Palo Alto

SAP Co-Chief Executives Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe have pledged to quicken the pace of product introductions and dealmaking at the German software company as they try to reverse the sales decline that led to the ouster of their predecessor, Leo Apotheker.

SAP (SAP), the world's largest maker of business applications software, is pushing a new engineering approach that is designed to get new products out the door faster, McDermott and Snabe told reporters and analysts on Mar. 15 at the company's campus in Palo Alto, Calif.

Social networking site Facebook is opening an operations office in India, its first in Asia, to help manage rapid growth in the number of users.

The office, in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, will have advertising and developer support teams, the company said Monday. It will supplement Facebook's other centers in Palo Alto, California; Dublin, Ireland; and Austin, Texas.

The move is part of a push to create support centers across time zones, with round-the-clock, multilingual support, the company said.

Developers are making money from Apple's App Store, and one is sharing just how much success it has had developing for the iPhone -- a success story that provides a clear indication of how Apple is bearing fruits from its own labor and the labor of the developers behind its more than 100,000 apps.

Developer Tapulous has raked in more than $12 million from some of its most popular applications, including Tap Tap Revenge (the first gaming franchise on the iPhone), Collage, and the music-based Weezer, according to the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company.

Social media sites including Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. have influenced 28 percent of U.S. holiday shoppers in gift-buying decisions this year, according to a survey by ComScore Inc.

Shoppers were most swayed by product reviews written by other consumers, the Reston, Virginia-based research firm said yesterday in a statement.

"We are getting our first real glimpse at the impact social media will play on commerce as we enter the next decade," ComScore Chairman and co-founder Gian Fulgoni said in the statement.

Hewlett-Packard, the world's largest personal-computer maker, is canceling its two-week holiday break for some U.S. sales employees because they need to spend the time closing deals, according to an internal e-mail.

"This is a business critical decision, one that was not made lightly," Randy Seidl, head of Americas sales for the enterprise storage, server and networking group, said in the Dec. 4 e-mail. The company's goals for increasing sales and market share in the quarter ending in January "make this action a business necessity."

Headbangers will have a reason to steady their gaze a bit starting Tuesday, when rock band Metallica makes its way onto iPhones with a finger-tapping music app called "Tap Tap Revenge: Metallica."

In the game, players tap areas on the screen in time with the music, much like players strum or drum plastic instruments in video games such as "Rock Band" and "Guitar Hero," except on a smaller scale.

The iconic rockers could probably make more money performing one or two shows live, with 10 playable songs on the game, including "Enter Sandman," selling for $4.99.

Kaufman Bros. analyst Shaw Wu doesn't think the combination of Xerox Corp. and Affiliated Computer Services Inc. will be much of a competitive threat against Hewlett-Packard Co.

Xerox agreed to buy ACS on Monday for about $6.4 billion in cash and stock. The deal came a week after Dell Inc. said it would buy Perot Systems Corp. for $3.9 billion and a year after HP snapped up Electronic Data Systems Corp. for $13.9 billion.

Microsoft's No. 1 rival is a household name, Google. But a strong candidate for No. 2 is a company scarcely known outside the technology industry: VMware.

"VMware is definitely a threat," said Gary Chen, an analyst at IDC, a research firm. "After Google, it is the company Microsoft fears most."

Google and VMware, which is based in Palo Alto, California, pose a broadly similar challenge to Microsoft, by potentially undermining the dominance of its most lucrative desktop software and operating systems. Google represents the attack from above, while VMware is the assault from beneath.

A Missouri woman was tricked into wiring about $4,000 to someone in England after receiving faked messages from a friend on Facebook asking for help, police said Wednesday.

Jayne Scherrman of Cape Girardeau wired the money through Western Union after receiving what she believed were several requests for help from her friend, Sgt. Jason Selzer said.

Even during tight budgetary times, a growing handful of state governors are proving too wary to accept laptop computers that have shown up at their offices this month, unsolicited.

Officials in West Virginia, Vermont, Wyoming and Washington state have reported receiving between three and five laptops, each over the course of two separate deliveries -- but none had ordered any of them.

"They immediately raised a red flag," said Matt Turner, spokesman for West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin. "No one said, 'Hey, we got a free gift.'"