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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 … Read more

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 … Read more

GeoDefense Swarm is the follow-up to GeoDefense, and is an extremely challenging open-path tower-defense game. Like its predecessor, GeoDefense Swarm stands out for a unique play style that mixes frantic arcade action with bang-your-head-against-a-wall puzzle-solving. Aside from the new open-path format, GeoDefense Swarm has much in common with the original GeoDefense, from its psychedelic vector graphics to its drag-and-drop interface and the same selection of upgradeable towers (GeoDefense Swarm adds a sixth tower, the Thumper, which deals damage in a wide area). You're still destroying a set number of waves of geometric "creeps," all with differing health … Read more

Facebook is angling to be the entertainment industry's next taste maker.

While CEO Mark Zuckerberg today wowed the crowd of its F8 developer conference with a nifty looking new Timeline feature, the company's latest vision of how much information others should see, and how it's being shared is the change that will affect users -- and Hollywood -- in the months to come.

For proof, look no further than Facebook's new slew of media partnerships, which include big entertainment names like Netflix, Spotify, and Hulu, along with media outlets like USA Today, The Guardian, and The … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Facebook is rolling out some of the biggest changes in its history, unveiling its new Timeline and all-new Open Graph features today, features that will radically change how users display their information, and the way they discover new content.

At F8, Facebook's annual developers conference, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the two new features. Timeline, he explained, is "the story of your life," significantly altering the way people's information is shown on the world's leading social network, presenting "all your stories, all your apps, and a new way to express who you are," … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--After unveiling Timeline at F8 this morning, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Ticker, a part of the next version of the social network's Open Graph.

Last year, Zuckerberg said, Facebook rolled out Open Graph, a map of all of a user's connections in the world, and made it so users can connect to anything they want in any way they want. But now with the next Open Graph, he said, users will also be able to connect to an order of magnitude more things than ever before using what he called Ticker, a way to express "… Read more

Intel has released a graphics driver update for its Sandy Bridge processors that boosts performance up to 37 percent for games on Windows 7 and Vista.

"This major graphics driver update for 2nd generation Intel Core processors with Intel HD graphics improves game performance by up to 37% on ULV platforms," Intel said in a statement.

ULV--or Ultra Low Voltage--processors are Intel's most power efficient and are typically used in thin and/or compact laptops such as Hewlett-Packard's updated Pavilion dm1 and Samsung Series 9.

ULV-based systems will see the biggest performance improvement, Intel said. "It is where some of the biggest gains are seen on the driver," Intel spokesman Dave Salvator said. But the driver update applies to all systems with Sandy Bridge processors sporting HD graphics. … Read more

Intel's next-generation processor is expected to add support for a key OS X technology that accelerates gaming and financial applications. That potentially means a more powerful MacBook Air in the future.

Listed as a "core" OS X technology, OpenCL "dramatically accelerates" applications by tapping into the special processing power of the graphics processing unit (GPU), according to Apple. It taps into what an Apple developer page states as the "the amazing parallel computing power of the GPU."

GPU-centric acceleration can be used for financial modeling, accounting applications, analysis on large media files, games, and media applications. In general, the GPU is much better than the CPU (central processing unit) at certain types of computations--thus the necessity of GPUs in games. … Read more

A recent Gartner survey found that business process management spending will increase significantly this year, with 54 percent of medium and large companies planning a 5 percent increase or more in their BPM spending this year and 20 percent of companies planning to up their BPM spending by at least 10 percent.

This week, venture-backed startup BonitaSoft announced a new $11 million round of financing to take advantage of the growth in the market.

Gartner explained the market growth by pointing to increased interest in software-as-a-service (SaaS) tools, which offer a cheaper entry point, and a shift toward funding BPM … Read more