Just over a week ago, the jury began deliberations on the ongoing patent infringement case between Google and Oracle. After waiting in the wings, with bated breath, the verdict is finally in, as Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court of Northern California dismissed the jury this afternoon after a unanimous decision that ruled in favor of Google’s mobile OS — declaring that Android did not in fact infringe on the Oracle patents in question.
The decision follows an opposing verdict earlier this month, in which the jury in the long-running infringement case found that certain components of Android APIs had too close of a resemblance to code used in Oracle’s Java programming tools. However, the jury ended up splitting on the notion of whether or not Google could in fact claim fair use in its defense (which could have then led to a mistrial.) → Read More
TechCrunch has discovered and confirmed that software giant Oracle has bought social marketing platform Vitrue for $300 million. [Update: A press release has confirmed the buy at an undisclosed price, though we know it to be $300 million.] As if Oracle didn’t offer enough products and services already, the acquisition will give it a strong Facebook marketing platform to offer its enterprise clients.
Vitrue had taken $33 million in funding over the years and grown to become one of the most popular solutions for big companies trying to win Facebook fans and push out marketing messages to the news feed. Vitrue, according to a source, was on course for revenues of just under $100 million this year, although we have other sources disputing it may have been that high. TC understands there were a lot of potential acquirers interested. Several bidders approached the company but Oracle was the most aggressive.
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Google has always been pretty cagey about the financials behind its Android mobile OS — and data that has emerged over the last week could give us an indication why: it’s been losing money from day one.
In the lawsuit between Oracle and Google — in which Oracle claims Google, in its Android platform, infringes on copyrights and patents related to Java — a judge and jury are trying to work out what kind of damages might be awarded to Oracle. That case took a turn for the specific yesterday, when Judge William Alsup (as reported by Reuters) read out excerpts of Google documents that determined that the platform produced a net loss for every quarter of 2010 — and “a big loss for the whole year”.
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A group of women is re-entering the workforce today and reshaping how products are made across key tech sectors like health & wellness, commerce and social products. Not only do they have the experience of raising families, but they’ve been business and technology leaders earlier in life. They’re becoming founders and leaders at startups and in the very companies they’ve been buying products and services from.
Not only do women make most of a family’s health decisions but 48% of graduating physicians are women and women compose 73% of medical and health services managers. As a healthtech startup, we think heavily about the importance of what I call the Family Chief Health & Wellness Officer (aka “Mom”). Avado is not unlike many startups in that we have two male co-founders. We’d be fools to not figure out ways to bring the female perspective into our business. → Read More
Oracle this morning announced that it is acquiring cloud-based talent management solutions provider Taleo for $46 per share or roughly $1.9 billion, net of Taleo’s cash and debt. Taleo’s solutions basically help organizations attract, motivate and retain human capital, and will serve to boost Oracle’s Public Cloud offering. → Read More
Oracle has tapped Cloudera, the startup that commercially distributes and services Apache Hadoop based data management software and services, to provide an Apache Hadoop distribution and tools for Oracle’s newly announced Big Data Appliance.
Hadoop is a Java software framework born out of an open-source implementation of Google’s published computing infrastructure which is fostered within the Apache Software Foundation. Hadoop supports distributed applications running on large clusters of commodity computers processing enormous amounts of data. Cloudera helps distribute Hadoop, and provides practical services around the technology, similar to what Red Hat does for the Linux framework. → Read More
RightNow Technologies this morning announced that, at its special stockholders meeting, nearly everyone voted in favor of the previously proposed merger with Oracle, who agreed to buy the cloud-based customer service company for $1.5 billion (or $43 per share) in cash at the end of October 2011. → Read More
Oracle this morning announced that it has acquired RightNow – both companies are listed on NASDAQ – for $43 per share or roughly $1.5 billion net of RightNow’s cash and debt. With the acquisition, Oracle is adding a robust cloud-based customer service offering (see graph below) to its own Public Cloud solution – more info on that here. RightNow’s share price closed at $35.96 last week, so the deal represents a premium of roughly 20 percent on its closing price on Friday the 21st of October.
RightNow’s solutions help companies handle customer interactions across a multitude of channels, including call and contact centers, the Web and social networks. → Read More
Oracle has acquired Endeca, a company that powers enterprise search for large companies. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Endeca has raised a total of $65 million from Bessemer, Venrock, Intel, SAP, Ampersand Capital Partners, DN Capital and Lehman Brothers.
Endeca’s core technology enables companies to correlate and analyze unstructured data and provides enterprise search for large companies including Borders, Boeing, the Census Bureau, the EPA, Ford, Hallmark, IBM, and Toshiba. The company specializes in guided search, and auto-categorizing results based on the keywords someone enters. Endeca charges from $100,000 to more than $10 million per installation.
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When I first started using Linux, way back in the last century, one of the biggest challenges was the lack of a decent productivity suite of the sort to which every Windows user is accustomed. The only real option was StarOffice, which worked but was unbearably slow to load and cumbersome to use. Sun Microsystems bought StarDivision, the makers of StarOffice, in 1999 and released the source code to the suite in July 2000. Thus was OpenOffice.org born, with the intention of providing a viable open source alternative to Microsoft Office. Sun got bought by Oracle in 2010 and commercial development of OpenOffice.org was officially terminated shortly thereafter.
