Sharp Corp. is increasing production of solar panels at its factory in Japan to meet burgeoning global demand for the products, it said Monday.

With Internet Explorer, Microsoft has increased its share of the global Web browser market to 85.85 percent, a gain that comes at the expense of Mozilla's Firefox and Apple Computer's Safari browsers.

By 2010, processor performance will increase 300 percent per watt as users demand eight times more grunt for encoding.

Europe's third largest chip maker will sell its semiconductor unit to a group of private investment firms in a deal worth ?8.3 billion (US$10.6 billion), increasing the pace of consolidation in the industry.

Intel Corp. unveiled its new Core 2 Duo processor lineup on Thursday, increasing the pressure on rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD). The 10 new dual-core chips promise markedly better performance and greater energy efficiency than Intel's existing products.

With energy efficiency as the standard, Intel Corp. has announced a new multicore architecture that aims to address consumers' increasing need for better price and higher performance per watt for notebooks, desktops, and servers.

Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. increased their market share in the online search arena as Microsoft Corp.'s MSN slipped, according to Web research firm Nielsen//NetRatings.

The amount of malware coming from China rose 153 percent during the last six months of 2005, Symantec Corp. reported Tuesday.

Facing increased competition throughout its line of processors, chip giant Intel Corp. warned on Friday that its first-quarter revenue would be lower than expected.

Sharp Corp. confirmed Monday that it plans to raise LCD (liquid crystal display) panel production capacity at one of its factories in Japan by 20 percent.

McAfee Inc.'s auditor, Deloitte & Touche USA LLP, may be thinking of buying some security software itself, after a Deloitte employee left an unencrypted CD containing sensitive information on thousands of McAfee employees in the back of an airline seat last December.

Intel Corp.'s poor performance in the last three months of 2005 turned out to be good news for rival chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices Inc., (AMD) which on Wednesday reported better-than-expected financial results for the period. With sales of AMD's microprocessor division increasing nearly 80 percent from the previous year, the company reported revenue of US$1.84 billion.

Sharp Corp. is planning to increase production at its two LCD (liquid crystal display) factories in Japan in response to anticipated soaring demand for flat-panel LCD televisions over the next few years, it said Wednesday. The company also expects to report record sales in 2006.

Information theft scammers are increasingly spoofing SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificates in a bid to fool Web users, Netcraft Ltd. reports.