Oracle’s announcement marks its latest effort to bolster its breadth of enterprise software applications in targeted markets, ranging from transaction-processing specialist Tangosol to retail specialist Retek to logistics and transportation management specialist G-Log.

“Insurance is a strategic industry for Oracle, with growth focused on integrated packaged applications,” Oracle President Charles Phillips said in a statement.

Skywire develops [...]

Well, I think I have an answer. But I’ve taken an oath to keep my big mouth shut for the remainder of the political season–at least on these pages. (If you want to bore yourself reading my election rants, you’ll have to go up on Twitter.) But I was so keen to share my [...]

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On the one hand, this means a lot of personnel and fixed costs of the sort that have been no small issue for IBM–the company HP is attempting to mirror in important ways. On the other hand, if you believe–as I do–that companies (especially in small and midsize businesses) are increasingly going to move their [...]

Update: All gone. Sending them out to folks now–check your spam boxes.
Remember Brightkite, the social network meets microblogging tool we wrote about last week? The creators have been nice enough to grace us with 100 invites to give away to Webware readers. Just fill in the Wufoo form after the break and we’ll get one [...]

[via Digg]
While it lacks points for originality in the looks department, it makes up for it in functionality that’s far easier to use than some of the solutions currently available in MySpace’s official mobile version, and the one found on Helio’s phones. One of its greatest feats is taking music, the centerpiece of MySpace, and [...]

A source at MTV Networks told CNET News that there were, however, still Rhapsody America layoffs. Employees were cut from the joint venture’s office space at Viacom headquarters; many of them were former employees of Urge, the MTV digital music service that was folded into Rhapsody America when the joint venture launched.
UPDATE (1:19 p.m. PT): [...]

CBS Evening News will have its usual wall-to-wall coverage of the conventions, anchored by Katie Couric and the CBS News political team, including CBS Senior Political Correspondent Jeff Greenfield and Face the Nation’s Bob Schieffer. The DNC and RNC convention coverage will also be Webcast live on CBSNews.com.
If you have a question about the candidates, [...]

Sun is trying to hollow out Oracle’s momentum with an aggressive, all-you-can-eat pricing for MySQL, but the real competition in the short term is from Microsoft and IBM.
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Over the past few years, Oracle has bought nearly every enterprise software company in existence, but comparatively few database-related vendors (Sleepycat, InnoDB, etc.). This hasn’t mattered, however, as [...]

A source familiar with the negotiations tells me that Twitter signed a term sheet for “either $15 million or $20 million” last week. We’re still trying to find out who is in, but the word is that it’s largely an inside round of funding with one outsider setting the price.
On Friday, Valleywag [...]

I’ll just note a few things here:
More memory in servers is all the rage. That’s because there’s a fairly strong correlation between how much work a processor is doing and how much memory it needs to store the associated data and instructions. Memory requirements have been going up forever, of course, but server virtualization [...]