RIM pays out

Research In Motion settled a long-running patent dispute with small technology company Visto. At home, the result of the Faritec rights issue, and the sell-off by UCS of one of its small units, made headlines.

* A mixed trading update from Datatec.
* A poor take-up (ie <50%) of the rights issue from Faritec.
* HCL Axon, a subsidiary of UK-listed Axon Group, acquired UCS subsidiary, UCS Solutions' Enterprise Solutions business, a SAP consultancy. The deal was worth R125.3 million.
* Dartingo Trading 178 made a R120 million investment in Alliance Mining via the issue of new shares, a BEE transaction that will see the former holding a 28.3% stake in Alliance Mining.
* Hasso Plattner Ventures invested in Cibecs, an enterprise desktop and notebook backup company.
* NRG Gestetner South Africa has changed its name to Ricoh South Africa.
* ICDL South Africa was appointed as the local affiliate for the Linux Professional Institute, the world's premier Linux certification organisation.

Worldwide PC shipments in Q209 declined 5%, reports Gartner. This result is much better than was expected, with HP well clear as the number one player.

Paul Booth, MD, Global Research Partners

* Accenture purchased Nokia's Symbian Professional Services operation.
* F-Secure bought France-based Steek SA, a software provider for online storage and data management solutions, for EUR27.5 million.
* HP acquired Ibrix, a provider of enterprise-class file serving software that includes data protection, high availability features and data management services for extreme scale-out.
* JDA Software Group made a 49% acquisition of Germany-based Strategix Enterprise Technology and Poland-based Strategix Enterprise Technology.
* Software AG acquired IDS Scheer AG, a software infrastructure and BPM software company, for EUR487 million.
* Compal Electronics (Taiwan) invested in CPT (Taiwan), an LCD panel maker, a move that takes its shareholding up to 28%.
* The potential $100 million purchase of shares by Digital Sky Technologies, a Russian Internet group, from existing shareholders of Facebook.
* Picsel, a Scottish technology company that provides software to more than 250 million mobile devices, has been put into administration (loosely, the UK equivalent of Chapter 11).
* Research In Motion settled its patent dispute with Visto for $267.5 million.
* Good quarterly numbers from LG Display (back in the black) and Tata Consultancy Services.
* Satisfactory quarterly results from Google.
* Mediocre quarterly results from BSNL (India), MobileOne (Singapore), Nokia, Philips Electronics and Xilinx.
* Mixed quarterly figures from IBM (revenue down, but profit up) and Tandberg (revenue up, but profit down).
* Quarterly losses from ASML, Intel and Sony Ericsson.

* International:
* An IPO by Vodafone Qatar this week on the Qatar Exchange.

* Africa:
* The bidders for Mozambique's third mobile licence.
* The bidders for Orascom Telecom's Internet subsidiary, LINKdotNet.

* South Africa:
* Further progress on the reverse take-over/listing of iBurst.

* Global IT spending is to drop 10% in 2009, but in Europe only an 8% drop is forecast, according to Forrester.
* Worldwide PC shipments in Q209 declined 5%, reports Gartner. This result is much better than was expected, with HP well clear as the number one player. Acer almost overtook Dell, the number two supplier. IDC recorded only a 3.1% slump from last year, but with the same overall positioning.
* The CRM market grew 12.5% last year to $9.15 billion, according to Gartner.

* JSE All share index: Up 5.5% (highest weekend close since September 2008)
* Nasdaq: Up 7.4% (highest weekend close since October 2008)
* Top SA share movements: Blue Label Telecom (+10%), Datatec (+12.3%), Dialogue (-16.7%), Faritec (-33.3%), FoneWorx (+15.4%), Labat Africa (+33.3%), Poynting (+71.4%), SecureData (+12.5%), TCS (-12.5%) and Zaptronix (-33.3%)

Fortune magazine has released its latest 'Global 500' listing. From a technology perspective, the top two places, as expected, are AT&T at number 29 and HP at 32. Other key positions are Samsung Electronics at 40, IBM at 45, and NTT at 44. A more detailed analysis will follow next week.