Emerging Tech

Lucent Technologies Inc. finally caught a break today after being steadily pummeled by financial problems since last fall. Lucent announced a three-year, US$5 billion deal with Verizon Wireless Inc. to supply 3G (third generation) mobile telephony equipment.

Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp.'s joint Wintel juggernaut failed to spot the emerging trend away from the desktop PC as the centre of the computing universe, according to John Dean, managing director of equity research, computer storage for Salomon Smith Barney Inc.

Intel Corp. announced Wednesday it would combine the company's Network Communications Group and its Communications Products Group into a single business unit in an effort to focus on development of products for Internet infrastructure and networking equipment.

This could be a tough year for makers of electronic-business software, according to Thomas Siebel, chairman and chief executive officer of Siebel Systems Inc., who predicted in a Thursday keynote speech at Internet World 70 percent of the vendors in that market will be out of business by the end of 2001.

IBM Corp. is trying to make it easier for companies to take advantage of a mainframe's traditional reliability and scalability for deploying emerging e-business applications.

Does online bookseller Barnesandnoble.com Inc. now have the smoking gun it needs to defend itself against a lawsuit filed by arch rival Amazon.com Inc. over alleged infringement of a controversial patent on one-click shopping technology?

With Canada

WorldCom Inc. announced Tuesday that it would consolidate the company's Latin American operations into a regional organization based in Miami known as WorldCom Latin America.