Yesterday's surprise $1 billion buyout offer for Novell from the New York-based private investment group Elliott Management came with a letter, made public yesterday, spelling out the investors' goal for the company. "Novell is a long-established company that we have followed closely for a considerable period of time," the firm wrote. "Over the past several years, the Company has attempted to diversify away from its legacy division with a series of acquisitions and changes in strategic focus that have largely been unsuccessful. As a result, we believe the Company's stock has meaningfully underperformed all relevant indices and peers."

If by "the past several years," Elliott meant "the dawn of time," it may very well have been accurate. Novell is a company that, in many people's minds, is defined by its propensity towards strategy shifts. Elliott Management's members collectively own 8.5% of Novell common stock. If their proposal ends up being approved, Novell's strategy could shift again -- this time, very dramatically. And if you can interpret their message as a signal of disappointment in Novell's inability to focus on its fundamentals, then you may see the possible result of all this: a divestiture of Novell's stake in SUSE Linux, the world's #2 Linux distribution.

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At the end of February, Senators John Kerry (D - Mass.) and Richard Lugar (R - Indiana) introduced the Startup Visa Act of 2010, which will let immigrant entrepreneurs earn a two-year visa if they get at least $250,000 in venture capital investment, and then earn them legal US residence if that startup creates five or more new jobs, gets a second round of funding of over $1 million, or nets $1 million or more in revenue.

"Global competition for talent and investment grows more intense daily and the United States must step up or be left behind," Sen. Kerry said in introducing the bill. "Everywhere Dick Lugar and I travel for the Foreign Relations Committee, we see firsthand the entrepreneurial spirit driving the economies of our competitors. Creating a new magnet for innovations and innovators to come to the United States and create jobs here will offer our economy a double shot in the arm -- robust job creation at home and reaffirmation that we're the world's best place to do business."

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For anyone that missed Microsoft CEO's Q&A during the Search Marketing Expo West yesterday, a transcript is now available online. I went through and picked out key quotes, so that you don't have to read the whole thing.

Several things stand out from Ballmer's comments:

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Though it's still technically a work in progress, TiVo's new higher resolution interface lets the Premiere DVR take better advantage of your HDTV. We sat down with TiVo's Director of Product Marketing, Bob Poniatowski to take a look at all the new features.

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Hulu has been increasing in popularity, and its ads are getting more valuable, but two of the video site's most popular shows, The Daily Show with John Stewart and The Colbert Report, are being pulled.

Hulu, a joint venture between NBC Universal, the Fox division of News Corp., and now the ABC division of Disney, now racks up over a billion video views per month. (Viacom was at one time merged with CBS, the proprietor of TV.com, but is now separate.) Viacom is removing the two shows from Hulu at the end of the day on March 9, after having been available on the popular site for a little less than two years.

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That's the question I pose to Betanews readers on this fine Spring afternoon. If "Yes" then please further answer: How has your smartphone changed your life?

I'm raising the questions today because of AFP news story "Australia is social networking capital of the world." (Mike Cherng tweeted the story -- my thanks to him.) Reporter Amy Coopes quotes Danielle Warby: "My smartphone changed my life. Serious. It has my calendar, all my contacts and is an easy and intuitive communication tool."

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It's only been a few days since Microsoft's rollout of the browser choice screen for European Internet Explorer users. But already, the European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS, not to be confused with the European Commission, a legislative body), which is credited with pressing the EC forward on the browser bundling issue, is claiming victory not just with regard to exposing users to the choice they have, but with helping to advance the developmental progress of the Web.

Now, ECIS legal counsel Thomas Vinje is calling upon other trade regulatory and legislative bodies worldwide to follow Europe's example, arguing in a statement yesterday (PDF available here) that everyone should be entitled to the same ballot.

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It's been just over a year since Nokia first announced it would be bringing Skype to its top-of-the-line N-Series smartphones. Today Nokia announced the popular voice and text chat client is available on all Symbian^1-based devices, making free voice calls over 3G a possibility for some 200 million handsets.

The free Skype client can be downloaded from the Ovi Store. It lets users make free Skype-to-Skype calls; send and receive instant messages to and from individuals or groups; share pictures, videos and other files; receive calls through an online number; see when other Skype users are live and available; and import contacts from the native phone address book.

