Corporate and legal

A year after the state of New York won its case against Dell and Dell Financial Services, the company will now pay up.

The PC maker will fork over $4 million to settle a case initially filed in 2007, New York's Office of the Attorney General said Tuesday. The initial suit brought by Attorney General Andrew Cuomo accused Dell of fraud, false advertising, and deceptive business practices, including offering misleading financing, and failing to honor rebates, warranties, and service contracts.

Cuomo won the suit in May 2008, when the company was found guilty of the accusations listed above as … Read more

Adobe said on Tuesday that it has reached a deal to acquire Web analytics firm Omniture for $1.8 billion, or $21.50 per share.

That represents a 45 percent premium to Omniture's average closing price for the last 30 days, Adobe noted in its press release. Omniture, which was started in 1996, has about 1,200 employees and took in just under $300 million in the 12 months ending Dec. 31.

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen called the move a "game changer" for the company.

"Adobe customers are looking to us for solutions to deliver engaging … Read more

One year and three months ago, Phil Spencer was appointed general manager of Microsoft Game Studios. On Tuesday, Microsoft announced that the executive has once again been promoted, this time to corporate vice president of Microsoft Game Studios. The first-party publishing label has been responsible for such Xbox 360 exclusives as Gears of War 2 and Fable II, and will distribute the forthcoming Halo 3: ODST and Alan Wake.

Historically, Microsoft Game Studios has also published PC titles such as the discontinued Age of Empires and Microsoft Flight Simulator. Its last corporate vice president, John Schappert, left Microsoft in June … Read more

Clearwire Communications has created a sandbox more than 20 square miles in size where developers can play with WiMax.

Clearwire announced on Tuesday the launch of the largest test area yet for its 4G WiMax service in Silicon Valley. Covering a wide area from Santa Clara to Mountain View to parts of Palo Alto, the company's Clear 4G WiMAX Innovation Network will let developers test the mobile broadband network on a large scale.

First announced in April by Clearwire, the Clear 4G WiMAX Innovation Network is seen as a testbed to prepare for the launch of commercial WiMax service … Read more

This was originally posted at ZDNet's Between the Lines.

Intel said Europe's top antitrust regulator failed "to meet the required standard of proof" when it fined the chipmaker $1.45 billion in May for anticompetitive behavior against Advanced Micro Devices. (The news comes as Apple named Intel's top lawyer Bruce Sewell as its general counsel.)

Intel noted that it would appeal, and the company recently laid out its case against the European Commission, the administrative wing of the European Union. In a nutshell, Intel argues that the EC:

• Failed to address evidence that AMD was … Read more

Microsoft on Monday reiterated its case in an appeal of an injunction ordering it to stop selling Word in its current form and argued against fines totaling $240 million for patent infringement and willful infringement.

The software giant is trying to get the federal appeals court to reverse a ruling in favor of Toronto-based I4i. That company sued Microsoft in March 2007 alleging that the software giant violated its 1998 patent (No. 5,787,449) by including in the program XML code, which eliminates the need for manually embedded formatting codes.

In May, a federal jury in Tyler, Texas, ruled … Read more

Oracle isn't letting a pesky EU investigation stand in the way of its planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems.

Larry Ellison, the software giant's chief executive, is joining Sun's server chief, John Fowler, to show off some new Sun hardware running Oracle's software on Tuesday. The companies are touting their "partnership" with a jointly branded "Exadata" system shown in a Webcast invitation sent to press and published by both Oracle and Sun.

"You are invited to attend an exclusive webcast event where Oracle CEO Larry Ellison will unveil an innovative new product, … Read more

Deutsche Telekom could be weighing a multibillion dollar bid to buy Sprint Nextel within the next few weeks, said London's Daily Telegraph on Sunday. The German telecommunications giant has called on financial advisor Deutsche Bank to study a proposed deal.

As the parent of struggling T-Mobile, DT might see a takeover of Sprint as a way to revive its listless U.K. and U.S. operations. DT chief executive officer Rene Obermann has been unhappy with the performance of T-Mobile, blaming it for the parent's first-quarter loss of 1.1 billion euros ($1.46 billion) earlier this year.… Read more

Intel has reorganized its upper management, and one executive, Pat Gelsinger, is taking a new high-profile role at storage and software company EMC, the companies announced Monday.

Gelsinger, 48, had been a major figure at Intel, where he worked for 30 years. Among his roles: chief architect of a flagship chip from the 1990s, the 486 that followed the 386 and preceded the Pentium; the company's first chief technology officer; and most recently co-general manager of the Digital Enterprise Group, which brought in more than half of the chipmaker's revenue selling chips for servers and business PCs.

At … Read more