Microsoft announced that it was ready to increase the offer for Yahoo, from $31 to $33 per share, adding $5 billion to the value of the takeover. Yahoo was seeking for further $5 billion to complete the deal, but Microsoft decided this increase would not be reflected by Yahoo’s values, so they decided to withdraw the proposal for Yahoo.
Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang said he is happy to see the back of Microsoft, and looks forward to the continuation of Yahoo’s plans of development.
Paypal announced that it will not block Safari, after earlier this months they announced new security measures, including blocking access using insecure browsers. Many thought that Safari will be among the blocked browsers, but Paypal denied that, and said it will block just old browser/OS combinations, for example IE4 running on Win98.
Shumeet Baluja, research scientist at Google, announced that he and some other Google employees developed software for detecting exploited children, in videos. They did it because they wanted to help the Nationa Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC). An interesting fact is that the team leaded by Baluja created this software in the 20% worktime in which the Google employees are allowed to focus on their own projects and ideas. So, thumbs up for both Google, and its employees.
In the latest edition of its bi-annual Internet Security Threat Report , Symantec revealed that the number of computer viruses is now bigger than one million. In the 2nd half of 2007, there were found 499,811 malicious threats, which is 136% increase compared to the first 6 months of 2007.
The end of 2007 found Symantec detecting 1,122,311 threats. Symantec says that this big increase of the new viruses is caused by the fact that high-tech crime groups now employ very good programmers to help them create dangerous viruses. Many of the threats are Trojans, which once installed on a computer, install other malicious programs, send confidential data to the Trojan creator, by logging user names, passwords and so on.
Microsoft informed Yahoo! that they should decide if they sell to MS, within 3 weeks. If this does not happen, Microsoft will try to buy directly from the share holders, at a lower price. This kind of offer is very likely to cause massive resignations at Yahoo, and of course Microsoft would not want to lose high qualified employees that gave Yahoo so much value.
The current offer that Yahoo should accept / reject within 3 weeks is $44.6 billion.
Yahoo! has released a new application, which enables the user to search the web using voice commands. The web giant says that voice searches should take no more than 5 seconds, or 10-20 seconds on slower networks.
Yahoo! claims that oneSearch will allow general queries, not just simple ones, based on a basic vocabulary. This is very good news, because people will easily find restaurants, movies, concerts, flights, and so on. Yahoo has already finished deals with mobile operators that sum 600 million users that access the web using a phone, they hope to reach 750 million users.
YouTube community is richer with the first known royal contributor. Queen Rania of Jordan created her first channel. Her intention is to post movies about life and culture in Arab companies. She hopes to bring a much wider view about life there, and also to demolish stereotypes.
One single video was posted so far, but it attracted over 150K views in the first days.
“I want people to know the real Arab world; to see it unedited, unscripted and unfiltered. To see the personal side of my region. To know the places and faces and rituals and culture that shape the part of the world I call home.”
Intel announced that it will launch solid-state hard disks (SSDs), which to replace the mechanical hard disk drives. This news should worry the other hard disks manufacturers, as Intel did not have a share of the HD market.
Capacities of the Intel SSDs would range between 32 and 160 GB, much more than Samsung’s 32 to 64 GB hard disks. The disks will be in SATA form, and the most important advantages would be the low power consumption and the awesome shock resistance (3-4 times better than typical mechanical disks).
Boris Epstein, founder of Sillicon Valley based BINC (a company specialized in head-hunting technical workers) says Yahoo! is in big trouble, because a lot of people leave the company.
Many employees of Yahoo! do not want to work for the merge between Yahoo! and Microsoft, considering that, while Yahoo! is good, Microsoft is evil. Other reasons are the lack of support for open-source from Microsoft and the “not so interesting” technologies of MS.
Other people say bureaucracy has made innovations impossible at Yahoo. The fact that in January Yahoo! announced that it will fire 1000 employees makes people not be sure about their job at Yahoo, so that prefer to search for another job.
VeriSign announced that the cost of registering Internet domain names with the .com and .net TLD will be raised.
Currently, registrering a .com domain costs $6.42, and a .net costs $3.85. The new prices, which will be probably introduced on October 1st, will be $6.86 and $4.23. It is expected that this change will be reflected by the prices asked by the domain registrars starting from now, till the end of the year.
Other announcements of this kind are probable this year.
