Amazon's Apple war costs $20bn

Amazon.com's escalating pursuit of Apple squeezed its profit forecast for this quarter, prompting investors to erase as much as $20 billion from the company's market value in late trading, according to Bloomberg.

The company is taking on Apple in the tablet market. The last time Amazon suffered an operating loss was in the third quarter of 2001, when it fell $68.9 million into the red.

Despite profit shrinking, revenue is benefiting from surging Kindle orders, [and] net sales increased by 44% to $10.9 billion in the company's last quarter.

Research in Motion (RIM) unveiled BlackBerry Business Cloud Services for Microsoft Office 365, a new company-hosted online service allowing mid-sized businesses to self-manage their BlackBerry deployments, states The Wall Street Journal.

RIM said among the key features of the new service is the ability to access Microsoft Exchange online e-mail, calendar and organiser data from a BlackBerry smartphone and BlackBerry Balance technology.

This offers a unified view of work and personal content on a BlackBerry while keeping the content separate and secure.

The hactivist group Anonymous plans to take down the Fox News Web site on 5 November, according to a new video released recently by the group, says Cnet

The group said it targeted the network for what it called biased news coverage of the Occupy Wall Street protests occurring in cities across the country.

The date - 5 November - is known as Guy Fawkes' day, which remembers a Brit who attempted to blow up Parliament in the Gunpowder plot of 1604. Fawkes was immortalised in a 2006 movie - “V for Vendetta”, where a freedom fighter uses terrorist tactics against a totalitarian society. The mask Fawkes wears has become the symbol for Anonymous.

A leaked internal memo indicates Sprint is dealing with significant problems relating to iPhone data speeds on its network, says TechNewsWorld.

Users are complaining about particularly slow download rates. "Sprint has been offloading much of its data on its [4G] Clearwire WiMax network, but the iPhone doesn't support WiMax, so that means Sprint's CDMA network has to carry all the load," said In-Stat's Allen Nogee.

The problem is that HSDPA is not supported on Sprint's network. Sprint supports CDMS, hence the network can't leverage the iPhone 4S's HSDPA capability.