SiliconBeat

Microsoft’s new Bing search engine gained less ground on Google than many observes had thought since its release last month, according to data released this morning from comScore, an independent research firm.
Doug Anmuth, an analyst with Barclays Capital, writes in a research note this morning that Microsoft’s share of search queries increased from 8 percent in May to 8.4 percent in June.
“While the share gain is positive for Microsoft, & Bing was the only one of the 3 large search engines to increase queries M/M, we had expected Bing share to come in between 10-11%,” Anmuth wrote. “As a result, we believe the search data is a slight positive for both Google & Yahoo!, & it should serve as a sigh of relief to some investors who were concerned about the early impact of Bing. Bing’s gains did come virtually all from Yahoo!, but the overall impact was still less than anticipated.”
Google will report its second-quarter earnings on Thursday.

Cannabis Science, the San Francisco company dedicated to developing medicines derived from marijuana, filled in a bit more detail on why it fired former Chief Executive Steve Kubby last week in a filing today with the SEC. The company has authorized an internal investigation and “review by counsel” of Kubby’s “apparently fraudulent Read the rest of this entry »

You know that you are in trouble when the chief software architect of Microsoft, a company synonymous with bloated code, criticizes your product as too complicated.
Coming from Bill Gates, Microsoft’s retired chairman, that assessment of “Wave,” a new collaboration tool developed by Google engineers, Jan and Lars Rasmussen, may have sounded like sour grapes. After all, mass enthusiasm for Wave, which was unveiled last week, stole the thunder from the introduction of Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine.
But the critic was Ray Ozzie, the soft-spoken, painstakeningly polite, universally admired developer of Lotus Notes and Groove. Ozzie began by earnestly praising the software developers who created Wave. “I have nothing but the most high degree of sincere respect for the people who took this on,” Ozzie said, and you could tell from the tone of his voice and the look on his face that he meant it.
Ozzie, after all is the guru of collaboration. It’s the topic his mind wanders to when it finds itself unoccupied, he told a crowd gathered for a Churchill Club event in Palo Alto on Thursday night. Ozzie said he continuously ponders how people can “more effectively connect” their brains so they can better work together. What he has seen of Wave, Ozzie added, he liked. “It’s nice,” he said.
But he cautioned that Web software needs to be simple. With Wave, “complexity is an issue.”
The remarks may have helped puncture some of the hype around Wave. A demo of the software last week at Google’s developer conference last week prompted a standing ovation. At its most basic, Wave ties e-mail together with instant messaging. But Wave doesn’t stop with a more diverse inbox, it seeks to reconceptualize online communication.
Wave is currently going through internal testing at Google and it is unclear when it will be available to the public. Though dubious that Wave will grow into a big success, Ozzie predicted the project would contribute to developing better Web-based tools. “We will learn a lot from their technology,” he said.

Craig Nordlund (pictured below), general counsel at Agilent Technologies since its spin-off from Hewlett-Packard in 1999, and before that the GC at HP since 1987, is retiring from the Palo Alto instruments maker sometime before the end of its current fiscal year in October, Read the rest of this entry »

Could it be that Yahoo is finding it harder to hire a new chief financial officer than it expected. Its current CFO, Blake Jorgensen (pictured) is still leaving, as the company announced Feb. 26 when he became one of the first casualties of the house cleaning done by the Internet company’s new chief executive Carol Bartz. Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Shannahan, who joined Kana Software less than 14 months ago, retired from the Menlo Park developer of customer communication software Monday in order to “pursue other interests,” the company said in a regulatory filing Tuesday.

It would be the end of Shannahan’s sixth CFO gig in 10 years, having also served in that capacity at Read the rest of this entry »

Apple shareholders will be getting a “say on pay” after all.

Beginning next year, Apple will allow investors to have an annual advisory vote on its executive pay packages, the company said Monday in a statement. After repeatedly saying that shareholders had lost a vote on the matter at its annual meeting in February, Apple acknowledged in the statement that it had miscounted shareholder votes, mistakenly counting abstentions as no votes.

In a post on Friday, I noted that Apple seemed to have changed the way it counts shareholder votes over the last year. More shareholder votes were cast in favor of “say on pay” this year than last, and the gap between yes and no votes on the matter had widened. Despite that, Apple said last year that the matter had passed, while saying this year that it failed.

Read the rest of this entry »

Amid the flurry of tech company earnings reports recently, the financial update provided by chip-maker Linear Technology of Milpitas got a bit overlooked this week. So we at SiliconBeat felt obligated to give you the highlights.

The company posted a profit of $54.5 million for its third fiscal quarter, which ended March 29. That was a 45 percent decrease from the same period a year ago.Its revenue was $200.9 million, off 33 percent from a year ago.

Analysts offered a mixed picture about the company’s prospects going forward.

J. P. Morgan analyst Christopher Danely took issue with Linear’s reluctance to reduce its chip inventory, declaring in a note to his clients, “we do not share Linear’s optimism” that sales will bounce back soon.

But in a note of his own, GC Research analyst David Wu said Linear’s management so far “has proved the skeptics wrong and we would give them the benefit of the doubt, at least over the next two to three years.”

AP Pharma said today in a filing that it’s board was notified by two of its directors on Tuesday that they would not seek re-election to the board when their terms expire at the company’s next annual meeting, scheduled for May 27.

Peter Riepenhausen is stepping down after after 18 years on the company’s board, where he served on the Read the rest of this entry »

Two years after naming Anthony Tebbutt its senior vice president for corporate strategy and business development, Alexza Pharmaceuticals has announced that his employment will end as of May 31.

Tebbutt, who worked for UCB, a Belgium pharmaceutical until October 2006, was paid $139,104  to cover certain expenses related to his relocation to the Bay Area when he was hired in March 2007. Since October 2007 he has been given a “monthly Read the rest of this entry »