Business Tech

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison will receive a base salary of $1 for fiscal 2010, according to a regulatory document filed Friday.

That's a decrease of $999,999 from last year. But Ellison won't exactly be starving. He is the world's fourth wealthiest person, according to Forbes.

And according to Oracle's filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Ellison's base pay of $1 million in fiscal 2009 only accounted for 1.2 percent of his total compensation anyway. Ninety-seven percent was in the form of stock.

Still, Ellison's new $1 base pay puts him on … Read more

Intel has quietly snapped up two software companies in the last 30 days with aim of boosting development of applications that take better advantage of chips with more than one processing core.

In a company blog, the chipmaker indicated the acquisition of Cilk at the end of last month and then Rapidmind earlier this week. Both are small companies that employ under 50 people. The acquisitions follow the purchase of software company Wind River Systems in June.

"Over the last few years, there has been a gradual emergence of multicore microprocessors. It's put parallelism in more and more … Read more

Sony is taking the game console wars down a notch with its new machine's belt size.

The electronics giant finally took the wraps off the much-rumored PS3 Slim and gave it the more affordable $299 price tag consumers have been clamoring for.

Sony Computer Entertainment CEO Kaz Hirai performed the unveiling at a press conference Tuesday in Cologne, Germany, preceding the opening of the Gamescom Expo.

The Slim is hitting stores September 1 in North America and Europe. Hirai says the device has the same features and functions as the "old" PS3 but is 33 percent smaller, … Read more

This was originally published at ZDNet's Between the Lines.

Salesforce.com delivered strong second-quarter results and upped its financial targets for fiscal 2010.

The software company on Thursday reported net income for the fiscal quarter, which ended July 31, of $21.2 million, or 17 cents a share, on revenue of $316 million, up 20 percent from a year ago. Wall Street was expecting earnings of 15 cents a share on revenue of $312.7 million.

In a statement, Salesforce said that it added 3,900 net paying customers to hit a total of 63,200. Net paying customers … Read more

Google officially rolled out its Apps Script functionality for enterprise users Wednesday, following a limited pilot release earlier this year.

Google Apps Script works mainly within the Spreadsheets app to automate various processes. For example, users can automate the sending of e-mails based on data held in a spreadsheet, or create scripts that communicate with other Web services.

"Back in May we announced a pilot release of Google Apps Script, and after thousands of hours of use, and lots of valuable feedback, we're excited to launch Google Apps Script to all Google Apps Premier and Education Edition customers … Read more

Updated on August 23 at 6:45 a.m. PDT: adding updated $299 price of Toshiba laptop.

Netbooks based on Intel's Atom processor faced a fresh assault this week: the $279 AMD-based Acer laptop.

Here's the $299--or this case, the $279---question: do you want a Netbook or a Notebook?

The choice: a Netbook with a 10-inch screen, an Intel Atom processor, no optical drive, and Windows XP that weighs about two pounds? Or, a notebook with a 15.6-inch screen, a higher-performance AMD or Intel processor, an optical drive, and Windows Vista that weights about six pounds?

On … Read more

Some selected Chrome users who want to synchronize browser bookmarks with their other browsers now can get a start.

Xmarks, whose browser addition can keep bookmarks synced across Firefox, Internet Explorer, and the Mac OS X version of Safari, has released an alpha version of a Chrome extension to selected testers.

"We've been swamped with requests to create a version of Xmarks for the Google Chrome browser. We're hard at work on that and, thanks to some new APIs (application programming interfaces) from Google, are pleased to report that we have Xmarks synchronization working in the Windows … Read more

Memory chip makers will offer more sophisticated flash drives for smartphones--technology that will be comparable to the solid-state drives found in laptops today.

Today's flash drives, which typically range up to 32GB in capacity in products like Apple's iPhone, often use relatively unsophisticated techniques for reading and writing data. In general, the technology is not very different from that used in basic cell phones or digital cameras, according to Brian Shirley, vice president of Micron's memory group.

But as smartphones--and possible future tablet devices--become more like personal computing devices and less like basic MP3 players, memory chip … Read more

Microsoft has released a free trial of its cloud-based relational database.

The community technology preview (CTP) of SQL Azure Database was made available Tuesday, along with a preview of an SQL Server driver for building PHP applications for the Azure platform.

The Azure Services Platform, first announced at a developer conference last year, is Microsoft's move into the rapidly growing cloud-computing market. As with all cloud platforms, the idea is to provide scalable, hosted services on a pay-per-use basis, running remotely in Microsoft's data centers.

SQL Azure Database, a key component of the platform, is a rival to … Read more