Agence France-Presse(AFP)

Agence France-Presse (AFP) is a French news agency, the oldest one in the world, and one of the three largest with Associated Press and Reuters. It is also the largest French news agency. Currently, its CEO is Emmanuel Hoog and its news director Philippe Massonnet.
AFP is based in Paris, with regional centres in Washington, Hong Kong, Nicosia, São Paulo, Montevideo and bureaux in 110 countries. It transmits news in French, English, Arabic, Spanish, German, and Portuguese.
The agency was founded in 1835 by a Parisian translator and advertising agent, Charles-Louis Havas as Agence Havas. Two of his employees, Paul Reuter and Bernhard Wolff, later set up rival news agencies in London and Berlin respectively. In order to reduce overheads and develop the lucrative advertising side of the business, Havas’s sons, who had succeeded him in 1852, signed agreements with Reuter and Wolff, giving each news agency an exclusive reporting zone in different parts of Europe. This arrangement lasted until the 1930s, when the invention of short-wave wireless improved and cut communications costs. To help Havas extend the scope of its reporting at a time of great international tension, the French government financed up to 47% of its investments. When German forces occupied France in 1940, the news agency was taken over by the authorities and renamed the French Information Office (FIO); only the private advertising company retained the name Havas.

Intel Corporation

Intel Corporation  is an American global technology company and the world's largest semiconductor chip maker, based on revenue.It is the inventor of the x86 series of microprocessors, the processors found in most personal computers. Intel was founded on July 18, 1968, as Integrated Electronics Corporation (though a common misconception is that "Intel" is from the word intelligence) and is based in Santa Clara, California, USA. Intel also makes motherboard chipsets, network interface controllers and integrated circuits, flash memory, graphic chips, embedded processors and other devices related to communications and computing. Founded by semiconductor pioneers Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore and widely associated with the executive leadership and vision of Andrew Grove, Intel combines advanced chip design capability with a leading-edge manufacturing capability. Originally known primarily to engineers and technologists, Intel's "Intel Inside" advertising campaign of the 1990s made it and its Pentium processor household names.

Intel was an early developer of SRAM and DRAM memory chips, and this represented the majority of its business until 1981. While Intel created the first commercial microprocessor chip in 1971, it was not until the success of the personal computer (PC) that this became their primary business. During the 1990s, Intel invested heavily in new microprocessor designs fostering the rapid growth of the computer industry. During this period Intel became the dominant supplier of microprocessors for PCs, and was known for aggressive and sometimes controversial tactics in defense of its market position, particularly against AMD, as well as a struggle with Microsoft for control over the direction of the PC industry. The 2010 rankings of the world's 100 most powerful brands published by Millward Brown Optimor showed the company's brand value at number 48.
Intel has also begun research in electrical transmission and generation.

Adobe Systems

Adobe Systems Incorporated  is an American computer software company headquartered in San Jose, California, USA. The company has historically focused upon the creation of multimedia and creativity software products, with a more-recent foray towards rich Internet application software development.

Adobe was founded in December 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke, who established the company after leaving Xerox PARC in order to develop and sell the PostScript page description language. In 1985, Apple Computer licensed PostScript for use in its LaserWriter printers, which helped spark the desktop publishing revolution. The company name Adobe comes from Adobe Creek in Los Altos, California, which ran behind the house of one of the company's founders.Adobe acquired its former competitor, Macromedia, in December 2005, which added newer software products and platforms such as Coldfusion, Dreamweaver, Flash and Flex to its product portfolio.

As of August 2009, Adobe Systems has 7,564 employees,about 40% of whom work in San Jose. Adobe also has major development operations in Orlando, FL; Seattle, WA; San Francisco, CA; Orem, UT; Ottawa, Ontario; Minneapolis, MN; Waltham, MA; San Luis Obispo, CA; Hamburg, Germany; Noida, India; Bangalore, India; Bucharest, Romania; Beijing, China.

Bing

Bing (formerly Live Search, Windows Live Search, and MSN Search) is a web search engine (advertised as a "decision engine")from Microsoft. Bing was unveiled by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on May 28, 2009 at the All Things Digital conference in San Diego. It went fully online on June 3, 2009, with a preview version released on June 1, 2009.
Notable changes include the listing of search suggestions as queries are entered and a list of related searches (called "Explorer pane") based on[4] semantic technology from Powerset that Microsoft purchased in 2008.
On July 29, 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced a deal in which Bing would power Yahoo! Search.


"Bing is often referred to as a recursive acronym for BING Is Not Google"
History of Bing:-
MSN Search:

MSN Search was a search engine by Microsoft that comprised a search engine, index, and web crawler. MSN Search first launched in the third quarter of 1998 and used search results from Inktomi.

Windows Live Search 
The first public beta of Windows Live Search was unveiled on March 8, 2006, with the final release on September 11, 2006 replacing MSN Search. The new search engine used search tabs that include Web, news, images, music, desktop, local, and Microsoft Encarta.

