San Francisco

Venture capitalists invested ,5-billion in 2006, marking the industry’s biggest burst of deal-making in the United States since the dot-com bust clogged the financial spigot for entrepreneurs five years ago. Renewed interest in internet start-ups, combined with expanding opportunities in the healthcare and alternative energy markets, spurred a 12% increase from the ,8-billion invested in 2005.

Cisco Systems on Wednesday sued Apple over its use of the iPhone trademark, a day after Apple shook up the cellphone market by unveiling its sleek mobile phone using the name claimed by Cisco. Shares of Apple, which are volatile, initially fell 1,3% in after-hours trade following the announcement and then pared the loss to less than half a percent.

Technology heavyweight Microsoft will unveil an online library on Thursday that will compete with Google’s controversial project to digitise the world’s books, the company said. Microsoft said it would launch a United States test of Live Search Books featuring tens of thousands of out-of-copyright books.

Internet search giant Yahoo! announced on Tuesday that it was revamping its structure and management to better cash in on its popularity and potential as an advertising vehicle. Dan Rosensweig will step down as chief operating officer in March of next year and the company will be divided into three groups, one devoted to technology and two that will be ”customer focused”, according to Yahoo!

Information technology giant IBM on Wednesday said it agreed to pay -million to settle a class action lawsuit concerning overtime pay. International Business Machines said that litigation ”would have been lengthy, burdensome and expensive, and IBM chose to resolve it.”

The long-rumoured arrival of a hybrid cellphone and iPod music player from Apple has morphed from a question of ”if” to ”when” among fans and analysts. Since the introduction of the iPod five years ago, the company has sold more than 67-million of the devices and more than 1,5-billion songs from its iTunes online music store.

Microsoft announced on Tuesday a plan to give holiday-season computer buyers discounts on upgrades to its Vista operating system and new-generation Microsoft Office suite due out next year. The software giant’s aim was to overcome reservations of shoppers inclined to strip their year-end gift lists of products based on soon-to-be outdated Microsoft software.

A hacker who as a teen cracked the encryption on DVDs has found a way to unlock the code that prevents iPod users from playing songs from download music stores other than Apple Computer’s iTunes. Jon Lech Johansen, a 22-year-old Norway native who lives in San Francisco, cracked Apple’s FairPlay copy-protection technology, said Monique Farantzos, managing director at DoubleTwist.

Google’s stock price surged to a nine-month high on Friday, reflecting Wall Street’s deepening admiration of the internet search leader as it continues to make extraordinary growth look routine. The Mountain View-based company’s shares climbed as high as ,10 before falling back slightly to close at ,67.

Google is converting its renowned headquarters to run partly on solar power, hoping to set an example for other businesses in the United States. The internet search leader announced what is believed to be the largest solar project undertaken by a US company during a solar energy conference in Silicon Valley on Monday.

Former Hewlett-Packard chairperson Patricia Dunn will fight ”false” criminal charges against her ”with everything she has,” her lawyer said on Wednesday. ”Today, in California, Pattie Dunn was charged with various offences. These charges are being brought against the wrong person at the wrong time and for the wrong reasons,” her lawyer Jim Brosnahan said in a statement here.

Google is introducing a new search service — strictly for computer programmers only. The web search leader said late on Wednesday it is introducing Google Code Search, a site that simplifies how software developers search for programming code to improve existing software or create new programs.

Google News is getting a sense of the past to balance out its relentless focus on the present. Google has added the ability to search through more than 200 years of historical newspaper archives alongside the latest contemporary information now available on Google News, the market-leading web search firm said on Tuesday.

Silicon Valley ranks dead last in an annual ranking of 12 United States technology hubs because of the region’s notoriously high housing costs, traffic congestion, high unemployment rate and other quality-of-life problems. The valley is one of the few global tech hubs that dominate both the technology and life-sciences industries.