chairman and CEO

Salesforce.com on Wednesday posted a 48 percent jump in fiscal fourth-quarter profit, on strong sales growth for its online business software applications.

For the three months ended Jan. 31, Salesforce.com said profit jumped to $20.4 million, or 16 cents per share, compared with $13.8 million, or 11 cents per share, in last year's fourth quarter.

Revenue shot up 22 percent to $354 million, from $289.6 million a year ago.

Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters, on average, expected profit of 15 cents per share, on revenue of $342.3 million.

Salesforce.com on Thursday announced a private beta program for an enterprise collaboration platform. Dubbed Salesforce Chatter, 100 companies around the world are testing the platform that offers anywhere, anytime access to Chatter's real-time feeds via BlackBerry or iPhone smartphones.

Chatter aims to help companies understand everything going on in their organization and avoid missing critical information. Chatter is taking direct aim at legacy software such as SharePoint and Lotus Notes with a design that looks and feels like popular consumer social-networking sites.

News Corp. late Wednesday evening announced a major shake-up in the MySpace executive ranks. With seemingly little warning, MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta has stepped down after only seven months at the helm of the struggling social-networking site.

"Owen took on an incredible challenge in working to refocus and revitalize MySpace, and the business has shown very positive signs recently as a result of his dedicated work," said Jon Miller, News Corp.'s chairman and CEO of digital media.

The battle for the shrinking American budget is moving online this year with a vengeance. While the recession took its toll on shopping centers and strip malls around the country, the economic downturn has left the Internet poised to enter 2010 as a larger force in retail.

Palm reported a drop in earnings for its fiscal 2010 second quarter, but the handset maker hopes news about an updated webOS will encourage the market. Total revenues for Palm's second quarter were $78.1 million, with gross profits of $5.5 million. The company's stock slid 10 percent as the company's new operating system and phone lineup failed to perform as well as expected.

Dell's earnings are up and expectations are solid, but the company's stock still took a hit Friday afternoon after analysts signaled the company isn't playing a key role in the PC market recovery. Dell's shipments were flat in the third quarter and down five percent from the year-ago period despite improvements in the large-enterprise and small-and-midsize business segments and increased demand and revenue from business customers.

In a move to compete for business from wireless carriers, Cisco Systems has reached an agreement to acquire Starent Networks for $2.9 billion. Starent supplies IP-based mobile infrastructure solutions.

The Palm Pre will make its debut in Europe next month. U.K.-based carrier O2 has the exclusive rights to sell the webOS-powered smartphone in Europe.

Palm said Thursday that O2 will be the exclusive wireless provider in the U.K., Ireland and Germany for an undisclosed amount of time. O2 has confirmed the deal.

The Palm Pre, which has a slide-out keyboard, Web browsing, music, photos and videos, launched with exclusive rights in the U.S. through Sprint, and in Canada through Bell Mobility.

Sony Ericsson is shaking things up with executive changes. The management shake-up at the London-based company comes as mobile-phone businesses struggle to make a profit.

Bert Nordberg, executive vice president of the Ericsson Group and a leader at Ericsson Silicon Valley, will share co-president duties with current President Hideki Komiyama, beginning Sept. 1. Nordberg will take full control of the company as president on Oct. 15 and Komiyama will retire at the end of the year.

The battle lines already are forming over TV shows on the Internet. Cable companies, led by giant operator Comcast, are pressing to limit online watching of TV shows only to those who already pay subscriptions to them. TV networks Fox, NBC, and ABC have allied behind Hulu, their own online service that offers advertiser-supported content to all comers for free.