Live Search

On March 21, 2007, Microsoft announced that it would separate its search developments from the Windows Live services family, rebranding the service as Live Search. Live Search was integrated into the Live Search and Ad Platform headed by Satya Nadella, part of Microsoft's Platform and Systems division. As part of this change, Live Search was merged with Microsoft adCenter.
Yahoo! search deal
On July 29, 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced that they had made a 10-year deal in which the Yahoo! search engine would be replaced by Bing. Yahoo! will get to keep 88% of the revenue from all search ad sales on its site for the first five years of the deal, and have the right to sell adverts on some Microsoft sites. Yahoo! Search will still maintain its own user interface, but will eventually feature "Powered by Bing" branding.

Apple Inc

Apple Inc.(previously Apple Computer, Inc.) is an American multinational corporation that designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. Apple software includes the Mac OS X operating system; the iTunes media browser; the iLife suite of multimedia and creativity software; the iWork suite of productivity software; Aperture, a professional photography package; Final Cut Studio, a suite of professional audio and film-industry software products; Logic Studio, a suite of music production tools; and iOS, a mobile operating system. As of August 2010, the company operates 301 retail stores in ten countries, and an online store where hardware and software products are sold.

Established on April 1, 1976 in Cupertino, California, and incorporated January 3, 1977, the company was previously named Apple Computer, Inc., for its first 30 years, but removed the word "Computer" on January 9, 2007, to reflect the company's ongoing expansion into the consumer electronics market in addition to its traditional focus on personal computers. As of September 25, 2010, Apple had 46,600 full time employees and 2,800 temporary full time employees worldwide and had worldwide annual sales of $65.23 billion.

For reasons as various as its philosophy of comprehensive aesthetic design to its distinctive advertising campaigns, Apple has established a unique reputation in the consumer electronics industry. This includes a customer base that is devoted to the company and its brand, particularly in the United States.Fortune magazine named Apple the most admired company in the United States in 2008, and in the world in 2008, 2009, and 2010. The company has also received widespread criticism for its contractors' labor, environmental, and business practices.

industry: Computer hardware,Computer software,Consumer electronics,Digital distribution



Key people Steve Jobs (Co-founder, Chairman, CEO)
                      Tim Cook (COO)
                     Peter Oppenheimer (CFO)
                       Bob Mansfield  (Mac and iPhone Hardware Engineering)
                         Jonathan Ive (Industrial Design)

Nvidia

Nvidia  is a multinational corporation which specializes in the development of graphics processing units and chipset technologies for workstations, personal computers, and mobile devices. Based in Santa Clara, California, the company has become a major supplier of integrated circuits (ICs), designing graphics processing units (GPUs) and chipsets used in graphics cards, in personal-computer motherboards, and in video game consoles.
Notable Nvidia product lines include:
the GeForce series for gaming
the Quadro series for computer-aided design and for digital content creation (DCC) on workstations
the nForce series of integrated motherboard chipsets
the Tegra for mobile devices.


Three people co-founded Nvidia in 1993:[2]
Jen-Hsun Huang (As of 2008 CEO), previously Director of CoreWare at LSI Logic and a microprocessor designer at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)
Chris Malachowsky, an electrical engineer who worked at Sun Microsystems
Curtis Priem, previously a senior staff engineer and graphics chip designer at Sun Microsystems

Facebook

Facebook is a social network service and website launched in February 2004 that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. As of July 2010 Facebook has more than 500 million active users,[Users may create a personal profile, add other users as friends and exchange messages, including automatic notifications when they update their profile. Additionally, users may join common interest user groups, organized by workplace, school, or college, or other characteristics. The name of the service stems from the colloquial name for the book given to students at the start of the academic year by university administrations in the US with the intention of helping students to get to know each other better. Facebook allows anyone who declares themselves to be at least 13 years old to become a registered user of the website.
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. The website's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It gradually added support for students at various other universities before opening to high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over.
A January 2009 Compete.com study ranked Facebook as the most used social network by worldwide monthly active users, followed by MySpace. Entertainment Weekly put it on its end-of-the-decade "best-of" list, saying, "How on earth did we stalk our exes, remember our co-workers' birthdays, bug our friends, and play a rousing game of Scrabulous before Facebook?" Quantcast estimates Facebook has 135.1 million monthly unique U.S. visitors.

Advanced Micro Devices(AMD)

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD)  is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Sunnyvale, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for commercial and consumer markets. Its main products include microprocessors, motherboard chipsets, embedded processors and graphics processors for servers, workstations and personal computers, and processor technologies for handheld devices, digital television, automobiles, game consoles, and other embedded systems applications.


AMD is the second-largest global supplier of microprocessors based on the x86 architecture and also one of the largest supplier of graphics processing units. It also owns 8.6% of Spansion, a supplier of non-volatile flash memory In 2009, AMD ranked eighth among semiconductor manufacturers in terms of revenue.

Founded 1969

Founder(s) W. Jerry Sanders III
Edwin J. Turney
Additional co-founders
Headquarters One AMD Place, Sunnyvale, California, U.S.
Area served Worldwide
Key people Bruce Claflin
(Executive Chairman)
Derrick R. Meyer
(President) (CEO) (Director)
Products Microprocessors Motherboard chipsets ,Graphics processors,DTV decoder chips,Handheld                      media chipsets