Sumner Lemon

Singapore will dramatically expand its use of technology to build closer ties with citizens, part of a S$2 billion (CDN$1.4 billion) plan to take e-government to the next level, officials announced Tuesday.

China will soon become the second-largest market for Sony Corp.'s electronics division, eclipsing sales from the company's home market in Japan, a senior executive said Tuesday.

Last week's firing of a prominent Chinese academic for faking the development of one of China's best-known chips is an embarrassing setback for a government that sees high-technology research and development as key to the country's economic future.

Cisco Systems Inc. has teamed up with Hanoi University of Technology (HUT) to open a research and development (R&D) lab in Vietnam, the company said Friday. The Networking R&D Lab is backed by Cisco's University Research Program and will be run by HUT's Bach Khoa Networking Academy.

After months of preparation, Google Inc. formally opened its Beijing research and development (R&D) center this week, the company said Thursday. Google hopes the R&D center will house up to 150 engineers by the middle of this year, said Debbie Frost, a company spokeswoman.

Chinese Internet censors take more than a week to identify and block access to sites that allow Internet users to circumvent their controls, according to a top executive at Anonymizer Inc. That's good news for Anonymizer, which recently introduced its Operation: Anti-Censorship software that allows Chinese Internet users to access blocked sites.

Now that Lucent Technologies Inc. and Alcatel SA have reached a definitive merger agreement, the two companies have their work cut out for them over the next year or so to make the deal work, according to one analyst.

U.S. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez will meet with senior Chinese government officials Tuesday as part of a two-day visit to Beijing focussed largely on protecting intellectual property (IP) rights in China and preparations for upcoming trade talks between the two countries, the U.S. embassy said.