Here are some of the news items which caught my eye recently with some commentary:

Nokia predicts the recession and a lack of credit will reduce cell phone sales. Nokia Siemens too says there will be a slowdown next year. The company further thinks the fourth quarter will see industry volumes fall by 20 million. This isn’t too surprising.

Sun is laying off 6,000 workers and with the high-end server market in trouble, some are saying the future of the company is uncertain. Many techies I have spoke with are upset that the company hasn’t been able to better monetize the many great products it has come up with over the years. They say this out of true admiration for Sun.

Oracle is selling an on-demand CRM solution to Olympus America – this is great news for Larry Ellison and company and shows that Oracle can not only sell software but hosted solutions as well. The challenge for Oracle is that they have such a large group of products to sell and promote, it is challenging to get the message out about all of them. Other more targeted SaaS companies are able to focus, focus, focus on SaaS.

American Airlines will now allow cell-phone based boarding passes using bar code technology. This will work on domestic flights out of select airports.

Microsoft is offering 0% financing to business customers in a move to jump-start sales. As I said yesterday, anything companies can do to help customers with financing will help boost sales. In fact, companies who have the capital to do such things are at a serious advantage over other companies who cannot.