After a year of high-profile consumer Internet IPOs — from Groupon Inc., LinkedIn Corp. and Zynga Inc. last year to Yelp Inc. and Facebook Inc. now — a slew of Silicon Valley companies that sell technology mainly to businesses are also getting ready to hit the stock market.

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The Round Rock, Texas, company on Tuesday reported that revenue rose just 2 percent in the fiscal period ended Feb. 3, which included an extra week that Dell said added to its growth. Dell also projected that revenue in the current quarter would decline slightly, an estimate that was lower than analysts expected.

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The companies — along with others such as financial-service companies Bank of America Corp., FMR LLC’s Fidelity Investments and eBay Inc.’s PayPal — are hoping to create an environment that allows the recipient of an email from, say, a bank, to feel secure that it isn’t a trick.

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“I’m very impressed by the great technology produced by this company,” the superstar singer told 46,000 techies, for whom he performed later that night.

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The revised severance policy, disclosed in the technology giant’s annual report filed Wednesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, means any executive officer terminated without cause will have to leave behind restricted shares or options that aren’t vested at the time they leave the company.

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But the company said that in an effort to woo new customers, it is adding a new feature to the 2012 TurboTax: some 700 live tax advisers who will answer customers’ questions by phone, for free.

Intuit didn’t provide a precise figure, but said it plans to spend millions of dollars to provide the tax-preparation assistance, which starts in December and runs through the end of April. It said it hopes the effort will keep its TurboTax business growing at its typical 10 percent-plus annual clip.

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The vast majority of servers — including those from H-P — use the chips sold by Intel and AMD that are based on a technology called x86. But HP, which jointly developed Itanium with Intel in the 1990s, continues to use that chip for three lines of large systems used for heavy-duty computing jobs.

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In a shift away from the frenzy surrounding consumer-focused companies such as social-games maker Zynga Inc., venture capitalists are pouring more money into business-to-business start-ups.

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That applies to Ray Barnard, chief information officer of Fluor Corp., an engineering and construction company that spends around $25 million a year on new hardware and software. Fluor was recently considering buying high-end computers capable of displaying 3D graphics from H-P, as well as doing a pilot project involving tablets with the tech company.
Now, however, “I’ve put that all on hold” and won’t buy from H-P, he said. “It appears that they’re lost right now.”

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Mr. McLaughlin has been tapped as CEO of Palo Alto Networks Inc., a closely held security-technology company widely viewed as a candidate for an initial public offering.

“I’ve had the chance to be the CEO of a great public company,” said the 45-year-old executive, whose new job is set to be announced Monday. “Something I haven’t done is to take a great private company public.”

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Unbeknownst to owner Joe Angelastri, cyber thieves planted a software program on the cash registers at his two Chicago-area magazine shops that sent customer credit-card numbers to Russia. MasterCard Inc. demanded an investigation, at Mr. Angelastri’s expense, and the whole ordeal left him out about $22,000.

His experience highlights a growing threat to small businesses. Hackers are expanding their sites beyond multinationals to include any business that stores data in electronic form. Small companies, which are making the leap to computerized systems and digital records, have now become hackers’ main target.

“Who would want to break into us?” asked Mr. Angelastri, who says the breach cut his annual profit in half. “We’re not running a bank.”

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The 46-year-old has been acquiring high-end technologies—such as storage and security systems—that Dell can sell to businesses to lessen its reliance on selling low-margin desktop and laptop computers.

Dell bought services provider Perot Systems Corp. for $3.9 billion in 2009. Last year, it lost a high-profile bidding war for 3PAR to rival Hewlett-Packard Co. but later scooped up another data-storage company, Compellent Technologies Inc., for $960 million.

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Epsilon Data Management LLC, a division of Alliance Data Systems Corp., said last week that hackers had accessed names and email addresses in its systems. In the days that followed, more than 40 companies—including J.P. Morgan Chase, TiVo and others—have said that their customers were among the victims.

The companies had hired Epsilon to manage marketing campaigns. When retailers such as Best Buy Co. and Target Corp. email promotions to customers, the likely buyers are often identified by and the messages are sent by firms such as Epsilon. Managing bulk mailings can be time-consuming and the technology to sort through customer information to come up with targeted promotions is often changing too quickly for businesses to do it on their own, experts say.

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He gives away most of the loaves, but only after taking photos that he posts on the Internet for fellow fanatics to critique.

The 33-year-old political organizer from Arlington, Mass., is part of a rising community of largely male home bakers who have become devoted to shaping and leavening, an obsession that has led some of them to share every crumb of their new hobby in online forums and Facebook pages.

Driving their passion for bread’s every nuance is “Tartine Bread,” the cookbook written by Chad Robertson, co-owner of Tartine Bakery. In the book, Mr. Robertson devotes 28 pages to a single recipe, his basic country bread. That is followed by more than 30 pages on “the basic loaf in depth” and slight variations on the recipe.

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By the end of March, San Francisco will have replaced more than 5,000 old parking meters with state-of-the-art versions that take credit cards, and, if all goes according to plan, work with sensors to indicate when a car is there.

Other Bay Area cities such as Sausalito and Redwood City have already shifted away from coin-only machines to so-called smart parking meters that help make parking more convenient for drivers and easier to manage for the cities. San Francisco’s $25 million project intends to go a step beyond the other early adopters, using the new meters to reduce car congestion on city streets.

