Honduras

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras – A powerful earthquake toppled more than two dozen homes in Honduras and Belize early Thursday, killing at least four people and injuring 40 as terrified residents spilled from their homes across much of Central America.

The magnitude-7.1 quake struck at 2:24 a.m. (4:24 a.m. EDT; 0824 GMT) off the Caribbean coast of Honduras, 80 miles (130 kilometers) northeast of the beach town of La Ceiba, according to the U.S. Geological Survey in Golden, ColoradoProxy-Connection: keep-alive
Cache-Control: max-age=0

3C/p>

"People were running for the door," Alfredo Cedeno said from the reception desk at the Gran Hotel Paris in La Ceiba. "You could really feel it and you could see it — the water came out of the pool."

Twitter co-founders

Twitter Inc.'s co-founders say the rapidly growing online communications company will eventually charge fees for its services, but it's unclear which ones and what will drive revenue.

"There will be a moment when you can fill out a form or something and give us money," said Evan Williams, co-founder and chief executive officer.

"We're working on it right now," Williams said at The Wall Street Journal's D: All Things Digital conference.

Williams and Twitter co-founder Biz Stone mentioned possible revenue-generators, including a service that would authenticate the source of information. For example, Dunkin' Donuts could pay to make sure that impostors don't send messages under its name.

Facebook making money

Facebook is getting a $200 million investment from a Russian Internet investor that values the social networking company at $10 billion.

The investment gives Digital Sky Technologies a nearly 2 percent stake in the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company's preferred stock. The deal presumes the company is worth $10 billion.

This is below the $15 billion valuation implied by a 2007 investment from Microsoft Corp., even though Facebook has substantially grown since then. However Facebook's own appraisal after the Microsoft deal gave the company a market value of about $3.7 billion, according to details revealed in a legal settlement.

Intel Corp. was fined a record $1.45 billion

Intel Corp. was fined a record $1.45 billion by the European Union on Wednesday for using strong-arm sales tactics in the computer chip market — a penalty that could turn up the pressure on U.S. regulators to go after the company, too.

The fine against the world's biggest chip maker represents a huge victory for Intel's Silicon Valley rival, Advanced Micro Devices Inc., or AMD, the No. 2 supplier of microprocessors to PC makers.

AMD has sued Intel and lobbied regulators around the world for the past five years, complaining that Intel was penalizing PC makers in the U.S. and abroad for doing business with AMD.

Although the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is also investigating, AMD seems to have found its most sympathetic ear in Europe.

EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said Intel has harmed millions of European consumers by "deliberately acting to keep competitors out of the market."

Environmental alarms raised over home electronics

Charge your iPod, kill a polar bear?

The choice might not be quite that stark, but an energy watchdog is alarmed about the threat to the environment from the soaring electricity needs of gadgets like MP3 players, mobile phones andflat screen TVs.

In a report Wednesday, the Paris-based International Energy Agency estimates new electronic gadgets will triple their energy consumption by 2030 to 1,700 terawatt hours, the equivalent of today's home electricity consumption of the United States and Japan combined.

The world would have to build around 200 new nuclear power plantsjust to power all the TVs, iPods, PCs and other home electronics expected to be plugged in by 2030, when the global electric bill to power them will rise to $200 billion a year, the IEA said.

Consumer electronics is "the fastest growing area and it's the area with the least amount of policies in place" to control energy efficiency, said Paul Waide, a senior policy analyst at the IEA.

Electronic gadgets already account for about 15 percent of household electric consumption, a share that is rising rapidly as the number of these gadgets multiplies. Last year, the world spent $80 billion on electricity to power all these household electronics, the IEA said.

Microsoft to raise $3.75B in first debt offering

Microsoft Corp. priced a $3.75 billion debt offering on Monday, a first for the world's largest software maker.

Microsoft said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that it is offering five, 10 and 30-year senior unsecured notes. In a press release, the company said it will sell $2 billion of 2.95 percent notes due June 1, 2014; $1 billion of 4.20 percent notes due June 1, 2019 and $750 million of 5.20 percent notes due June 1, 2039.

The software maker said it will use proceeds from the sale for general corporate purposes, including possible acquisitions and stock buybacks.

Last September, Microsoft's board authorized it to take on up to $6 billion in debt. Standard & Poor's Rating Services gave Microsoft an "AAA" corporate credit rating.

The authorization came just before interest rates soared. Microsoft, which is sitting on more than $25 billion in cash, could afford to wait until rates came down to make a move.

Corporate debt offerings dropped off last fall but picked up again in January. Microsoft's issue comes on the heels of offerings byWhirlpool Corp., Nokia Inc. and Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc.

Asking a machine to spot threats human eyes miss

The surveillance cameras at Big Y, a Massachusetts grocery chain, are not just passively recording customers and staff. They're studying checkout lines for signs of "sweethearting."

