CEO

It's per­haps a lit­tle too lit­tle and a lit­tle too late, but Qualcomm can now use the word "smart­book" to de­scribe low end smart­phone/lap­top hy­brids -- the sort of ma­chine the com­pa­ny's CEO says have been all but killed off by tablets. The un­for­tu­nate le­gal ac­tion ini­ti­at­ed by Smartbook AG way back in 2009 has now been deemed in­valid by the German Patent and Trademark Office. The com­bi­na­tion of the words word "smart" and "book" are no longer cov­ered by German trade­mark law, which seem­ing­ly (...)

Take one dose of im­prop­er gen­er­al­iza­tion, mix it in with a heap­ing of con­de­scen­sion, and then add a pinch of good old sex­ism. What do you get? This quote, com­ing from Frank Meehan, CEO of the Android hand­set-mak­ing INQ: "If you go to a night­club in any ci­ty in the world, the pret­ty girl has an iPhone or a BlackBerry. She doesn't have an Android phone. She has no emo­tion­al at­tach­ment to an Android phone. It's too com­pli­cat­ed. It's a geek de­vice, it's all wrong." Now, be­fore you go (...)

Sure, there may have been some toasts and like­ly a bit of jok­ing, but it looks like President Obama al­so got down to a bit of busi­ness dur­ing his meet­ing with some of the tech in­dus­try's top CEOs yes­ter­day. While com­plete de­tails are ob­vi­ous­ly light, White House press sec­re­tary Jay Carney has re­vealed that the pres­i­dent raised the is­sue of his re­cent pro­pos­als to in­vest in re­search and de­vel­op­ment with the group, and he's said to have al­so dis­cussed ways to en­cour­age kids to study math, (...)

Barack Obama is a pres­i­dent well known for be­ing in touch with tech­nol­o­gy, so it's no sur­prise to see him win­ing and din­ing the in­dus­try's biggest de­ci­sion mak­ers. Larry Ellison, Eric Schmidt, Carol Bartz, Mark Zuckerberg, and yes, even Steve Jobs joined el pres­i­den­te for an in­for­mal din­ner on Thursday to dis­cuss im­por­tant things like jobs, ed­u­ca­tion, and re­search spend­ing. We're not here for that, though, we're here to drop zingers about one all-pow­er­ful dude and his big-time CEO bud­dies. (...)

We've still got a hand­ful of posts in the pipeline, but with the gates closed and ev­ery­one in the air head­ing back to their re­spec­tive homes, our ad­ven­tures at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona have come to a close. The good news is we can re­turn to our reg­u­lar four of hours of sleep each night (a fig­ure that was cut in half this week). The bad news is the heartache of leav­ing be­hind gor­geous scenery and de­li­cious pael­la. Take a look at some of our high­lights be­low! Microsoft Microsoft (...)

Leo Apotheker, HP's suc­ces­sor to the in­fa­mous Mark Hurd, has sat down for a chat with the Wall Street Journal re­cent­ly, and while most of it is in­nocu­ous cor­po­rate-speak -- "we need to fire up our in­no­va­tion engine" -- there was one quote that piqued our in­ter­est. The new chief be­lieves HP needs to get its prod­ucts to mar­ket faster, re­ject­ing Sam Palmisano's sug­ges­tion that HP has lost its in­no­va­tive touch and in­sist­ing that his com­pa­ny's weak­ness has been in just not get­ting the prod­ucts (...)

Bill Gurley’s ex­cel­lent piece on Silicon Valley IPO Anxiety in­spired me to take a com­pan­ion look at the East Coast, par­tic­u­lar­ly Massachusetts and New York, and eval­u­ate the health of the lo­cal IPO econ­o­my and prospec­tive pipeline.  To­day, I'll cov­er Massachusetts; to­mor­row, New York. I first came across Bill when he was a Wall Street an­a­lyst and cov­ered my com­pa­ny Open Market (IPO 1996).  I al­ways ad­mired his per­spi­cac­i­ty, even if he didn’t like our stock all the time!  For pur­pos­es of this (...)

Oracle is putting the screws to SAP again. In court pa­pers filed Friday, the com­pa­ny de­mand­ed SAP pay it $212 mil­lion in in­ter­est on top of the $1.3 bil­lion in dam­ages award­ed it in the TomorrowNow law­suit. Should Oracle’ de­mand be ap­proved, it would raise SAP’s to­tal penalties to $1.63 bil­lion. SAP, which ar­gued in court that it should be held li­able for no more than the $28 mil­lion, clear­ly has no plans to pay Oracle the in­ter­est to which it says it’s en­ti­tled. Said an SAP spokesman, “We (...)

XtremeMac has been crank­in' out iPod docks for years, and now former CEO Gary Bart has launched Stem Innovation, a com­pa­ny ded­i­cat­ed ex­clu­sive­ly to iOS ac­ces­sories. For its first trick, Bart and com­pa­ny have in­tro­duced TimeCommand which (as its name im­plies) goes be­yond the whole dock thing and comes across as a con­trol sta­tion for the bed­room. Among its many charms are iPhone / iPod / iPad com­pat­i­bil­i­ty, the abil­i­ty to con­trol your mood light­ing (in­clud­ing a dim­mer and a "wake by light" (...)

The CEO of the largest U.S. health in­for­ma­tion ex­change dis­cuss­es mount­ing tech pres­sures.

