SiliconBeat

I spent Tuesday at the Internet Identity Workshop at the invitation of Kaliya Hamlin. I met Hamlin a couple of years ago while working on another conference, and had some fascinating discussions at the time about the Semantic Web and the future of news.

Hamlin was named by Fast Company last year as one of the most influential women in technology. She’s the organizer of numerous un-conferences around the valley. But in this case, she was being recognized for her co-founding and ongoing role in the Internet Identity Workshop. Started five years ago, the group gathers twice each year and was holding its 10th conference this week at the Computer  History Museum in Mountain View.

The subject of identity on the Web is especially timely right now with the controversy swirling around Facebook. The social media giant wants to essentially be the main repository of your online identity, and allow you to carry that around the Web with you. There are a lot of benefits to that, but there are also reasons to be wary. The folks at the workshop are developing more open alternatives.

What’s at stake here? As Hamlin frames it on her blog:

“The issue at hand is fundamentally about FREEDOM: the freedom to choose who hosts your identity online (with the freedom to set up and host your own), the freedom to choose your persona – how you present yourself, what your gender is, your age, your race, your sex, where you are in the world.”

So I stopped by the workshop for a few hours to sit in on some sessions and talk to Hamlin about the subject of identity on the Web. It was a great conversation, so let me summarize some of her thoughts. And at the end, I added a copy of her presentation that kicked off the three-day gathering.

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Call me an securities filings nerd, but one of my favorite things about any merger of public companies is when they file the “background of the merger” proxy. Today, Palm filed its latest proxy giving us the details of events that led to the merger with Hewlett-Packard. I’m still digesting the timeline, but in a nutshell, Palm realized that in February, after the poor launch with Verizon Wireless in January, the roof was caving in: Read the rest of this entry »

Larry Ellison doesn’t do a lot of interviews. But in a recent confab with the Reuters news service, the Oracle CEO offered up some typically unvarnished opinions about prior management at Sun Microsystems, the once-great computer-maker that had fallen on hard times when Oracle bought it for $7.4 billion earlier this year.

Though much of the interview covered familiar ground, it offered some interesting tidbits as Ellison described some of the inner workings of Sun’s operation – including what’s characterized as outdated manufacturing and distribution systems, inefficient sales commissions, wasteful spending and bad management at the very top levels.

“The underlying engineering teams are so good, but the direction they got was so astonishingly bad that even they couldn’t succeed,” Ellison said.

Ellison offered what appeared to be a sharp dig at Jonathan Schwartz, the pony-tailed CEO who ran Sun before the sale to Oracle and who was known for diligently blogging about the company’s strategy and products.

“Really great blogs do not take the place of great microprocessors. Great blogs do not replace great software,” Ellison said. “Lots and lots of blogs does not replace lots and lots of sales.”

Ellison also gave some hints about future acquisitions as he attempts to transform his hugely successful software company into a full-service purveyor of integrated data center systems. Short summary: Oracle may be looking to buy more hardware companies. “We’ll buy in all areas of our business,” Ellison said.

Now that I’ve had time to digest the news of Hewlett-Packard’s $1.2 billion acquistion of Palm, I’ve been thinking more about the man who sits at the heart of this deal:

Jon Rubinstein.

He’s hardly a household name in Silicon Valley. But in many ways, he’s got more on the line here than anyone else in the deal on a personal level. Yet for the most part, he’s been oddly silent since the deal was announced, except for a short interview with All Things D’s Kara Swisher.

But it’s worth remembering that the entire plan to reinvent palm revolved around Rubinstein. In my column over the weekend, I gave Palm credit for taking the risky path of trying to reboot itself. As I was researching that column, I was reminded of something that I had forgotten: The deal to get Elevation Partners to invest $325 million in Palm was all contingent on Rubinstein joining Palm.

No Rubinstein, no deal. That’ pretty extraordinary. I can’t think of another deal in Silicon Valley that was so dependent on the participation of a single individual. And it shows just how deeply the folks at Elevation believed in Rubinstein, who while at Apple was credited with developing the iPod before leaving in 2006.

So how did their $325 million man do? And did his stock go up or down after three years at Palm?

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