COMPANIES

Energy infrastructure company Chicago Bridge & Iron Company NV (NYSE: CBI) will buy The Shaw Group Inc. (NYSE: SHAW), a Baton Rouge, La.-based engineering and construction firm, for about $3 billion in cash and stock, the companies said Monday.

After considering formation of a strategic relationship for over a year now, Apple and Twitter are reportedly back in talks about Apple investing in the short-messaging service, Twitter, to gain a toehold in the social-media world. According to the New York Times, Apple is reportedly considering an investment of hundreds of millions of dollars in Twitter, which would raise Twitter's value to $10 billion -- more than $1.5 billion more than its valuation last year.

It's been almost a week since Apple released OS X Mountain Lion, the next-gen operating system for the Mac, and we asked readers to submit any bugs, issues, errors or incompatibilities they've discovered on the platform. Our readers have come through in somewhat alarming numbers. We've sifted through reader submissions and emails to deliver the most common issues reported among Apple users using OS X Mountain Lion on their Macs. At the very end of this story, we have some information ab...

Oracle Corporation (Nasdaq: ORCL) said Monday it will buy Xsigo Systems, a network virtualization technology company, to expand its presence in the cloud computing business. The value of the deal was not disclosed.

For weeks, we have been seeing varying leaked details about Apple's next-generation iPhone, including several pictures purporting to be unassembled parts of the phone. Now, the Chinese-language blog iLab Factory is showing what it claims to be a fully assembled iPhone 5 built from smuggled parts.

In the wake of the release of Samsung's healthy financial results for the second quarter of 2012, research firm IDC let out a new report saying that the South Korean tech giant's smartphone division is considerably ahead of its arch rival Apple and the rest of the competition.

Just 48 hours after Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) launched its latest Macintosh operating system, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, the tech giant has already sold more than 2 million copies of the system, according to industry analysts.

Chick-fil-A may have irreparably damaged its relationship with a core constituency because of its same-sex marriage stance.

The head of public relations at Chick-fil-A died Friday morning of an apparent heart attack, according to the company.

The 2012 Aston Martin V8 Vantage is the coolest car on the road, a fighter-jet dressed up in a tuxedo.

Cleveland Browns owner Randy Lerner admitted on Friday that he is in negotiations to sell the team to Tennessee businessman Jimmy Haslam after months of speculation.

The 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony will draw the world's audience to London on Friday night, but signal an Olympics that will be more glitz than substance for the host city.

The second-quarter earnings season is in full swing and investors will hear next week from several more major players, including AIG, Kellogg, Procter & Gamble, Kraft Foods, Pfizer, Mastercard and General Motors.

Samsung Electronics Co, the world's largest maker of mobile phones, reported a second quarter net income of 5.19 trillion won ($4.4 billion), up from 3.51 trillion won in the same period earlier year, aided by sales of Galaxy smartphones.

During a keynote ceremony today Google officially announced its latest venture: Google Fiber. This move puts the search-engine giant among the likes of companies such as Verizon and Comcast as it rolls out its first service provider service.

Gizmodo reported that an Easter Egg was found in the Mac App Store in OS X Mountain Lion. To see an Easter egg for yourself, every time you download an App from the Mac App Store, check the applications folder and look at the time stamp on the downloading application. It will say January 24 1984 which is Macintosh's birth date.

The idea that a few-hour Twitter outage could have more than a billion-dollar effect on the economy sounds preposterous at first, but some simple math suggests that might be just the case.

Facebook Inc (NYSE: FB), the world's largest social networking platform, on Thursday issued its first quarterly report, disclosing results that slightly beat analyst expectations.

Speaking at an earnings call with analysts, Barry Diller, chairman of IAC/InterActiveCorp, had some pretty grim words to say about what ails the storied magazine and print media as a whole.

A remora is a fish that sticks to the side of a shark. Inventor of FarmVille is the remora in this analogy.

Soybeans are used to make tofu, but did you know they can also be used for tires?

Mac users have been able to play with Apple's new big cat, OS X Mountain Lion, for roughly 24 hours at this point. Though the initial reviews were overwhelmingly positive, we mentioned that it was still early in the day, and as Apple users had a chance to explore Mountain Lion, they would inevitably find some bugs and errors. And that's exactly what happened. Mac OS X Mountain Lion: Apple Users Report More Bugs, Errors, And Incompatibility Issues

Exxon Mobil Corporation (NYSE: XOM), the world's largest publicly traded oil company, said Thursday its second-quarter profit rose 49 percent, helped by a gain related to divestments and tax items.

Nintendo reported another loss Wednesday, saying its revenue has decreased nearly 10 percent year over year. But upcoming releases including the Wii U and the handheld 3DS XL could jump start the troubled company this fall.

Apple beat its own conservative quarterly estimate, reporting a strong jump in earnings and even sold a record number of iPads in Q3, but across the board, Apple did a rare thing: It missed analysts' estimates. Apple can rebound in Q4 if it decides to release its next iPhone, which many are already calling "iPhone 5," as long as the much-rumored "iPad Mini."

Social media is now a $16.9 billion business, according to 2012 estimates by Gartner.

Based on analyst estimates, Merck & Co. will report earnings of $1.01 a share on sales of about $12.16 billion -- an increase of 0.1 percent from the year-earlier quarter. The company posts its second-quarter earnings on Friday, before the opening bell.

The short answer: Many companies lie about their earnings results.

Most Apple fans couldn't wait to download OS X Mountain Lion, the eighth iteration of the OS X software line for Mac, and as a result, the Mac App Store was flooded early Wednesday morning with download requests for the $19.99 upgrade. Most early adopters of Mountain Lion love the beast, but most major software upgrades are not without their fair share of bugs, issues, errors and omissions. Would OS X Mountain Lion suffer the same fate?