UPDATED: Sun confirms that layoff notifications were sent to about 1,300 employees as the result of its action 14th November, 2008. Reductions were made across all levels, including vice presidents and directors, the company says.

U.S. researchers have developed a new type of semiconductor ink that brings companies a step closer to making bendable computer screens or inexpensive sensor tags to help retailers keep track of their inventory. The soluble semiconductor ink is capable of carrying a negative electrical charge, says Polyera CEO Philippe Inagaki.

Intel and Citrix are planning to bring desktop virtualization technologies to a wider enterprise audience by combining their respective capabilities to make running and managing virtual machines within corporate desktops and notebooks easier. Intel and Citrix plan to combine Intel's vPro management and security technology with Citrix's Xen hypervisor and other virtualization applications that will allow IT departments to run several secure virtual machines within the same corporate client. The announcement by Citrix and Intel also looks to counter what VMware plans to offer with its vClient VMware View products.

Seagate has isolated a potential firmware issue in certain products, including some Barracuda 7200.11 hard drives and related drive families based on this product platform, manufactured through December 2008

DiVitas Networks' newest mobile UC platform moves beyond the usual fixed mobile convergence features to include secured instant messaging, presence and visual voicemail. Such features made up for a disappointing set-up experience.

ContentWatch's CP 300 security appliance offers very good content filtering, traffic shaping and anti-malware capabilities, as well as excellent reporting. It also integrates with directory services such as LDAP to let businesses enforce Internet usage policy per person.

The SRP feature in Microsoft Windows doesn't offer the same granularity of control or change management capabilities as whitelisting options from third-party suppliers, but there also are no extra licensing costs and it works well with Windows clients and servers.