Tech Business Roundup: Yahoo, RIM and More

Chairman Jorma Ollila announced that Nokia (NYSE:NOK) will introduce tablets and “hybrid” smartphone/tablet devices, to shore up its declining market position. It is anticipated that the firm will release Windows 8 (NASDAQ:MSFT) tablets that operate on Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) Snapdragon processors, although only limited details are known. Nokia CEO Stephen Elop’s controversial decision to tie the company’s future to the Windows Phone, was also supported by Chairman Ollila.

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Enough already! Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Samsung (SSNLF.PK) are under orders by a United States District Judge to reduce the egregious number of patent infringement complaints, that each has filed against the other, for the second time. The judge remarked that the flood of lawsuits is “cruel and unusual punishment” for her court’s jury. This new order is ahead of mediation talks between the two companies’ CEOs scheduled for May 21 and 22.

Shares of Research In Motion (NASDAQ:RIMM) are at 8-year lows on the final day of its much dissed BlackBerry World conference, and are presently down by 16 percent since the conference began earlier this week Sentiments towards RIM among those attending the meeting were said to be mixed, by Network World, and out loud worries were registered regarding the cost of deploying its Mobile Fusion device management solution, and about strong employee interest in using competitors’ devices.

Facebook (FB) has officially set its initial public offering price in a range between $28 and $35, in a new S-1. It hopes to sell 337.4 million shares, of which 180 million will be new, and 157.4 million from insiders, which will comprise a total offering amount of $9.45 billion, to $11.8 billion, all of which beats the expectations of many observers. Mark Zuckerberg will personally sell 30.2 million shares.

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Samsung (SSNLF.PK) launches its ballyhooed Galaxy S III in London, with a live blog. The product, due to arrive in Europe in May and in the U.S. in the summer, features a 4.8″ display, as well as home media sharing and voice recognition features, all of which implies that the firm is trying harder to differentiate itself through software. International versions will be run by a quad-core processor, but U.S. models might employ a QCOM Snapdragon chip.

A major revelation is made at Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO), when Dan Loeb’s assertion that the company’s CEO Scott Thompson lacks a computer science degree, is confirmed. Further, (in an ‘Etch-A-Sketch’ moment) it’s now being said that company documents to the contrary contained “inadvertent errors”, even though they might go back to Thompson’s PayPal era. Yahoo says that “This, in no way, alters the fact that Mr. Thompson is a highly qualified executive.”

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