John Lamb's Week: How the rumour machine keeps billionaires on their toes

In 1999 Ellison announced that he was going to forgo his salary in favour of stock options that eventually netted him $1bn as a result of sharp rises in Oracle's share price.

However, the practice of issuing senior executives with valuable options is coming under increasing scrutiny as outside shareholders complain that these deals, voted on by management boards themselves, have the effect of diluting the value of their holdings.

Ellison already holds a quarter of Oracle stock and anything concerning him can affect the value of his company. For example, unfounded rumours that he might be dead or leaving the company last year caused wild vacillations in Oracle's stock value.

Tuesday also sees software geeks getting a sneak preview of Adobe's latest version of its Acrobat software for distributing documents exactly the way they originally looked. The launch of an updated version of Acrobat is the latest bit of Adobe's ePaper solutions strategy. Acrobat 5.0 has features intended to help groups of users share files over networks.

Is Europe's lead in wireless technology slipping? According to a report by Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, within the last 12 months around 100 wireless start-ups have been funded in Europe raising around $700m. In the US, some 200 wireless start-ups in the same period have attracted backing totalling more than $2.7bn.

Business leaders from BT Cellnet, the GSM Association, Kodak, Logica, and Lucent will be addressing these and other issues in London on Wednesday as part of a promotional drive for the 3 GSM World Congress get together in Cannes starting 20 February.

Wednesday was scheduled for a gloating session from ERP software company PeopleSoft following year end figures that showed turnover up 34 per cent at $496m and profits at $41m recording a whacking 343 per cent hike.

However, the company's chief financial officer, Kevin Parker has pulled out of a UK visit. He was due to brief commentators on how the company transferred all its products onto the internet so that customers no longer have to run PeopleSoft applications locally.

Rivals SAP and Siebel are also awash with cash after switching to online applications. Not all ERP vendors are so fortunate, however. Baan and JD Edwards continue to struggle.

Sybase is another old-timer back from the dead and crowing about its ecommerce software. The company's chief executive, John Chen, will be over in the UK in the middle of this week to discuss enterprise portals and mobile applications with analysts and customers.

Thursday sees end of year results from Autonomy, the UK's most valuable software company. Founder Mike Lynch, Britain's first IT billionaire, is said to have launched the company on the back of £2,000 borrowed in a Soho bar from an inebriated pop promoter. This past week he must have been thrashing his company's Portal-in-a-Box internet search system in a bid to keep up with the reports and rumours surrounding his company.

It has been a sobering time for the former maths student as Lynch counters rumours of a disaffected senior manager and an investor with cold feet. As Autonomy's share price tumbled insiders were pointing the finger at a concerted campaign to bring the company's share price down.

Although it is only comparatively recently that Autonomy has turned a profit, long-term prospects for the company look good. Its sophisticated pattern recognition software for searching unstructured internet data is still ahead of many of its US rivals.