Internet Solutions

Former HP CEO Mark Hurd stands to score big as co-president at Oracle. Beyond the salary, there’s a potential $5 million bonus in 2011, and oodles of stock options.

Firefox and other up-to-date browsers are capable of running newly complex games, Mozilla argues, launching an effort to get programmers interested.

Originally posted at Deep Tech

Along with the security fixes, Firefox 3.6.9 gets a new feature to help Web developers reduce clickjacking risks. Also: Chrome 6 gets bug fixes.

Originally posted at Deep Tech

As Salesforce’s foray into social collaboration, Salesforce Chatter, gains traction amongst enterprise users, it makes sense for the company to launch complimentary mobile apps to the platform. And as the enterprise increasingly relies upon mobile devices for connectivity; there is a strong demand for native mobile use of Chatter. Today, Salesforce is taking Chatter to mobile phones; unveiling Chatter Mobile apps for the iPad, iPhone, Google Android and BlackBerry devices.

Salesforce Chatter, which was originally announced last November, was launched into public beta in June after four months in private beta. In the realtime collaboration platform’s firts three months open to the public, Chatter has been adopted by 20,000 companies; with 25 percent of Salesforce’s client base using the platform. .

Chatter Mobile includes all of the functionality of the web-based product. With Chatter Mobile, users will be able to monitor their Chatter feeds, including posts from colleagues and alerts from apps, as well as post status updates and comment on conversations taking place within their company.

Chatter was launched as a platform to deliver realtime access to data and information, using social sources, such as YouTube and Twitter. Similar to interactions on Facebook, employees can create business profiles with professional information like personal contact data, area of expertise, and work history. Searching other people’s profiles, colleagues can quickly identify individuals who are relevant to their enterprise needs. Users can post status updates to share communications, files and links around a project, sales deal or customer support case. And users can see realtime feeds of personalized updates from people, applications and documents.

Of course, with a mobile platform, it would make sense for Chatter to leverage GPS of users and get into the location game. However, Salesforce says that while location-based services aren’t shipping out on the first version of the app, location features could be included in future versions. Salesforce is also announcing that third parties can now integrate Chatter into their mobile apps as well.

Originally Chatter was available within the Salesfore CRM apps, which have seen 250,000 downloads from the Apple App Store and more than 100,000 from the BlackBerry App World (You can see a demonstration of the Chatter on the CRM app here.)

Salesforce Chatter is included at no additional charge to all paying user subscriptions of Salesforce CRM and Force.com, with Chatter-only user licenses available for customers using Professional Edition, Enterprise Edition or Unlimited Edition for $15 per user. Mobile apps will be available at no additional charge for Salesforce CRM and Force.com subscribers.

Chatter Mobile apps for BlackBerry, iPad, iPhone and the new iPod touch are currently scheduled to be available in late 2010. Chatter Mobile for Android devices is currently scheduled to be available in the first half of 2011.

With the launch of mobile apps and a mobile app ecosystem, it looks like Chatter is becoming a full-fledged independent platform. Earlier this spring, Salesforce launched an app marketplace for Chatter, called ChatterExchange. As the need for social networks within the enterprise grows, Salesforce wants Chatter to be a viable option for existing customers and new customers who may not have need for the CRM application or Force.com platform.

However, while Chatter looks and feels like a social network, CEO and founder Marc Benioff has been fairly adamant that Chatter is best characterized as a collaboration platform, not a social network.

That being said, the social network/collaboration platform is a competitive space. Yammer is launching soon as a full-fledged social network for the enterprise, and Jive, Bantam Live, and SuccessFactor’s CubeTree also offer compelling products.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

A new audio data API, default hardware acceleration, and a return of some menu options that had been missing in previous betas are the keystones to Firefox 4 beta 5.

Originally posted at The Download Blog

While full-time tech jobs might not be making a roaring comeback, freelance and part-time work seems to be picking up the slack. One data point just came out today illustrating the shift to freelance and online work. Online outsourcer oDesk passed one million hours of work on its system for the first time in the month of August. A year ago, workers on oDesk were logging less than half of that, about 400,000 hours per month. Online hiring is up 129 percent since last year, compared to flat employment growth in the larger economy.

The work on oDesk is spread across 215,000 employers and 720,000 contractors, whose desktops are monitored by oDesk’s software. The top three job categories on oDesk are Web Programming, Web Design, and Blog & Article Writing. Cumulatively, employers have paid out more than $185 million to online workers through oDesk, up from the $100-million mark last October.

A couple other key stats: eCommerce sites are hiring 70 percent more Web developers than a year go. While many of these online workers are overseas in the Philippines, India, Pakistan, and Russia, the U.S. is the the largest source of online workers on oDesk. California is the top state for virtual workers, and the top ten cities in the U.S. where virtual workers live are:

1. Manhattan
2. Los Angeles
3. San Francisco
4. Austin
5. Chicago
6. Pittsburgh
7. Brooklyn
8. San Diego
9. Miami
10. Charlotte

Crunch Network: TechCrunch obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies

One of the big problems with video on the Web is that other than the title, description and some meta tags, it is mostly invisible to Google and other search engines. One way to make video more SEO-friendly is to add transcriptions, but that can get expensive. An angel-funded startup called SpeakerText is (re)launching today with a very clever way to automate the transcription process and attach the full transcript as part of the video player in a drop down window. You can see an example of how this works below. And if you publish a lot of videos and want to try it out yourself, we have 100 beta invites (use the code: techcrunch).

Once a video is transcribed, it appears in a collapsible window below each player. Not only is all the text visible to search engines, and thus should help drive more search traffic to individual videos, but the text is all time-stamped. So you can click on any sentence and it will jump to that point in the video. Anytime somebody cuts and pastes a portion of the transcript in a blog or other site, a link back to that point in the video is also included. The startup tried doing a Flash wrapper before for the YouTube player. It completely reworked its technology into what it is now calling the SpeakerBar that is more of a transcript plug-in that detects any video on your site that has a matching plug-in. SpeakerText works with video players from YouTube, Brightcove, and Blip.tv, and there is also a WordPress plug-in.

The UK’s Information Commissioner has reprimanded ISP TalkTalk over recent unpublicised trials of its anti-malware system.

Tech stars join forces as Oracle’s Larry Ellison brings in former HP boss Mark Hurd to replace Charles Phillips.

Sony has released a “minor” update for its PlayStation 3 that closes a loophole that allowed users to run pirated software.