Business Tech

Benioff plays keynote martyr, markets Salesforce wares

SAN FRANCISCO--Salesforce.com CEO and Chairman Marc Benioff is not happy with Oracle, and he didn't mince words one bit during his last-minute rescheduled keynote speech, which he gave across the street from Oracle OpenWorld 2011 on Wednesday morning.

Benioff's earlier planned OpenWorld keynote was canceled abruptly by Oracle on Tuesday afternoon with an offer to reschedule for 8 a.m. PT on Thursday--basically when the conference was ending.

Nevertheless, Benioff used that exact incident as a jumping point for describing what's wrong with Oracle OpenWorld and the company putting on the show. He gave his own more

RIM execs don't want to buy stock either, report says

Research In Motion's top executives, including co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, have not purchased any of the company's shares on the open market since last year, a new report claims.

According to Bloomberg, which compiled data on stock purchases made by RIM executives, none of the company's "insiders" has acquired shares on the open market since July 2010. Over the last year and a few months, those people have, however, sold off stock "at least 11 times," Bloomberg's research has found.

From a personal financial perspective, the move may have behooved RIM's executives, considering more

HP's Whitman: I'll decide PC biz fate this month

Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman plans to make a decision on the future of her company's PC division sooner rather than later.

She served that notice yesterday at Fortune magazine's Most Powerful Women Summit in Laguna Niguel, Calif. According to Reuters, which was in attendance at the event, Whitman told the audience that she planned to make a call on the fate of the PC division, known internally as the Personal Systems Group, "much faster" than former HP Leo Apotheker planned to, adding that she'd like to make her decision "by the end of October."

In August, HP more

Apple stock feels impact of iPhone 4S

Investors were put off yesterday by Apple's underwhelming iPhone news. Today we'll see if their overall infatuation with Apple kicks back into gear.

Shares slumped yesterday following the unveiling of the iPhone 4S--there had been widespread and fervent expectation of an "iPhone 5"--but intraday trading showed things could have been worse.

At around 10 a.m. PT yesterday when Apple CEO Tim Cook took the stage at his company's Cupertino, Calif., headquarters, Apple's shares started to inch lower. When Apple announced the iPhone 4S, and as it became abundantly clear that an iPhone 5

Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce.com and onetime close friend of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, said he has been removed as a speaker from Oracle's OpenWorld conference going on this week in San Francisco, and he blames Ellison for the move.

"Larry just cancelled my keynote tomorrow! Beware of the false cloud," Benioff said in a Twitter post this evening. Despite the cancellation, Benioff seemed undeterred, announcing that he had moved his appearance to the St. Regis. "The show must go on! Sorry Larry!"

In a statement on the matter, Oracle characterized the move as a scheduling more

Adobe brings programmable 3D pizazz to the Web

Now that the Web-standards bug has bitten Adobe Systems, the company is starting to produce some very interesting new technology.

The newest example, revealed at the Adobe Max show this week, are CSS shaders.

This newly proposed standard, developed in cooperation with CSS pioneers Opera and Apple, brings a common 3D graphics ability to the Cascading Style Sheets technology for controlling Web page formatting.

Shaders are small programs run by computers' graphics chips for games and other graphics-intensive applications. Shaders come in two varieties: vertex shaders, which control the geometry of the vertices used to construct the 3D surface meshes, more

HP gains control of Autonomy

Hewlett-Packard said today it has gained control of Autonomy via a cash tender offer.

The company said that it has acquired more than 87 percent of Autonomy for £25.50 ($39.72) per share in cash.

With the deal, which has been derided for being too expensive by analysts, HP gains 25,000 customer accounts and can pursue its plan to beef up its software unit.

Autonomy is seen as a specialist in managing unstructured data. HP CEO Meg Whitman said Autonomy allows the company "to manage and extract meaning from that data to drive insight, foresight and better decision more

Adobe: We've got the Touch for tablets

After dipping its toes in the water with some limited-scope mobile apps, Adobe Systems is taking the plunge today with six programs for Android Honeycomb tablets, including the company's flagship brand, Photoshop.

The programs, each to debut in November with a $10 introductory price, fall under the new Adobe Touch Apps brand. And they tie in with the new Adobe Creative Cloud, a service for sharing files, finding services, and transferring works from the tablet apps to Adobe's Creative Suite apps running on traditional computers.

Along with Photoshop Touch, the other apps are Collage, Debut, Ideas, Kuler, and

Adobe buys PhoneGap, TypeKit for better Web tools

Using a tried and true method to make up for lost time, Adobe is acquiring two companies, Nitobi and TypeKit, to give it more strength in a fast-moving area where it's playing catch-up.

For years Adobe advocated its Flash Player technology for advanced Web design, but now it's wholeheartedly on board with the biggest alternative, Web standards including HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Today, in conjunction with its Adobe Max developer and designer conference populated with the very people wrestling with that transition, the company announced the two acquisitions.

Overall, both acquisitions make sense strategically. Each gives Adobe a solid new starting point for aspects of new-age technology. Terms weren't disclosed, though, so it's not clear whether Adobe had to pay a premium for the companies. The TypeKit acquisition is complete, but the Nitobi buy is subject to closing conditions that should be met this month, Adobe said.

Nitobi makes PhoneGap, an open-source programming tool for creating Web apps that run on a variety of mobile phones. That aligns well with the cross-platform approach Adobe has favored with Flash: give programmers the ability to create what they want, and let the tools worry about the differences from one system to another.

Adobe Systems, racing to match surging interest in a new generation of Web standards, is adding today a significant advance for its Edge software for Web design: interactivity.

A third public preview version of the software with the feature is set to debut today on Adobe Labs. The release is timed with Adobe Max, the company's conference for developers and designers, which begins today.

"Interactivity is the most requested functionality thus far," said Mark Anders, the Adobe fellow who leads the Edge project. With it, Edge changes from a tool that essentially spruces up a page as it loads more