Category
Yahoo has publicly knocked back the offer by Microsoft. The tone of their rebuttal suggests that they may now be resigned to an eventual MS buyout and are now just looking for the best price, but I still wonder how some of these executives come up with their valuations of their companies worth. The current Microsoft offer rates Yahoo at
Microsoft has announced the ability to use your friends and networks in some social networks to invite them to Live, in particular to instant messenger. I like this in theory, but in practice I'm not sure how this helps the majority of people. The initial implementation (which is only for Facebook) is a bulk invite option that downloads your friends
In a deal that has been rumored for some time, MS is attempting to buy Yahoo for a high, but superficially reasonable price. The $41.7B offer is only a slight premium above the current Yahoo market cap of $37.1B, and they only have a chance to get this low a price because of the jitters Yahoo shareholders currently have about the current management.
I have been searching for a media extender box to stream some of my content on my PC to the TV in my lounge-room. This has been more difficult that I thought it would. This does not seem to be a big enough market yet that all the available systems are being imported into Australia yet, which limits my selection. The ones that are available here all seem to be limited in some way, generally either they are not wireless (a definite preference) or they only work with certain media types, Apple TV being the biggest example.
Microsoft has a “pre beta” version of a new tool called Photosynth. This tool stitches together multiple photos from either your personal collection or from online photo sites like Flickr. The result is the ability to move around a wire-frame model of the location in 3D and select the points of view you would like to see. For an early stage product it looks interesting. You can look at the tech demo at MS Live Labs.
We all know that Microsoft has been trying unsuccessfully for years to knock Google from its dominant search position. From the early versions of MSN search, to forcing default search to MSN on IE and changing branding to Live, Microsoft have struggled to make a dent in the Google spot. Recently they have been trying to get into the ad-sense market as well, including offering big incentives to some popular sites to entice them to MS (e.g. Digg).
I talked about this last night on my show, but the second I get back from Ontario next week I am pulling Office 2007 off my computer. This has been an disaster of an upgrade.