Napster said on Tuesday that it has reached an agreement with Gracenote, a maker of music recognition services, to help it exclude files from its service under a court-ordered injunction.
A preliminary injunction requires copyright holders to notify Napster with artist and title names and at least one file name indicating that the musical work controlled by the copyright holder is available on the Napster index.
After receiving such notices, Napster will turn to Gracenote's unparalleled music Recognition Service to help identify possible user-defined variations in related artist and title names offered for sharing on the Napster index.
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Acer, UMC Join Forces: Two of Taiwan's largest technology groups, Acer and UMC, announced that they would merge subsidiary firms in a $1 billion deal to create the world's second-largest manufacturer of flat computer screens.
The boards of Acer Display and the UMC group's Unipac Optoelectronics had approved a plan to merge the companies through a share swap, the chairmen of the firms' parent groups said at a hastily-called news conference.
The new company, tentatively named AU Optoelectronics, would have five plants, with combined production capacity of 70,000 square meters of thin film transistor liquid crystal display screens per month.
A joint statement by UMC (UMC) and Acer said that the joint venture would be second in terms of capacity to make the screens used in notebook computers and flat computer monitors behind Korea's Samsung Electronics. It would be tied with LG Philips, a joint venture between Philips Electronics and LG Electronics, the statement said.
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Change at the top: Wired magazine editor in chief Katrina Heron said she would resign from her job for personal reasons, dealing a blow to the publication's owner, Conde Nast.
The magazine, which is separate from Terra Lycos-owned Wired News, had a strong year in 2000, but has not been immune to the recent ad slump. Ad revenues for the first two months of 2001 were down 6.6 percent over last year, from 8.2 million to 7.6 million, according to Publishers Information Bureau figures.
Even so, Heron was a popular figure at Conde Nast. She worked at the company as an editor at Vanity Fair and then the New Yorker before coming to Wired.
Conde Nast spokesperson Maurie Perl would not comment on rumors about Heron's successor, but it is understood that Powerful Media co-founder Kurt Anderson has talked to Conde Nast editorial director James Truman about the job.
Another possible candidate, Josh Quittner, managing editor of Time's On magazine, said he was surprised to hear of Heron's departure but had not been contacted regarding the post.
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Motorola sharpens the ax: Motorola said it will cut 7,000 jobs in its cell-phone unit and take a charge against first- and second-quarter results in an effort to cut costs in the slowing sales environment.
The technology giant (MOT) said the job cuts bring the total in the cell-phone unit so far this year to 12,000.
"Unfortunately, this was a necessary next step for us to achieve renewal and stay competitive in today's dramatic business environment, particularly given the current slowdown in the economy," Mike Zafirovski, president of Motorola Personal Communications Sector, said in a statement.
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Hitachi to sell IBM components: International Business Machines and Japan's biggest electronics maker Hitachi said they will cooperate in making and selling powerful business computers, semiconductors and other computer gear.
The companies released details in a statement, but did not say whether the deal involved a capital outlay.
The deal boosts the Asian presence of IBM (IBM) and strengthens it against rival Hewlett-Packard (HP).
Under the deal, Hitachi will resell IBM server computers, which run the Unix operating system to manage corporate networks and websites, under the Hitachi brand name. The reseller agreement represents a new sales channel for IBM.
The alliance gives Hitachi an additional source of customized components such as multi-chip modules -- the advanced ceramic components that are the heart of IBM mainframes and memory cache components for use in servers.
Hitachi Senior Vice President Toshihiko Odaka told a news conference that collaboration with IBM could cut Hitachi's research and development costs for servers by 30 to 40 percent, although he did not mention a specific sum.
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Deal du jour: Tyco International said it plans to buy CIT Group for about $9.2 billion in order to add a large financing component to its broad array of businesses.
Tyco (TYC) said it would issue 0.6907 of a share for each share of New York-based CIT (CIT), valuing the leading independent commercial financing and leasing company at $35.02 per share. That's a 54 percent premium over CIT's Monday closing price of $22.75 on the New York Stock Exchange.
Tyco, whose businesses include electronics, fire and security systems, disposable medical supplies and flow-control products such as valves, said the deal has a value of about $9.2 billion, based on the company's closing stock price of $50.70 on the NYSE.
Tyco said the latest deal would add immediately to its earnings and that CIT's financing and leasing capacities would greatly boost its existing businesses, including its infrastructure development, undersea fiber optic networking, and security technology arms.
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IBM, Alltel ink deal: International Business Machines said it formed a joint venture with Alltel, raising the rural telephone and information technology company to IBM's exclusive club of preferred providers of software applications.
In the Alltel (AT) agreement, IBM will take an undisclosed "significant minority equity stake," in the joint venture, IBM (IBM) said.
The joint venture will be know as Corebanking Solutions. Its first product, Corebank, will allow financial institutions to pull information on their customers' activities from its systems.
Corebank will then feed the information to marketing databases or other systems that can analyze it to find how best to market products to individual customers or groups. The product initially will be targeted at markets in Germany in France.
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Reuters contributed to this report.
