Sumner Lemon

GlobalFoundries is on track to build a future chip manufacturing plant in Abu Dhabi, but details of the company's plans remain scarce.

"We're committed to establishing a technology and manufacturing presence there in the coming years but we're not willing to go into too much detail on timelines and costs just quite yet," said Jon Carvill, a GlobalFoundries spokesman in an e-mail. "Adding a presence there is part of our overall strategy to further diversify our capacity and technology across a global footprint."

A Google engineer was fired for violating the company's privacy rules, Google said Wednesday, responding to a report that the engineer had improperly accessed the accounts of several teenagers.

"We dismissed David Barksdale for breaking Google's strict internal privacy policies," said Bill Coughran, senior vice president of Google, in a statement.

The Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition has signed up its first Asian operator customer -- Singapore Telecommunications (SingTel) -- ten months after the partnership was created to offer packages of hardware and software for data centers, it said this week.

The VCE coalition was announced in November 2009 and is comprised of three partners: Cisco, which provides networking equipment and servers; storage provider EMC; and VMware, which provides virtualization software. They combined their products into bundles, called Vblocks, that are designed to handle different types of data-center workloads. They basic idea is that companies can easily build and scale up their data centers for cloud-computing applications by putting these Vblocks together.

Dell may have lost out to Hewlett-Packard in the bidding war for storage vendor 3Par earlier this month, but the computer maker wasn't pained by the decision to walk away.

"At some point, winning is losing. You get [the company], but it's way too expensive," said Praveen Asthana, vice president of strategy and technology at Dell's enterprise solutions group, during an interview in Singapore.

Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd has been appointed co-president of Oracle, the software company announced Monday.

Hurd, who also joined Oracle's board of directors, will serve as co-president alongside Safra Catz. Co-President Charles Phillips has resigned his position and will step down from the company's board, the company said.

The latest beta version of Skype offers the ability to do group video calls with up to 10 people.

Skype 5.0 beta 2 runs on Windows and includes an updated user interface, the company said on its blog. The release doubles the number of people that can be included in a group video call from the five people allowed with Skype 5.0 beta 1, released in May.

The number of people with Internet access in Brazil, Russia, China, India and Indonesia will double by 2015, management consulting firm Boston Consulting Group said in a report released Wednesday.

These five countries -- which the consulting firm dubbed BRICI -- account for 45 percent of the world's population and 15 percent of global GDP (gross domestic product), BCG said, noting they are currently home to 610 million Internet users. That number is set to double to 1.2 billion by 2015, it said, predicting the number of users will increase at compound annual growth rates of 9 percent to 20 percent.

Singapore's Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts (MICA) has proposed changes to a law governing telecommunications operators that would raise penalties for companies that violate conditions of their licenses.

The changes being proposed by MICA aim to bring Singapore's Telecommunications Act up to date with changes in the telecommunications industry. "Telecom networks have increased in importance as consumers rely on these networks for all forms of communication services, including voice, data, video, Internet access and even television services," the ministry said in a consultation paper describing the proposed changes.

Worldwide server sales posted their biggest jump since 2003 during the second quarter as Hewlett-Packard outsold rival IBM to take the top spot among server vendors, IDC said Tuesday.

Server revenue rose 11 percent during the second quarter, to US$10.9 billion. These numbers marked the second consecutive quarter of revenue growth for the server market and the fastest pace of growth since 2003, IDC said.

The chief executive officer of Taiwanese display panel maker AU Optronics, who faces felony charges related to an LCD price-fixing investigation, has been barred from leaving the U.S.

AU Optronics President and CEO Lai-Juh Chen is one of six AU Optronics executives named in a price-fixing suit filed by the U.S. Department of Justice in June.

Dell is likely to bring its Streak tablet to Asia-Pacific markets early next year, a company executive said Friday.

"We have not yet announced the expansion plans for Streak in Asia. I suspect the early part of next year we'll see that product," said Steve Felice, president of Dell's small and medium business unit, during a conference call with reporters.

A top executive at JLJ Holdings, the parent company of a Singapore-based Apple supplier named in an alleged kickback scheme, has stepped down from his position "for the time being" as the company pursues an investigation of the charges, it said Thursday.

JLJ Executive Chairman Jacky Chua is the brother-in-law of Andrew Ang, a former employee of JLJ subsidiary Jin Li Mould Manufacturing, one of six suppliers -- including three Singaporean companies -- named in an Apple civil suit against former Apple employee Paul Shin Devine.