Corporate & legal

Here's how you know how enamored Dell is with the Netbook concept: it's volunteered to fight over the trademark on behalf of all other Netbook makers.

On Wednesday the PC maker filed a petition with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to cancel a registered trademark for the term "Netbook" by a company called Psion.

Psion is a Canadian mobile computer maker that owns the trademark and indeed has sold a product called Netbook in the past. Psion began sending some tech bloggers and Netbook makers cease-and-desist notices late last year asking them to stop … Read more

T-Mobile USA, the fourth-largest cell phone operator in the U.S., is launching new service promotions in an effort to keep long-term customers and attract new ones.

The company plans to offer a special $50 per month unlimited voice plan to longtime customers in San Francisco, initially. It will also offer new customers who switch from a competitor a $135 rebate, Reuters reported Thursday.

T-Mobile's new plan will only be available to San Francisco customers who have used its service for 22 months or more, according to a T-Mobile representative who spoke to Reuters. An analyst told the wire … Read more

UPDATE at 5:17 a.m. PST: Comments added from the company's conference call.

There was good news and bad news in Sprint Nextel's fourth-quarter earnings report on Thursday. But mostly it was bad.

First, the good news: Sprint narrowed its losses considerably, compared with a year earlier. For the fourth quarter, Sprint lost $1.62 billion, or 57 cents a share. This is certainly better than the $29.45 billion, or a whopping $10.36 a share, it lost during the fourth quarter of 2007. The previous year's losses were due to some large write-downs the … Read more

This story was update at 1:59 p.m. PST, with information about a potential tax break for Allen regarding the Charter bankruptcy.

For Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, 2009 is not starting well.

His largest investment, Charter Communications, announced last week it would file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, pushing the value of his multibillion dollar investment down to a little more than $11.5 million, based on Wednesday's closing stock price of a little less than 3 cents per share.

Last month, Allen cut the workforce at his private investment and philanthropic company Vulcan by 7.6 percent, or … Read more

Updated at 3:15 p.m. PST with details from the conference call.

Hewlett-Packard is facing the reality of the recession, and finally slipped up on its earnings.

For the fiscal first quarter, the PC maker earned a profit of $1.9 billion, or 75 cents per share. That's down 9.5 percent from a profit of $2.1 billion, or 80 cents per share, the same quarter a year ago. It recorded a 1 percent uptick in revenue from a year ago, at $28.8 billion. Analysts were expecting revenue of $31.9 billion, and earnings of 93 … Read more

The global financial crisis has caused many of the largest technology vendors to rethink how they approach the market. At Lenovo, that has meant changes at the very top of its business. Last week the Chinese PC maker announced it had cut ties with Bill Amelio, its CEO of three years, and installed company chairman Yang Yuanqing as the new chief executive.

Lenovo co-founder Liu Chuanzhi was brought back as company chairman and in one of the first interviews after the changes were announced, commented that his company would be refocusing its efforts on China and other emerging markets for … Read more

While European regulators are showing a continued interest in regulating Microsoft, the Obama administration may have its sights set elsewhere.

In a speech in June, the woman nominated to be the new administration's antitrust chief said that Google, not Microsoft, is the big competitive worry.

"For me, Microsoft is so last century. They are not the problem," Christine Varney said at a June 19 panel, according to Bloomberg News, which unearthed the comments this week. In the same speech, Varney said that Google poses a threat because it already "has acquired a monopoly in Internet online … Read more

Updated at 9:15 a.m. PST with official comment from Intel.

Bit-tech.net tipped us off Wednesday morning that Intel has sued Nvidia over the latter's right to create and sell motherboard chipsets that support Intel's Nehalem (aka Core i7) class of desktop processors.

We haven't heard much about this fight since May 2008, although since that time Nehalem has come to market and Intel remains the only manufacturer with a supporting chipset.

We spoke to Derek Perez, Nvidia's head of public relations, Wednesday morning, and he provided some clarity on the nature of the court filing, as well as Nvidia's take on the filing, which he says is actually a request for an injunction to prevent Nvidia from manufacturing a Nehalem chipset.

"We have a cross-licensing agreement with Intel, entered into about four and a half years ago. Intel is now basically saying the cross-license agreement doesn't apply to future bus interfaces, specifically DMI, (the direct media interface Intel uses to link the Nehalem CPU to a system's memory, a new feature for Nehalem chipsets). Intel has now filed an injunction against us, basically trying to stop us from innovating on DMI.… Read more

BARCELONA--Verizon Communications' chief technology officer dished out details Wednesday on the company's soon-to-be-built 4G wireless network that's set to go live in 2010.

Verizon will begin testing the service this year and launch it commercially in at least 25 to 30 markets in the U.S. in 2010, CTO Dick Lynch said during an interview with CNET News after his keynote speech Wednesday at the 2009 GSMA Mobile World Congress here.

"We are modeling the roll-out after our EV-DO deployment. So we expect to get to about the same level in the first year of deploying LTE … Read more