executive

Apple Inc. is giving its chief operating officer a $5 million bonus for "outstanding performance" running the company while CEO Steve Jobs was on medical leave.

Timothy Cook, 49, will also receive 75,000 restricted stock units scheduled to vest in 2011 and 2012, Apple said in a regulatory filing Friday.

A former executive with IBM and other tech companies has been named the new CEO of an organization in charge of coordinating the technical specifications behind the World Wide Web.

The Web's inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, is remaining the director of the World Wide Web Consortium, and Jeffrey Jaffe, 55, will work under him as its CEO. Jaffe replaces Steve Bratt, 53, who left the position in mid-2009 to run a Web foundation also started by Berners-Lee.

Microsoft Corp. has said its new software for smart phones, Windows Phone 7 series, is a "clean break" with the past. Now it's clear just how clean that break is: The new phones, expected late this year, won't run any applications written for older versions of Microsoft's phone software.

In a blog post Thursday, Microsoft executive Charlie Kindel, who handles contact with outside software developers, said that jettisoning support for older applications was necessary to make the new operating system as powerful and user-friendly as possible.

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.

Controversial Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz has stepped down in a nonconventional way by using Twitter. He tweeted his resignation early Thursday, well within the 140-character limit.

"Today's my last day at Sun. I'll miss it. Seems only fitting to end on a #haiku. Financial crisis/Stalled too many customers/CEO no more", Schwartz said via Twitter. Schwartz also tapped into social media on Jan. 28, when he signaled his impending departure from the company with a blog post that he called "likely my last blog at Sun."

Qualcomm was the chipmaker of choice for some of the highest-profile tech gadgets unveiled the week of the Consumer Electronics Show -- in Las Vegas and elsewhere. Not only do Qualcomm chips run the Google Nexus One smartphone introduced in Mountain View, Calif., on Jan. 5, but they're also under the hood of computers shown off at CES by Hewlett-Packard. HP and Lenovo are working on smartbooks, scaled-down personal computers, based on Qualcomm's Snapdragon processor.

The White House has tapped a corporate cyber security expert and former Bush administration official to lead the effort to shore up the country's computer networks and better coordinate with companies that operate 80 percent of those critical systems.

Howard A. Schmidt, a former eBay and Microsoft executive, will become the government's cyber security coordinator, weathering a rocky selection process that dragged on for months, as others turned the job down.

The FBI is investigating a hacker attack on Citigroup Inc. that led to the theft of tens of millions of dollars, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

Citing anonymous government officials, the Journal reported that the hackers were connected to a Russian cyber gang. Two other computer systems, at least one connected to a U.S. government agency, were also attacked.

The FBI is investigating a hacker attack on Citigroup Inc. that led to the theft of tens of millions of dollars, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

Citing anonymous government officials, the Journal reported that the hackers were connected to a Russian cyber gang. Two other computer systems, at least one of connected to a U.S. government agency, were also attacked.

European Union regulators looked closer to approving Oracle Corp.'s takeover of Sun Microsystems Inc. when they said Monday that the company's stated commitment to open-source database software was "an important new element."

The European Commission is holding up the $7.4 billion (euro5.05 billion) deal over worries that Oracle would gain too much control over the database software market if it takes over Sun's open-source-based MySQL, which the EU claims poses a threat to Oracle's own database programs.