Trio to gamble $65m Facebook fortune

Three Harvard graduates are to gamble a $65 million settlement they made with Facebook over who came up with the idea for the site, in an effort to get more money, says the BBC.

Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss and Divya Narendra argue that at the time of the settlement, Facebook misrepresented its stock price, robbing them of millions.

The three accuse Mark Zuckerberg of stealing their idea for what has become the world's biggest social network. Zuckerberg, who also attended Harvard, has always denied the claims.

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) forced out its CEO Dirk Meyer yesterday, in a surprise twist of fate for a technologist who inherited the chipmaker when it was in tatters and won fans on Wall Street for steering it through a wrenching turnaround, writes Associated Press.

Meyer's sudden resignation caught many in the industry off guard. Under his two-and-a-half-year tenure, AMD came back from the brink of collapse by spinning off its expensive chip factories, and its stock price went from less than $2 to more than $9 a share.

AMD's board was blunt in its reason for showing Meyer the door, saying it felt Meyer wasn't the right person to lead the company through its next phase of growth.

Intel will gain access to Nvidia's patents while paying the graphics chip supplier $1.5 billion in licensing fees as part of a six-year agreement, according to CNet.

"For the future use of Nvidia's technology, Intel will pay Nvidia an aggregate of $1.5 billion in licensing fees payable in five annual instalments, beginning on 18 January 2011," Nvidia said.

Furthermore, Nvidia and Intel have agreed to drop all outstanding legal disputes between them.

Major technology companies should manage to keep up sales and profit growth in 2011, but economic troubles in the US and Europe could temper results, reports Reuters.

Intel and other sector heavyweights are expected to keep expanding, albeit at a slower pace than in 2010, when the industry enjoyed a rebound following the US recession.

Heavy suppliers of tech to US corporations, such as Oracle, should enjoy a resurgence of corporate spending in the first half, while select consumer-centric companies should also do well.