Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO) is being accused of designing a surveillance system that allow the government in China to monitor and suppress the Falun Gong spiritual group according to a lawsuit filed against the networking and voice company. The lawsuit was filed in the Federal District Court for the Northern District of California in San Jose.

Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO) is shutting down the Flip video camera business. Cisco acquired Pure Digital Technologies about two years ago. About 550 employees in the Pure Digital division will be laid off as part of the restructuring. Cisco said that they are planning to keep supporting Flipshare customers that upload media to the web.

The White House has uploaded some images on Flickr of President Barack Obama’s meeting with the tech titans of Silicon Valley. This photo symbolizes how the meeting went. The meeting was about how these executives plan to support entrepreneurship, increase exports, and strengthen the economy. The executives in this picture includes:

President Barack Obama is making a trip to Silicon Valley today and is meeting with some major tech CEOs. The names of the executives that he is meeting was revealed by the L.A. Times. The meeting will be about supporting entrepreneurship, increasing exports, strengthening the economy, etc. Below is the list of people that he is meeting:

Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE:HPQ) is offering a 20% promotion discount to those who switch from similar services offered by Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO). “Cisco has never seen this level of competition before,” stated HP SVP and General Manager for networking Marius Haas. “We’re not going to let them gain an inch in servers, and we know that they’re going to be losing in networking,”

Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO) will be acquiring DVN (Digital Video Networks) for $44.5 million. Of that $44.5 million, $17.5 million will be paid up front and the rest of the $27 million will be paid based on sales performance. The deal is expected to close by the first half of 2010. DVN has about 160 million subscribers and the company plans to grow by another 200 million customers in the next 3-5 years. DVN will be rolled into Cisco’s International Cable Unit division.

Earlier today Cisco announced that their first quarter profit dropped 19% because of a drop in sales. However Cisco CEO John Chambers said that there are “strong sequential growth trends” as the economy is recovering. The profit posted was $1.79 billion for the quarter. This is down from $2.2 billion the year before. Cisco has recently partnered with VMware and EMC to sell data center products. Cisco plans to repurchase $10 billion worth of stock.

Cisco reported their fourth quarter earlier this week and as analysts expected, they were down.  Sales were $8.5 billion which was down 18% year-over-year, but in the earnings report Cisco CEO John Chambers said that he is starting to see positive signs in the economy.

“Cisco delivered very solid quarterly and annual results in a challenging economic environment, as we continued our focus on disciplined execution and our customers’ success,” stated Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers. “We are confident in our strategic position in both existing and thirty adjacent markets. We saw a number of positive signs this quarter in the economy and in our business, especially comparing our sequential quarter-over-quarter order trends. If we continue to see these positive order trends for the next one to two quarters, we believe there is a good chance we will look back and see that the tipping point occurred in our business in Q4.”

According to Kaufman Brothers analyst Shaw Wu, Cisco is showing some impressive month-to-month progress, but year-over-year comps will definitely be tough.  Cisco also reported a 46% drop in earnings.

[via Cisco PR/BusinessInsider/WSJ]

Earlier this week VMware launched the vSphere “cloud operating system.” The new service attracted the likes of Michael Dell (Dell Inc. CEO), John Chambers (Cisco Systems CEO), Joe Tucci (EMC CEO), and Pat Gelsinger (Intel SVP) to the announcement meeting. Cisco was one of the first companies to work with VMware on the data center expansion. Intel has been a VMware partner for quite some time. And Dell plans to switch to get into the virtualized computing environment.

In conjunction with the launch of vSphere, EMC has launched a path management system software called PowerPath/VE. PowerPath is a software that finds the most optimal I/O path for data traveling through applications and storage resources.

vSphere is able to manage 64 processor cores in one server. VMware’s last system could support only 32 cores. Every day cloud computing is expanding and keeps pushing the limit.