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Today, at Oracle’s OpenWorld Conference in San Francisco, an animated Larry Ellison took to the stage to unveil an assortment of cloud computing services, which will run the company’s long-time-in-coming (six years, in fact), Fusion Applications — most notably the “Oracle Public Cloud”. And, not one to miss an opportunity, Ellison made sure to take quite a few public jabs at Salesforce — really intended for its CEO Marc Benioff — whose keynote earlier in the day was cancelled due to “overwhelming attendance”. Whatever that means. The cancellation created a hubbub and led to Benioff giving his own “off-campus” keynote at the St. Regis hotel across the street. (You can read our coverage of the Salesforce CEO’s talk here.) → Read More
The fun continued this morning at Oracle’s OpenWorld Conference in San Francisco. Or, I should say, the fun continued at a restaurant across the street. Fine dining and location aside, for those unfamiliar, yesterday afternoon Oracle CEO Larry Ellison cancelled a keynote that was planned for this morning by none other than his former employee and frenemy: CEO of Salesforce, Marc Benioff.
As we reported yesterday, Benioff tweeted last night to his followers, “Sorry #oow11 I don’t know why….Larry just cancelled my keynote tomorrow! Join me@St.Regis AME Restaurant at 10:30AM! I’m disappointed too!”
Though Oracle representatives were quick to say that the cancellation was simply a result of “overwhelming attendance”, and that Benioff was offered a keynote later in the week, it’s hard to say that this isn’t the result of something more than a full schedule. → Read More
Well, well, well. The Oracle OpenWorld Conference is in full swing, and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff was scheduled to be one of the keynote speakers tomorrow (Wednesday). “Was” being the operative word here. Thanks to a recent update from Benioff’s Twitter account, it seems that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has cancelled Mr. Benioff’s keynote tomorrow.
Hmmm. Instead, Larry will be king of the stage, with a one hour and forty-five minute keynote, kicking off at 2:45 p.m. PST. No word as of yet on why Ellison cancelled the Salesforce CEO’s keynote. Not even Benioff was sure: “Sorry #oow11 I don’t know why….Larry just cancelled my keynote tomorrow! Join me@St.Regis AME Restaurant at 10:30AM! I’m disappointed too!” → Read More
Oracle this morning announced that it has acquired GoAhead Software, which sells packaged service availability software to network equipment providers (NEPs) and other players in the commmunications industry. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. → Read More
“I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed.”
I’m reminded of Daniel Plainview’s admission in There Will Be Blood when thinking about Google.
While the company is still largely beloved by the public, sentiment seems to have turned against them amongst their peers, and even amongst many of the startups around Silicon Valley. While these tensions have been building for months — and even years, in some cases — we’re seeing this on display more clearly than ever now thanks to the patent issue(s). → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Danny Sullivan, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — talked patents and PR, Spotify, and everything except Google+ for the first time in months. It’s not that G+ has jumped the shark; in fact, it is the shark on which realtime video streaming will emerge when YouTube finally goes live. It’s a race with iCloud to get there, with AirPlay-enabled Spotify stoking the fire in the near term.
Social signals are gaining value as feature sets and hardware mature, as we harvest our laboriously-created investments in individual and virtual spheres of influence. For the Gang’s part, we’re going to begin broadcasting live from and to the iPad as events warrant it, starting with a trip to the heart of the emerging Social Enterprise at EvolutionCRM in New York next week. → Read More
In the past, I’ve been critical of Google for trying to dance around directly calling out their competitors who are actively attempting to screw them. Today, they’re no longer dancing.
In a post just put up on the main Google Blog, Google SVP and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond takes shot after shot at Google’s competitors. By name, he calls out Microsoft, Apple, and Oracle. What’s this all about? What else? Patents. → Read More
Oracle this morning announced that it has agreed to buy Pillar Data Systems, a privately-held provider of SAN Block I/O storage systems based in San Jose, California, which is said to serve nearly 600 customers across 24 countries. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
An interesting purchase, particularly since Pillar Data Systems is majority-owned by Oracle founder and CEO Larry Ellison through his venture capital firm Tako Ventures. According to a 2005 CRN article, Ellison invested over $150 million in the business. → Read More
Oracle has just announced a new acquisition today—web experience management company Fatwire Software. Financial terms of the deal, which is expected to close mid-2011, were not disclosed.
Fatwire Software’s web content and experience management software powers web presence for organizations, allowing them to deliver relevant customer content, build community engagement and drive site stickiness and loyalty. FatWire currently serves more than 500 customers in industries, including financial services, media, technology, manufacturing, public sector, retail, healthcare and more. → Read More
If you are reading TechCrunch you probably already realize this fact: Flavor-of-the-month consumer Internet companies have a way of hogging the spotlight. If you didn’t, we conveniently published some evidence of it yesterday.
But that reality predates us by at least a decade. In 1999 when the world talked about Silicon Valley, they usually meant sexy dot coms. In 2005 when people were writing headlines about “the return of Silicon Valley,” a lot of people working in technology were justifiably irritated. After all, tech behemoths like eBay, Yahoo, Oracle, Intel, Hewlett-Packard never exactly left.
That focus on the sexy, social, consumer Web over everything else has only gotten more pronounced as those many of those one-time flavors of the month like Facebook, Zynga, Twitter and Groupon have become bonafide giants. The difference is that now the divergence in attention actually makes sense. → Read More
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