IBT Staff Reporter

Stocks were little changed on Wednesday, with investors staying cautious on a strong dollar and higher bond yields, but analysts didn't rule out a year-end rally.

Salesforce is on the roll as the enterprise cloud-computing company announced that it has acquired Heroku, a company that offers Ruby platform-as-a-service (PaaS), for $212 million cash, just a day after releasing Database.com, the first cloud-based enterprise database.

Stocks were little changed on Wednesday, with investors staying cautious on a strong dollar and higher bond yields, but analysts didn't rule out a year-end rally.

Yum Brands Inc said China would surpass the United States as the fast-food restaurant operator's top profit generator this year, and the Chinese market's potential is still largely untapped.

Fortune Brands Inc announced plans to spin off or sell its golf and home products units, paving the way for an eventual sale of its most profitable business of alcoholic drinks.

Credit card giant MasterCard and the Swedish prosecutor's office came under cyber attack on Wednesday as WikiLeaks supporters vowed to retaliate for moves against Julian Assange after the release of U.S. diplomatic cables that angered and embarrassed Washington.

From keeping the WikiLeaks site alive to helping British anti-austerity protesters outmaneuver riot police, Twitter is entering the Western political mainstream as a powerful tool for dissent.

The House of Representatives, early this morning, introduced a continuing resolution budget proposal that wraps all the major spending bills Congress has yet to pass into one, while freezing Fiscal Year 2011 discretionary spending at Fiscal Year 2010 levels.

Intel Corp has resumed share buybacks after a pause of more than a year and its chips have been chosen for 35 tablet computers as well as some smartphones, its chief executive said on Wednesday.

A project billed as the first micro-philanthropy website dedicated to U.S. filmmakers, writers, musicians and visual artists was launched on Tuesday, aimed at attracting small public donations to bring artistic projects to life.

Major-economy government bonds fell further on Wednesday, extending Tuesday's sharp losses and driving 10-year US Treasury yields above 3.20%, causing liquidation in commodity markets including Gold and Silver.

International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn on Wednesday said the situation in Europe remained troubling, keeping up pressure on policymakers to find more effective measures to deal with the euro zone's debt crisis.

When two people posted photos several times from the same locations and at the same time, this was a good predictor that those people were socially connected, says a research.

Top home improvement chain Home Depot Inc gave an outlook for the next financial year that could miss Wall Street expectations amid continued weakness in the U.S. economy and its shares fell.

Phillip Hughes has emerged as the most likely replacement for Australia's injured opener Simon Katich for the third Ashes test at Perth after the 22 year-old received the backing of his skipper Ricky Ponting.

Salesforce.com, an enterprise cloud computing company, on Tuesday launched Database.com, which is touted as the world’s first enterprise database built for the cloud.

Gannett Co said it expected to report stronger fourth-quarter earnings and indicated its digital and local newspapers were due to benefit from improved advertising in early 2011.

Steady economic improvement should fuel U.S. stock gains through 2011, according to a Reuters poll of investors and strategists, but international concerns could limit gains in the second half of the year.

French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who was on a four-day official visit to India along with his wife Carla Bruni left for Paris on Tuesday after signing a few deals worth more than $10 billion, which is almost the same as what US President Obama managed during his visit last month.

Netflix Inc reached a deal with ABC Television Group to add past episodes of popular shows Grey's Anatomy, Desperate Housewives and Brothers & Sisters to its online streaming service, the two sides announced on Wednesday.

Hackers, possibly in retaliation for attacks on Wikileaks, forced down the website of the international credit card service MasterCard on Wednesday and warned PayPal they could be next. PayPal has admitted that the US Government was behind the company's decision to sever ties with Wikileaks.

Costco Wholesale Corp posted better-than-expected quarterly profit, helped by strong sales and increased fee revenue as consumers sought out its bulk offerings of food and other items.

Salesforce.com Inc said it has agreed to buy privately held cloud-platform company Heroku for up to $249 million to expand its presence in cloud computing related to social and mobile applications.

Google released its Chrome OS-based beta notebook Cr-48 for a select group of testers after announcing the light-weight, web-centric browser last summer.

McDonald's Corp reported a smaller-than-expected rise in global sales at established restaurants in November as demand was weaker than anticipated in its key domestic market and Japan.

A prominent U.S. business group on Wednesday urged the Obama administration to consider modifying some provisions of a broad-based financial regulatory overhaul that they said hurt American competitiveness.

Bickering among European Union leaders escalated on Wednesday over a proposal for joint euro zone bonds to overcome the bloc's debt crisis, with Germany saying it opposed the idea on legal and economic grounds.

Hackers forced down the website of the international credit card service, MasterCard, on Wednesday. The move is likely to be an apparent revenge by alleged Wikileaks supporters. In what they called Operation: Payback, the anonymous hackers announced on twitter that they successfully brought down the MasterCard website with DDoS attacks. MasterCard had earlier severed ties with the whistle-blower site, suspending all payments to the organization. The website currently remains inaccessible...