Can an exec with consumer tech experience run an enterprise tech company? That’s the question raised by analysts who spoke to Bloomberg about Meg Whitman’s prospects as HP’s new CEO, following the firing of Leo Apotheker on Wednesday. Apotheker had been CEO for less than a year–after being fired from his previous job as co-CEO of SAP. READ MORE
Call it a sign of the economic times: According to a TurboTax infographic, states are now instituting affiliate taxes. Although it’s been a long time coming for online retailers like Amazon, cloud services resellers have typically been immune. But that could change. READ MORE
Diffbot, a Palo Alto, Calif. start-up, hopes its new technology will let websites create content that appeal more to the human eye. READ MORE
Although major U.S. companies such as Google and Yahoo might have failed in China, for entrepreneurs, China is the new Silicon Valley says TD Daily’s Lara Farrar. A host of international start-ups, including American ones, are finding the climate conducive to their needs: cheap labor, fast developers, and the ability to stretch seed funding farther than in the U.S. READ MORE
Facebook is slowly moving its employees into a new campus in Menlo Park, California that formerly housed Sun Microsystems. And already, the kids can’t seem to keep from writing whatever they want on the walls. Some of the partitions in the new office space have been punched out to create roomier spaces, but others have been covered with blackboard paint on which employees can doodle idly. READ MORE
Welcome back vacation warriors! You picked a great time to be away last week. Outside of tech, there was really only one story to pay attention to: Washington continuing to fiddle while the deficit burned. High drama was not limited to the political sphere, however. It was drama and not Apple, Google or Facebook dominating the tech world last week. Here’s an update of what happened while you were… Off the grid! READ MORE
Instant Heart Rate, a smartphone app that measures a user’s heart rate through the phone’s camera, has accumulated eight million downloads on iPhone and Android devices since its debut last fall. The creators of the app, Azumio, a start-up based in Palo Alto, California, announced today that it’s raised $2.5 million from investors, including Founders Fund, Accel Partners, and Felecis Ventures, to continue to deliver health-measuring mobile apps. READ MORE
Amazon has become more aggressive in its battle against California’s demands that the Internet retail site pay state sales tax. And while it is larger companies like Amazon that are arguing the sales tax issue directly with the state, there are thousands of small online retailers that also stand to gain from the California initiative. These smaller companies are more likely than a major corporation to have trouble collecting sales taxes. READ MORE
The percent of companies planning to use social networks to recruit job candidates is up, according to a new survey from Jobvite, a California company that makes software to help companies use social networks to recruit. READ MORE
TED has a well-deserved reputation not only as a home for big ideas and great networking, but as an exceptional production. Everything from the stage lighting to the program guide is carefully crafted to optimize the experience they want to provide attendees. While much of the magic is in the arrangement of elements, there are some strategies that they’ve employed over the years that any conference or event planner can learn from. READ MORE
