Business & Tech

Tech Roundup: Mitt Romney Visits Solyndra; Cisco Sues TiVo

A roundup of news stories to come out of the Milpitas tech world over the past week.

Mitt Romney visited backrupt on Thursday, toting a political message. The solar company, backed by half a billion dollars of Stimulus Package money, was a sign of Obama’s economic failure, he said. Still, the Associated Press questioned if all of the claims Romney made about the Solyndra bankrupcy, which occurred last Fall, were correct.

Cisco filed a lawsuit to void four TiVo patents, or receive a court order that states TiVo and its DVRs are not infringing them. In a lawsuit filed on Wednesday, the company stated that TiVo resisted granting a broad license for its technology, fearing doing so would stymie its ability to bring lawsuits over its parents.

During the first quarter of 2012, server shipments slowed around the world. But Cisco was the dramatic outlier, with its shipments jumping 70 percent in the first quarter compared to the same time last year. In general, server shipments worldwide grew by only 1.5 percent this quarter. The top three server vendors (IBM, Dell and HP) all saw their shipments decline.

This week, Milpitas-based Nanometrics announced a share repurchase program of up to $20 million of the company’s common stock. Effective immediately, the program is to be funded with the company’s $95.5 million of available cash.

Despite its lower-than-anticipated earnings for the first quarter, analysts are predicting that SanDisk shares will almost double. The vast improvement is due to increased demand for flash-memory in the smartphone market.


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