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Acer and its former chief executive Gianfranco Lanci may have parted ways for almost a year now, but it is apparently not quite water under the bridge between the two sides.

The Taiwanese company said on Tuesday that it has initiated legal action in Mr Lanci’s home country of Italy, alleging that Mr Lanci violated non-compete clauses in the contract he signed with Acer upon leaving in Febuary 2011 – Mr Lanci joined Lenovo as a consultant in September, and the Chinese company last month announced Mr Lanci would head its Europe, Middle East and Africa operations, effective April.

Chris Nuttall

Apple has finally named a successor to Ron Johnson as head of its retail store operation, choosing John Browett, chief executive of the British electronics retailer Dixons.

Mr Browett (pictured left) will join in April as senior vice president of Retail, reporting to Apple CEO Tim Cook. Mr Johnson was named last June as the new chief executive of JC Penney, the US department store chain.

Apple has done it again. For a brief moment last week, following the announcement that it beat quarterly forecasts with record numbers, the Silicon Valley company once again became the world’s most valuable company.

This time, though, things were different, with Tim Cook, who took over as Apple’s chief executive from co-founder Steve Jobs, now at the helm.

Chris Nuttall

Intel has announced a management reshuffle that provides fresh clues to the eventual successor to Paul Otellini as chief executive.

Brian Krzanich, (pictured left), head of manufacturing, is also taking on a chief operating officer role – a position that has not existed since Mr Otellini held it prior to becoming CEO in 2005.

Chris Nuttall

Livescribe, the digital pen company, has announced a new chief executive, new funding and a new strategy as its founder Jim Marggraff steps down.

Gilles Bouchard, a former senior HP executive, becomes CEO. $10m has been added by existing backers in a new round and the company plans to release a wireless version of its Echo smartpen later this year as it explores cloud services.

Maija Palmer

Facebook has taken the unusual step of making public the names and personal details of five men it believes to be behind the Koobface computer worm that attacked hundreds of thousands of computers through the social network’s profiles.

The alleged gang appear to be living in St Petersburg and were tracked by Facebook and a team of researchers over three years.

Joseph Menn

Smack in the middle of the ultrabook and tablet hoopla from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas comes a sobering report from the market researchers at IDC: PC shipments in the critical fourth quarter were down 0.2 per cent from a year before.

Chris Nuttall

Marvell and One Laptop Per Child will unveil their first tablet prototype at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Sunday evening.

The chipmaker and the non-profit trying to bring affordable computing to schoolchildren worldwide plan to show a fully functional version of the long-awaited X0 3.0, which they describe as “a low-cost, low-power, rugged tablet computer designed for classrooms around the globe”.

Chris Nuttall

Vizio, the TV maker that shook up the US market, is aiming to do the same to the PC industry with the unveiling of a line of notebooks and all-in-one PCs at the Consumer Electronics Show next week.

The California company, which has been swapping the sales top-spot with Samsung in the US LCD TV market,  says the largest product launch in its history will challenge the “sleepy giants” of the PC world in the same way it took on Samsung, Sony and other TV players.

When Acer last March unceremoniously ousted its then-chief executive Gianfranco Lanci, it was not an amicable parting, with both sides apportioning blame on the other for the split.

But if the Taiwanese company had thought they were rid of Mr Lanci by forcing his resignation, then they are sorely mistaken. Mr Lanci was this week appointed the head of Europe, Middle East and Africa by none other Lenovo, Acer’s Chinese rival.

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Richard Waters, Chris Nuttall and April Dembosky in the FT's San Francisco bureau share their views - plus tech insights from Tim Bradshaw and Maija Palmer in London and Robin Kwong in Taipei.

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