Otellini’s total compensation package clocked in at $12.1 million last year, up from $5.9 million the previous year–an increase of 104 percent.

“Both elements were increased in light of peer data indicating that his cash compensation was significantly below the committee’s compensation goals,” Intel said.

Intel CEO Paul Otellini delivers a keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show in January.

And despite more than doubling Otellini’s compensation in 2007, the Intel board’s compensation committee, according to the filing, “believes that his total compensation was still significantly below the 65th percentile (among the peer group).”

While some investors may question the sizable bump to Otellini’s wallet, one thing to note is that about a third of the overall increase came from a long-term stock option award of 700,000 shares that was front-loaded in 2007.

While staggered stock option awards are often used as golden handcuffs to retain executives, it seems in this case that Intel is more interested in boosting its share price than it is worried that Otellini might bolt. After all, doubling the pay package may have addressed the latter concern.

Otellini’s long-term stock option award was granted in a single year instead of spread over a number of years. The decision was to “reinforce the at risk, performance-based nature of Otellini’s total compensation package,” Intel noted in its filing.

(Credit:
Corinne Schulze/CNET News.com)

Intel gave CEO Paul Otellini a substantial pay raise last year, doubling the value of his compensation, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Otellini’s pay hike was the result of trying to bring his compensation package in line with those at peer companies, Intel said in the SEC filing. The bulk of the 2007 increase came from giving his total cash compensation a 91 percent jolt to $4.7 million, while his base pay received a 10 percent increase to $770,000.

“For 2007, the peer group consisted of technology companies generally considered comparable to Intel as well as non-technology companies within the Fortune 100. For the peer group used in 2007, the committee’s intent was to choose companies that had one or more attributes similar to Intel’s, including semiconductor or computer design, manufacturing and integration, and large enterprises with global operations,” Intel stated in its filing.

Intel investors, meanwhile, saw the chip giant’s stock jump 33.6 percent during the year, as the Dow logged a 5 percent gain and the Nasdaq a 7.6 percent increase.

Caveat: Sure, it’s small now, but the number of Blu-ray titles is growing slowly but surely. In fact, Blu-ray and HD DVD adoption (combined) has actually outpaced that of the original DVD format, which took three or four years before it really went mainstream.

Caveat: Does anybody really watch those PiP-enabled commentaries? Or want updated trailers downloaded from the Web? Beyond the hardcore cinephiles, I think the answer is a big “no.” In other words, if you’re among the vast majority who only wants to watch the movie, you’re not really gaining anything with a 1.1. or 2.0 player. Those older Blu-ray players should play everything else on the disc (the non-playable features are just grayed out on the menu). With the older players hitting the discount racks to make way for newer models, getting a Profile 1.0 player is a nice way to score a Blu-ray player on the cheap ($300 or less).

4. Blu-ray still has growing pains: How many times have you popped a brand new DVD into your player, only to be greeted with a message that you need to update the firmware to view the movie? Probably never, but Blu-ray early adopters have faced this message more than they would like to admit. (To be fair, HD DVD has had its share of disc compatibility issues as well.) To make matters worse, many early Blu-ray players can’t update via Ethernet, so you’ll need to burn a CD to update the player. If you’re reading Crave, burning a disc probably isn’t a problem–but there are many less-tech-savvy people that love DVDs, but have no idea what an ISO file is.

So there you have it: there’s absolutely no compelling reason to dive into Blu-ray, at least for the next few months. But as with all of the items above, the conclusion comes with a big caveat of its own: the Sony PlayStation 3. It’s the only player that’s futureproof, it doubles as a top-notch game machine and network digital media streamer, and it’s readily available for $400. Oh–it also happens to be a great Blu-ray player, and it does a fine job of upconverting your standard DVDs to high-definition resolutions. As such, it remains the exception to the rule, and the only Blu-ray player that we can enthusiastically recommend for the time being.

