COMPANIES

The Indian unit of Japan based leading car maker Nissan Motors has launched the diesel variant of its compact hatchback Micra in the Indian market. The new model has been put in the price bracket of Rs 5.59 lakh to Rs 6.05 lakh (ex-showroom Delhi).

Chronology: Key events that highlight Apple's march this year

Barcelona Football Club have ended a 111-year old tradition of refusing commercial shirt sponsorship by signing a five-year €150m deal with the Qatar Foundation

Rodman & Renshaw initiated exploration company Energy Partners Ltd. (NYSE:EPL) with a Market Outperform rating and a target price of $18, saying its turnaround story is worth another look.

Rodman and Renshaw initiated coverage of Ballantyne Strong, a maker of theatre and lighting systems, with a 'market outperform' rating, saying the shift of motion picture industry to digital bodes well for the company.

Patent collecting company Intellectual Ventures, which was started by former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold, has filed patent lawsuits against nine companies.

Ford Motors will invest $600 million to transform its Louisville Assembly Plant into a state-of-the-art facility to build the Escape and create 1,800 new jobs, the carmaker said in a statement.

Nissan Motor and Mitsubishi Motors Co will allow drivers of their electric vehicles to share battery chargers at their 2,900 dealerships nationwide in a bid to increase the popularity and convenience of the eco-friendly cars, report said.

Mitsubishi Motors Corp on Thursday announced its plans to invest $532 million in a new Thailand plant, where it will manufacture 'global small' cars in March 2012.

comScore (NASDAQ:SCOR) said online holiday spending in the United States exceeded $17.5 billion for the first 35 days of the November-December shopping season. Free shipping surged to more than 50 percent of all the E-Commerce transactions.

New shares of Chinese online video broadcasting company Youku (NYSE:YOKU) are selling like it's 1999.

Chinese banks are going public. But why are these banks raising money, and are they good investments?

Chronology: Key events that have punctuated Oracle's handling of Java this year.

For the first time, a private company has successfully launched a spacecraft to orbit and returned it to Earth.

The value of U.S. homes is expected to decline by more than $1.7 trillion during 2010, following a drop of more than $1 trillion in 2009, according to data from Zillow Real Estate Market Reports. Since the market peak of June 2006, U.S. housing has lost $9-trillion in value.

General Electric (GE) is very close to bringing out the 'Electric Bus of the Future', which is mooted to be cost-effective solution for electrification of buses, delivery trucks, off-highway vehicles and other heavy-duty vehicles.

Toyota Tsusho Corp, the trading company part-owned by Toyota Motor Corp will build a rare earth processing plant in India to secure supply sources outside China.

British packaging company DS Smith Plc said first half pretax profit rose 17.5 percent, helped by strong volume and revenue growth in the recycled packaging business.

Salesforce is on the roll as the enterprise cloud-computing company announced that it has acquired Heroku, a company that offers Ruby platform-as-a-service (PaaS), for $212 million cash, just a day after releasing Database.com, the first cloud-based enterprise database.

Google released its Chrome OS-based beta notebook Cr-48 for a select group of testers after announcing the light-weight, web-centric browser last summer.

The South Korean government has unveiled a plan to nurture the eco-friendly vehicle industry and plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

British IT services company Micro Focus International Plc reported a 63 percent rise in pretax profit for the first half as revenue rose and the company lifted its interim dividend by 28.6 percent to 7.2 cents.

The Indian domestic passenger car sales jumped by 20.79 percent to 161,497 units in November, compared to 133,703 units during the same period year ago, according to data released by Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers.

Ford Motor Company and Azure Dynamics have begun shipping the first Ford Transit Connect Electrics to early customers in North America and to the United Kingdom for a demonstration project.

The electric propulsion system of Nissan's all-electric car Leaf has been named among the 10 best engines for 2011 by Ward's AutoWorld magazine.

British building and support services firm Carillion Plc expects annual revenue to be lower than last year's $5.4 billion pounds, citing the reduction in UK construction, the sale of non-core business and equity investments in Public Private Partnership projects.

The much-hyped year-end bonuses offered by Cravath Swaine & Moore and other U.S. law firms are not all that great as they come with conditions attached.

A Pennsylvania-based law firm has been sued for using non-lawyers to review, sign and file foreclosures that caused people to lose their homes.

A three-judge bench of the Second District Court of Appeal in Lakeland, Florida, has ruled that pasting of face photos of 11- and 12-year old children over the heads of nude adult women doesn't amount to child pornography.