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[excerpt]

Hewlett-Packard (HP) has filed a lawsuit against Mark Hurd, its former chief executive, to block him from joining Oracle as co-president.

Oracle (ORCL, Fortune 500) announced late Monday that it had hired Hurd, and that he will sit on the company’s board of directors. In court documents filed on Tuesday in California, HP said it believes Hurd has put its “most valuable trade secrets and confidential information in peril.”

Oracle and HP compete in markets including computer servers and data storage.

HP (HPQ, Fortune 500) didn’t have an explicit non-compete clause in its employment contact with Hurd, who stepped down last month in the wake of a sex scandal. Such clauses are typically very hard to enforce in California, where Hurd lives and where both companies are based.

“In California, non-compete clauses are generally null and void,” said Nancy Abrolat, an employment lawyer at Abrolat & Associates in California. “Some other states do allow those kinds of restrictions, but California’s statute against them is pretty straightforward.”

But HP did have confidentiality agreements that Hurd signed annually, and the $12.2 million severance deal he struck requires him to continue abiding by those agreements. Those trade-secret “protective covenants,” quoted in HP’s lawsuit, require that for 24 months after leaving HP Hurd refrain from “conflicting business activities” with HP rivals that would result in the disclosure of confidential information.

HP thinks that’s inevitable if Hurd joins Oracle.

“Hurd’s position as a President and a member of the Board of Directors for Oracle puts HP’s trade secrets and confidential information in jeopardy,” the company wrote in its legal filing. “He will be responsible, in whole or in part, for the direction of the company. As a competitor of HP, he will necessarily call upon HP’s trade secrets and confidential information in performing his job duties for Oracle.”

Hurd’s confidentiality agreement also prohibits him from communicating on behalf of an HP rival with any HP customer he had business contact with in the past two years. But because of California’s employee-friendly non-compete rules, the deal has an exemption: As long as Hurd remains a California resident, he can have any contact he wants with customers that isn’t made with the “unauthorized assistance” of confidential HP information.

Even if HP is able to constrain Hurd’s activities for the next year, Oracle may have decided it’s worth snapping Hurd up now and waiting out the restrictions. In Oracle’s announcement of Hurd’s hiring, co-president Safra Catz said she looked forward to working with him working with him “for years to come.”

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[excerpt]

Skype’s initial public offering may add a dose of healthy hype to Silicon Valley. The Internet telephone group’s $100 million float should be red hot. While there have been several tech offerings this year, investor reception has been uneven. A bit of justified excitement over Skype’s growth and its backers’ gains is just what the Valley’s capitalists — and entrepreneurs — need.

With hot companies like Facebook and Zynga ruling out public floats in the near future, growth investors are hungry for the next big ticket. Skype obliges. It has 560 million registered users and continues to grow. It added 86 million in the first six months of the year. Moreover, it is in the black. Skype has $116 million of adjusted Ebitda (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) since January, and this figure could grow rapidly if the company succeeds in cracking the lucrative business market.

Moreover, Skype is big. If its estimated 2011 revenue of $1 billion is valued on the same multiple as Google, the company might be worth more than $5 billion. That would be a huge gain for the private equity backers at Silver Lake who led Skype’s carve-out from eBay, clarified copyright issues with its founders and tweaked its software. They valued it at $2.75 billion at purchase in 2009.

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