3. There are still very few movies available on Blu-ray: As of February 5, 2008, there are less than 450 current Blu-ray titles available in North America (not counting discontinued and adult titles). That stacks up well to HD DVD (around 400). But it’s a drop in the bucket compared to standard DVD, which has at least 90,000 titles available (including TV shows).

Don’t overpay for an obsolete Blu-ray player like this $,1000 Pioneer Elite BDP-95FD

(Credit:
Pioneer)

1. Nearly all current Blu-ray players are obsolete: The Blu-ray standard is still evolving. Most models currently available use the original Profile 1.0 standard, while some newer models use Profile 1.1 (which adds the ability to show picture-in-picture commentaries). Later this year, the first Profile 2.0 players–which add the ability to deliver online special features (BD Live)–will become available. Ironically, both of these are designed to bring the Blu-ray standard in line with HD DVD players, which have long been able to deliver these features.

A couple of the most recent Blu-ray players (the combo players from Samsung and LG) can be updated from Profile 1.0 to 1.1 with a downloadable firmware update. But the
PlayStation 3 is, supposedly, the only existing Blu-ray player that will be fully upgradeable to Profile 2.0. So if you don’t want your Blu-ray player to be obsolete, the PS3 is your only choice until 2.0 models–such as the Panasonic DMP-BD50–hit later this year.

Caveat: Eagle-eyed videophiles–or those who sit especially close to their 1080p TVs–may well see a difference. Rule of thumb: if HDTV programming looks noticeably better than DVD playback on your TV, then Blu-ray will be a worthwhile investment.

5. Prices have nowhere to go but down: Even without competition from HD DVD, Blu-ray prices seem to be on a one-way ticket downward. Older players can be purchases for about $300, so don’t be surprised to see Black Friday 2008 specials at $249 or $199. Caveat: See item number 1: the cheaper players are likely to be older models that are effectively “obsolete.”

With HD DVD looking more and more like it’s on the ropes, it would seem like the ideal time to commit to Blu-ray–right? Not so fast. There are at least five reasons to stick with your good old-fashioned DVD player–at least for the next few months. (And, as always, there are some key caveats and insider secrets for those who can’t resist pullling the trigger as soon as possible.)

CNET Networks, News.com’s parent company, on Thursday announced a three-year strategic partnership with Yahoo under which CNET will be a third-party content provider of technology news and reviews.

The announcement was made as CNET reported its quarterly earnings, a net loss of $6.1 million, or 4 cents per share, compared with a net loss of $9.1 million, or 6 cents per share, in the year-ago period. Reuters said the per-share loss was in line with Wall Street estimates, but net revenue of $91.4 million fell short of analysts’ average expectation for $93.4 million.

“Working together, we have the ability to build more robust content environments and more comprehensive programs for our marketing partners,” CNET CEO Neil Ashe said in a press release.

CNET has also been in the news of late because the hedge fund Jana Partners is trying to take control of its board.

The shareholders are asking a Delaware Chancery Court to invalidate the severance plans, but no date has been set for a court hearing.

Investors in the coming weeks will be deluged with competing proxy cards from Yahoo and Icahn, asking shareholders to disregard each other’s material, along with some likely barbs tossed over the fence.

If Icahn is successful with his proxy fight and he wins a majority of the board seats, it could trigger Yahoo’s controversial employee severance plans, which may potentially cost the Internet search pioneer as much as $2.13 billion in payouts, according to documents in a shareholders lawsuit against Yahoo.

Some of the later has already begun, with Icahn calling for the ouster of Yahoo co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

Yahoo, in the following week, announced it would delay its July 3 shareholders meeting to late July, in an effort to give the Securities and Exchange Commission time to review its preliminary proxy materials. The company also announced that one of its directors, Edward Kozel, would resign, in preparation of moving his family to Europe.

Yahoo will be asking its shareholders to re-elect its current board of nine directors, while Icahn is challenging the board with his own slate of dissident directors.

Yahoo announced Tuesday it will hold its annual shareholders meeting on August 1, setting the stage for a contentious proxy battle with billionaire shareholder Carl Icahn.

