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.

After grand success of muscular and hottest-looking bike FZ16, India Yamaha Motor (IYM) has come with another new bike 'FZ-S' priced at Rs 67,000 (ex-showroom Delhi).

The FZ-S, a 150cc motorbike, will be available in two colours -- Yellow Streak and Silver Tech to Indian consumers.

In a case pertaining to copyright theft, four men working at The Pirate Bay file-sharing Web site go on trial in Stockholm. All four of them - Peter Sunde, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom, and Fredrik Neij - were supposedly accomplices in breaking copyright law.

If convicted, the four men face a fine of $143,500, and a two-year prison term.

The real value of Facebook's stock appears to have become a contentious issue - while a $240 million investment by Microsoft for a 1.6 percent stake in the company in 2007, puts Facebook's value at $15 billion, the company claims its own evaluation to be $3.7 billion.

In June last year, Facebook's self appraisal pegged the price of its privately held stock at $8.88 per share; while the Microsoft investment put the related figures at $35.90 per share.

The incongruity with regard to Facebook's actual worth has come to light because of the revelations pertaining to the Palo Alto-based company's $65 million lawsuit settlement with ConnectU.

It is quite well accepted fact that social-networking traffic is increasing with every passing day. Monday had lot of things for Technology writers to talk about as Compete. com came out with latest numbers for the month of January.

The results were astonishing as for the first time in a survey; Facebook was in the lead, with nearly 68 million unique visitors, well ahead of the News Corp.-owned MySpace's 58 million in U. S. traffic.

The GPS device-maker Garmin and the PC components-maker Asus have teamed up to manufacture co-branded smartphones; and they intend bringing the so-manufactured devices at "attractive" prices to the US market!