GOOG stock price amazes and delights employees

[NYT] “It isn’t considered ‘Googley’ to check the stock price,” said an engineer, using the Google jargon for what is acceptable in the company’s culture. As a result, there is a bold insistence, at least on the surface, that the stock price does not matter, said the engineer, who did not want to be named because it is considered unseemly to discuss the price.

IBM buys BI vendor Cognos for $5b

[CW] The acquisition of Cognos supports IBM's Information on Demand strategy, IBM said, because integrating Cognos tools under the project will provide new business insight into a broader set of users that those who traditionally have used BI tools.

AOL buys Israeli Q&A company

[BizWeek] Yedda uses patent-pending technology that automatically matches questions to other related questions and topics, while selecting the best available users to answer the question.

Facebook gets a formal invite to OpenSocial

[MarketWatch] Chris DeWolfe, chief executive of MySpace, said that Palo Alto-based Facebook was likely to be under pressure to consider joining the initiative. MySpace and Facebook are the two largest U.S. social networking sites by number of users.

Intel's Penryn boosts performance, pressure on AMD

[CW] Intel Corp.'s new 45-nanometer chip for the desktop, part of the newly released Penryn family, should give gamers, researchers and serious multitaskers a significant performance boost, according to analysts. And that is not good news for rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc., which recently started shipping its quad-core Barcelona processor -- built using a 65nm manufacturing process.

In UK, iPhone 'fastest-selling' phone ever

[Times] Peter Erskine, the chief executive of O2, which is Apple’s chosen network partner in the UK, said: “It has been the fastest-selling device we have ever seen.” The phone had sold “in the tens of thousands” since its launch on Friday, he said.

Northeastern sues GOOG over patent

[Reuters] Google faces a federal patent infringement lawsuit by Northeastern University over technology used in its core Web search system, according to legal papers filed last week. The complaint was filed on Nov. 6 but the case only came to light over the weekend.

MySpace hack that compromised Alicia Keys site widespread

[PCW] The widely reported problems with pop singer Alicia Keys' MySpace profile have been cropping up on the social networking site for the past ten days and are likely to continue, a security expert said Friday.