Business in brief: DSL provider gets new name

Eastern Washington phone line and DSL provider CenturyTel is renaming itself CenturyLink. Customers in Washington will see little immediate change other than rebranded signs and logos, company spokesperson Kim Valiquette said.

CenturyTel has phone and business service customers in Lincoln and Adams counties and across the West Plains. Most of its Eastern Washington phone line customers are in Cheney, Medical Lake, Reardan, Spangle, Edwall and Davenport.

The new name reflects the merger of CenturyTel, based in Monroe, La., with Embarq, based in Overland Park, Kan.

Tom Sowa

Networking site to host party

The owners of a regional business networking Web site, LaunchPad Inland Northwest LLC, plan to host a LaunchPad Oktoberfest party Friday at 4 p.m. at the Lincoln Center, 1316 N. Lincoln St. in north Spokane.

This year’s winners of the Catalyst business and technology awards will be announced at the event, which will take place in association with Technet and Greater Spokane Inc.

Awards are scheduled to be announced at 5 p.m., with networking continuing until 9 p.m., said Bill Kalivas, one of the owners and managers of LaunchPad Inland Northwest.

Admission is $15 per person; registration is required through launchpadinw.com.

Tom Sowa

‘Nook’ eyes Kindle market

New York – Barnes & Noble Inc. unveiled a new electronic-book reader Tuesday that will compete with Amazon.com’s Kindle.

Closer to a printed book than its precursors in some respects, the “nook” allows users to lend their copies of electronic books to any friend who has installed Barnes & Noble’s e-reader application on a mobile device or personal computer.

The wireless nook, which runs on Google Inc.’s Android platform and comes with 2 gigabytes of memory built in, also can store and play MP3 audio files and photos.

The reader is available on Barnes & Noble’s Web site for $259 – same as the recently reduced Kindle.

Associated Press

Server maker plans job cuts

San Francisco – Sun Microsystems Inc. plans to eliminate up to 3,000 jobs, or 10 percent of its worldwide work force, as it awaits a takeover by Oracle Corp., a deal being held up by antitrust regulators in Europe.

The layoffs Sun outlined Tuesday in a regulatory filing are the latest in a series of job cuts at the world’s No. 4 server maker.

Sun has already cut about 7,600 workers in the past three years in three rounds of layoffs.

Associated Press