Today, at 11:00 a.m. PST, you can harass me with all of your burning headphone and MP3 player accessories questions in CNET’s ATE Live forum. It’s like MP3 Mailbox Monday, only live! So go ahead: hit me with your best shot.
Aug
31
Aug
30
Microsoft gives Yahoo three weeks to do a deal
Full coverage
Microsoft’s big bid for Yahoo Click here for the latest on the software giant’s attempt to buy the Net pioneer.
The opposition slate would move to unseat Yahoo’s 10 directors at the next annual shareholders meeting. Should Microsoft take such action and prevail, it’s likely the opposition slate would vote to remove Yahoo’s “poison pill,” which makes it prohibitively expensive to acquire the company. A poison pill floods the market with additional shares of a target company, should a hostile bidder acquire too many shares of a company’s stock.
Updated at 6 p.m. PDT with comments from an institutional investor.
One large institutional investor is planning to call Yahoo’s independent directors and management on Monday.
And as a further cattle prod in getting a deal consummated, Microsoft threatened to lower its existing bid, citing how Yahoo’s value will be hurt if it needs to resort to such hostile means.
The software giant threatened to launch a proxy fight to unseat Yahoo’s board of directors, as well as take its case straight to Yahoo investors should no deal be reached in that period.
Yahoo should brace itself for an onslaught of investor wrath come Monday.
“We could enter formal talks and they might increase the bid, or they might not,” the source said, noting opening their financial books to the software giant may make little difference. “Our books are already open. We’re going to report our earnings in a couple weeks.”
Microsoft on Saturday issued an ultimatum to Yahoo, giving the Internet search pioneer three weeks to enter formal merger negotiations and conclude a deal.
The investor added: “Microsoft has to do this deal. The paradigm is shifting away from their core business to the Internet. They’ve already spent billions of dollars but haven’t gotten it right. This is such a logical deal for them to do.”
And while this investor had a brief thought of banning together a group of major Yahoo investors to make a public statement in support of Microsoft’s bid, the institutional investor noted that there would be a number of filing hoops to go through with the Securities and Exchange Commission. He noted a more likely scenario will be for institutional investors to make individual statements.
Ballmer, in his letter, indicated that Microsoft would ask Yahoo investors to tender their shares to the software giant, which would park them until it could get its opposition slate elected. While Microsoft would not be able to gain control of Yahoo by taking that measure, it will send a clear message to Yahoo if enough of the Internet company’s investors side with Microsoft. Basically, it would show Yahoo how successful Microsoft would be in getting its opposition slate of directors elected, when those investors are asked to vote on Yahoo’s new board.
“If we have not concluded an agreement within the next three weeks, we will be compelled to take our case directly to your shareholders, including the initiation of a proxy contest to elect an alternative slate of directors for the Yahoo board,” Steve Ballmer, Microsoft chief executive, stated in his letter to Yahoo’s board of directors. “The substantial premium reflected in our initial proposal anticipated a friendly transaction with you. If we are forced to take an offer directly to your shareholders, that action will have an undesirable impact on the value of your company from our perspective which will be reflected in the terms of our proposal.”
Microsoft initially offered an unsolicited buyout bid of $31 per share for Yahoo back on February 1.
Yahoo, meanwhile, is cognizant that Microsoft wants to get the deal done and past federal antitrust regulators, otherwise called the Department of Justice (DOJ), while President Bush is still in office, the source said.
Meanwhile, another source noted back in early March that Microsoft has its opposition slate of directors for Yahoo all ready to go.
Ballmer’s letter is no slam dunk in driving Yahoo to formal talks. Yahoo, which already rejected Microsoft’s initial offer as too low and one that undervalues the company, is leery of entering formal talks without assurances Microsoft’s bid will be higher.
“I’m not happy with how Yahoo has handled it. I think they’ve bungled it while Microsoft has played it pretty well,” the investor said. “I like that (Microsoft) has put a clock on this. I previously told Yahoo’s independent directors that if they didn’t move forward with this, I might support a new board.”
The investor previously advised Yahoo to move forward and fast in doing a deal with Microsoft, given the changes in January with a new administration in the White House and in the European Union. He also advised Yahoo’s management to ditch the idea of doing a roadshow with its three-year strategic plan, and instead spend the time getting a deal in place.
Since its initial offer, executives from both companies met four weeks ago for the first time to discuss the merger and once again last week with no results of moving it into formal talks.
