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Larry Ellison’s got some news for skeptics predicting Oracle will dump the Sun Microsystems hardware business when its $7.4 billion acquisition of the company closes: It’s not gonna happen. In an interview with Reuters subsequently filed with the SEC, the Oracle CEO said he plans to maintain that part of Sun’s business.

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Nokia, the world’s largest maker of mobile phones, will soon be just a tad smaller. This morning the company said it will sack a further 450 employees in its mobile services business, a division charged with developing and delivering the Ovi-branded Internet services tied to Nokia devices. Seems the still souring economy has undermined Nokia’s ambitions in that area, and Apple’s success with the iPhone App Store has inspired it to look to third-party developers to bring new applications to its devices.

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Reports that Apple is developing a new touchscreen device are picking up traction and credibility. In the past few days, claims made in a Chinese-language financial newspaper have been reinforced first by Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal and now by Reuters as well. Consensus seems to be that Apple has ordered 10-inch touchscreens from Wintek and that those screens are destined for an entirely new device. Netbook is the word most often bandied about for it. But might it be an e-book reader?

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The market was expecting the worst in the government’s latest monthly employment report and it was not disappointed. “Job losses were large and widespread across most major industry sectors,” the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday. The U.S. economy lost 524,000 jobs in December, closing out the worst year for job attrition since World War II, according to the BLS. Total job losses for 2008: 2.6 million, the largest decline since 2.750 million jobs were lost in 1945. A 16-year high. Congratulations, folks….

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Just because Microsoft acquired Danger doesn’t mean the company has its eye on Research in Motion, though some observers apparently feel otherwise. Noting the ugly decline in RIM’s share price in recent months and a financial crisis that’s already slowing the corporate IT spending that is its lifeblood, Canaccord Adams analyst Peter Misek speculates that the Blackberry peddler is a good takeover target for Microsoft.

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When he appeared at our D5 conference in May 2007, Sen. John McCain said that, given the chance, he’d hire Cisco CEO John Chambers for his cabinet. Now, in the run-up to the November presidential election, it looks like Chambers has some competition for that spot. In an interview with Reuters, McCain said that Chambers is still on his short list of potential Treasury secretaries, but the Cisco CEO has some company.

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Oh, we’re in trouble now. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer seems to have lost his optimistic outlook on the current economic collapse. And when a guy with a pay package valued at about $1.35 million loses his faith in the tech industry’s “buoyancy,” as Ballmer likes to call it, well, you know things are getting really ugly.

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Come next month there will be another retail outlet at which to wait in line for an iPhone. On Sept. 7, Best Buy will become the first U.S. retail chain to sell the iPhone outside of the Apple-AT&T duopoly. The deal is an obvious coup for the big-box retailer, which, with the exception of Apple and AT&T, has a national exclusive on the device through Christmas.

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