■TECHNOLOGY
Elan complaint probed
Elan Microelectronics Corp’s (義隆電子) patent-infringement claims against Apple Inc over touch-screen devices including the iPad and iPhone will be reviewed by a US trade agency that could order imports halted. The US International Trade Commission in Washington on Friday said it would investigate the complaint filed last month against Apple. Notice of the commission’s decision was posted on the agency’s Web site. Elan, a Taiwanese designer of integrated circuits, claims Apple’s iPhone 3G and 3Gs, iPod touch, iPad players, Mac computers and Magic Mouse wireless mouse violate a US patent.
■TECHNOLOGY
HTC ‘drops’ Palm bid
HTC Corp (宏達電) and Lenovo Group Ltd (聯想) declined to comment on a report that HTC pulled out of talks to acquire Palm Inc, leaving Lenovo as the main bidder from Asia. HTC declined to make a bid for Palm, the Sunnyvale, California-based maker of the Pre handset and WebOS platform, because the deal lacked synergies, Reuters reported on Friday, citing a person familiar with the matter it didn’t identify. Lenovo remains as the only major Asian bidder because talks with Huawei Technologies Co (華為) stalled, it said.
■TECHNOLOGY
Bookseller adds features
US bookstore giant Barnes & Noble added Web surfing and games to its electronic reader on Friday as rivals move to break the momentum of Apple’s freshly launched iPad tablet computer. Barnes & Noble updated its Nook devices with features that included letting users browse complete works instead of just getting summaries of the content of digital books they are considering buying. Amazon, meanwhile, will make its Kindle electronic book reader available at US retail giant Target later this year in a deal that marks the first time the device will be available anywhere other than the Amazon.com Web site.
■INTERNET
Twitter buys Cloudhopper
Twitter announced on Friday that it had bought Cloudhopper, a small SMS technology company, in the second acquisition by the popular micro-blogging service this month. The Seattle-based Cloudhopper is a messaging infrastructure firm that helps Twitter connect directly to mobile carrier networks around the world, Twitter said in a blog post. Financial terms of the purchase were not disclosed.
■ENERGY
Reliance profit up 30%
India’s largest private sector firm, Reliance Industries, said on Friday its sales more than doubled but net profit rose only 30 percent in the quarter to March due to pressure on its refining margins. The oil and gas giant said net profit was 47.10 billion rupees (US$1.02 billion) for the three months ended March, from Rs36.2 billion a year ago, while turnover jumped 125 percent to Rs602 billion.
■PRINTERS
Xerox forecasts profit
Xerox Corp, the largest maker of high-speed color printers, forecast second-quarter profit that beat analysts’ estimates as customers renew spending on printing and office services. Per-share profit this quarter, excluding some costs, will be at least US$0.20, Xerox said in a statement on Friday. That compares with the average analyst estimate of US$0.18 in a Bloomberg survey. First-quarter profit and sales also exceeded analysts’ projections. Xerox said that full-year profit would be at the high end of its forecast.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts