iPad boosts chipmakers' losses

Apple's iPad is the bane of computer-memory makers, worsening the industry's losses as consumers choose the handheld device that uses about 75% fewer of the chips than a typical laptop, revealed Bloomberg.

Elpida Memory, Hynix Semiconductor and other makers of dynamic random-access memory, the most common chip in computers, lost a combined $14 billion in the past three years, according to Bloomberg calculations.

That comes after the $37 billion that researcher DRAMeXchange estimates they spent on building factories in a bet on continued growth in the industry.

Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL are providing metadata from messages that get delivered to their customers to Palo Alto, California-based Agari so it can be used to look for patterns that indicate phishing attacks, says Cnet.

Agari collects data from about 1.5 billion messages a day and analyses them in a cloud-based infrastructure, according to Agari CEO Patrick Peterson.

The company aggregates and analyses the data and provides it to about 50 e-commerce, financial services and social network customers, including Facebook and YouSendIt, which can then push out authentication policies to the e-mail providers when they see an attack is happening.

Yahoo hopes to strike a deal to sell a minority stake to a private-equity firm by year's end, people familiar with the matter said, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Short of that, the company will pursue other alternatives, they said. Offers for a roughly 20% stake in Yahoo came in earlier this week from at least three bidders, including private-equity firm TPG Capital and a group consisting of Silver Lake Partners, Microsoft and others.

The bids put a per-share value on Yahoo of between $16 and $18, sources said. Yahoo is seeking an investment at a price that's higher by a few dollars, they added. Shares closed on Tuesday at $15.70.

An Apple iPhone 4 began emitting smoke and appeared to spontaneously combust on a recent Regional Express flight to Sydney, Australia, reports TechNewsWorld.

The phone was emitting a significant amount of dense smoke, accompanied by a red glow, according to Regional Express.

Standard safety procedures were followed and no one on board was injured. The phone was handed over to the Australian Transport Safety Bureau for further investigation.