The Associated Press reports that “German software maker SAP AG said Monday it will shut down TomorrowNow, a subsidiary that provided support for Oracle Corp. software and was accused of stealing information from Oracle.  Bryan, Texas-based TomorrowNow was formed by former engineers at PeopleSoft Inc., with the idea of providing less expensive software support to PeopleSoft customers. SAP bought TomorrowNow in 2005, around the same time Oracle completed its $11.1 billion purchase of PeopleSoft.  Soon after, Oracle alleged in a lawsuit, TomorrowNow employees hacked into Oracle’s computer network to steal information about its software so SAP would have a better chance of luring customers. The lawsuit is scheduled for a February 2010 trial in San Francisco.”

The International Herald Tribune writes that “

[f]or eight years, Dr. Arnold Kim has been trading gossip, rumor and facts about Apple, the notoriously secretive computer company, on his Web site, MacRumors.com.  It had been a hobby — albeit a time-consuming one — while Kim earned his medical degree. He kept at it as he completed his medical training and began diagnosing patients’ kidney problems. Kim’s Web site now attracts more than 4.4 million people and 40 million page views a month, according to Quantcast, making it one of the most popular technology Web sites.  It is enough to make Kim hang up his stethoscope. This month he stopped practicing medicine and started blogging full time.  Kim epitomizes the home-grown publishers whose wealth has been enabled by the Internet.  Although few of the millions of blogs ever make their creators rich, the ones that do provide all the incentive necessary to fuel the medium.”

According to the New York Times, “[i]n an ominous sign for Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial machine, venture capital firms are cutting back on their investments in companies at their earliest stage of development and being forced to provide extra financing for later-stage companies that can’t leave the nest and go public.  Overall, venture capital investment remained flat at about $7.4 billion in the second quarter, according to a report released Saturday by the National Venture Capital Association and PricewaterhouseCoopers. But the amount of money invested in companies seeking their first round of venture investment fell 12 percent to $1.6 billion, down from $1.8 billion in the first quarter. Also, first-round financings fell to just 21 percent of all venture funding — the lowest percentage since the fourth quarter 2004.”

MSNBC reveals that “Facebook Inc. is making sweeping changes to the world’s largest social networking site, aiming to give users more control and to curb new forms of spam, company officials said late on Sunday.  Facebook’s redesign aims to make user profiles more dynamic by giving more prominence to the newest information, and it is cracking down on applications that violate privacy or user-control guidelines.”

And in more Facebook news, the Guardian reports that “[t]he head of a German social networking site has strongly defended his firm against a lawsuit brought by US giant Facebook which claims it has ripped off the design of the site.  In a statement issued over the weekend, StudiVZ chief executive Marcus Riecke dismissed Facebook as "arrogantly laying claim to an international monopoly" and denied that his site had received any official legal complaint from Facebook.  Lawyers for Facebook filed an intellectual property lawsuit in a court in California on Friday.”