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Though the focus of tonight's TiVo unveiling was a new TiVo Premiere DVR, the company was especially proud of the upgrade to the remote control due out later this year. TiVo's new Bluetooth remote features a QWERTY keyboard to aid searching and finding content.

Shaped identically to the standard TiVo "peanut" remote, the new model slides horizontally to reveal a chiclet keyboard with a D-pad and a numeric keypad. This feature adds some girth to the usual remote's size and also contributes to a somewhat flimsy feel. This, however, could be due to the fact that all the remotes we handled were pre-production versions that looked to have been handled quite a bit.

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Now that TiVo has unveiled its Series 4 platform of TiVo boxes, known as the Premiere and Premiere XL, the big question for existing users is: How do I upgrade? We cornered a few executives at the launch event in New York to get the answer. And no, your existing TiVo box will not receive the new user interface.

In short, there are two separate upgrade paths. One for lifetime subscription customers and another for customers wanting to pay monthly. Why two different approaches? TiVo says its because each customer has different priorities.

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For the first time in the company's history, TiVo has completely redesigned the user interface of its popular DVRs with the introduction of the new TiVo Premiere and Premiere XL. TiVo says it has "reinvented" the DVR with what it calls the "One Box," which incorporates content from the Web, movies, music, and TV into a unified library.

The problem with any media, be it print, audio, or video, is that there's simply too much content for a user to be able to casually browse it and still be satisfied by what he's seeing. That's why news aggregators are so handy, and why there's a whole industry dedicated to social media content sharing. When there's so much stuff, you need something to filter it for you.

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Sybase's new mobile sales application for iPhone, Windows Mobile, and BlackBerry lets users connect to SAP CRM remotely from their phones, much as they would from a desktop or laptop PC. And a new mobile workflow app from Sybase and SAP lets users play roles in multi-part business processes from their phones, an SAP representative tells Betanews.

With new business apps for iPhone, WM6, and BlackBerry smartphones rolled out on Tuesday, Sybase and SAP have now completed the first phase of a long-term pact around mobile customer relationship management and (enterprise resource planning software. In the week ahead, iPhone and Windows Mobile client software will be available for both Sybase Mobile Sales for CRM and Sybase Mobile Workflow for SAP Business Suite, said Prashant Chatterjee, director of mobility and industry analytics for SAP.

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Could someone please give back Steve Ballmer's brain? He really needs it. The Web is buzzing about a Microsoft executive telling APC Magazine that existing Windows Mobile handsets will not be eligible for Windows Phone 7 Series upgrades. Is Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO, out of his fraking mind for letting this happen? Oh, right, someone took away his brain. Please return it.

What's all the fuss about? Firstly, the no-upgrade policy gives every possible Windows Mobile buyer every reason not to purchase. Secondly, the hottest WinMo phone, the HTC HD2, is suddenly a Windows Phone 7 Series brick. According to Natasha Kwan, Microsoft's Asia-Pacific region Mobile Communications Business GM, the HD2 "doesn't qualify because it doesn't have the three buttons." The smartphone has too much of a good thing--five buttons.

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At the heart of Apple's very serious charges against HTC -- among the most prominent manufacturers of Android-based phones today -- is whether the methodology Android uses to run Java programs using a specialized derivative of the Java Virtual Machine, called Dalvik, actually borrowed (or stole) ideas directly from the NeXT operating system. NeXTSTEP, you may recall, included radical innovations to the system kernel enabling inter-application communication (IAC), on a level far beyond anything Macintosh had used at the time. It was Steve Jobs' revenge against the company that had spurned him, and as history has borne out, Jobs was the victor in that little skirmish.

One of the ten patents Apple is defending in its lawsuit against HTC, drafted yesterday and filed this morning in US District Court in Delaware, deals specifically with NeXT's methodology. Apple acquired NeXT at the end of 1996, which is how Jobs re-entered the universe of Apple -- many believe, to have saved the company. Earlier that year, NeXT received a patent on a framework for IAC designed to compete with COM/DCOM and CORBA, the two other leading object methodologies of the time.

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Download Opera 10.5 Release Version for Windows from Fileforum now.

Usually software companies have the luxury of picking their own deadlines, and typically -- especially in the case of open source or free programs -- those deadlines are allowed to slip or even lapse. But the European Commission gave Opera a solid opportunity to get back in the game, to be discussed once again in the same company as Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Apple Safari.

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