One former high-level antitrust attorney with the DOJ, who is now in private practice, said it usually takes six to eight months to move a deal through the DOJ. There is approximately eight months left before Bush’s term ends.
“We all think Microsoft should pay more for Yahoo and, if it is handled right, Microsoft will likely pay more,” said the major investor, who thought $34 to $35 per share is a good range.
Yahoo’s board is expected to discuss Ballmer’s letter next week, as well as provide a briefing on how talks between the two companies went last week, one source said.
Aug
30
Save time by customizing Windows’ taskbar
Move your taskbar out of view when you're not using it by checking "Auto-hide the taskbar" in the Taskbar and Start Menu Properties dialog box.
(Credit:
Microsoft)
You can also save some room by selecting to group similar taskbar buttons, which combines multiple open windows of the same app rather than placing a separate shortcut for each instance in the taskbar.
Customize Windows' taskbar by right-clicking it and choosing an option on the Toolbars menu.
Should you find that your taskbar is getting crowded, just hover the mouse over the top edge until the double-arrow icon appears and drag up. To place the taskbar on either side or the top of the screen, click and hold a blank area of the taskbar and drag it to your desired location.
Freeware to enhance your taskbar
To get even more functionality out of your taskbar, try using one of the many free utilities designed for this purpose. Jessica Dolcourt recommends XNeat Windows Manager, which lets you set certain taskbar windows to appear on top at all times or rearrange the order of windows on the fly. Three other great taskbar utilities are Launchy, Taskbar Shuffle, and RocketDock, which Seth Rosenblatt described in a Download Blog post from last January.
For example, I like to keep my desktop free of shortcut icons, but I still want fast access to items I store there. By placing my desktop in the taskbar, I can open items by choosing them off the menu that appears when I click the double chevrons. I save space by dragging the Desktop toolbar to the right until only the word “Desktop” and the double chevrons are visible.
To customize your taskbar, you must first unlock it: right-click a blank area of the taskbar and make sure Lock the Taskbar is unchecked. Now you can resize or move the Quick Launch area, the system tray, and other elements residing there. To add an item, right-click the taskbar again, choose Toolbars, and select one of the elements listed.
Tomorrow: supercharge
Firefox with the Chickenfoot scripting add-on.
Instant browser access via the taskbar
Perhaps my favorite Vista innovation (there’s a phrase you don’t hear everyday) is the search box on the OS’s Start menu. Simply press the Windows key and start typing to find a file, a program, or even a Web site.
This feature obviates the need for a separate Address bar at the bottom of your screen, but if you’d like this function in XP or earlier Windows versions, right-click a blank area of the taskbar and choose Toolbars > Address. Drag it to the left or right to make the text box the right size. Now when you want fast access to a site, simply type the URL in the address box and press Enter to open the site in your default browser.
(Credit:
Microsoft)
Your computer’s dashboard is that small row of icons located along the bottom of the screen–at least that’s where it’s located on most PCs. Windows’ taskbar shows you at a glance which applications are open and which programs are running in the background (represented by the icons in your system tray just to the left of the clock, though it’s not an exhaustive list).
If you have your Quick Launch toolbar active, you also see shortcuts to open various apps, show the desktop, or perform other operations with a single click. Your taskbar’s skills go far beyond simply lining up your shortcuts, however.
To make more screen space available to your application windows, set the taskbar to disappear when you’re not using it. To do so, right-click the Start button, choose Properties, click the Taskbar tab, check “Auto-hide the taskbar,” and click OK. Now your taskbar will appear only when you move the mouse pointer to the bottom of the screen (or wherever you placed the taskbar).
Aug
26
MySpaceTV now allows direct uploads
MySpaceTV, the video-sharing section of News Corp.’s MySpace, has announced the addition of direct video uploads. This means that you can now sit in front of your Webcam, navigate to MySpace, and hit a “record” button, blab on incessantly about how the Jonas Brothers are ruining American youth, and you’ve got yourself a piece of Web video.
A look at MySpaceTV's new direct-record tool.
Many other video-sharing sites, including Google’s YouTube, have similar features already. The real advantage to the presence of direct uploads on MySpace, however, is the fact that they can then be quickly embedded in member profiles, “bulletins,” and comments, capitalizing on the fast-growing video commenting trend.
MySpace also announced that MySpaceTV videos’ maximum file size has been extended to 512 megabytes; that’s half of what YouTube allows, but YouTube also caps them at 10 minutes in length, which MySpaceTV does not.
