Shares of Apple (AAPL) are down more than 20% in the past three months from highs in the $700 range. Despite guiding for a record holiday quarter, Wall Street continues to be split on Apple’s future. Some analysts expect the company’s success to continue while others have argued that “people overbelieved in Apple.” Rob Cihra of Evercore Partners thinks the company will report record sales on January 23rd when it posts its fourth quarter earnings results. In a recent note to investors picked up by Apple Insider, the analyst estimated that Apple could report having sold 50 million iPhones in the fiscal first quarter, representing a 35% year-over-year increase and 86% growth from the previous quarter. He also believes the company may have

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Big-budget games such as Halo 4 and Call of Duty: Black Ops II might brag about how they rule the Xbox 360 in terms of sales, but indie games can also compete – if they’re addictive enough and offer enough value. Take Minecraft, an indie game developed by Markus “Notch” Persson’s company Mojang. According to Mojang, Minecraft, an indie game originally made for PC and ported to the Xbox 360 seven months ago has sold 4,476,904 copies as of the end of November with 40,000 to 60,000 copies sold every week. Minecraft is an anomaly because it doesn’t boast high-definition graphics that ooze of detailed lighting effects and didn’t cost millions of dollars to make, and yet it is the third-most played game on Xbox LIVE. According to Gamasutra’s analysis and

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(Reuters) - Eastman Kodak Co agreed to sell its digital imaging patents for about $525 million, a key step to bringing the photography pioneer out of bankruptcy in the first half of 2013. The deal for the 1,100 patents allows Kodak to fulfill a condition for securing $830 million in financing. The patent deal was reached with a consortium led by Intellectual Ventures and RPX Corp, and which includes some of the world's biggest technology companies, which will license or acquire the patents. Those companies are Adobe Systems Inc, Amazon. ...

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SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Cloudera, a distributor of software that helps companies analyze big data, said it has raised $65 million in new funding. The company is part of a growing group of businesses that help dig into the vast trove of data created by digital sources such as sensors, posts to the Internet, pictures and videos. The field caught investor attention when Splunk, another data analytics firm, held an initial public offering earlier this year and doubled in price on its first trading day. ...

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(Reuters) - Eastman Kodak Co agreed to sell its digital imaging patents for about $525 million, a key step to bringing the photography pioneer out of bankruptcy in the first half of 2013. The deal for the 1,100 patents allows Kodak to fulfill a condition for securing $830 million in financing. The patent deal was reached with a consortium led by Intellectual Ventures and RPX Corp, and which includes some of the world's biggest technology companies, which will license or acquire the patents. Those companies are Adobe Systems Inc, Amazon. ...

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Appconomy, Inc., developer of the Appconomy Commerce Cloud platform and mobile apps, announced today the launch of its JinjinTM mobile marketplace in China.Shanghai, China (PRWEB) December 20, 2012 The Jinjin marketplace launched in two of China’s most strategic markets, Beijing and Shanghai, the nation’s capital and the country’s largest city, respectively. ...

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Apple (AAPL) on Monday announced that it sold more than 3 million iPad mini tablets during the device’s debut weekend. The tablet, which starts at $329, launched on Friday after preorder inventory sold out on Apple.com in three days. Developing…

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SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Facebook Inc Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg sold $3.75 million worth of stock in the company on Tuesday, her second stock sale since trading restrictions on insiders expired last week. Sandberg sold roughly 176,000 Facebook shares for an average price of $21.24 on Tuesday, according to a regulatory filing on Thursday. Sandberg still owns nearly 19 million vested shares of Facebook, the world's No.1 Internet social network, according to the filing. Last week, Sandberg sold roughly $7.4 million worth of Facebook stock. ...

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(Reuters) - Spotify is in the middle of a $100 million financing round that could value the music streaming company at just over $3 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported citing sources. The Journal said Spotify would raise the fresh capital from multiple investors including Goldman Sachs. The WSJ report did not name any other investors. Spotify has raised capital from outside investors several times since it set up shop in 2006, and was earlier reported to have been looking to secure a capital boost of about $200 million, at a valuation of about $4 billion. ...

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SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Facebook Inc Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg and two other executives at the social networking company sold millions of dollars worth of stock this week as restrictions on insider trading expired. Sandberg netted about $7.44 million by selling roughly 353,000 Facebook shares on Wednesday, according to a filing with the SEC on Friday. Sandberg still owns roughly 20 million vested shares of Facebook stock, including shares held in her trusts, according to the filing. ...

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BOSTON/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Citigroup fired its top Internet analyst, Mark Mahaney, and paid a $2 million fine to a Massachusetts regulator to settle charges that the bank improperly disclosed research on Facebook IPO and information on other tech companies. It was the first formal charge involving an underwriter's disclosure of sensitive financial information ahead of the social media company's $16 billion initial public offering in May. ...

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A headless humanoid robot clambers noisily through an obstacle course with the grim, unfeeling purpose of a terminator. Luckily, it's just the latest video celebrating the official start of a U.S. military challenge to create robots that can work alongside humans in disaster scenarios.

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Citigroup has paid a $2 million fine and fired a junior analyst after the employee leaked confidential information about Facebook's initial public offering to a popular tech blog.

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A headless humanoid robot clambers noisily through an obstacle course with the grim, unfeeling purpose of a terminator. Luckily, it's just the latest video celebrating the official start of a U.S. military challenge to create robots that can work alongside humans in disaster scenarios.

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BOSTON/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Citigroup fired its top Internet analyst, Mark Mahaney, and paid a $2 million fine to a Massachusetts regulator to settle charges that the bank improperly disclosed research on Facebook IPO and information on other tech companies. It was the first formal charge involving an underwriter's disclosure of sensitive financial information ahead of the social media company's $16 billion initial public offering in May. ...

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SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder and Facebook Inc's first outside investor, is close to investing roughly $150 million in Airbnb in a deal that would value the lodging rental start-up at about $2.5 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. Details of the investment round, which has not yet closed, was first reported by the Wall Street Journal on Friday. ...

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A Northern California jury on Tuesday found Toshiba guilty of conspiring to fix prices of liquid crystal displays. Customers brought a civil lawsuit against the Japanese company and other LCD providers earlier this year alleging anti-competitive practices. While most other defendants settled the case out of court, Toshiba decided to fight the allegations in a San Francisco federal court. The company will now be forced to return $70 million to consumers who bought various products, and pay $17 million to manufacturers who used its LCD panels. “There was strong evidence that Toshiba participated in the price-fixing conspiracy through communications with other TFT-LCD manufacturers, and that it received future pricing information from its competitors, shared its own future information, and was aware

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SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Apple Inc has more retail stores in Pennsylvania than in all of China - where it earns a fifth of its revenue - and a slow pace of expansion may cost the firm more than just sales. Apple's six stores in Greater China are routinely packed, and customers often wait in long lines for iPhone repairs. Scalpers are known to camp out to be first in line for new products, which they then re-sell for a tidy profit. ...

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SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Apple Inc has paid $60 million to Proview Technology (Shenzhen) to end a protracted legal dispute over the iPad trademark in China. The lawsuit had hampered some sales and delayed the introduction of the new iPad in China. Prior to the launch, Proview requested authorities in scores of Chinese cities to order resellers to take all iPads off their shelves. The court-mediated settlement, announced on the website of the Higher People's Court of Guangdong province, will allow Apple to get on with selling its popular tablet PC in one of its most important markets, analysts ...

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A federal jury on Monday awarded $956 million to U.S. media group Liberty Media after concluding that the French entertainment group Vivendi deceived it in a decade-old deal involving the USA Networks.

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