...Chris Coles, chief executive of HyperQuality, a company that monitors customer service calls, suggested asking for a name early in the conversation, because if it turns ugly and you angrily demand identification, the customer service agent is more likely to hang up or give you false information...

When Hewlett-Packard Co. announced the $2.7 billion purchase of 3Com Corp., it let the world know that H-P intends to compete fully with Cisco Systems Inc. in the corporate data center. With its strength in Ethernet, 3Com gives HP a major piece of the pie, but it still needs a few more slices if it wants to be a one-stop-shop for data centers. One such slice it might go after next is application acceleration, said Catharine Trebnick, a senior research analyst with Avian Securities.

James Gimzewski, UCLA Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry and a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA, was today elected a 2009 fellow of Britain's prestigious Royal Society in recognition of his scientific excellence.

UCLA has opened its new technology incubation space within the California NanoSystems Institute to Matrix Sensors Inc., a startup company in the process of developing multichannel gas and biological sensor systems based on technology developed jointly by UCLA and Stanford University researchers.

Western Digital Corp. (NYSE: WDC), a world leader in hard drive storage for computing and consumer electronics applications, today announced that it has completed a $65 million cash acquisition of SiliconSystems, Inc., Aliso Viejo, Calif., a leading supplier of solid-state drives for the embedded systems market.

...FastSoft's technology requires no hardware or software at the data's destination points, and accelerates transfers by optimizing the TCP protocol to be more intelligent in pacing and maintaining the flow of the data, the vendor says. FastSoft promises to improve transmission speeds by as much as a factor of 30, without requiring that the data's endpoints be controlled or that caching or compression be used.