Michael Hickins

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged former Apple Inc.  general counsel Nancy Heinen with fraud in connection with an options backdating scandal that broke last fall. The SEC also settled charges it filed against former Apple CFO Fred Anderson, whom it accused of failing to take steps to ensure that the company’s books were […]

Oracle  agreed to acquire meter data management applications vendor Lodestar today for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition complements Oracle’s existing applications suite for utilities management and gives the vendor an even stronger foothold in an industry that has seen greater competition emerge in the wake of deregulation. Oracle, which acquired another utilities management applications vendor, […]

BlackBerry maker Research in Motion  (RIM) today announced that it plans to let users of non-BlackBerry smartphones download its software. The wireless hardware and software vendor said that, as a first step, it will begin offering the new software application for devices running Windows Mobile 6. In the future, the company plans to offer the […]

Microsoft  doesn’t want a hearing; it wants a conversation. The company today filed its official response to the European Commission’s Competition Committee’s Statement of Objection (SO), issued in March, which accused Microsoft of charging monopoly prices for interoperability protocols for its Windows Workgroup servers. But the software vendor, which had until the end of the […]

Salesforce.com , known as the leading vendor of on-demand customer relationship management (CRM) software, is shifting gears. The company announced today that customers can now use its Apex and AppExchange platforms without having to subscribe to its flagship Salesforce Automation (SFA) application. As a result, it may leave a more lasting imprint as the builder […]

Could the former Qwest CEO have been spared jail time if Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) had been in effect in 2001? It looks that way. Ironically, certain provisions of SOX, passed by Congress in 2002, could have spared Joe Nacchio the fate of other high-profile CEOs convicted of their accounting misdeeds. According to law professor and former […]

AOL Co-Founder Steve Case wants to create another online revolution, this time in health care. Case officially launched RevolutionHealth.com today, following months of an open beta. The health information site is trying to distinguish itself from other sites with its reliance on elements of Web 2.0, such as user-generated content and crowd-sourcing. Case said he […]

Google  will run out of superlatives before it runs out of steam, it seems. The search giant reported that revenues jumped 63 percent during the quarter ended March 31, 2007, an increase of 63 percent over the first quarter of 2006 and 14 better than the fourth quarter of 2006. Earnings per share were $3.18 […]

Microsoft  announced today that it has entered into a broad cross-licensing agreement with South Korean electronics maker Samsung. The deal, which Microsoft said is patterned after the agreement it struck with Linux vendor Novell  last November, may pave the way for greater interoperability between open source and patented software in the future, the company said. […]

IBM  today introduced a new framework and toolset allowing customers to build customized portlets that can help them access business applications through their Websphere portals. The first of these, which IBM is calling “business accelerators,” is the Dashboard Accelerator, which allows customers to assemble dashboards and scorecards from a catalog of pre-built portlets. Customers can […]

BlackBerry maker Research in Motion  (RIM) suffered a service outage Tuesday, but said service for most customers has now been restored. RIM said it was still investigating the root cause of the outage and is “closely monitoring systems in order to maintain normal service levels.” The company added that phone service on the devices was […]

NEW YORK — Oracle Corp.  has been selling CRM On Demand, the on-demand customer relationship management (CRM) application, since it inherited the software with its 2005 acquisition of Siebel Systems. But it hadn’t fully embraced it until today. Oracle President Charles Phillips said today the on-demand CRM application is now fully secure and able to […]