Tech for Lunch!

Microsoft announced Saturday that it is withdrawing its offer to purchase Yahoo!, due to the inability of both parties to agree on an acceptable sale price.

Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer said in a letter sent to Yahoo! that the software manufacturer was willing to spend $47.5 billion to acquire Yahoo, or $33 per share.

But Yahoo! insist’s that the computer giant pays at least $53 billion, or $37 per share.

The original offer of Microsoft, dating back to January 31st, amounted to $44.6 billion, or $31 per share. Yahoo! had refused, arguing that it under-valued the society.

On April 22nd, Yahoo! posted its financial results for the first quarter as being higher than the expectations of analysts. Yahoo’s earnings had risen to $542 million, or 37 cents per share, more than triple that of $ 142.2 million, or 10 cents per share, garnered in the same period last year.

Most of this improvement came from a windfall of $401 million generated by the participation of Yahoo! in the parent company Alibaba.com, an e-commerce site in China.

If it were not for the provision of Alibaba, Yahoo! would have benefited of earnings per share of 11 cents, on the whole similar to that of last year. Profit per share was still two cents higher than expected on average by analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial.

Yahoo! has not raised its forecast for the remainder of the year. Microsoft had hopes that its bid would become inevitable if Yahoo! was unable to substantially accelerate its growth.

Microsoft had threatened to oust the board of Yahoo! of its 10 directors to accept its offer this Saturday.

Yahoo! felt from the beginning that it was worth more than what Microsoft offered, even if their share price had dropped to less than $20 at the time of submission of tenders.

Private shareholders are beginning to break silence and are publicly stating their disagreement with Yahoo’s decision to refuse the offer. Now would probably be a good time for Microsoft to come back to the table to make an offer and let the shareholders make their stand. There have been a few lawsuits against Yahoo’s board because of their position, and more are expected to appear in the coming days.

I recently said that I do not usually cover the gaming industry, but it seems that it is getting more and more difficult to ignore. Some games are just impossible to ignore and I’m pretty sure you’ve heard a little something about this franchise.

Take Two’s Grand Theft Auto 4 is most definitely the best one of the entire franchise and is out to become the best selling video game of all time. The game stands to sell an estimated $300-million during its first week and perhaps a $450-million during this year.

The Grand Theft Auto franchise has become well known for it’s immersive experience and is probably most notorious for it’s high level of violence. Many lawsuits and reports have followed the previous installments stating that the games are a bad influence for teens and make crime look like an interesting avenue. GTA4 takes it all even further, but most people will tell you that, although the game is very violent and realistic, it is not that bad an influence if you can think for yourself.

You play as Niko, a fresh-off-the-boat immigrant who gets caught up into a life of crime whether he wants it or not. You get jobs or missions from your employers and your decisions truely have an impact on the progression and the outcome of the game. Let’s say you have a choice of killing someone to complete a mission, that death could make someone very mad or very proud of you, and may bring revenge upon you or a helping hand later on when you need one. This makes for an even more interesting storyline because your experience is based on how you play the game.

The city itself is very impressive, even though it is not as huge as San Andreas was. The details and the realism are what makes it so incredible. You can see potholes and garbage strewn on the streets in a shady part of town, and compare that to the smoothly paved roads and posh stores in a wealthy part of town is like looking at any real-world city. But this goes even further with different clothing styles, different lingo and even different cars, depending on the neighbourhood. That’s what I call an incredible gaming experience!

The single player campaign is certainly very interesting to play, but the greatest addition to GTA is the multiplayer online game play. Supporting up to 16 players at one time, you can choose any one of over a dozen different match types for some thrilling action.

The reviews for this game are simply unbelievable. Almost everyone agrees that every aspect is well above every standard and sets the bar for next generation games to come. I recommend for everyone to give this game a try if you get the chance or at least just watch someone who is playing it, because it plays out just like a movie. Crime pays for Take Two.

It was thirty years ago, on May 3rd 1978, that the very first spam message was sent out. I’m not sure if this is a wonderful event to remember, but the first message was not of malicious intent contrary to the ones we sometimes get today.

Back then, the internet as we know it today was not quite born just yet.. The network was known as the Arpanet and was still government-owned. According to Wikipedia: “The ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) developed by DARPA of the United States Department of Defense, was the world’s first operational packet switching network, and the predecessor of the global Internet.” While I was digging around for this story I ended up reading a few documents on the origins of the internet and it’s original purpose and I’ll probably write an article about all of this later on.

