Former HP CEO Apotheker to get more than $9.6 million
Outgoing Hewlett-Packard CEO Leo Apotheker will get a severance payment of $7.2 million, plus a $2.4 million performance bonus and additional stock benefits, according to documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday.
Apotheker was recently ousted from the top post at HP after spending just 11 months on the job. Meg Whitman, the former CEO of eBay, has taken over. She will receive a base salary of just $1 per year, the regulatory filing shows.
Apotheker made several decisions during his tenure that drew criticism, including one to spin off HP's PC division, which it announced before it had found a buyer. HP missed its financial targets for the past three quarters and its stock dropped by nearly half while Apotheker was CEO. Read more...
‘Think cloud computing will save you money? Forget it’
Cloud computing is often sold as a way for companies to cut their tech bill by only paying for the IT they use.
Veteran IT chief Ian Cohen has other ideas - telling silicon.com that any company looking at moving to cloud computing purely as a way of saving money should "forget it".
JLT CIO Ian Cohen says any company looking at cloud purely as a way of saving money should "forget it"Photo: Jardine Lloyd Thompson
Cohen is speaking from experience. As group CIO of Jardine Lloyd Thompson (JLT) he is helping the global risk management and insurance broker to make greater use of cloud-based services, such as Salesforce.com's CRM platform.
When businesses shift to cloud services, the oft-talked-about savings won't last, Cohen said, as any reduction in cost or overheads is quickly swallowed up by fresh demand for IT services.
"If you go into cloud thinking you will save money, forget it. What invariably happens is that you create more efficiency and headroom. However, demand that previously could not be met can now be enacted and thus your activities simply increase to fill the available resources - be that time, people or infrastructure," he told silicon.com at Salesforce's recent Cloudforce conference in London.
"People will be using your systems to do more. That's the killer sell as to why people should be looking at cloud: the ability to flex your enterprise into a more extensible model at light speed." Read more...
Euro beaks mull copyright of software features
The European Court of Justice (ECJ) should apply copyright protection to the functions of computer programs, a software company has told it, according to media reports.
SAS Institute Inc claims that World Programming Ltd infringed its copyrights by developing a rival software program it designed using information published in manuals for SAS software. It wants the ECJ to apply copyright protections to the functions of computer programs.
"[Exempting computer program functions from copyright protection would] deprive the copyright owner of a significant part of the value of the protection given to computer programs," SAS's lawyer said, according to a report by news agency Bloomberg. Read more...
With Kindle Fire, Amazon’s digital ambitions burn
Amazon's unveiling of the Kindle Fire tablet computer sends a bright-hot message: The online retailer is ready to rival iPad maker Apple in an effort to be the world's top digital content provider.
It may sound odd coming from a company that pioneered online sales of physical products, selling its first book, Douglas Hofstadter's "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought," in 1995. But since it first entered the digital market in 2006 with its video download store, Amazon has bet consumers will pay for high-quality digital content.
In addition to the millions of actual items it sells, which range from toys to toothbrushes, Amazon's trove of digital content now includes more than 1 million e-books, 100,000 movies and TV shows and 17 million songs. This is about 1 million fewer songs than iPad maker Apple Inc. sells, but more than twice as many e-books and many thousands more TV shows and movies. Read more...
Germans create physical iPhone 5 prototype based on design rumors
We won’t know until Tuesday what Apple’s next iPhone will look like in real life, not officially, at least. But if the rumors or true, we might just have a sneak peek thanks to some highly motivated Germans. The gadget heads at Germany-based technology website Giga.de have created their own iPhone 5 prototype based on a variety of iPhone 5 rumors. That’s right, they made an actual iPhone 5 – or at least something that might look just like one.
The Giga team created a computer mockup based upon “CAD designs, hardware components, several leaked hints, cases and recent, believable mockups,” according to a post on the sit. Their device was made using the same process that’s used to create the iPad, they say, which includes machining the rounded-edge back plate from a solid block of aluminum, which they later treated with glass pearls to give it “the same slightly rough touch” as the iPad. Read more...
Oracle OpenWorld’s burning questions
Oracle's OpenWorld conference, which kicks off Sunday in San Francisco, could be the biggest one yet for the company, which entered the hardware game last year through the purchase of Sun Microsystems and is closing in on $40 billion in revenue.
But the bigger the company, the more questions it has to answer about its future directions and past promises. The tens of thousands expected at OpenWorld and its sister JavaOne conference will be in search of all the details.
An Oracle spokeswoman declined to comment on the company's planned announcements for OpenWorld, but through interviews with industry experts, reasonable speculation and some digging, here's a look at some of the most important questions facing Oracle going into the show. Read more...
PlayBook in trouble, if not dead, says analyst
Research in Motion's PlayBook looks to be in trouble, as it appears that the smartphone maker has stopped production of the tablet and is actively considering getting out of the business, says Collins Stewart semiconductor analyst John Vihn.
"We believe [RIM] has stopped production of its PlayBook and is actively considering exiting the tablet market," Vihn wrote in a note to investors. "Additionally, our due diligence indicates that RIM has canceled development of additional tablet projects."
Vihn noted that Quanta Computer recently laid off workers at one factory that manufactures the PlayBook.
RIM officials did not respond to a request to comment on Vihn's note. Read more...
Mayor Bloomberg calls H-1B visa caps ‘national suicide’
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is calling for "eliminating the cap on H-1B visas" and believes restrictive U.S. visa policies -- particularly the limiting of employment-based green cards -- are a form of "national suicide."
Bloomberg, who spoke Thursday at the U.S Chamber of Commerce about national competitiveness, has been an advocate for eliminating the visa cap, easing access to employment-based green cards, and doing more through visa policies to attract foreign entrepreneurs and encourage foreign students to remain in the U.S.
But Bloomberg's call for more H-1B visas comes at the same time the pace of visa demand is relatively low, as is IT hiring overall. In the immediate pre-recession years, available visas disappeared in a week.
In his speech, Bloomberg said that "temporary visas like the H-1B program help fill critical gaps in our workforce, but the numbers are too few and the filing process too long and unpredictable." Read more...
Apple signs point to iOS 5 release in two weeks
Apple will likely release iOS 5, the next version of its mobile operating system, in two weeks.
Signs point to the week of Oct. 10, with reports focused on Oct. 12 as the release date for iOS 5. That date fits with Apple's past practice of opening the download gates for its operating system several days before the on-sale launch of the next-generation iPhone, dubbed iPhone 5 by most analysts and pundits.
Earlier this week, Apple issued invitations to an Oct. 4 event tagged with the less-than-cryptic phrase, "Let's talk about iPhone."
If Apple repeats the schedule it used last March for the iPad 2, the new iPhone will go on sale the week following the Oct. 4 introduction, most likely either Thursday, Oct. 13 or Friday, Oct. 14. Read more...
Amazon’s Silk browser raises privacy, security eyebrows
Amazon's new Silk browser has raised some eyebrows among privacy and security experts.
"This makes Amazon like your ISP," said Aaron Brauer-Rieke of the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), Washington D.C.-based advocacy group. "Every site, everything you do online [through Silk] will go through Amazon. That's a new role for someone like them, and I don't think it's at all clear that Amazon can step into that, or that it will be apparent to consumers."
On Wednesday, Amazon introduced its new Kindle Fire touch-based tablet, and the browser that will run on the Android-powered device: Silk. Read more...