AMD chooses Lenovo’s No. 2 exec as new CEO

Advanced Micro Devices announced that Rory Read, former No. 2 executive at Lenovo, will become AMD’s new CEO.

Read will replace acting CEO Thomas Seifert, who moves back to chief financial officer at AMD. While executive chairman Bruce Claflin will return to his role as chairman. Read will have a tough job as the point man for AMD’s perennial struggle against Intel, which usually has about four times as much market share in the PC … Continue Reading

Exclusive: How Facebook is open-sourcing its data centers and servers

This is the first of a two-part exclusive on Facebook’s involvement with and creation of open source technologies. For these articles, we spoke with two of Facebook’s open source gurus, David Recordon and Amir Michael, about how the company is opening its infrastructure to other developers and organizations.

It’s one thing to open-source the code for your app — that’s a simple matter of mashing a button on Github. But how do you really open-source … Continue Reading

Kabam will launch The Godfather Five Families social game on Facebook

Kabam is going Hollywood. The hardcore Facebook game publisher is announcing today that it has a deal with Paramount to make an empire-building social game based on the Godfather mafia films. The new game is called The Godfather: Five Families and it will debut later this fall.

The title is a big departure for Kabam, which has relied to date on its own original titles. But this Godfather title is going up some very established … Continue Reading

Tributes to Steve Jobs from business executives start pouring in

Reactions to the resignation of Steve Jobs are coming in and they aren’t surprising, given Jobs’ influence on technology over the course of decades. Jobs has left a huge legacy on the world’s business landscape, and his resignation is stirring a lot of emotions among business executives who look up to him.

People are having an emotional reaction, even though the market has had a lot of time to prepare for this. Apple’s stock price … Continue Reading

Facebook: Threatened by Google+? Our trillion page views say no

Social network giant Facebook brought in 870 million unique visitors and a trillion page views in June, according to an updated list of the top 1,000 most-visited sites on the web released Tuesday by Google subsidiary DoubleClick.

Between clicking through photo albums, playing games and sifting through profiles, Facebook gets nearly 1,150 page views per unique visitor, according to the data obtained by DoubleClick. The data also indicates that Facebook has a 46.9 percent reach … Continue Reading

Facebook to add its own photo filters instead of buying Instagram

There’s just no escape from mobile photo filters. After being made popular by apps like Instagram and PicPlz, now Facebook is looking to add filters to its mobile apps, reports the New York Times.

The move isn’t entirely surprising, since filters aren’t very difficult to implement and Facebook has been the leading online photo sharing site for years. And this point, even Apple is looking to add photo filters as a core feature of its … Continue Reading

Markets will punish Apple for the loss of its master magician

[Update: I probably should have specified a timeline for this market reaction. There's short term and long term. The market punished apple immediately in after market trading, as pointed out below. And yes, a week later, Apple's stock is actually higher than it was last week, as Gruber points out, BUT that comes after a week where the overall market had a nice upturn. Apple doesn't look so great in this perspective, where it appears … Continue Reading

Benchmark plops down $7.6M to make CouchSurfing into a for-profit

CouchSurfing, the site that helps you find a couch to spend the night on or a safe foreigner to warm your own couch, is switching from the slow lane to the fast lane.

It’s converting itself from a non-profit into a B Corporation, a for-profit structure intended for companies aimed at solving environmental and social problems. It’s moving to a new headquarters in the heart of the social media startup universe, San Francisco. And it’s … Continue Reading

Twitter founders announce their new venture, Lift

Lift is the latest app to earn the interest of Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams, and it’s shrouded in mystery.

In a blog post rich in allusion and light on actual detail, Stone said the app isn’t a new creation of Obvious Corp, the company he, Williams and former Twitter executive Jason Goldman re-founded in June after departing Twitter. Rather, the application is being supported by funding and human resources from Obvious Corp. … Continue Reading

RPM software company Eloqua files $100M IPO

Revenue performance management (RPM) software company Eloqua Limited Wednesday filed an initial public offering estimated at $100 million.

Eloqua’s RPM software solution is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that provides its clients with analytics to help predict revenue performance by tracking a number of different marketing and communication platforms. The company’s clients include Adobe, Dow Jones, Fidelity, Polycom, and many others.

It fits into a larger category of marketing automation tools: Software and services aimed at … Continue Reading

Apple’s Tim Cook has some big shoes to fill

They are the biggest of shoes to fill. Tim Cook is taking over as CEO of Apple. It’s the beginning of a new era in technology, as his predecessor Steve Jobs has been a dominating presence for everything associated with Apple. And Apple has defined some of the biggest changes in the history of technology.

Jobs is the visionary who pulled together groundbreaking products such as the iPhone, the iPad and the MacBook Air. On … Continue Reading

Enterprise social networking company Jive Software files for $100M IPO

Business social networking company Jive Software has filed to go public and raise up to $100 million, according to a filing today with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Jive Software supplies enterprises with internal social networks similar to Facebook. An employee can create a profile and interact with co-workers much in the same way they do on Facebook — by posting content, commenting on it, sharing files and interacting with some other third-party enterprise software … Continue Reading

Steve Jobs’ letter to Apple board

Today, Steve Jobs stepped down as chief executive of Apple. Here is his letter to the Apple board of directors and the community overall.

Letter from Steve Jobs

To the Apple Board of Directors and the Apple Community:

I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.… Continue Reading

Steve Jobs resigns from CEO job at Apple; Tim Cook takes top job

Steve Jobs has resigned from the job of chief executive at Apple, the company has just announced in a press release.

Jobs will remain at Apple as chairman, but the company is appointing longtime chief operating officer Tim Cook to the job of CEO.

“I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you … Continue Reading

Applied Materials sees weak outlook for consumer electronics and PCs

As far as electronics suppliers go, Applied Materials has pretty deep insight into the future demand for tech goods. It is the world’s largest supplier of equipment for manufacturing semiconductor chips. And today, the company said that it doesn’t really like what it sees.

Santa Clara, Calif.-based Applied Materials beat earnings targets for its fiscal third quarter, but chief executive Mike Splinter said in a conference call today with analysts that the outlook is weak.… Continue Reading

Location-based social network BuzzMob launches. We’re not sure if it’s awesome, yet.

Let’s all give a warm, startup-community welcome to BuzzMob, which officially launched today. Hi, BuzzMob!

The Irvine-based company has made a mobile app, also called BuzzMob (free), for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad (their Android app is in the works) that connects users by location and creates a real-time, live community.

No no, you haven’t meet them before. It might sound familiar (Foursquare, Loopt, Brightkite, Gowalla, One etc.) but this company says it’s different. … Continue Reading

Update: Sony and YouTube take down full-length Godfather

Early on Wednesday, the cinema classic The Godfather was made available in its entirety on YouTube by an authentic-looking account called “SonyPicturesUK.” We wrote about the event and thought the idea of putting the film up was bold. Turns out, the account hosting the film was a fraud.

Sony has contacted VentureBeat to let us know that “SonyPicturesUK” account has been taken down as well as the full-length film. A representative from Sony wrote:

On … Continue Reading

Yammer unveils single sign-on and embeddable feeds with Yammer Connect

Enterprise social networking site Yammer today unveiled Yammer Connect, a new JavaScript application programming interface (API) that adds a single sign-on “Connect” button and embeddable streams to third-party enterprise software websites.

Yammer is working with a number of third-party enterprise software providers to add a connect button similar to Facebook’s that verifies an employee’s identity. The company wouldn’t disclose what companies it is working with right now but told VentureBeat that it already had a … Continue Reading