Let’s get back to the subject at hand, the first SPAM message. Gary Thuerk, the guy who sent the message had to use a text-based email client (there was no Windows at that time ;-)) and had to type all of the addresses manually. Compared to today’s spam attacks, it was a very limited number of recipients. It was an advertisement (or actually an invitation to come see) for the new DEC Computers. DEC does not exist anymore, but not because of the spam. The message was sent to a whopping 393 people and was not sent without problems. The person who sent the message was not very familiar with arpanet and its rules, nor with the software to send messages. He typed in all the addresses in the TO: field but after 320 names, they started overflowing in the body of the message. The first recipients then received the email with a bunch of addresses before the actual message. When they figured out that the last 73 names had not been included in the first broadcast, they sent another one!

The response was not very friendly to Mr. Thuerk’s pioneering message. Because the Arpanet was only used by researchers and the U.S. Military, he received many replies telling him that the system was not for his business purposes. In fact, he had managed to connect one of his DEC Computers to the Arpanet, which was also a violation of the rules.

It was approximately 10 years before another spam message was sent out in another form, and the evolution of spam followed the networks. Spam was used on Bulletin Board Systems (BBS), and today as we know it on the internet, where they account for about 90% of all emails sent in one day.

You can see the full transcript of the original message as well as many of the replies that followed here.

Sony has announced another delay in the launch of PlayStation Home. It is a project for a 3D virtual world for users of the PlayStation 3 console, a sort of meeting place, exchange and encounter for the members of this community.

Initially, the project was announced in July 2007, Sony had stated that everything would be ready in the autumn of 2007, but officials have seen fit to delay the launch to spring of this year. However, Sony now indicates that the first testing service (beta) will be held next autumn.

In a statement issued yesterday, the president of Sony Computer Entertainment, Kazuo Hirai, said that the project is not yet ready: “We are well aware that we once again ask the current and future users of the PS3 to be patient, but we have come to the conclusion that we needed a little more time to improve the product, in order to be able to offer a product that comes out of the ordinary.”

PlayStation Home aroused much enthusiasm in the PS3 community. Any user will be represented by a virtual character (avatar), which may interact with those around him, in a village in 3D, just like life in the community; this environment will consist of public and private spaces.

Each member of PlayStation Home will have its own “apartment” where he can receive one or several people, listen to music, watch television, discuss with your partner or group, decorate the walls with photos, etc..

As for public spaces, they will house cinemas which will be presenting trailers for movies or games, there will be game rooms, where people can enjoy, alone or in a group, different arcade games, billiards or bowling.

Sony has already announced that the virtual world, which will be downloadable from PlayStation Store, should not exceed 500 MB of memory on the hard drive.

Well, I discussed Windows Vista SP1 previously, and now Microsoft has turned on the deployment through automatic updates. This means that if you have automatic updates turned on to download and install automatically, you should be getting SP1 installed pretty soon.

Naturally, the process will be progressive because of the many bugs that were found during the first phases. The most annoying bug is the endless booting loop where your computer simply reboots constantly after SP1 is applied. It’s a bit difficult to get any work done when that happens. Other problems are mostly with security programs which end up broken after the patch is installed.

You can still just go ahead and download the full installation file directly from Microsoft (mostly for administrators) to get SP1 right away if you don’t trust the automatic updates.

Earlier this month, Yahoo! announced “ Onesearch 2.0“. Onesearch is Yahoo’s search software for Internet connected mobile devices. The newly released version allows users to use voice commands to search the web.

Now you can use your voice to get answers on your phone. With Yahoo! oneSearch™ with voice, it’s fast and easy to search for anything you need when you’re mobile. Just speak into your phone and get relevant and accurate results from Yahoo! oneSearch, an industry leading mobile search product.

Onesearch is a pretty cool product because it allows you to find things faster than you normally would on your mobile phone. No need to browse to yahoo, search and then hope the results are relevant and well formatted for your phone. OneSearch runs directly on your mobile phone and lets you launch a search faster and returns relevant results that you can actually use.

Yahoo has partnered with 29 mobile telephone service carriers, representing 600 million customers, since the first version of oneSearch launched in early 2007. The second-generation oneSearch software is free for download and installation to mobile telephones linked to the Internet.

For those of you who have been paying attention, Microsoft is slowly moving towards using the internet as their platform rather than the actual machine you use to access it. Basically, in the long run, we should be able to access all of our stuff from anywhere, using any kind of computer, whether it’s a PC, Mac or even mobile devices. Techcrunch has a very complete article about it and I wasn’t quick enough to get into the first beta round so I’ll just write a summary of features here.

Imagine all your devices—PCs, and soon Macs and mobile phones—working together to give you anywhere access to the information you care about. With Live Mesh, you can spend less time managing devices and data and more time connecting with family and friends or collaborating with colleagues.

