In another deal reflecting the growing importance of broadband, Motorola is reportedly close to acquiring General Instrument, a cable TV equipment maker.
General Instrument is the cable industry's leading provider of set-top boxes and the companies hope the deal will give them a foothold in the burgeoning market for high-speed access over cable TV lines, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.
Also:
Suit against modified crops planned
Secure Dynamics makes RSA switch- - - - - -
The newspaper, which cited its customary "people familiar with the matter," said that under the proposed deal – which could be announced this week – Motorola would swap shares worth about $10 billion for General Instrument.
- Back to topKeeping it pure: Jeremy Rifkin, whose challenge to genetic engineering stirred participants last week at the Ars Electronica conference in Austria, is reportedly set to challenge modified crops on a much larger scale.
The Financial Times said Monday that Rifkin's Foundation on Economic Trends, along with the US-based National Family Farm Coalition and individual farmers across Latin America, Asia, Europe, and North America, were preparing to bring multi-billion-dollar antitrust suits against the world's biggest life sciences companies later this year.
The suits would claim that companies such as Monsanto, DuPont, and Novartis were exploiting bioengineering techniques to gain a stranglehold on agricultural markets, the Financial Times said. Twenty US law firms have reportedly agreed to take the cases.
4. Back to topIts name isn't secure: Secure Dynamics Technologies is no more. The maker of the widely used network security product SecureID said Monday it had become RSA Security, reflecting its integration with RSA Data Security.
The name change puts further distance between the company's management and its founder, Kenneth Weiss, who left the company three years ago in a dispute over control after it acquired RSA Data Scurity.
*Reuters contributed to this report.*
