IBT Staff Reporter

Shares of companies active in Friday's early trade are: Research In Motion, Finish Line, Accenture, JetBlue Airways, Holly, Western Refining, Embraer, Hitachi, SYNNEX and HealthSpring.

The doors of the Geneva Motor Show have just slid open and immediately throngs of reporters and camera crews scramble to reach Fiat's stand. The Italian carmaker is unveiling the Freemont, one of its first models to borrow from the Chrysler playbook since it took a stake in the Detroit auto giant after its 2009 bankruptcy.

Moody's credit rating for Portugal depends heavily on the country maintaining strong commitment to consolidating its finances, the rating agency said on Friday.

Arsenal Dutch striker Robin van Persie has blasted Premier League competitors Chelsea and Manchester City branding the two big spending clubs as big mouths.

The late legendary actress Elizabeth Taylor got a private burial Thursday at Forest Lawn in Glendale, Calif.

Reports are coming from Japan that one of the six reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant may have suffered a breach to the reactor containment vessel.

Stocks were poised for a higher open on Friday as an upbeat outlook from Oracle boosts technology stocks.

The economy grew more quickly than previously estimated in the fourth quarter as businesses maintained fairly solid spending and restocked shelves to meet rising demand.

Just like Lady Gaga promised she released Born This Way (The Country Road Version) on Twitter Friday morning.

European leaders gave themselves until June to finalize an increase in their temporary bailout facility at a summit, failing to deliver the broad package they had promised to resolve their debt crisis.

The economy grew more quickly than previously estimated in the fourth quarter as businesses maintained fairly solid spending and restocked shelves to meet rising demand.

Portugal's president started to consult leaders of political parties on Friday as he weighs whether to call a snap election after the Socialist prime minister resigned.

BP and Rosneft , Russia's largest oil company, have been blocked by an arbitration panel from forming an alliance to explore for oil in the Russian Arctic and executing a $16 billion share swap.

Shares of Oracle Corp rose 5 percent on Friday, a day after the world's third-largest software maker forecast solid sales of new business software, signaling strength against Hewlett-Packard and IBM in data center and cloud computing businesses.

During its fourth-quarter earnings call, Research In Motion revealed that its upcoming BlackBerry Playbook tablet would be compatible with applications developed for Google's Android operating system.

BP boss Bob Dudley has come under fire after an Arctic exploration deal with Russian group Rosneft was blocked by the British oil company's partners in joint venture TNK-BP.

Stock index futures rose on Friday, supported by technology shares after Oracle gave an upbeat forecast.

China's customs authorities detained a Glencore trader as part of an investigation into the potential evasion of millions of dollars in taxes on fuel imports, sources with direct knowledge of the situation said on Friday.

The triple disaster in Japan and the ongoing turmoil in the Middle East and North Africa likely would have only a limited impact on the global economy - provided the twin shocks of higher oil prices and the supply chain disruptions from Japan do not get much worse, market research firm IHS said.

The star of CES 2011 Motorola Xoom has ushered in the age of Android 3.0 or Honeycomb and brought about super specifications like killer camera's and dual-core processors to the limelight faces but now faces stiff competition from the new slimmer Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1.

Oxford University Press has announced number of new internet-borne linguistic additions, signaling yet another way in which tradional mediums are adapting to the rapid linguistic changes caused by online communication.

Blizzard co-founder Frank Pierce said that their continued success would depend on the development of a really talented team with some of the best developers in the industry and that they were trying to see if some of it could be nurtured internally.

Stock index futures rose on Friday, supported by technology shares after Oracle gave an upbeat forecast.

JPMorgan Chase & Co boss Jamie Dimon and Coca-Cola CEO Muhtar Kent were among top global executives to visit Tokyo this week to meet with local staff coping with the devastating earthquake and radiation panic that hit the city.

In a series of postings from mid to late February on 51Jobs.com (the Monster.com of China), VanceInfo Technologies Inc. (NYSE: VIT) has advertised numerous positions for onsite assignments at Yahoo China. VanceInfo is an information technology (IT) service provider and an offshore software development company in China.

Loose monetary policies in developed economies will place more upward pressure on global commodity prices and weigh on the dollar this year, the Chinese central bank said on Friday.

Hundreds of customers formed long lines outside Apple stores on Friday for the international launch of the iPad 2, which has flown off the shelves in the United States and left the company struggling to meet demand.

The collapse of an asset bubble will not necessarily lead to higher unemployment as long as monetary policy is loose enough, a top Federal Reserve Bank official said on Friday.

Merck & Co Inc. (NYSE: MRK)'s shingles vaccine Zostavax is now approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for people aged 50 and older. Zostavax was originally approved on May 2006 to prevent herpes zoster, commonly known as shingles, in individuals 60 years of age and older.