Toshiba has announced that it will establish two new technology development centers for hard disk drives (HDD). The "HDD Advanced Technology Center" will seek to accelerate development of higher density technology and the "HDD Manufacturing Technology Center" will develop enhanced manufacturing capabilities. Both will open on July 16th.

FBR Capital analyst Craig Berger asserted in a research note that OmniVision could be at risk of losing its status as the dominant provider of image sensors for the Apple iPhone.

Applied Materials has announced a trio of new systems designed to boost performance in the next generations of DRAM chips. These innovative systems overcome key challenges in fabricating the transistor and contact areas of memory chips.

Chipmaker Wolfson Microelectronics has lost a quarter of its value after it warned on profits after customers sold fewer products than expected and delayed new launches. The company supplies chips for smartphones and tablets for the likes of Samsung, LG and Research in Motion (but crucially, not Apple).

Hackers apparently broke into the FoxNews.com's Twitter feed for political news early Monday and used it to announce - falsely - that President Barack Obama had been assassinated.

Judge E. James Gildea found that Apple infringes US Patent No. 6,658,146 directed to systems and methods for compressing images and US Patent No. 6,683,978 directed to image data formats, both of which belong to S3 Graphics. In the industry, that technology is known as S3 Texture Compression (S3TC).

ARM has said that within 18 months its Mali GPU will be able to match the power of Sony's Playstation 3 or Microsoft's Xbox 360, but that Moore's Law was not the only way to achieve that.

Japan's Ricoh plans to acquire Pentax as part of a push to get into the digital single-lens reflex camera market, it said Friday.

IBM has solved two related problems with phase-change memory and now says the fast next-generation data-storage technology will be ready for use in 2016 in servers.

"It is a bit surprising that we have not seen a more significant impact on our global IT spending forecast as a results of the Japan earthquake and tsunami, but despite widespread concerns about disruptions to the supply of critical components in the initial aftermath of the natural disaster, there has not been a dramatic impact on overall IT spending," said Richard Gordon, research VP at Gartner.

Shares of Taiwan's HTC are up more than 15% this year as the company cashes in on Android. Investors might be wise to seek out international funds that own the stock.

Online search giant Google has launched a new social networking website in its latest attempt to take on Facebook, which now claims more than 500m users.

Spansion has announced a collaboration with Freescale on a memory expansion module for the Freescale Tower System that provides design engineers more flexibility in prototyping a growing range of embedded applications.

TSMC may first appear, in the fourth quarter, as a second-source supplier of the A5 processor, according to Gus Richard, an analyst at Piper Jaffray, who wrote about this in a research note last month and still maintains this outlook. Then TSMC would take on the next-gen A6.