REPORT SAYS APPLE TO UNVEIL NEW IPAD IN MARCH: SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A news report says Apple plans to unveil a new iPad early next month.

AllThingsD, a website affiliated with The Wall Street Journal, says Apple Inc. is holding an event in San Francisco the first week of March — the same week Apple announced the iPad 2 last year.

The report cites unnamed people familiar with the device. Apple declined comment Thursday.

It's not known whether the new device will be called the iPad 3, and when it will be available for sale. Last year, sales of the iPad 2 began in the U.S. nine days after the announcement.

Since the first iPad came out in 2010, sales of traditional computers have slowed. Rivals PC and phone makers have been unable to mirror Apple's success with their own tablet computers.

ORACLE TO PAY $1.9B FOR TALEO, EXTENDS SAP RIVALRY: REDWOOD SHORES  (AP) — Oracle Corp. is escalating its rivalry with German business-software maker SAP AG with a $1.9 billion purchase of Taleo Corp., a company that helps businesses hire and manage their employees.

The proposed purchase announced Thursday extends Oracle's offerings in a growing arena of computing known as the cloud. With such an approach, businesses don't run software and services in-house. Instead, those tasks are dispatched over the Internet to remote locations operated by companies such as Oracle, SAP and IBM Corp.

Oracle, which is based in Redwood Shores, Calif., pounced on Taleo just two months after SAP struck a deal to buy a similar Silicon Valley software service, SuccessFactors, for $3.4 billion. It also comes as another rapidly growing company called Workday is emerging as a cloud-computing threat in human-resources software.

US VIDEO GAME SALES FALL 34 PERCENT IN JANUARY: LOS ANGELES (AP) — U.S. retail sales of video game hardware, software and accessories fell 34 percent in January from a year earlier to $751 million due to the lack of new game titles, according to market researcher NPD Group.

NPD analyst Liam Callahan said the dearth of new games likely resulted in fewer people going to stores and buying other recent releases on impulse.

"Shoppers were not drawn to stores due to new launch activity," he said.

Callahan said sales of titles released before the holidays were down 31 percent in January compared to a year ago.

Sales of console and portable software — the video games themselves — fell 38 percent to $356 million.