US-based $2.8 billion Perot Systems would open a new facility in Chennai and one in Coimbatore in a bid to expand its business in the country. The new facility is aimed to bring the company's worldwide BPO (business process outsourcing) operations in a single floor to deliver efficient results. The company has already invested about $2 million for these facilities to make them operational by the end of March.

San Francisco - Not content with dominating the internet, Google is looking to take on the traditional phone companies and Skype by offering a free new phone service that manages your voice communications and allows all your different phones to ring on one number.

San Francisco  - National Semiconductor Corp, one of the world's largest manufacturers of mobile phone chips, will cut over 1,700 workers, or about a quarter of its work force, the company said Wednesday.

The layoffs will hit all areas of the company and will be carried out in two phases with 850 redundancies occurring immediately and 875 taking place over the coming months, the Silicon Valley-based company said.

With the IBM - International Business Machines Corp. - stock having done better than the company's large-capital technology contemporaries,

Chairman and CEO Samuel J. Palmisano, in a letter to the stockholders, expressed optimism that IBM is "positioned to lead in the era that lies on the other side of the present crisis."

Saying that IBM is confident of thriving despite the economic downturn, as the company plans to develop money-saving computer services, and spread out further, by the way of the so-called 'cloud computing' concept of delivering software, data and computing power over the Internet.

Taipei - Hon Hai, the world's largest electronics components manufacturer, said friday its 2008 sales rose but income fell amid the global financial crisis.

Sales surged by 19.2 per cent to 1.47 trillion Taiwan dollars (42 billion US dollars), but net income dropped by 29 per cent to 55.1 billion Taiwan dollars (1.6 billion US dollars), compared with 2007.

ComScore has released January 2009 data from the comScore Video Metrix service indicating that U.S. Internet users watched 14.8 billion online videos during the month, which represents an increase of 4% as compared to December 2008.

YouTube topped the growth charge with 91% of the incremental gain in the number of videos viewed against December, as it exceeded 100 million viewers for the first time.