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On Monday, eBay said it would take a $900 million so-called impairment write-down against the value of Skype. This means that eBay has been forced to reassess the value of the Internet telephony company relative to its overall business today. By recording a charge, the company is essentially saying that it has taken a loss on its original investment. In what looks like an attempt to shake things up at Skype and move the division in a new direction, eBay also said Monday that Skype co-founder and Chief Executive Niklas Zennstrom has stepped down.
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The move expands Adobe's collaborative software services and steps up its competition with Microsoft and a host of other Web application providers, including Google. Adobe also is scheduled to announce a service, code-named Share, that allows people to invite others to view and access documents stored by Adobe. Documents can be embedded inside a Web page as well. The service, which is still in testing mode, will offer users one gigabyte of storage for free. Adobe executives are scheduled to detail these initiatives at its Max 2007 developer and designer conference, which starts Monday in Chicago.
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The software maker is announcing Office Live Workspace, a free online tool for viewing, sharing and storing--but not editing--Office documents online. (It's existing Office Live efforts will be rebranded as Office Live Small Business.) It's not quite ready--starting Monday customers will be able to put in their name to be part of a beta testing program expected to begin later this year. Still, the effort is a recognition that competition is heating up in the productivity arena, an area that large rivals had basically ceded to Microsoft a few years ago. In addition to Google's effort, which as of earlier this month also includes presentation software, IBM announced its free Lotus Symphony productivity software, which prompted 100,000 downloads in its first week of availability.
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Armed with the backing of the White House and congressional leaders-and subsidies, such as $500 million in risk insurance from the U.S. Department of Energy- the nuclear industry is experiencing a revival in the U.S. As many as 29 new reactors may be added to the current U.S. fleet of 104, according to Bill Borchardt, director of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC) office of new reactors. "It is going to be significantly different than it was in the 1970s," he says.
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That didn't exactly send shivers down the spine of executives at Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, Samsung, STMicroelectronics and others that build chips for mobile phones. They've seen this coming for a long time, an inevitable consequence of Intel finding itself with reams of chipmaking capacity and a maturing PC market. And Intel has already tried this once, spending billions trying to develop a combination of chips for the cell phone market but failing miserably. Following Intel's show in San Francisco last week, ARM developers will be meeting next week in Santa Clara, Calif.--Intel's hometown--for its annual developers' conference to discuss new applications and techniques for extracting more performance out of ARM's processor cores. The collective effort of both camps should do wonders to jump-start a market for mobile devices built for real people, not just coffee-toting executives rushing through O'Hare trying to get the 7:42 flight to San Francisco.
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Even though he takes issue with the price cut and how it was handled, Wozniak said he is a big fan of the iPhone. "I fell in love with the iPhone," he said. "I did not like it at first." Wozniak said it took him a month to fall in love with the device. He said he also "loves the Blackberry Pearl because it is such a small size. The iPhone is bigger, but boy that iPhone is more fun even when it's slower at dialing phone calls." Wozniak said he still has not switched the phone he primarily uses for voice over to the iPhone because of the "voice quality, being able to hear it." What's more, he said, the iPhone doesn't work with the BlueTooth (wireless hands free) technology he loves so much."I like to be hands free and my voice dialing is not built into the iPhone yet," he says. "I expect that soon."