With BEA gone to Oracle, the speculators have turned to TIBCO Software, figuring the smaller middleware company is likely to be swallowed by some bigger fish. Its stock shot up better than 11% on the news that Oracle was buying BEA. Its market cap is $1.4 billion.

 

TIBCO Software was founded by Vivek Ranadivé in 1985 with the vision of bringing real-time technology into the mainstream. His acclaimed New York Times business bestseller The Power of Now: How Winning Companies Sense and Respond to Change Using Real-time Technology (McGraw-Hill, 1999) has been widely used in academia and been the subject of numerous interviews. Mr. Ranadivé has appeared as a featured expert on real-time computing on CNBC and in publications such as the Economist, Fast Company and Red Herring. Mr. Ranadivé has consistently been recognized as a visionary for the future of business integration, securing him a place in InfoWorld's 2002 Top Ten Technology Innovators. He was also recognized by Ernst & Young as a 2002 Software Entrepreneur of the Year.

 

TIBCO's management team includes Murat Sonmez, who is responsible for company's worldwide sales and field operations. He joined TIBCO in 1994 and has held a variety of executive positions including general manager of EMEA operations and chief marketing officer. His professional background includes EVP of Operations at Centrata, a utility computing software firm, and engineering and product marketing positions at Consilium, a Manufacturing Execution Systems software provider. Mr. Sonmez holds a B.S. in Industrial Engineering from Bosphorus University, Istanbul, Turkey and a M.S. in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from Virginia Tech.

 

The largely bug-fixing Vista Service Pack 1 release candidate has gone to public beta.

 

There are five million copies of Leopard out there now, Apple says, almost 20% of the installed base and a wonder after only 90 days.

 

Apple CEO Steve Jobs said Tuesday during his MacWorld keynote that four million iPhones have been sold and using Gartner data claimed the widget garnered a 19.5% share of the US smartphone market between June and September, its first three months out.

 

The free iPhone software update 1.1.3 announced at MacWorld will let users automatically find where they are using a redesigned Maps application; text message multiple people the same message; customize their home screen; and watch movies rented from the newfangled iTunes Movie Rentals for $2.99 or $3.99 a clip.

 

Having failed to established a $100 laptop, the ex-CTO of One Laptop Per Child Mary Lou Jepsen and her shiny new for-profit Pixel Qi start-up is going to shoot for a $75 laptop while also commercializing the sunlight-readable, low-cost, low-power screens invented for OLPC's XO machine. Her web site observes that volume can bring down the price of next-generation hardware. It says OLPC will get the products at cost.

 

Microsoft has cut another one of those patent cross-licenses it's grown fond of, this one with JVC. The agreement is said to cover a broad range of consumer products that each company manufactures and sells and while no details were released - like whether it included Microsoft's touchy Linux pretensions - they did say Microsoft was making money off it. Microsoft has been at IP licensing for four years now and has signed over 200 licensing pacts.

 

SGI is going to sell Panasas ActiveStor Parallel Storage Clusters to customers deploying SGI-based Altix ICE and XE HPC Linux clusters. The Panasas goods will augment SGI's InfiniteStorage line. The two have already collaborated on a few deployments such as NASA.

 

Stanford University researchers may have figured out a way to increase the life of the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries used in laptops, iPods and other consumer goods 10 times

Sun pre-announced its positive calendar Q4 results in the latest fashion among large companies and said it's untroubled by recession fears. It is however expecting to take a $50 million-$100 million charge against in-process R&D because of its new acquisition.