Live Mesh provides you with an online virtual desktop to which you connect your computers and any other device you want to use to control it. Right now, only Windows XP and Vista are supported but Macs and mobile devices should be added this year, as well as the capability to connect your xbox or even a picture frame.

The current product is definitely oriented towards developers and supplies all the necessary APIs to start building applications that will make good use of Live Mesh. Essentially, you could use it to not only sync files and folders, but entire applications. This would really take the desktop out of your local PC and move it online, allowing you to truly work (or play) from any machine you choose.

I can’t wait to see more of this product, but I will have to wait for openings in the beta which is full right now. In the mean time, the article I mentioned above is very thorough and has some screenshots.

Not too long ago, I covered the Microsoft Online Portal Solutions offering Exchange and Sharepoint capabilities as web services. Microsoft just announced that the Office suite will now also be a part of this approach. This is no surprise since Bill Gates mentioned that we would be seeing more and more of this from Microsoft to keep up with the competition, but also to offer more choices to the customers. The yet-to-be-released product, code named “Albany” will be a bundled installation available on a subscription basis.

With just a few clicks, “Albany” subscribers will be able install the whole package, which includes Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007, giving them the latest versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote for their personal and school projects; Windows Live OneCare to help keep viruses at bay and their computer fast and healthy; and Windows Live Mail, Messenger and Photo Gallery so they can connect and share with others. Albany also installs the Microsoft Office Live Workspace connector on the Microsoft Office toolbar, so users can save documents to their own dedicated online workspace and invite friends and classmates to collaborate and share.

Right from the start, we can see that the main difference here is that the product does not run directly in a browser like Microsoft Online, but is offered as a subscription-based download with updates for as long a you are a member. This is certainly a brand new approach for Microsoft who have always offered software on a license based model either per seat or per user.

The target audience for a product like this is limited because it is not for businesses and not everyone is inclined to having a bunch of Microsoft products pushed onto their machine. Microsoft’s point of view is that they are bundling the office software with a software segment that most users are willing to pay to get as a subscription: Security - They also aim for people who like to always have the latest version of everything installed on their machines.

Microsoft will be adding products to this new model to broaden the target audience and to better compete with their closest competitors for the online suites: Google and Zoho. A business version should also become available.

The beta version of Albany will become commercially available later this year and and pricing has yet to be established.

While we are in this line of thought, might as well cover another application that uses the Adobe Flex framework and that deals with financial data. I spoke about Spiceworks.com and iexpenseonline.com in my last two posts, so this application is a bit more for developers, but could have some very interesting results for the end-users.

Intuit has just announced that they are joining the “Platform-as-a-service” band wagon with Amazon, Google and their closest competitor, Salesforce.com. The Quickbase development environment offers developers the opportunity to use intuit’s Quickbase as a platform combined with the Adobe Flex Framework to build applications for end-users.

Quickbase is not the new product, but the fact that it is going to be available for developers to use openly and to publish their own applications directly for all quickbase users to see, is new. One great advantage that Intuit has is that large user base for Quickbooks. The apps developed will be web add-ons for Quickbooks users sold on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Developers not only get the power and reliability of the Quickbase platform, but the visibility to Quickbooks users. Users are already familiar with quickbooks so a minimized learning curve is also important.

Take a look at the quickbase website; there are videos and some demos of applications that can be built using the Quickbase Development Environment.

It’s no secret that I am a fan of Google’s impressive array of online applications and, when it comes to desktop applications, they do an excellent job as well. Google Earth is one of those applications and an even more impressive one if you stop and think about the massive amounts of information that are required to make it possible.

Google Earth 4.3 was released this week and there are number of new features to make this a worthwhile upgrade if you like the application. Google Earth Blog has a great review with screenshots of this version. The best way to get a good look at the features without doing all the work yourself, is probably the videos on Youtube: This one by Google, and this one by Frank Taylor which is embedded below.

The most important new features are:

• Photo-realistic buildings from cities around the world
• Dawn to dusk views with the Sunlight feature
• Swoop navigation from outer space to street-level
• Improved Streetview
• Imagery dates

All of these features a pretty clear in terms of what they offer, but the Streetview feature is probably one of the coolest in its presentation. When you get to the street level of a city(a city which has streetview and pictures to go along) you can see “spheres” representing the images that you can walk into at that specific spot. Once inside the image, you have a picture-quality view as if you were standing there.

One thing I was waiting for and that is now available though, is the imagery dating which allows you to know when the images you are looking at were taken. This way, you’ll know if that’s really your car your seeing!