MIDDAY MARKETS: Techs sustain rally

A few deals, coupled with last week's economic news helped techs continue last week's rally at midday Monday. The Nasdaq rose 3.45 to 3,816.83 while the Dow Jones industrial average slipped 15.32 to 10,779.44.

The Inter@ctive Week @Net Index fell 2 to 488.31.

Qualcomm (Nasdaq: QCOM) tumbled as much as 11 percent Monday after news China Unicom would not be using its wireless technology, but another company, Garmin Corp, would. Motorola (NYSE: MOT), up 7/8 to 37 11/16, announced a deal with Sega Enterprises to jointly develop new cellular phones that can access the Internet.

Ariba (Nasdaq: ARBA), up 9 1/4 to 79 3/4 continued its ascent Monday, after announcing a deal with American Express (NYSE: AXP) down 1 3/16 to 55 5/16 and VeriSign (Nasdaq: VRSN), down 4 11/16 to 178 13/64.

Investors made a bid of faith in InsWeb's (Nasdaq: INSW) restructuring plans; after announcing losses would be even deeper for the rest of 2000, shares rose 3/8 to 3 5/16, or 13 percent.

Cisco Systems (Nasdaq: CSCO), up 1/4 to 64 5/8 snapped up another company Monday, adding the privately held Israeli company HyNEX Ltd. for about $127 million in stock. Lucent (NYSE: LU) shares rose 1/2 to 63 1/2 and Nortel was up 9/16 to 60 5/8.

Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) rose 1 5/16 to 67 5/8.

Among other leading tech issues: Dell (Nasdaq: DELL) lost 9/16 to 42 3/4, Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW)fell 3/8 to 87 5/8 and Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) was up 1/2 to 80 11/16.

Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) was down 9/16 to 133 5/8, while AMD (NYSE: AMD), which is releasing a rival chip, rose 4 11/16 to 94 13/16.

Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN) lost 3 1/8 to 54 3/4, Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO) rose 5 to 139 1/2 and America Online Inc. (NYSE: AOL) dropped 1 5/16 to 55 11/16.