Xiaomi is preparing to enter the US smartphone market "in the near future," employing the same online sales and social media marketing tactics that helped the six-year-old startup become China's largest privately funded startup.

Xiaomi has agreed to purchase around 1,500 patents from Microsoft in an example of the rising costs facing the Chinese smartphone startup as it expands outside China.

About a decade after Apple's iPhone first hit the market, Nokia is seeking to relaunch its consumer business with health bands and connected scales by acquiring French startup Withings.

The technology market may be rough, but that's not stopping business computing giants from investing in fast-rising startups.

China's economic slowdown, coupled with turbulence in the stock market, is prompting investors to take a second look at China's high startup valuations. Startups such as Xiaomi, which raised vast sums on China's mobile Internet boom, are now facing growing pressure to live up to expectations.

Microsoft has agreed to invest about US$100 million in Uber Technologies at a valuation of approximately US$50 billion, a person with knowledge of the matter said.

James Xiong, CEO of a startup called 3Wearable Technology, is obsessed with the smartwatch.

The venture-backed Bitcoin startup CoinTerra has filed for bankruptcy, making it the second major miner manufacturer to do so in recent months.

Alibaba said Monday it has earmarked 10 billion New Taiwan dollars (US$316 million) to invest in entrepreneurs from Taiwan who are starting and growing their businesses through Alibaba's online platforms.

Intel is in the process of buying smartwatch startup Basis, as part of the tech giant's new focus on wearables and the Internet of Things.

A startup called Ubi Interactive is now selling $150 software that can turn any wall, desk or screen into a 45-inch touchscreen. Just hook up a Microsoft Kinect sensor and a screen or projector, and the display will instantly gain touch-screen capabilities.

The company Jolla, which counts four former Nokia engineers and directors among its five founders, presented its new operating system Sailfish in Helsinki and co-founder and chairman of the board Antti Saarnio promised to deliver "the world's best smartphone" by mid-2013.

EpiGaN NV, a startup spun out of the IMEC research institute in 2010, has officially opened a production facility for gallium nitride on silicon wafers at the Research Campus in Hasselt, Belgium.

Global chipmaker Broadcom has reportedly acquired Israeli startup BroadLight for at least US$200 million, two Israeli newspapers report Tuesday.

Qualcomm has acquired display startup Pixtronix, which develops technology applicable to smartphone and tablet screens.

Michael Van Buskirk, former chief technology officer at Spansion and a longtime engineer at AMD, was named CTO of non-volatile memory chip startup Adesto Technologies Tuesday (Aug. 16).

Globalfoundries will leverage Intermolecular's high productivity combinatorial (HPC) technology to accelerate the creation of process modules that will be integrated into Globalfoundries manufacturing lines worldwide.

Startup chip design company Adapteva has announced the multicore Epiphany processor, which is designed to accelerate applications in servers and low-power devices such as smartphones and tablets.

Adesto Technologies, a memory startup funded by Applied Materials and others, is readying its first conductive-bridging random access memory (CBRAM) product. CBRAM is seen as a potential candidate to replace conventional flash memory. Other candidates include FRAM, MRAM, phase-change and RRAM.

Battery Ventures, Flybridge Capital Partners and Highland Capital Partners represent the traditional venture capitalists behind Smooth-Stone. They have been joined by ARM, Texas Instruments and Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC).

Most believe TSMC will remain a foundry in the IC sector, but not in LEDs. There is little or no business model in the LED foundry sector. Most LED vendors have their own fabs and the startup costs are minor compared to the IC industry. The real value-added in LEDs is technology and the channels.

Nanda Technologies has raised US$4 million from Capital-E and KfW working alongside existing shareholders. The company said it will use the money to support pre-production evaluations at semiconductor manufacturers.

Its technology, called QuantumFilm, is four times more efficient at capturing light than traditional silicon-based image sensor chips, meaning the company's sensors will offer either higher sensitivity in low light or more megapixels in resolution.

Kleiner Perkins and Khosla Ventures-backed solar-thermal startup Ausra is in talks with three potential buyers to sell itself, according to sources familiar with the company.

The major supplier of NAND flash silicon invested "millions" in Fusion-io, said Fusion-io President and CEO David Flynn, though he declined to give a more specific figure. The two will jointly evaluate technology for new applications of solid-state storage.

Nakaya Microdevices, Amkor Technology and Toshiba have jointly announced the start of their joint venture will be postponed. The operation was initially scheduled to begin on October 1.

Pliant Technology has released its first series of enterprise-class solid state disk (SSD) drives based on a proprietary ASIC design that the company claims can handle - without using any cache - more than twice the input/output operations per second as the top competitive drives.

Advanced Inquiry Systems, a developer of wafer-level sensing systems for memory testing, has closed an US$11 million Series B financing round with all its current investors participating.

Israeli start-up 3GSolar says it has developed the world's first commercial-size solar energy system that uses colored dyes to turn sunlight into electricity.

Dubbed single mode level cell (SMLC) technology, Fusion-io says products using the enterprise class flash offer a cost-effective MLC-based solid-state solution with the endurance and performance of SLC at a much lower cost-per-gigabyte.

Compound Semiconductor Technologies (CST) Global, the Scottish foundry company, is to upgrade its manufacturing equipment thanks to new financing.