Updated at 8:09 p.m. PDT with more information on the proxy contest.

The shareholders meeting will be held at 10 a.m. PDT at The Fairmont hotel in San Jose, Calif.

Once Yahoo and Icahn file their definitive proxies with the SEC and distribute them to investors, they’ll hit the road, meeting with investors to make their best pitch for voting for their respective slate of directors.

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I love my iPhone, Apple. I’d just like to be able to use it internationally. On the plans you currently offer through AT&T, I can’t.

P.S. Don’t tell me this is AT&T’s fault. Apple has had so much control over everything to do with the relationship that if international roaming is ridiculously pricey, it’s with Apple’s blessing or direction.

Apple fan that I am, I’m trying to think of a good reason why it should be so much more expensive to access email and browse the web internationally on my iPhone than it was with my Blackberry. (Same sites, same email volume.) It has put a huge crimp on how I use my iPhone. I’m actually frightened to use it at all, lest I go over the 50MB limit (when overage prices hit $5 to $20 per MB(!!!)).

Sound like a lot of MB? Nope. I hit nearly 10MB in just one day, and that’s with Saturday email traffic (not much) and very, very little web browsing. No pictures or attachments.

What’s the problem? The cost. With my old Blackberry, I paid an additional $9.95/month for unlimited data while roaming internationally. With my iPhone, I pay $24.99 per month for just 20MB. Scratch that: Last night I upgraded to the only other plan Apple/AT&T offer: $59.95 per month for 50MB of data (on top of the $40/month I already pay for domestic data).

I imagine he’ll have a lot of fun along the way. Google strikes me as a company that does IT right (even now opening up its data centers to outside developers).

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A week ago Google lost its CIO, Doug Merrill, to EMI. Word on the street is that Google has already found a replacement, and it’s Ben Fried, divisional CIO at Morgan Stanley.

A Managing Director in Morgan Stanley’s Information Technology department, Ben Fried manages teams in New York, London, Tokyo and Hong Kong and is responsible for Morgan Stanley’s Institutional Securities Web infrastructure and client connectivity. His purview includes numerous Internet sites and a global, multi-platform application-hosting environment running over 1,000 applications, services and portals.

How relevant is Mr. Fried’s experience to Google? Consider his role:

I had to laugh when this error came up today when accessing LinuxWorld’s website:

To be fair, it’s just a conference company that organizes a wide range of conferences, not all of them focused on open source. Indeed, IDG also runs (or ran) the website for OSBC and ran it on a Windows infrastructure, too.

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In both cases, it’s still mildly ironic to see IDG making money with open source…but paying money to Microsoft.

The most vocal about not being on that list, hands down, is Red Hat. The Linux seller has been adamant in resisting Microsoft’s idea of a “patent bridge” in which commercial open-source companies pay Redmond money and, in return, Microsoft offers to indemnify them–and their users–from intellectual property claims.

Red Hat is not alone among Linux companies in saying no to Microsoft, despite its claim that open-source software infringes hundreds of Microsoft patents. Mandriva, among others, also spoke out against the need for such a pact.

“The reality is that the community development approach of free and open-source code represents a healthy development paradigm, which, when viewed from the perspective of pending lawsuits related to intellectual property, is at least as safe as proprietary software,” the company said in a 2007 statement. “We are also aware of no patent lawsuit against Linux. Ever. Anywhere.”

Anyone have any names that I missed? And who will be next to sign? Sound off with your guesses below.

But it’s not just Linux companies that have not signed an accord with Redmond. Two other names worth noting from General Counsel Brad Smith’s not-yet-friends list are search king Google and database giant Oracle.

In both cases, Microsoft competes pretty head-on with those companies’ products, so it’s not surprising that they would be among the companies with whom Microsoft either hasn’t sought, or hasn’t struck, a deal.

The company has inked a lot of deals since it began its patent deal push a few years back, signing folks from Sun Microsystems to Novell to Samsung. So it’s getting a lot less interesting to write up each one of these things. As the latest one crossed my desk earlier this week, I had an idea. Rather than write up a story on how another name got added to the list (Pentax), I’d focus on something far more interesting–who’s not on the list.

