5 O’Clock Roundup: Yahoo’s communication engine, Motorola’s idea factory, AMD’s embarrassment

Why did he do it? A Bloomberg profile of AMD executive chairman Héctor De J. Ruiz, whom government prosecutors say fed inside information to hedge fund firm Galleon Group, whose co-founder Raj Rajaratnam was arrested on Friday, along with three other people including top IBM executive Robert Moffat, who had been seen by many as the company’s next CEO.
This is the part you need to know to correct office gossips: “Ruiz hasn’t been charged with wrongdoing in the case, and prosecutors don’t say he profited from insider trading. Ruiz declined to comment, said Jon Carvill, a spokesman for Sunnyvale, California-based Globalfoundries, a spinoff of AMD’s foundry business. Ruiz is still the company’s chairman, Carvill said yesterday.
Motorola turned to employees for new phone ideas — “Why should we trust you?” one employee supposedly blurted to co-CEO Sanjay Jha a few minutes into his first 2008 meeting with employees to gather new ideas for the company’s mobile phone handsets. Moto’s biggest boost to its own potential was to drop several handset operating systems, such as the Symbian system found on Nokias, and to move forward with the open-source Android operating system backed by Google.
[Photo: Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times]

Yahoo Investor Day Liveblog – Search Engine Land editor Danny Sullivan reports that Carol Bartz is now calling Yahoo a “communications engine.” Sometimes, when he can’t hear every word, it gets better: “”We make up every morning with passion to beat every one of them … and we usually do .. we’re not a search company. we’re not a display company. we’re a broadbased internet [something, communication?] company … that is awesome.”
Disney.com launches cheery, family-friendly, all-conquering iPhone app — The company has created a free single entry point to all its content and connectedness features. I spent half this afternoon talking to Disney.com VP Jason Davis. He talks enthusiastically about going “beyond the browser” with iPhone apps, video content, etc, that let Disney movie fans, for example, continue to have a relationship with the characters from Up after they’ve seen the movie. I think Google VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra would disagree with Davis, because in VicWorld we’ll run all our software in little browsers that don’t seem like browsers.
Intel helps Joyent become the first cloud computing service in China — ReadWriteWeb reports that Joyent, which offers instant-deployment, scalable cloud systems for businesses, is working with Intel and the Qinhuangdao Economic and Technology Development Zone (QETDZ) to bring its infrastructurecloud computing service to the Chinese market.
BusinessWeek goes hunting for the money in apps — “Look past the beer-drinking apps and flatulence programs and you’ll see something significant taking shape: a bustling app economy that’s creating new fortunes for entrepreneurs and changing the way business gets done.” They say that every week, I know, but there really is an app market hiding beneath the hype.
Bing, your vampire decision engine – My Bing obsession has been fed, for now, by these new TV ads.