Intel Gives Lukewarm Revenue Forecast

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Court gives Post-Gazette OK to intervene in healthcare litigation

PITTSBURGH, Pa. (AP) - U.S. District Judge Joy Flowers Conti today granted the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's motion to intervene in a legal thicket involving the city's biggest health care players, in which some 70 documents are now hidden from public view.

DealBook: Best Buy Gives Founder More Time to Make a Bid

4:20 p.m. | Updated

Best Buy plans to give its founder a reprieve from holiday shopping.

The electronics retailer said on Friday that it would give its founder, Richard Schulze, until Feb. 28 to make a takeover bid for the company. That will give Mr. Schulze and his private equity partners the chance to review holiday sales before making their bid.

Best Buy cautioned that its founder may not make a bid, and that it may turn down any offer that is made.

Shares of the retailer closed down nearly 15 percent on Friday, to $11.75, as investors appeared worried that the chances of a successful takeover were growing remote.

Mr. Schulze remains the single biggest shareholder, with a roughly 20 percent stake, but analysts and investors have questioned whether he can line up the requisite equity and debt financing.

He has reached tentative agreements to partner with a number of leveraged buyout firms — currently including Cerberus Capital Management, Leonard Green & Partners and TPG Capital — to aid him in his campaign, a person briefed on the matter said. But any offer is unlikely to come close to the $8.8 billion that he initially floated.

The announcement comes as shares in Best Buy have fallen steadily in recent months, down 33 percent over the last three months. Even with the holiday shopping season in full swing, the retailer is expected to struggle against online competitors like Amazon.com and bigger rivals like Wal-Mart Stores.

Analysts suspect that consumer will continue to use Best Buy stores as “showrooms” to play around with products, before buying them more cheaply elsewhere. That’s despite efforts by the company’s relatively new chief executive, Hubert Joly, to entice shoppers with redesigned stores and improved customer service.

The company said last month that its same-store sales fell yet again, as it reported a $10 million loss in its third quarter.

F.D.A. Gives Early Approval to Leukemia Drug Iclusig

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Bits Blog: Test Run: Burner, a Mobile App That Gives You Disposable Digits

Early Monday morning I got a mysterious text message from an unfamiliar number. It contained two pieces of information: another unknown number and a winky emoticon.

A weird message or two is not enough to unnerve me, but something about the timing (7 a.m.! On a Monday!) and the flirty face tacked on the end (anyone who truly knows me knows of my passion for emoji) seemed extra suspicious. I wanted to investigate further — but without involving my personal cellphone number any more than it already was.

So I downloaded an app called Burner that I’ve had my eye on for a while but hadn’t had a reason to use. After you sign up, Burner supplies you with a disposable mobile number for those times when you need a little bit more discretion. You can to do with it what you please — like coordinate with someone on Craigslist to buy a used item, set up a blind date, freak out your friends and text strange numbers to see if you can uncover who is behind them.

Digital subterfuge, at least the temporary kind that Burner provides, will cost you: the app itself is $1.99 and comes prepackaged with 20 free voice minutes or 60 free text messages. Additional talk time and texts can be purchased through the app itself. But having a thin layer of privacy between yourself and the rest of the world, when needed, is hard to put a price on and it was worth spending two dollars to interact with two people I did not know.

For what its worth, I never got a satisfactory answer from either number. One recipient never responded, and the other said her name was “Cathy,” which, in an ideal world, could be more viral marketing for R. Kelly‘s hip-hopera collaboration “Trapped in the Closet,” but is more likely the result of a mistyped number or a misfired text. Either way, it was freeing and satisfying to be stealthy in a world where that is increasingly difficult.

Test Run will be a regular feature on Bits that looks at interesting and new mobile applications, gadgets and Web services.

Bits Blog: RIM Shows Off New BlackBerry Phones, but Gives No Release Date

Eric Risberg/Associated Press Thorsten Heins, the president and chief executive of RIM, did not offer a specific date for the coming line of BlackBerry 10 phones.

OTTAWA — Research in Motion said on Tuesday that its coming line of BlackBerry 10 phones would include the company’s popular BlackBerry Messenger service, a feature still absent on its tablet computers.

But during his presentation to software developers in San Jose, Calf., Thorsten Heins, the president and chief executive of RIM, still did not offer a specific date for what he called “our most important launch ever.” Mr. Heins said, however, that the new phones, which have been delayed twice, will be on sale at some point early next year.

At the meeting, the company displayed the second version of a prototype BlackBerry 10 phone. Outwardly, it appeared little different from a prototype given to developers in May. But the software on the phone demonstrated on Thursday looked much more refined and advanced. In addition to BlackBerry Messenger, it included apps for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Foursquare, which were integrated with the phone’s calendar, datebook and e-mail apps.

RIM also showed how corporations and governments would be able to segregate their data and app from users’ personal selections and information.

The software linking all the features, Mr. Heins said, will allow users to perform a variety of tasks from a single screen without switching applications.

Although creating new phones and a new operating system has clearly been a struggle for the company, Mr. Heins made no effort to temper expectations.

“We are convinced that the BlackBerry 10 platform will shape the next 10 years as profoundly and significantly as BlackBerry shaped the last 10 years,” he said. Recent demonstrations of the prototype to people at telephone companies and elsewhere, he said, have made “believers out of those who had previously written BlackBerry off.”

Still, the success of the new phones remains to be seen. On Thursday, Mr. Heins will have to face a much less cheery group, RIM’s investors, when he announces the company’s second-quarter results. A Bloomberg survey of 35 analysts found that they expected the company to report that earnings fell 41 percent from the same period last year.

Leading up to Tuesday, some analysts speculated that the total number of BlackBerry users had not grown or had even declined during the quarter, which would have been a first for the company. But Mr. Heins said RIM had counted 80 million BlackBerry users during the quarter, up from 78 million the last time the company reported.