(Credit:
MySpace)
Aug
26
VMware’s sales disappoint, shares plunge
After the report, VMware shares plummeted more than 25 percent in after-hours trading. As of 3 p.m. PST, its shares were trading at $60.60, down $22.40 or more than 26 percent.
“We begin 2008 with more than 100,000 customers, 500 technology and consulting partners, nearly 10,000 go-to-market partners, and more than 5,000 employees,” Greene said. “As others begin to enter the market, VMware and our partners are continuing to broaden and deepen our highly reliable end-to-end virtualization solutions.”
The software maker said Monday that it earned $78 million, or 19 cents per share, as compared with $31 million, or 9 cents per share in the prior quarter. Its sales were also up sharply, to $412 million, though that was slightly less than the average analysts’ forecast.
In a statement Monday, CEO Diane Greene praised the company’s position, even as it faces a stepped-up attack from Microsoft and other rivals.
VMware took in less money on virtualization software than expected in the fourth quarter, leading to a steep drop in the company’s shares.
Aug
24
Open Season Episode 20 In which we talk about eve
I just wanted to talk about Clouds but Ashlee seemed obsessed with dieting and Matt led us down a path of censoring non-offensive movies. I wonder if he knows that Bambi’s mother eventually gets her brain eaten by zombie robots from outer space?
I was on a ridiculous amount of cold medicine when we recorded this week’s Open Season podcast, bringing us to Episode 20.
Aug
22
So much for the myth of the ‘alpha geek’
The iPhone hordes! Hide the women and children before they get “i-mashed.” Hoo boy. Brooks must have received special dispensation from The New York Times copy desk because this is rhetorical overkill to the point of being ridiculous. If there’s a political darling among the nerd set these days, it’s probably Ron Paul (though Obama definitely has the coolness factor). But defining a generation by the popularity of a commercial product is a Madison Avenue cliche waiting to be born. Maybe the ghost of Lionel Trilling will get so worked up about the cacophony of the blogosphere it will soon haunt the ramparts of Columbia’s Morningside Heights.
(Credit:
http://www.pocketprotectors.com )
The news that being a geek is cool has apparently not permeated either junior high schools or the Republican Party. George Bush plays an interesting role in the tale of nerd ascent. With his professed disdain for intellectual things, he’s energized and alienated the entire geek cohort, and with it most college-educated Americans under 30. Newly militant, geeks are more coherent and active than they might otherwise be.
So, in a relatively short period of time, the social structure has flipped. For as it is written, the last shall be first and the geek shall inherit the earth.
At last he didn’t peddle past the idea of the techno-elite as a tribe of bad-smelling, social losers with barely enough sense to wipe the snot off their faces. But Brooks’ assignment of a present-at-the-creation date for the “nerd ascendency” to Microsoft and the digital economy in the 1980s is subjective. He could just have easily moved the time line back to around the birth of Fairchild Semiconductor and the myriad successful tech companies later founded by its alumni.
Um, sure David. On the basis of the most flimsy evidence, we’re expected to believe that a fundamental societal transformation is under way. I suppose that’s not as over the top as your Candyland declarations cheerleading our way into Iraq. But it’s as equally rooted in unreality.
Barack Obama has become the Prince Caspian of the
iPhone hordes. They honor him with videos and posters that combine aesthetic mastery with unabashed hero-worship. People in the 1950s used to earnestly debate the role of the intellectual in modern politics. But the Lionel Trilling authority-figure has been displaced by the mass class of blog-writing culture producers.
The future historians of the nerd ascendancy will likely note that the great empowerment phase began in the 1980s with the rise of Microsoft and the digital economy. Nerds began making large amounts of money and acquired economic credibility, the seedbed of social prestige. The information revolution produced a parade of highly confident nerd moguls–Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin and so on.
Over the years, I’ve become inured to David Brooks’ predictable platitudes about politics and culture. He’s been wrong so often on the big story of our times–the war–that I automatically tune out his musings on contemporary culture. But after stewing all weekend about his most recent New York Times column, I’ve got to get this off my chest.
And let’s not forget the likes of Hewlett-Packard and other sundry start-ups, which put Silicon Valley on the map. But that was long before the emergence of the era of 24/7 naval-gazing, so I suppose that doesn’t count as much today.