That's when cashiers use subtle tricks to pass free goods to friends: obscuring the bar code, slipping an item behind the scanner, passing two items at a time but charging for one.

There simply aren't enough watchful human eyes to keep it from happening. So Big Y is using technology to block it — with implications far beyond dishonest cashiers.

Mathematical algorithms embedded in the stores' new security system pick out sweethearting on their own. There's no need for a security guard watching banks of video monitors or reviewing hours of grainy footage. When the system thinks it's spotted evidence, it alerts management on a computer screen and offers up the footage.

The possibilities that researchers envision for this kind of technology have the ring of science fiction. Think of systems that spot abandoned packages on a train platform or alert an airline crew to a potential terrorist on board. Already, cities like Chicago have invested in "anomaly detection" cameras around town, linked to emergency headquarters. The city plans to announce this week that it is using the technology at Navy Pier, one of Chicago's best-known attractions.

But just how smart have these cameras really become?

Verizon wireless

Verizon Wireless has shortened the period in which it demands exclusive rights to new cell phones from LG and Samsung, to give small rural carriers a better chance to sell up-to-date phones.

Rural carriers have complained that big carriers like Verizon andAT&T Inc. lock up hot phones with "exclusivity periods" that can last for years.

Verizon spokesman Jeffrey Nelson said the company two months ago started allowing LG and Samsung to sell their phones to rural carriers six months after the devices' launch at Verizon.

The Associated Carrier Group, which represents rural wireless carriers, says Verizon's move is encouraging, but in practice, its members can't start selling the phones six months after Verizon. The companies need to modify the phones' software to work on their networks, which can take more time.

Nintendo profits 8.5%

Nintendo's annual profit rose 8.5 percent, propelled by its hitWii and DS game machines, but a forecast for lower sales shows even the resilient video game maker isn't totally immune to the global slump.

Still, Nintendo is faring much better than other big name Japanese manufacturers like Toyota Motor Corp. and Hitachi Ltd., both forecasting record annual losses, lending weight to president Satoru Iwata's boast the game maker is "recession free."

The company said Thursday it racked up a record 279.09 billion yen ($2.8 billion) net profit for the fiscal year ended March 31, up from 257.34 billion yen the previous year.

Fiscal year sales edged up 9.9 percent to 1.839 trillion yen from 1.672 trillion yen, with overseas sales accounting for 87.5 percent, according to the Kyoto-based maker of Pokemon and Super Mario games.

20% of US homes have cell phones no landlines

For the first time, the number of U.S. households opting for only cell phones outnumber those that just have traditional landlines in a high-tech shift accelerated by the recession.

In the freshest evidence of the growing appeal of cell phones, 20 percent of households had only cells during the last half of 2008, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey released Wednesday. That was an increase of nearly 3 percentage points over the first half of the year, the largest six-month increase since the government started gathering such data in 2003.

The 20 percent of homes with only cell phones compared to 17 percent with landlines but no cells.

That ratio has changed starkly in recent years: In the first six months of 2003, just 3 percent of households were wireless only, while 43 percent stuck to landlines.

E-Marketing

Online retailers are shifting their marketing from traditional advertising to less expensive tools like Facebook.comand Twitter and e-mail as they seek market share or just work to retain customers, according to an industry study being released Tuesday.

Conducted by Internet analysis firm Forrester Research forShop.org — the online arm of the trade group National Retail Federation — the survey found that merchants believe online business is better suited to withstand an economic downturn than physical stores or catalogs, though they acknowledge challenges for both.

The study involved 117 online retailers polled between Feb. 18 and April 1.

The companies, which Shop.org didn't name, reported scaling back hiring and their increasingly expensive search marketing programs, which include paying for top billing in the results consumers see for their Web searches. Online merchants whose business is beating expectations will likely fuel much of the e-commerce investments in the coming months, the survey found.

Windows 7 near done

Microsoft Corp. has released a near-final version of the Windows 7 operating system that adds a few new features, including a way to run Windows XP applications.

The Windows 7 "release candidate" was made available to a large group of technology-savvy testers Thursday and will be ready for anyone to download and try out starting Tuesday. The release candidate is typically the version used by Microsoft's corporate customers to test how the new system will work for them. Software developers, hardware makers and other partners also base their next-generation products on this version because they trust that it's stable and close to finished.

Microsoft published the Vista release candidate about five months before the final version went on sale to consumers. If Windows 7 were to follow the same trajectory, it could be available by the start of October. Officially, Microsoft expects to start selling Windows 7 by the end of January 2010, but has said this week that it is possible it could launch in time for the holiday shopping season.

The software maker is counting on Windows 7 to win over businesses that put off upgrading to Vista, which got off to a rough start because it didn't work well with many existing programs and devices.