AMD spinnoff, The Foundry Company. has been given the green light by New York state's economic development arm, which has approved US$1.2 billion in state incentives for the firm's new chip fab.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and Intel are teaming up to produce solid-state drives (SSDs) for servers and workstations, the companies said Tuesday. Under terms of the deal, drive maker Hitachi GST will only use NAND flash chips obtained from Intel in its high-end SSDs. The two companies will jointly develop drives that use Serial Attached SCSI and Fibre Channel interfaces, with products expected to hit the market in 2010, they said. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

Japan's Toshiba said it planned to increase its output of flash memory-based solid state drives (SSDs) 15-fold over the next two years, aiming to control half of the global market for the new memory devices.

Stores and online merchants were busier this weekend than they were a year ago, according to figures out Sunday, but signs persist that holiday shopping will suffer in the weakest economic climate in decades.

AMD's manufacturing arm which is heading for a spin-off to form a foundry services provider, regards the current downturn as a good anti-cyclical investment opportunity. Nevertheless, the company is aware of the challenges they are approaching, said two top managers of the company. While the Foundry Company will maintain and expand its production capacity in Dresden and later plans to build a new fab in upstate New York, the headquarters will be placed in the Silicon Valley.

The deadly attacks Wednesday in Mumbai, in addition to the human toll, have damaged for now the city's lofty ambitions of becoming an international finance capital rivaling Hong Kong and Singapore.

"There is no denying that fundamental weakness in demand is turning from bad to worse," Irvin Seah, an economist at DBS Group Holdings Ltd. in Singapore, said in a report today. The outlook for manufacturers in the coming months "will not be a pretty picture."

The US bank called off talks with Panasonic on a sale of its stake in the Japanese electronics maker, unhappy with Panasonic's bid.

The global digital camera market may contract next year, the president of industry leader Canon warned, as sluggish economic conditions dampen consumer demand. Canon was aiming to cut $1 billion in costs with a new computer system to be completed by 2010.

Ever since it rejected a buyout offer from Microsoft early this year, Yahoo! has seen its share price head straight down and suffered a huge talent drain. This week's resignation of co-founder Jerry Yang as chief executive had an air of inevitability to it, as did the recent collapse of its search deal with Google.

“We have slowed our hiring, but we're still hiring,” Schmidt said in an interview that will be aired on Bloomberg Television at 9 pm New York time. Google fell $4.99 to $257.44 today in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The shares have lost 63 percent this year.

Americans expect to limit credit-card purchases, seek out bargains and stretch spending as recession fears put a damper on their holiday cheer. If the gloomiest predictions come true, that could spell disaster for many more store chains and their employees, and provide insight on how long it may take the economy to recover.