on Monday said that it will enter the solar-photovoltaics business. Toshiba's photovoltaics business will be part of the conglomerate's Transmission Distribution & Industrial Systems business, which makes equipment for natural-gas power plants.

A slowdown in technology node migrations at the major DRAM producers is adding to the expected capital expenditure cuts manufacturing as companies struggle to combat increasing losses and preserve cash, according to the latest report from DRAMeXchange. The spending cuts are a direct result of the combined DRAM industry losing approximately US$8 billion in 2008.

Spansion, the Sunnyvale flash-memory maker, chose to borrow US$74.8 million of the US$85 million available to it under an agreement with UBS, the Swiss investment banker that holds auction-rate securities that were worth US$121.9 million when Spansion first bought them. The investment has a current estimated market value of US$107.4 million, according to a filing Spansion made Monday.

Samsung Electronics denied a report saying it may cut its 2009 investment in semiconductors by more than half from last year amid a lingering downturn. "At this point, we have not made any decisions on our investment plan, and even if we had a plan it would be contingent on different economic scenarios that will be possible during this year," Chu-Woo-sik, Samsung's executive vice president of investor relations, told Reuters.

Across the whole holiday season 3.7 million Blu-ray units were sold in Britain, and that doesn't include sales of Sony's Playstation 3 console, which also plays Blu-ray movies.

Sony is likely to announce closures of Japanese factories and major divisions early next month, the Times of London said on Monday, but the company denied any such plan existed. The maker of Bravia flat TVs and PlayStation video game consoles faces halting sales and mounting piles of inventory in the wake of the financial crisis, even as a stronger yen bites into earnings.

Freescale on Monday is expected to announce a new processor for netbooks that may challenge chip maker Intel on price in the low-cost computing space. The company's i.MX515 processor will run on netbooks, low-cost laptops that are designed to perform basic computing functions like accessing the Internet and running productivity applications.