Business Tech

Former Netscape executive Mike Homer lost his battle with a rare brain disease on Sunday, reported Kara Swisher of All Things D. He was 50.

Homer suffered from Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, a degenerative and fatal neurological disorder that leads to dementia (a variant is known as mad cow disease).

Among other things, Homer steered the creation of Netscape Communications' Netcenter portal until Netscape's acquisition by America Online. The Silicon Valley stalwart also worked at Apple.

Before his illness, Homer had been investing in and mentoring a series of start-ups. But he had also been focusing on philanthropy and spending time … Read more

Updates at 9:10 a.m., 9:45 a.m., 10:30 a.m., 10:40 a.m., 11:25 a.m., and 12:15 p.m. PST: Google's and StopBadware.org's numerous responses added. Rewrites have been made throughout to sum up the issue.

For about an hour on Saturday morning, Google listed every site on the Internet as malware.

After the initial problem was fixed, it took a couple of hours to iron out who actually was to blame--Google or a nonprofit known as StopBadware.org.

TechCrunch and CNET reported around 7 a.m. PST that … Read more

Google released a second beta of its toolbar software for Firefox that gives the browser a prominent feature of Google's own Chrome.

In Chrome, when you open a new tab, the browser displays a page with up to nine miniature versions of pages you visit often--a selection of what you've shown to be your collective home page. The new beta version of Toolbar 5 does the same for Firefox, including not just the miniature pages, but also the list of recent bookmarks and recently closed tabs that Chrome shows.

There are still no ads, though, which I wonder … Read more

Citrix Systems, the business software company behind the Xen hypervisor, said it plans to cut 10 percent of jobs despite being "pleased" with its fourth-quarter results.

Overall revenue for the fourth quarter increased from $400 million (300 million pounds) to $416 million, the company said on Wednesday, even though revenue from product licenses fell by 9 percent. Revenue from license updates was up by 13 percent, and online service revenue grew by 18 percent compared with the same quarter the previous year. Net income for the fourth quarter was $60 million, calculated on a GAAP basis, a drop … Read more

Georgetown University is banning the use of the Windows 7 beta, informing students and faculty it will not support the trial version of Microsoft's latest operating system, according to a report in InformationWeek

The university's information technology group notes it generally does not support any beta version of software, unless otherwise noted.

And in the case of the Windows 7 beta, the Georgetown IT group reiterates Microsoft's warning that the beta could disable security software, as well as cause other hardware, such as printers and video cards, to function incorrectly, according to the report.

The university IT … Read more

Amid what seems to be a never ending stream of dire economic news, a few rays of sunshine poked through the gloom this week.

Amazon.com beat Wall Street's fourth-quarter revenue and earnings expectations, posting strong holiday sales amid a weak economy. The company's CEO, Jeff Bezos, expressed particular gratitude that demand is strong for the company's Kindle e-reader (which, we surmised this week, we may see a new version of on February 9).

In another despite-the-troubled-economy moment, AT&T and Verizon Communications both reported strong growth in their cell phone businesses, as it appears people … Read more

Update at 1:50 p.m. PST, with information from American Guarantee's lawsuit against Intel in the Delaware Chancery Court.

Intel has filed a $50 million lawsuit against insurance carrier American Guarantee and Liability Insurance, alleging breach of contract.

The alleged breach involves the insurance firm's failure to pay for Intel's legal defense related to antitrust lawsuits filed by rival Advanced Micro Devices and consumers.

Intel, in the lawsuit filed last week in the U.S. District Court for Northern California, alleges that American Guarantee did not step up to the plate and begin paying for the … Read more

Updated at 10:45 p.m. PST with additional information about Intellectual Ventures

Intellectual Ventures has acquired the patent portfolio of Transmeta, an erstwhile supplier of low-power Intel-compatible x86 processors.

Intellectual Venture Funding, an affiliate of Intellectual Ventures, has picked up 140 U.S. patents and additional pending patent applications owned by Transmeta, which was acquired by privately held Novafora in November of last year.

The Transmeta technology will be used "through two distinct routes," according to an Intellectual Ventures' statement. Novafora will improve its own proprietary designs by using some of the technologies invented by Transmeta. And … Read more

Googlers who want to revalue their underwater stock options will have to wait until Tuesday for the voluntary employee option exchange program to launch, Google said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday that did not explain why.

The program--which allows allow employees to exchange all or some of their existing stock options for the same number of new options--was scheduled to launch Thursday and end on March 3. Employees were notified of the change in an e-mail sent Wednesday by Laszlo Bock, vice president of People Operations at Google, and which was included … Read more