Cisco Systems announced Wednesday that it would acquire PostPath, a venture-backed start-up that provides open-source e-mail and calendaring software, for $215 million. The acquisition will add to Cisco’s collaboration tools. It also comes as welcome news for venture capitalists in a year in which investors have been able to cash out of few start-up companies. Cisco jumped into online workplace co

By Saul Hansell August 11, 2008 3:27 pm August 11, 2008 3:27 pm UPDATED In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Steven P. Jobs repeated Apple’s longstanding assertion that it doesn’t expect to make much money from the iTunes store. In this case, he was talking about Apple’s new business of selling applications for the iPhone, which he said sold $30 million worth of little programs in the fir

By Andrew C. Revkin July 30, 2008 5:17 pm July 30, 2008 5:17 pm [UPDATE 7/31: See additional context on Google’s own energy thirst below.] David M. Herszenhorn, who covers Congress, sent me a note from Washington today on an interesting hearing held to explore the role of efficiency in cutting Americans’ expensive energy appetite. Here’s David’s report: WASHINGTON -– Dan Reicher, Google’s guru of

CORRECTION: Anna Patterson’s name was misspelled, sometimes, in the first version of this post. If you invented a more efficient way to build an automatic transmission, I’m not so sure that the right response is to start a car company. I’m trying to figure out why so many of the very smart people I meet who are trying to start search engines are building products I just have no interest in using.

Though almost every discussion at the MobileBeat conference in Sunnyvale, Calif., on Thursday centered around the iPhone, venture capitalists told mobile entrepreneurs to broaden their focus and build applications for all phones. Still, all anyone wanted to talk about was the Apple App Store, from which users have downloaded 30 million applications for the iPhone this month. Startups should “intel

By Saul Hansell July 22, 2008 7:17 pm July 22, 2008 7:17 pm The flavor of the day at Yahoo is “external swirl.” It is certainly more palatable to lap that cone topped with many excuses on a summer day in Sunnyvale than to have to eat a hot plate of crow for tepid second-quarter financial results. Here, in its 48-word glory, is the first sentence of the prepared remarks by Sue Decker, Yahoo’s presi

By Saul Hansell July 21, 2008 9:09 am July 21, 2008 9:09 am Carl C. Icahn backed down over the weekend and worked out an agreement with Yahoo to join Yahoo’s board, along with two more people on his slate, which had been set to go to shareholders for a vote on Friday. Yahoo’s statement is here. The tipping point may have been the decision by Bill Miller, the influential portfolio manager at Legg M

Is the best way to protect the public good to go private? That is the view of Truste, a 10-year-old nonprofit organization that certifies that Web sites meet some minimum standards to protect the privacy of their users. The group is converting to for-profit status and selling the bulk of its newly created stock to Accel Partners, the venture capital firm that backed eBay and Facebook. The group ho

By John Markoff June 30, 2008 8:58 pm June 30, 2008 8:58 pm Intel’s 40th anniversary is July 18 and the world’s largest chip maker is making a big bet on the past. The Santa Clara, Calif., semiconductor maker would undoubtedly quibble with this characterization of its strategy for the next four decades. However, Patrick P. Gelsinger, an Intel senior vice president and one of the company’s leading

By John Markoff June 27, 2008 7:21 pm June 27, 2008 7:21 pm Andrew S. Grove, Intel’s former chairman and chief executive, is wading into the energy debate, arguing that America’s national goal of energy independence is misguided. He reasons that a more sensible approach for both environmental and political reasons would be shifting to a goal of “energy resilience.” In the July/August issue of the

By Steve Lohr June 17, 2008 11:56 am June 17, 2008 11:56 am The nation’s 6,000 football field-sized computer data centers have been recognized as remarkably wasteful power hogs, and the industry is mobilizing people and investment to address the problem — and also cash in on that new market for energy efficiency. (It has, for instance, triggered a strong demand for mechanical engineers who can mak

By Saul Hansell June 9, 2008 7:25 pm June 9, 2008 7:25 pm AT&T restructured its deal with Apple, said Ralph de la Vega, the chief executive of AT&T Mobility, in order to overcome resistance from mass consumers to the high $399 price of the iPhone. Now, instead of paying Apple a portion of their monthly fees, carriers like AT&T will make a large payment to Apple every time an iPhone is sold and att

By Miguel Helft June 4, 2008 10:31 pm June 4, 2008 10:31 pm In a tit-for-tat common in election campaigns, Yahoo’s chairman, Roy Bostock, lashed out against Carl C. Icahn late Wednesday, refuting the accusations made by the billionaire investor earlier in the day. In a public letter, Mr. Bostock said Mr. Icahn’s attack was based on “a series of unsubstantiated allegations from a complaint filed in

By Miguel Helft June 4, 2008 3:07 pm June 4, 2008 3:07 pm With about 8,000 workers at its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, Google is already the largest employer in its hometown. And while Google is now growing even faster overseas, it has plans to turn the Googleplex into a mega-Gooplex. The search engine giant signed a 40-year agreement Wednesday to develop a 42-acre campus on the grounds of

In a wide-ranging conversation with New York Times editors and reporters Wednesday, Intel’s chief executive, Paul Otellini, explained the grand plan behind the chip maker’s new Atom microprocessor, took a gentlemanly swipe at Apple’s iPhone and called on the next president to commit $25 billion to alternative fuel programs to liberate the economy from imported oil and “reinvigorate math and scienc

By John Markoff May 31, 2008 11:22 pm May 31, 2008 11:22 pm For a half-decade, the San Francisco bureau of The New York Times had a remarkable resource. Just five floors above us were the offices of Microsoft’s Bay Area Research Center and more specifically, Gordon Bell and Jim Gray, two of the world’s legendary computer scientists. I would have coffee with Jim on occasion, and from time to time,

By John Markoff May 28, 2008 7:36 pm May 28, 2008 7:36 pm Should Jerry Yang be running Yahoo? The search portal’s embattled chief executive and its president, Susan Decker, made the case on Wednesday afternoon that they should be given the opportunity to turn around the company that Mr. Yang co-founded 14 years ago as a Stanford student. “There’s a lot going on,” said Mr. Yang at the Wall Street J

By Miguel Helft May 28, 2008 12:30 pm May 28, 2008 12:30 pm Google has been a leading proponent of Web-based computing — software that is delivered over the Internet and typically runs inside a browser. But most browser applications cannot do many of the things that more powerful PC-based software can. Google has been trying to help close that gap. On Wednesday, Google touted the fruits of its eff

By John Markoff May 28, 2008 12:37 am May 28, 2008 12:37 am Bill Gates, Microsoft’s chairman, is intent on performing what must be the world’s longest-running Cheshire Cat act. Mr. Gates — who is reducing his role at Microsoft on July 1 and will work only on specific projects but will remain as chairman — appeared with his longtime friend and business partner Steve Ballmer on the opening night of