With Microsoft’s announcement of yet another patent cross-licensing deal this week, it would seem nearly everyone has a deal with Redmond.

Forrester’s report states:

Mozilla’s share of the browser market rose steadily throughout 2007, only slowing for the quarter directly following the release of Internet Explorer 7 (IE 7) in late 2006. Adoption in the enterprise nearly doubled to 18 percent by the end of 2007, but large-scale, companywide deployments are not yet typical. Mozilla continues to expend little energy on wooing IT managers to formally adopt Firefox….

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And yet it’s getting them, all the same.

As Forrester reports, however, there is an increasing number of applications that are adding Firefox support, and rightly so. Enterprises should never box themselves into any one provider, no matter how benevolent. Costs fall when choice rises.

Mozilla
Firefox’s share of the enterprise desktop market has reached 18 percent, according to a new Forrester report noted by ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley.

This number will seem low to those who have seen higher numbers elsewhere (for example, as high as 30 percent in Europe). This simply reflects the bias of the report toward formal enterprise adoption, a route that Mozilla has explicitly not taken. Basically, Firefox is not an alternate universe into which you will be banished.

Why?

Once inside Firefox, life gets better. It is massively expandable and customizable. When I first switched to Firefox (from
Safari–I’ve long disliked IE), I hated its chubby icons. No problem: Someone had already created a theme that looked just like Safari.

From my big-company days, I know there are still a range of enterprise applications written specifically for IE. Shame on the slothful developers who can’t be bothered to design their applications properly for a heterogenous computing world.

Firefox continues continued to outpace IE in terms of innovation and in terms of performance. I was playing around on IE7 last night on my new Windows partition on my
Mac. It looks better than it used to, but it still reflects the design decisions (both good and bad) of one particular Redmond-based monopoly. Mozilla’s Firefox? It was built by the planet in that planet’s disparate image(s).

If you haven’t tried out Firefox lately, I’d encourage you to do so. It really is a markedly better browser.

Sure, you can get an decent recording with a portable stereo recorder, or a couple of inexpensive mics panned left and right and plugged directly into the mixer, but most artists want their music to sound as good as it possibly can–as good as any other artist played on the radio. That takes an array of microphones and other audio gear and somebody who knows what they’re doing. In other words, money.

(Credit: Slicethepie)

Making a professional-sounding recording can be expensive, particularly for ensembles (like rock bands) who want to capture at least some semblance of a live performance.

SellaBand works more like a small-scale venture capitalist for bands: fans can “invest” $10 apiece, and when an artist reaches $50,000, Sellaband will hook them up with industry professionals, including producers and studios, to record and market an album. Revenue comes from advertisements shown next to free downloads, as well as sales of the finished album, and are split three ways between SellaBand, the “investors,” and the artist.

ArtistShare, which has been around since 2002, allows fans to contribute to particular artists and receive exclusive tidbits, such as in-progress recordings.

Fans can also earn money by betting on the success of artists in a stock market. The winner of the showcase gets 15,000 pounds from the organization to fund a recording, while Slicethepie receives some royalties from sales of the album. (I’m always a bit wary of showcase-type models–often bands must pay up front to participate, labels and radio stations ignore them completely, and the only party who benefits is the organizer. In this case, the entry fee for each song appears to be around 20 pounds, although the FAQ isn’t entirely clear on this, and entry fees are currently being waived. Still, proceed with caution.)

U.K.-based Slicethepie not only allows fans to invest, but essentially asks them to do artist discovery. Fans are compensated a few cents for listening to acts and writing reviews, and bands who score the best end up in a showcase, where labels might find them and offer them a deal.

Slicethepie offers an online trading market that lets you speculate on the number of singles and albums a band on the service will sell over two years.

Whether or not any of these particular organizations actually ends up funding the next Radiohead, it’s interesting to see all this business innovation occurring outside the bounds of the traditional label system.