AT&TEd Whitacre announced that he will retire as CEO and chairman of the board at AT&T Inc. effective June 3. The 65-year-old executive is the longest-serving CEO in the telecommunications industry, having served as chairman and CEO of Southwestern Bell since 1990. When...
Nursing home, lobster films drawtop honors at CellFlix Film FestivalFollowing a blind judging process masking school affiliation and biographical information, professional filmmakers and editors have selected the winners of the second annual CellFlix Film Festival at Ithaca College that challenges aspiring filmmakers to create...
Motorola Inc. said it hired a platform technology guru for its mobile devices business, a pragmatic move that reflects the ailing handset giant's efforts to revive its fortunes-albeit one that will take precious time to be felt in the market.Whether that news actually reaches...
Texas Instruments Inc. reported revenue of $3.2 billion and net profit of $516 million, down 4 percent and nearly 12 percent, respectively, over the year-ago quarter. The chip vendor said that revenue was impacted by an inventory correction in the market. "We believe the...
As the April 9 deadline draws near for renewing an existing cross-licensing agreement between Nokia Corp. and Qualcomm Inc., the Finnish handset maker has filed complaints in two European courts asking that the courts find certain Qualcomm patents "exhausted." Such a finding would free...
Hello! And welcome to our Thursday column, Worst of the Week. There's a lot of nutty stuff that goes on in this industry, so this column is a chance for us at RCR Wireless News to rant and rave about whatever rubs us the...
Nokia Corp. is asking European courts to declare Qualcomm Inc.'s patents in Europe "exhausted," freeing the Finnish mobile phone maker to sell handsets in Europe containing chips by Texas Instruments Inc. on which Nokia otherwise would owe royalties to Qualcomm.Nokia cited a patent portfolio...
Qualcomm Inc.'s prospects for quarterly revenue and earnings due in April have brightened, while Texas Instruments Inc.'s forecast lacked luster. Although both companies' forecasts pertain to the current quarter only, analysts said the outlook for the rest of the year may look somewhat similar...
CDMA pioneer Qualcomm Inc. sat atop a busy week-with many more likely to come-as the company made moves in its legal battle with Broadcom Corp., stirred up the dust in a separate matter with Nokia Corp., and negotiated a new cross-licensing deal with Nortel...
In a routine update of its business outlook for the first quarter, Texas Instruments Inc. narrowed its expected revenue and earnings per share ranges. Investors may have expected a more bullish forecast due to improved outlooks by TI's competitors, however; TI's stock fell 49...
Sorry, wrong numberA Kentucky middle school teacher was arrested after trying to arrange to buy drugs via text message. The woman mistakenly sent text messages about the buy to a police officer rather than a drug dealer. The officer, who began receiving messages on...
Private-equity buyout companies are the darlings of Wall Street, snapping up companies left and right and flush with the cash to do so. According to Thomson Financial, buyouts by private-equity companies accounted for more than 25 percent of the total merger-and-acquisition activity in the...
The next couple of quarters will be rocky, Motorola Inc.'s CFO told investors and analysts at last week's Bank of America's 2007 Technology Conference in New York. David Devonshire, Motorola's CFO, used the term three times until an unidentified analyst asked him to clarify...
Want to invest like Verizon? Like any smart investor, Verizon Communications Inc. has its pension fund invested in a diverse array of stocks, from the Cheesecake Factory to Northrop Grumman Corp. The company's $40-plus billion pension portfolio includes hundreds of companies. The Verizon Investment...
The next few quarters will be "rocky," Motorola Inc.'s chief financial officer told investors and analysts at Bank of America's 2007 Technology Conference-a term the executive used three times until an analyst asked him to clarify it. Did "rocky" mean no margins or negative...
BARCELONA, Spain-While Cingular Wireless L.L.C.'s announcement last week that it planned to use Qualcomm Inc.'s MediaFLO network to launch a mobile television service later this year cemented the technology as the de facto leader of streaming TV in the States, the company likely will...
At the 3GSM World Congress, as at other major industry confabs, there are gadgets galore. And then there are the market-based strategies and financial plans behind them. Attempting to translate one into the other-reading the gadgets' features for clues to a vendor's strategies or...
Texas Instruments Inc., established in 1930 to develop oil exploration technology, has grown into a predominantly wireless-based powerhouse with $14.3 billion in annual revenue last year. Its main customer for its digital signal processors is Nokia Corp., the world's largest cellphone vendor. By revenue,...
Carriers looking to cash in on mobile TV services should pony up and build their own dedicated multimedia network, according to a new report from a consortium of industry players. Then they should somehow convince subscribers to pay $20 a month for the stuff.The...
After declaring a strategy of diversity in semiconductor suppliers and signing deals with Texas Instruments Inc. and Qualcomm Inc. for W-CDMA and other chips, Motorola Inc. declared yesterday that it still cherishes its relationship with its spinoff, Freescale Semiconductor.If in fact the two companies,...
German chip maker Infineon Technologies AG crowed yesterday that it will supply Nokia Corp. with baseband and RF chips for the handset vendor's entry-level phones in GSM markets.Details of the deal were not disclosed, so the relative impact of the move to Texas Instruments...
Motorola Inc.'s recent, sobering earnings report came with a number of explanations of how the American vendor would turn things around. Motorola executives mentioned, among several factors, their portfolio mix-and the role of 3G in a higher-average selling price, higher-margin mix of handsets. Ed...
The art of the "announcement" appears to couple specific news with vague hints at future products. Announcements can reassure investors and analysts and seek to intimidate competitors while keeping one's own product plans under wraps.Thus Motorola Inc. and Texas Instruments Inc. said they would...
Mobile-phone and high-tech sectors urged the new Democratic-led Congress to oppose any effort to dilute the pool of auction-bound 700 MHz spectrum, a major portion of which is being sought by public-safety advocates."The American public wants Congress to work in a bi-partisan manner to...