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The Vive with proper branding. (credit: HTC / Ron Amadeo)

HTC has recently announced it is spinning off its VR division into a wholly owned subsidiary called "HTC Vive Tech." The move seems to suggest that VR headsets are now a pillar of HTC and that the company will be a player in the VR market for years to come. While the HTC Vive is a compelling device, and the best VR headset out there, the driving force behind the Vive is co-creator Valve. I think HTC is taking way too much credit for the Vive's creation.

HTC is struggling mightily in the smartphone market and is still good for a 40-percent year-over-year decline in revenue every month. The Vive—a "joint effort" between HTC and Valve—is a rare bright spot in the company's lineup, but I think it's a temporary reprieve. Evidence shows HTC had little to do with the technology behind the Vive. HTC is more like Valve's tool, and while the company is in charge of manufacturing the Vive right now, HTC won't be left with any IP or competitive advantages once Valve is done with it.

"HTC Vive" makes about as much sense as "Foxconn iPhone." The name "Valve Vive" would probably be more appropriate. HTC seems more like the contract manufacturer for the device, building the Vive for Valve the same way Foxconn builds iPhones for Apple. The Vive is a product of Valve research using licensed Valve technology and Valve software in an effort to kickstart Valve's VR ecosystem. The only oddity is that, through a weird quirk of branding, HTC's name ended up on the side of the device.

As part of BMW Group's 100th anniversary, the company designed these three concepts for mini, BMW, and Rolls Royce. (credit: BMW)

On Friday morning, BMW, Intel, and Mobileye announced a collaboration that will see a fully autonomous car on sale by 2021. The car will be called the iNEXT, building on BMW's i sub-brand that currently includes a battery electric vehicle city car (the i3) and a hybrid sports car (the i8). What's more, the three companies want to work with other automakers to create an open platform for autonomous driving.

Intel's current processors are already being used by OEMs in their research fleets of self-driving cars, and Mobileye's hardware and algorithms power many of the semi-autonomous cars already on our roads. And even though one of BMW's core values is building "the ultimate driving machine," the Bavarian automaker recognizes that sometimes we don't want to drive ourselves, showing off an autonomous i8 concept at CES in January.

The plan is to develop a platform that will support everything from "level 3" self-driving (where a human driver can be handed back control within several seconds) to "level 5," where the vehicle can complete an entire journey with no human control at all.

Coffee break with lots of splashes.

Stop me if you've heard this one before: Oracle has quietly pulled funding and development efforts away from a community-driven technology where customers and partners have invested time and code. It all seems to be happening for no reason other than the tech isn't currently printing money.

It's a familiar pattern for open source projects that have become the property of Oracle. It started with OpenSolaris and continued with OpenOffice.org. And this time, it's happening to Java—more specifically to Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE), the server-side Java technology that is part of hundreds of thousands of Internet and business applications. Java EE even plays an integral role for many apps that aren't otherwise based on Java.

For months as Oracle Corporation's attorneys have battled Google in the courts over the use of Java interfaces in Android's Davlik programming language, Oracle's Java development efforts have slowed. And in the case of Java EE, they've come to a complete halt. The outright freeze has caused concerns among companies that contribute to the Java platform and among other members of the Java community—a population that includes some of Oracle's biggest customers.