While other cities are using smart meters to simply charge different rates at different hours, San Francisco plans to use the meters to influence how many people park in a particular area at a particular time. The long-term goal is to continuously adjust rates up or down to keep 15 percent of spaces in a neighborhood free, says Nathaniel Ford, executive director of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. The city hopes the project can reduce emissions on the streets by stopping people from “circling around trying to sharp-shoot a parking spot,” says Mr. Ford.

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The eight-page letter, in which former HP contractor Jodie Fisher accused Mr. Hurd of sexual harassment, is currently under seal in Delaware’s Court of Chancery as part of a shareholder suit filed against HP over the executive’s exit.
The law firm for the plaintiff in the lawsuit said in November it intended to make the letter public. Earlier this month, Mr. Hurd’s lawyers filed a motion to keep the letter under wraps.

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The European Union’s antitrust regulator has privately expressed concerns during its preliminary review of the deal, which could prompt the regulator to submit the deal to a lengthy examination, people familiar with the matter said.
A key focus of the European review, these people said, is Intel’s stated desire to incorporate security features into its widely used microprocessor chips. The EU appears concerned that if McAfee, by virtue of being owned by Intel, had privileged access to those features, it could be difficult for McAfee’s rivals to compete, they added.

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The U.S. government next year will begin to dole out billions of dollars to health-care providers who adopt electronic medical records. Doctors also face a federal mandate to upgrade software as the U.S. switches to a new system of insurance billing codes.

For Indian companies with experience in software outsourcing, the flurry of health-related tech spending in the U.S. is “like another Y2K opportunity,” says Pradep Nair, head of the health-care practice at New Delhi’s HCL Technologies Ltd., referring to the turn-of-the-millennium computer glitch that provided work for Indian tech firms.

But cashing in on what Forrester Research expects to be a nearly $50 billion U.S. health-information market in the next two years won’t be straightforward for Indian companies. While they have had success handling outsourced work for pharmaceutical companies and insurers, Indian companies have struggled to win business from U.S. hospitals, which will do the bulk of new health-tech spending.

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The company’s tablet-style device seems to be sidestepping the resistance that the iPhone and other consumer-oriented devices have faced in the corporate environment. Indeed, many businesses have raced to snap up iPads.

One example is the Chicago law firm Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal LLP, which banned the iPhone when it first came out yet preordered 10 iPads in the run up to the tablet’s release in April.

“We made sure that we knew as much about these devices as possible,” said Michael Barnas, the firm’s director of application services. The technology department now offers access to its internal systems for more than 50 iPad-toting attorneys, and anticipates issuing iPads as an alternative to laptops as soon as next year.

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The company said in a statement that the issue only affected customers who have received replacement motherboards for four types of servers – the PowerEdge R310, R410, R510 and T410 – which is less than one percent of these models. The statement added that the virus only causes damage “when a customer has a specific configuration and is not running current anti-virus software.”

Dell says that it has removed all the infected motherboards from its supply chain and that its current stock is virus-free.

The computer maker has been contacting infected customers in order to schedule changes.

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Merchants that sell digital goods lost 1.9 percent of all revenue to fraud in 2009, compared with a 1.1 percent fraud rate for companies that sell physical goods online, according to CyberSource Corp., which processes credit cards for online merchants.

Such percentages seem small, but can translate into sizeable sums of money as social networks like Facebook Inc. expand the market for virtual goods, which have long been associated with games like Second Life and World of Warcraft, where players buy items like virtual gold and clothes for avatars.

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The need to reach customers and employees over the Web is driving furious demand for server systems, the machines that power corporate computer rooms.

Many companies are stocking up on new servers, which typically cost a few thousand dollars apiece, to replace older machines with more energy efficient models or systems with more powerful processors.

Also, an increasing number of businesses are turning to outsourcing companies, which manage computer rooms for customers and in many cases are sharply stepping up purchases of servers to keep up with rising demand.

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The answer: the site still has a large user base, a target demographic that should allow it to carve out a niche for itself, and a few obvious ways to make more money, says Adam Levin, the serial entrepreneur who acquired the company.

AOL bought Bebo for $850 million two years ago. It sold it last month for a small fraction of that. (Neither AOL nor Mr. Levin would disclose terms of the deal.) Mr. Levin, managing partner of private-equity firm Criterion Capital Partners, has invested in films, a mobile video company, a company that makes golf grips, and a minor-league hockey franchise. Now he’s taken over Bebo as its CEO. The 31-year old says that he’s planning to treat the company like a start-up—with a few advantages.

While users have left Bebo since it was acquired by AOL, it still has 117 million registered users. Of those, about 13 million use the site at least once a month. Bebo gets about 4.5 billion page views each month, according to the company.

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The number of identity-theft victims in the U.S. jumped 12 percent to 11.1 million in 2009, according to research company Javelin Strategy & Research. Fraud cases reported to the Internet Crime Complaint Center, which is partly run by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, climbed 23 percent to 336,655 last year.

Information that people inadvertently make public on sites like Facebook plays a role. So too do the sort of technical exploits demonstrated by the group that recently exposed a flaw in AT&T Inc.’s (T) website.

But in many cases, finding social-security and credit-card numbers or medical records on the Internet doesn’t require computer expertise. Instead, such information is accessible to anyone who knows where to look.

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