Jan 16, 2008

I Heart WSJ News Alerts

When I set up my Wall Street Journal (WSJ) subscription I signed up for news alerts that send me short abstracts of hot news items as they hit the WSJ site. It's good. WSJ is judicious about what they send and my inbox isn't overloaded with new stories, it's just enough though.

Today was a banner day for technology news. See the headlines here: http://online.wsj.com/page/technology.html?mod=1_0013

A few of the big stories that hit today:

1. Oracle has agreed to pay $19.375 per share in cash for BEA Systems for a grand total of $8.5 billion. BEA has agreed to the price even though they said last fall they would not accept a bid under $21 a share. The sabers have stopped rattling. See the press release (it's the same on both company sites).

2. Sun Microsystems has agreed to buy the open source database MySQL AB for a sum of $1 billion in cash and options. Jonathan Scwartz's blog post almost reads like a Whole Earth article.

3. Gregory Reyes, former CEO of Brocade Communications Systems was sentenced to 21 months in prison and a $15 million dollar fine for stock-options back dating. Ouch! I guess it could have been worse (good thing the company didn't lose any money) but the article paints a stark picture.

Interestingly it's day 2 of Macworld and Apple is in 5th position on the top news items. I suppose all the big news was yesterday.

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