Toshiba said Tuesday it will purchase IBM's retail point-of-sale (POS) business for US$850 million, with the Japanese company taking over the hardware business while IBM shifts its focus to back-end software solutions.

Cisco, Juniper, HP and nine other technology companies have joined forces with two leading universities to form a research center focused on software-defined networking (SDN).

NEC has begun sales of new software to quickly find video clips in large archives, which is well-suited for finding illegal content on video sharing websites, it said Tuesday.

NTT DoCoMo said Monday a planned joint venture with Samsung Electronics, Fujitsu, NEC and other Japanese companies to design and sell chips for high-speed mobile networks based on the LTE (Long Term Evolution) standard has been abandoned.

NEC will acquire the information management business of Convergys for about US$449 million, to strengthen its telecommunications software products targeted at large carriers, it said Thursday.

With so much chatter about tablets this year, you might think that the handheld, rectangular devices being unveiled represent a significant innovation. The reality is that so much of what we're seeing is not a whole lot different than what we saw in previous years; these products offer only a few new twists. But those new twists could make the difference between tablets' remaining a niche item and their finally busting out to the mass market in a meaningful way.