WSJ: Deutsche Telekom mulls Sprint Nextel buyout
Sources have told the Wall Street Journal that Deutsche Telekom is looking into either a merger or buyout of the third-largest US wireless provider.
With the addition of Sprint's customer base, T-Mobile would become the largest cellular provider in the US, serving nearly 83 million customers. The news appears to be a repackaging of earlier rumors that first surfaced in March.
Yahoo minus Microsoft: Ballmer slams the door on his way out
It is perhaps the biggest "no-go" in the history of the Internet industry. So in the absence of any Cinco de Mayo celebrations in Redmond, did Microsoft manage to move the needle in its direction in its fight to avoid becoming the #4 player?
Whether the idea was made popular by the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tse in the sixth century B.C., or by Michael Douglas' portrayal of "Gordon Gekko" in the classic 1980s movie "Wall Street," there's a notion that warriors don't enter into battles they haven't already won in advance. Maybe Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer hasn't read up on his philosophy or hasn't watched much AMC lately; in either case, he's the one holding an empty basket today, after shutting almost every door behind him on the way out of the Yahoo negotiations.
E3 in turmoil as game publishers skip event
Once the premier video game conference, E3 is now losing major publishers with Activision saying it will take a pass.
Vivendi -- which owns Activision -- will also drop out of the Entertainment Software Association for "business reasons." Instead of being at E3, the company will have its own event at its Santa Monica headquarters during the show.
Steve Ballmer's letter to Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang
Microsoft drops $50 billion bid to acquire Yahoo
In a statement issued late Saturday, Microsoft announced it has withdrawn its proposal to acquire Yahoo. Speculation surrounding the status of the $50 billion deal has escalated since Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell's deadline of last weekend passed.
"We continue to believe that our proposed acquisition made sense for Microsoft, Yahoo! and the market as a whole. Our goal in pursuing a combination with Yahoo! was to provide greater choice and innovation in the marketplace and create real value for our respective stockholders and employees," said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in the statement.
Twitter co-founder refutes rumors of ditching Ruby on Rails
Twitter, Inc. Co-Founder Biz Stone today refuted published rumors that Twitter is dropping Ruby on Rails as an application development environment for the social networking site.
The controversy got started with a report published in TechCrunch yesterday, which was then reiterated in some other online publications and ultimately linked to in Slashdot.
Dell tries again with its XPS 730 high-end desktop gaming system
After one of the worst starts in the history of PCs two years ago, Dell's XPS desktop series has come crawling back, but not without scrapes and bruises along the way. Yesterday it revealed a new 730 model it hopes can recapture Dell's glory.
There are two schools of thought in the consumer PC industry: One believes that the global economy is in such poor shape this year that computer purchases will end up being heavily curtailed, and that the discretionary segment of the market -- the high end -- will absorb the brunt of the blow. The other believes that since the bad economy will impact lower wage earners hardest, higher wage earners will continue spending as they have before, and thus the high end of the market will be an oasis in the desert.
Xbox 360 to get wireless sport-themed controllers
Qmotions, the peripheral manufacturing subsidiary of the Actiga Corp. and a maker of controllers unique to individual sports games, will soon be releasing fully Microsoft-endorsed Xbox 360 wireless controllers.
One of these is called the Big Air, a wireless full-sized skateboard deck controller for skate- and snowboarding games. The Big Air will be an updated version of its X-board, which was a PS2 and Xbox peripheral that retailed for $99.99. Its availability is currently only listed as "Spring 2008," but updates are pending.
Surprising loss for Sun shows the heavy costs of MySQL
Despite his company racking up a $34 million loss this last quarter due entirely to its $1 billion buyout of MySQL, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz voiced optimism yesterday that its ownership of the open source database will start paying off.
During a fiscal third quarter that cost Sun's stockholders four cents per share, Sun closed the acquisitions of both MySQL and Innotek, maker of desktop virtualization products used mainly by crossplatform software developers.
Prime real estate on MySpace apps gallery comes with a price
Last week, MySpace opened its Application gallery to the public, allowing third-party developers' apps to be discovered and embedded in users' profiles. Those now highlighted as "featured applications" have reportedly earned that position by paying for it.
The most downloaded applications typically enjoy a place on the first page of MySpace's applications gallery, which premiered last week. Now, however, the gallery has a "featured applications" section that encompasses the top half of the splash page, the prime real estate formerly showing off the most popular gadgets.
Yahoo Buzz social news service receives update
Yahoo's social news service Yahoo Buzz, which launched in beta in February, has upgraded its service, adding a widget and expaned RSS feeds.
Principal among the updates is the "Top Buzz" embeddable widget. The 240-700 pixel window can display between one and ten Buzz stories from a chosen subject and be placed in Web sites or blogs.
Top Democrats ask for restrictions on XM + Sirius
Two leading Democrats in the US House, who both chair committees overseeing the FCC, are asking for the Commission to place conditions upon its final approval of any merger between the nation's only two satellite radio providers.
Rep. John Dingell (D - Mich.) chairs the Committee on Energy and Commerce, while Rep. Edward Markey (D - Mass.) chairs the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, part of the Commerce Committee.
iSuppli: 1Q 2008 DRAM revenues fall 39 percent
Research firm iSuppli says the high stakes game of "chicken" between memory chip manufacturers is continuing the sharp decline in revenues overall.
While revenues only dropped 7.4 percent sequentially, year-over-year they plummeted 39 percent. Top DRAM producer Samsung padded its market share lead during the quarter, ending at 30.6 percent of the market, but it came at the expense of making a profit.
Digg makes official its adoption of a 'semantic Web' standard
It could be the very thing the Web has lacked all these years, even with its wealth of intermingled hyperlinks: a markup language for conclusively identifying context. Now, Digg is making the bold attempt to be its biggest "beta tester."
One of the principal deficiencies all these years about HTML or XHTML as a markup language has been the absence of any genuine, built-in feature for explaining to indexing services or even to browsers with intelligent features, just exactly what a page contains at a granular level. Metadata could conceivably help categorize data, assuming everything on a page had the same category; but with more Web pages these days constituting whole blogs, whole-page metadata is rapidly becoming useless.
Microsoft claims 2-to-1 sales edge for GTA IV on Xbox 360
Microsoft says anecdotal evidence indicates its version of Grand Theft Auto IV is doing much better than Sony's, although Sony seems to dispute that claim.
So far, there are no hard numbers available, so Microsoft's claims cannot be verified. To its defense Sony is disputing the claims as inconsistent with its own reports, although it will not provide more data until further reports are received.
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