At GigaOM’s Net:Work con­fer­ence on Thursday in San Francisco, Salesforce.com chair­man and CEO Marc Benioff said the com­pa­ny has an an­a­lyt­i­cal tool that tracks ac­tiv­i­ty on Chatter, its in­ter­nal Twitter-style cor­po­rate so­cial net­work (which the soft­ware provider al­so sells to other com­pa­nies), and that Salesforce is giv­ing em­ploy­ees who provide valu­able in­for­ma­tion or con­tri­bu­tions to the cor­po­ra­tion via the net­work ex­tra com­pen­sa­tion, in the same way ex­ec­u­tives are given bonus­es for ex­ceed­ing (...)

BGR par­ent com­pa­ny MMC an­nounced Friday the com­ing launch of its lat­est dig­i­tal prop­er­ty, TVLine. The new web­site, which will fo­cus on con­sumer TV news, is set to de­but next mon­th. Michael Ausiello is Editor-In-Chief and Founder of TVLine, and he joins MMC from his most re­cent roles as Columnist at Entertainment Weekly and Senior Writer at TV Guide. Matt Webb Mitovich will serve as Editor-At-Large. TV­Line will be the most re­cent ad­di­tion to MMC’s lead­ing en­ter­tain­ment port­fo­lio, which (...)

Google CEO Eric Schmidt wrote a blog post to­day about why the net­work com­put­er failed and how cloud com­put­ing has made it pos­si­ble to sup­port a Web-based op­er­at­ing sys­tem. Schmidt calls the an­nounce­ment of the Chrome OS note­book ear­lier this week one of the most im­por­tant de­vel­op­ments of his work­ing life. He says the news is tes­ta­ment to the ad­vance­ment of com­put­er science that al­lows de­vel­op­ers to use lightweight tools sup­port­ed by com­plex back-end sys­tems to cre­ate prod­ucts and ser­vices (...)

Earlier this week, Comcast Corp. (NSDQ: CMCSA) pres­i­dent Neil Smit stat­ed pret­ty em­phat­i­cal­ly it had no plan to in­sti­tute usage-based broad­band pric­ing. But Time Warner Cable (NYSE: TWC) COO Landel Hobbs seemed to send a dis­tinct­ly dif­fer­ent sig­nal in an ap­pear­ance Friday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” In a broad-rang­ing con­ver­sa­tion on the fu­ture of the ca­ble busi­ness, Hobbs had this to say when the sub­ject of “con­sump­tion-based billing” came up (...)

Online ad tech com­pa­ny Undertone has ac­quired dig­i­tal pub­lish­er rep firm WWN. Terms of the deal, New York-based Undertone’s sec­ond in the past past, were not dis­closed. The pur­chase of Paris-based WWN is in­tend­ed to ex­pand Undertone’s glob­al reach, as the com­pa­ny works to evolve from an ad net­work—it dumped the “net­works” part of its name not too long ago—in­to a more gen­er­al on­line ad ser­vices provider to pub­lish­ers and ad­ver­tis­ers. “There’s noth­ing in­her­ent­ly neg­a­tive or wrong with the ad net­work (...)

Right about now, a lot of us are scratch­ing our heads about what to give peo­ple for the hol­i­days. Well, if the per­son you are look­ing for us­es Twitter a lot, try Hunch’s new Gift-O-Matic. You just plug in their Twitter han­dle, and Hunch spits out a list of gift sug­ges­tions. The Gift-O-Matic is just some­thing a cou­ple Hunch em­ploy­ees threw to­geth­er to show off the Hunch API (which pow­ers re­al gift sug­ges­tions at Gifts.com based on your Facebook friends). Essentially, Hunch is map­ping your (...)

<img align='left' src="http://pho­tos.mac­nn.com/news/1012/twit­ter-dick­cos­tolo.jpg" bor­der='0' width='176' height='120' /Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and his Twitter coun­ter­part Dick Costolo were re­port­ed­ly seen to­day hav­ing break­fast and have sparked ru­mors that Microsoft might ac­quire or land a deal with Twitter. The na­ture of the dis­cus­sion wasn't known, but the two com­pa­nies have both de­clined com­ment, hint­ing that it was busi­ness and not sim­ply a per­son­al dis­cus­sion. It's un­known (...)

A sneak peek at the on­line Android Market With the re­lease of Chrome OS Web Store this week, it got me think­ing: Where is that on­line browser-based Android Market Google promised? You might re­call that al­most sev­en months ago, Google VP Vic Gundotra took the stage at Google I/O and gave at­ten­dees a “s­neak peek” of Android Market ac­ces­si­ble through a browser. No re­lease date was given, but the im­ages shown were promis­ing, re­veal­ing an iTunes-like pol­ished mar­ket­place, with var­i­ous dis­cov­ery (...)

Jenny An is a Chicago-based writer with a fo­cus on pop­u­lar cul­ture, food and trav­el. Her work has ap­peared in Time Out Chicago and VenusZine. Social me­dia cer­tain­ly has its ben­e­fits for those who love din­ing and drink­ing. From free drinks for Foursquare check­ins, to Twitter no­ti­fi­ca­tions about hap­py hours, to Facebook mes­sages about free food, there’s al­ways some­thing tasty hap­pen­ing on­line. But the so­cial web of­fers a lot more than just dis­counts and deals when it comes to drink­ing and (...)

Google’s amends for inad­ver­tent­ly har­vest­ing con­sumer data with its Street View cars may have been good enough for the Federal Trade Commission, but not for Connecticut at­tor­ney gen­er­al Richard Blumenthal. Working with the Connecticut Department of Consumer Protection, his of­fice has is­sued a civil in­ves­tiga­tive de­mand, hop­ing to force the com­pa­ny to turn over the per­son­al data it col­lect­ed and to which it has so far re­fused him ac­cess. “We need to ver­i­fy what con­fi­den­tial in­for­ma­tion the (...)