Archive for May 9th, 2008

Citigroup Inc. said Friday it planned to unload $400 billion in assets over the few years as the beleaguered banking icon aims to reinvigorate itself.

Oil leaped into unchartered territory Friday, soaring past the $126-a-barrel mark for the first time, and leaving analysts and investors wondering how high the price will go.

Even as Clear Channel's day in court draws near, the broadcast and advertising conglomerate's $20 billion privatization deal appears less and less likely.

A decade ago Akamai was not much more than a handful of scientists at MIT trying to come up with an approach that would rid the Internet of congestion. The only glitch was that in 1998 there wasn't any congestion on the Internet. Today, of course, it all makes sense. The Internet is getting jammed as more people conduct their business, find information, or simply get entertained online. The Akamai team's foresight and the solutions they have concocted are now a business that booked $636 million in sales in 2007, with a profit just north of $100 million. The company, based in Cambridge, Mass., was No. 48 on our 2007 list of fastest-growing companies and is projected to break $1 billion in revenue in 2009. Not bad for an outfit that solved a problem nobody knew we had.

Record oil and gas prices and a big quarterly loss for Dow component AIG were among the factors pressuring stocks Friday morning.

Stocks slumped Friday morning, as record oil and gas prices and a big quarterly loss for Dow component AIG gave investors a reason to retreat.

Each year, Weddle's (www.weddles.com), a major U.S. publisher of print guides to Internet job hunting, invites the public to visit its Web site and vote for their favorite job boards. The 30 sites with the most votes at the end of the year are declared the winners of the Users' Choice Awards. It's not a scientific survey, since those polled are a self-selected sampling and tend to feel strongly about certain sites, both pro and con.

When Microsoft walked away from its blockbuster bid for Yahoo, the media sought desperately to keep the news coming even when there wasn't much left to say. That seems to be how The Wall Street Journal came up with the notion that Microsoft had approached Facebook about an acquisition. It's not true.

The nation's trade gap narrowed in March, as a weakened U.S. economy led to the sharpest decline in Americans' demand for foreign imports in more than six years, according to a government report released Friday.

Citigroup Inc. said Friday it planned to unload $400 billion in assets over the few years as the beleaguered banking icon aims to reinvigorate itself.