(Image courtesy of MacRumors) Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ stock is rising — both with his company and in a new annual ranking of the world’s billionaires. MacRumors is reporting on the latest Forbes annual list of the world’s billionaires , where Apple CEO Steve Jobs ranked at 178th place with $3.4 billion in 2009. Cupertino’s main man leapt up the chart for 2010, tying with six others for 136th place and a net worth of $5.5 billion

Think the semantic web is all hype with no bite? Paul Allen backed semantic startup Evri will announce tomorrow that it has been acquired, we’ve learned from a reliable source. The service specializes in extracting the names of people, places and things from raw streams of text in order to facilitate smart user navigation and related content recommendation.

This week at GDC, Microsoft showed off XNA games running on Windows Phone 7 and the screenshots are pretty darn impressive. Microsoft – Microsoft XNA – Xbox – Windows Phone 7 – Xbox Live

The CodePlex Foundation has announced the arrival of several new board members, including Jim Jagielski, the Chief Open Source Officer of SpringSource. Jagielski, who was one of the original cofounders of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), brings a lot of credibility and leadership experience to the CodePlex Foundation. When the CodePlex Foundation was established by Microsoft last year, an interim board of directors was assembled to help get the organization off the ground while permanent board members were being chosen

There are two types of Office users: Those who know everything – or nearly everything – about the program and those that do not. The latter group usually has to look really hard, consult an online help, book or colleague if they have to do something in Microsoft Office that they have not done before at all or only scarcely in the past. Ribbon Hero is an add-on for Microsoft Office that can be used to learn new features of Microsoft Office in a playful way.

FTP Sync is a free command line application to synchronize files between two ftp sites or local directories. Its main purpose is to automate the synchronization of files between two ftp servers or between a ftp server and a local directory. This can be helpful for instance for webmasters or coders who design their websites and projects offline and want to automatically synchronize the updated files to a web server.

Let’s look back at the week that was in Microsoft news. Here were the top stories: Coding error leads to uneven EU browser ballot distribution : The distribution of browser choices on the EU browser ballot released this month to Windows users is uneven. Internet Explorer shows up in the right-most position 50 percent of the time for current IE users, an outcome that’s due to Microsoft attempting to shuffle the browsers using JavaScript’s sort function.

Turns out Steve Ballmer’s talk up at the University of Washington delivered even more saucy info than we were initially led to believe. In a transcript of the subsequent Q&A session, Steve is shown to have delivered the following statement on the topic of large-screen televisions and Microsoft’s related hardware strategy: For that big screen device ..

Microsoft plans to release the final version of Microsoft Office 2010 on June 15 and is – as always – offering free upgrades for users who happen to purchase the previous version of the Office suite shortly before that release. In a blog post over at Technet Microsoft announced that the free upgrade period starts today which means that users who purchase Office 2007 from today on will be eligible for a free upgrade to Microsoft Office 2010 once it comes out

Microsoft may be saving most of its Windows Phone 7 Series news for MIX the week after next (at least that’s what we’ve heard whispers about), but it looks like it’s still dishing out a few more details beforehand, as evidenced by a short demonstration Microsoft’s Charlie Kindel gave to CNET . Nothing major like a confirmation of HD2 support, but we do get a glimpse of a few apps we haven’t seen before (including a flashlight, level, and weather app — all supposedly “trivial” to build thanks to XNA and Silverlight ), and a look at some new screens for various applications we have seen, including a better look at the Xbox Live hub. Head on past the break to check out the video for yourself.