U.S. Industrial News

Texas Instruments Inc. CEO Rich Templeton told a group of analysts this week that the integration of National Semiconductor is progressing well with no surprises. That update was in a note written by Stifel Nicolaus & Co. analyst Tore Svanberg after a lunch on Wednesday between Templeton and analysts. Dallas-based TI bought National in September for $6.5 billion. Svanberg also wrote that TI hopes to expand its applications processing business into horizontal markets beyond smartphones and...

Ran across this article on Network World this morning. “Can industry heavyweights Google, PayPal, Microsoft and AOL — along with 11 others in high-tech such as Facebook and LinkedIn, as well as the financial world’s Bank of America and Fidelity Investments — succeed in stopping phishing attacks right in their tracks? In uniting behind an effort called DMARC.org unveiled today, the group says it can through policy-based steps filter out spoofed email that attackers use for phishing.” Now, if...

Global chip growth will remain sluggish this year because of a continuing global economic uncertainty and slow inventory movement, according to an IHS report released Tuesday. Semiconductor industry revenue is expected to increase 3.3 percent to $323.2 billion from $312.8 billion in 2011, according to the report. That will exceed last year’s 1.3 percent gain. Len Jelinek, director of semiconductor manufacturing research at IHS, attributed much of the industry’s weak performance to external...

What do you get when you mix tech geeks with politics? You get an app. Earlier this month, techies Mike Hendrix and Taylor Cavanah were frustrated by presidential candidate New Gingrich’s showing in the Iowa Republican Primary. They decided to support him by pooling their tech knowledge and gaming experience. Hendrix heads the Precise Agency and Red Digital Media, both in Dallas. Cavanah is CEO of Locai Inc., a location-based mobile platform based in Plano, but he recently moved to San Diego....

Affiliated Computer Services Inc. officially has adopted the Xerox name. Xerox Corp. chief executive Ursula Burns on Wednesday morning announced the name change in a conference call about the company’s fourth-quarter earnings. In early 2010, Xerox bought outsourcer Dallas-based ACS for $6.2 billion, the last of the three big local outsourcing companies (with Electronic Data Systems Corp. and Perot Systems Corp.) to end their independent lives. ACS was founded in 1988. Xerox and ACS said...

U.S. technology professionals saw their average pay increase more than 2 percent to $81,327 last year — the largest annual salary growth since 2008, according to a survey by Dice, a technology and engineering career site. Not only did pay increase after two straight years of nearly flat wages, but more companies rewarded their top performers. One-third of tech professionals received a bonus in 2011, up from 29 percent in 2010 and 24 percent in 2009. The size of the average bonus also rose —...

Texas Instruments Inc. on Monday reported lower fourth-quarter revenue and profit from a year earlier but predicted an end to the industry downturn. The Dallas-based chipmaker also said it plans to close two older semiconductor factories in Houston and Hiji, Japan, which employ about 1,000 people combined. TI posted revenue of $3.42 billion, down 3 percent from $3.53 billion in the fourth quarter of 2010. Still, revenue beat Wall Street estimates of $3.25 billion. Net profit fell 68 percent...

Apple is trying to reinvent the text book and they’ve signed up some heavy-hitting publishing houses to start. iBooks 2 is a free app you’ll need to download to buy the books. Pearson, McGraw Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt publish 90 percent of all textbooks sold and they’re going to start offering their books on the iPad at prices of $14.99 or less. Apple also showed off iBooks Author, which is a full-featured program to write and layout iBooks. iBooks 2 is available today with a handful...

If you are wondering about forklift hire there a couple of things that you should take into account. If you have determined forklift hire then you must have the inventory to need one, given that you do, then check out the following. Advantages of Cost If your company is small and call for the assistance of forklift then it is sensible to use one rather than making a cash investment. It is sensible to find out the charging of hiring a forklift right before engaging them for a prolonged period...

I hope you do all your Wikipedia browsing today, because they’re shutting off access to the English-language version of the online encyclopedia for one day to protest SOPA. If you’re wondering exactly what SOPA is and why you should care, take a look at this entry from Wikipedia: The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), also known as House Bill 3261 or H.R. 3261, is a bill that was introduced in the United States House of Representatives on October 26, 2011, by House Judiciary Committee Chair...

Plano-based Navigation Solutions Inc. is at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week with some new Hertz NeverLost navigation products and services for leisure and business travelers — not just Hertz car renters. It’s demonstrating 16 My Explore mobile companion travel apps to help travelers navigate 16 major U.S. cities across a wide range of interests and categories. (My Explore Hawaii will be the first.) The apps will be available on iTunes early this year. Navigation Solutions...

It’s that time of year again — time for the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The show technically starts today and runs through Friday, but Texas Instruments Inc. already has announced or has been part of announcements for: Neonode Inc.’s ultra-low power, single-chip optical touch controller, NN1001, was developed with TI. TI hosted an OMAP4470 processor-based tablet running on a pre-release version of Windows 8. QNX’s CAR 2 application platform boasts the support of TI as well...

I usually don’t throw deals up on this blog, but I’m going to start if they sound good enough. I got a release today from OfficeMax about their brown bag sale where they give you a bag when you walk in the store and you can get 20% off everything that fits in that bag, including Kindle Fire, Kindle Touch, NOOK Color and NOOK Simple Touch. Oh, and bags can be found in this Sunday’s Dallas Morning News as well. The sale is on through Jan. 14.

So Dallas is getting Sprint 4G LTE service in a few months. Sure seems like Dallas is a hotbed of 4G competition. Good for us. Here’s the release: Customers in Dallas, Atlanta, Houston and San Antonio are expected to enjoy ultra-fast service and an improved 3G wireless experience before middle of year SAN FRANCISCO – Jan. 5, 2012 -Sprint (NYSE: S) CEO Dan Hesse announced today at the annual Citigroup Entertainment, Media and Telecommunications Conference that customers in Dallas, Atlanta,...

If you’ve got a new iPhone 4S and you’ve fallen in love with Siri, be prepared for the bill as a new study has shown that using Siri can double your monthly data usage. Atlanta-based research firm Arieso did a study called, “Recent Smartphone Trends & the Extreme Data User”, which compares data usage across a variety of smartphones and connected devices. It finds that users of the iPhone 4S demand three times as much data as iPhone 3G users and twice as much as iPhone 4 users, who were...