If anyone has the address of this “geek cohort,” please pass it along. Until then, I think that’s utter hogwash. I’ve watched several generations of college-educated Americans under 30 and beyond and, truth be told, there’s nothing in that history to suggest the current crop’s presumed group sensibility is going to last into middle age. And the only “newly militant geeks” I can point to usually surface when Twitter goes haywire during another of its prolonged brown-outs.
Writing about the ascent of the “alpha geek”–a contradiction in terms?–Brooks cobbles together a series of easy generalizations regularly tossed around as shorthand to explain more complex developments. Call it cliche as socio-economic analysis. To wit:
Aug
22
Google’s slow transformation into an open, transpa
commentary
For something that is used so often by so many people, surprisingly little is known about (search) ranking at Google. This is entirely our fault, and it is by design. We are, to be honest, quite secretive about what we do. There are two reasons for it: competition and abuse. Competition is pretty straightforward. No company wants to share its secret recipes with its competitors. As for abuse, if we make our ranking formulas too accessible, we make it easier for people to game the system. Security by obscurity is never the strongest measure, and we do not rely on it exclusively, but it does prevent a lot of abuse.
I’ve been in both camps. One thing is increasingly clear to me, however: Google is opening up to open source.
The details of the ranking algorithms are in many ways Google’s crown jewels. We are very proud of them and very protective of them…But being completely secretive isn’t ideal, and this blog post is part of a renewed effort to open up a bit more than we have in the past.
It remains to be seen what, if anything, Google will actually open, but I trust its track record on living up to its word more than Microsoft’s, which also went through a flurry of “We’re now really open!” announcements lately that actually netted the industry…not much.
To some, Google has long been a champion of open source, hiring top open-source developers and contributing to a range of open-source projects, in addition to its Summer of Code. To others, Google has been the worst enemy of open source, bumping AGPL-based code of its Code.Google.com and only selectively contributing back to the projects like Linux and MySQL from which it derives benefit.
All good. But it’s actually Google’s promised transparency about its crown jewels–its search algorithms–that makes me think Google is finally ready to truly open up. Perhaps this newfound transparency derives from its 61 percent search market share, but the shift is welcome, if still hesitant:
Without intending to sound melodramatic, an industry is on the line with Google’s move toward openness. Google can demonstrate that the 21st century belongs to those companies that interoperate best, that embrace open source, open data, and open standards, and to those companies that win because of superior service, not superior lock-in. Microsoft won the last century’s software wars. We can’t afford to let anyone else win on those terms.
Earlier this week, I noted its Google I/O Conference, which will serve open source’s most important constituency: developers. CNET News.com reporter Steve Shankland writes of Google’s Android as “Google’s highest-profile attempt so far to use the collaborative programming method to change how computing is done outside the company’s walls.”
Aug
22
For draft, NFL goes deep on social media
That’s why, for the first time, the league has rolled out what it’s calling fan “war rooms,” essentially team-specific comment forums that are available via a map of the United States that shows each team’s logo and the number of comments posted there.
(Credit:
NFL.com)
And the league is also promoting NFL Mobile Live, a WAP site that will allow any Web-enabled mobile phone on Sprint’s network to follow the Draft Tracker. However, despite Goldberg’s acknowledgment that the service would probably look best on an
iPhone, she said that NFL.com has yet to release an iPhone app for the draft. That’s because, she said, the league and partner Sprint are interested in reaching the broad cross-section of mobile device users, including those on BlackBerries, Android phones, and others.
Goldberg explained that the NFL is also well aware of the popularity of social-networking sites, and as such, it has a new Facebook widget–already downloaded more than 100,000 times–that will update users with the latest draft-related news and video.
Another significant tool is NFL.com’s Draft Tracker, an online system that allows fans to look for the latest information and analysis about prospects, positions, colleges, teams, and even draft rounds. So, Goldberg said, fans could see what is being said about all potential draftees from the University of Miami, or all quarterback prospects, or what specific teams are doing.
There’s no shortage on TV and on the Internet of expert sources weighing in on the draft-day needs of various NFL teams and their likely moves before, during and after the April 25 and 26 event. But many people are just as, or more, interested in what their fellow fans think about their favorite teams’ decisions.
The aggregated comments feature is the newest NFL.com is employing for draft day, but by no means the only social media tool fans will have at their fingertips as they try to keep up with the flood of news that will peak during the draft itself but that NFL Online general manager Laura Goldberg expects will be heavy both before and after the league’s 32 teams make their best stabs at improving their rosters by picking from the pool of eligible amateurs.
And one thing is clear from the map: the teams with the biggest draft-day needs, in other words, the league’s weaker franchises, have the most active forums. That helps explain why, in the wake of the Denver Broncos’ much-publicized and highly-controversial recent trade of star quarterback Jay Cutler, its “war room” has far and away the most fan comments.
Once the draft is over, fans will also be able to issue grades for how they feel teams did. Experts’ opinions on each team’s performance are always hot topics, but now fans will be able to weigh in, and their collective votes will be averaged, Goldberg said, meaning it will be possible to see, in real time, what fans thought of any individual team’s draft-day moves.
For now, there is also no official NFL draft-related Twitter account, but Goldberg said that the league would be tweeting from the site of the draft.
Update (9:12 a.m.): This story has been edited to reflect the fact that NFL Mobile Live is available only to Sprint users, as well as the league’s plans for Twittering the draft.
For serious football fans, there is likely no bigger single event–except the Super Bowl–than the annual amateur draft. And as the NFL gets ready for two days of hysteria over where dozens of pro prospects end up, the league has deployed its deepest roster ever of social media tools to ensure that fans’ thirst for even the most minute news is quenched.
The NFL.com’s war room feature will let users see a graphical representation of aggregated comments by fans of each of the NFL’s 32 teams.
Aug
21
Reasons to like Baidu–but whose reasons are they
I was all ready to highlight what seemed like a very insightful comment on this blog by a co-founder of the advertising company CultureFish Media on the merits of Baidu, China’s leading search engine. But then I remembered Rick at CNET Asia had asked readers for reasons to love Baidu. Lo and behold, the same comment appeared there under the name of a different CultureFish exec (and prominent blogger).
This wouldn’t bother me at all, except that the comment includes personal reflection, such as this passage that appears verbatim in both posts: “Maybe I will get more bullish on Google when they get around to assigning someone to answer my phone calls or when their operator tells me that their marketing department does not have a phone number.” A quick Google search didn’t turn up any more copies of the same comment, but what’s the deal guys?
The comment first appeared under Lonnie B. Hodge’s name on Rick’s Little Red Blog. Hodge is CEO of CultureFish and The Professor at Onemanbandwidth, a long-running China media blog. There, Hodge has criticized an article that painted Baidu inaccurately as an “upstart” engine and may have been inaccurate in its portrayal of Baidu’s music search. (Mea culpa: By reporting on articles with similar material, I may have perpetuated inaccurate numbers, if they are indeed inaccurate.)
On Sinobyte the comment appeared under the name of David DeGeest, one of Hodge’s coworkers. The comment was different only in that it fixed a few typos and was prefaced with a good rebuke of a xenophobic comment that had appeared above and managed to misspell “develop” while saying “men from the east” aren’t that smart.
Whoever wrote the comment, its laundry list of reasons users and especially advertisers might like Baidu is informative. I just wish credit had been given to whoever was the original author. (Also there’s a “next week” below that doesn’t work on the second posting since it was more than a week after the first.) Here’s the list:
They now devote more than 10% of revenue to R&D.
They are innovating at a terrific rate: They have instant messaging in the works, the Answer service similar to Naver/Yahoo, a developing financial section similar to Google, some new social media acquisitions coming that will modernize them and likely steal a load of Tencent’s traffic.
They have advertising solutions that can be tailored–as opposed to Google cookie-cutter stuff- for any biz.
They have a 30% no-count rate for click-throughs on ads (Google is 10%) to fight click fraud.
They have opened their API to new analytics companies (they will formally announce a partnership with Omniture next week)..
Their bulletin board system just surpassed the 200,000,000 post mark.
They dominate mp3 download searches and are leveraging that into BRANDED deals with music companies and artists. IF you took away ALL their mp3 searches that everyone ******* about, you’d only take less than 8% of their market share…
They are not the Yuppie stuffed shirts running Google. I have access to decision makers at Baidu and don’t have to wade through layers of people who think they are too important deal with me….
They are open to new ideas: our company now has a strategic partnership with PRNewswire and are co-investigating a tool with Baidu that will change the face of online news releases….
After all, I find this to be a pretty persuasive list, though I won’t likely switch to Baidu anytime soon, while they’re still censoring large portions of search results, even though I realize that’s not a top concern of many Chinese users. I had e-mailed CultureFish’s public address hoping to get in touch with DeGeest to clarify some information before I discovered the repetition, by the way. I’d still be curious to find out about some sources, especially for the music downloading issue that I’ve written about.