millisonecological.com

• Regulators might not allow the AOL-Google paid-search deal to pass to Yahoo, which would wipe out the other synergies–creating a large risk for both sides.

• The primary source of synergies is staff reductions, where Yahoo has (an) unimpressive track record. Other benefits, such as pricing power in display and combining Advertising.com with Right Media Exchange, will not drive short-term incremental revenues.

According to the report, Yahoo would buy AOL’s content business, but not its dial-up subscription business. Time Warner had separated the two, and given Yahoo’s online-publishing and advertising interests, it would be no surprise to see Yahoo pass over that dwindling asset.

A Yahoo acquisition of AOL could happen as early as this month, TechCrunch reported Monday, citing sources close to the negotiations.

“It’s rumors and speculation, which we don’t comment on,” Yahoo spokesman Brad Williams said. Update 2:30 p.m. PDT: AOL also declined to comment.

The possibility grew out of Microsoft’s unwelcome attempt to acquire Yahoo, but some would be surprised to see any deal at all. In a note on Monday, Sanford C. Bernstein analysts said the deal is unlikely for three reasons:

• Stock transactions over $3.4 billion are dilutive to Yahoo. We think Time Warner was hoping for $6 billion to $8 billion, which is only possible with synergies.

Nombray is a new site that lets you buy vanity domains for your name. The service is aimed at people with very little experience setting up a Web site, letting them “squat” the page while funneling any traffic to third-party services they’re already using.

If you’ve already purchased a domain through another service (like GoDaddy or Domain.com) you can simply link up to it and have Nombray host the page for $10 a year. This offers a little less than a service like WordPress Premium, which charges $15 a year for custom domain registration and hosting (along with a pretty swell blogging platform). I do, however, like that Nombray keeps a frame on the top of the page so your visitors can quickly toggle between activities–it’s a nice touch.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

On Nombray’s home page, you simply type in your first and last name, and the site will search to see which coordinating domains have been taken and which are still available. From there, you’re able to claim available domains for $20 a pop, which gets you a free year of hosting and a page designer with which you can link to various social-networking profiles, such as those for Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. These sites, along with any other URLs you plug in, will show up like tabs on the top of the page, and visitors can simply click on them to flip between profiles while the Nombray navigation frame remains.

Nombray hosts a page for users with top links to their various social-networking profiles, blogs, or Web sites. It also searches the Web to show if domains using their name are available.

Updated at 11:34 a.m. PT to include Broadcom statement

“Qualcomm is very pleased with the court’s opinion,” Don Rosenberg, Qualcomm’s general counsel, said in a statement. “In effect, the court has disapproved Broadcom’s tactic of attacking the wireless industry, including handset manufacturers and wireless operators, without providing them with the opportunity to defend themselves in the action.”

On Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued its decision (PDF). The appellate court upheld the ITC’s ruling about the patent’s validity. However, it reversed the import ban because Broadcom filed a complaint only against Qualcomm. The ITC could not ban products made by “downstream manufacturers who were not named as respondents in Broadcom’s initial complaint,” the appellate court ruled.

A U.S. appellate court has reversed an import ban on certain cell phones with chips made by Qualcomm, ruling that the U.S. International Trade Commission overstepped its authority in a 2007 decision.

In a statement, Broadcom said the company was “pleased that the Court affirmed our patent’s validity, the infringement by Qualcomm’s customers and the validity of the ITC’s claim construction.”

“In light of that, we believe that Qualcomm’s continued use of our patented technology would certainly meet the new standard of intent and be found to infringe,” the company said.

Last year, the ITC ruled that certain new models of 3G wireless handsets with Qualcomm chipsets could not be imported because they infringed on a Broadcom patent. An appellate court stayed the ban in September, pending appeal.

For years, Qualcomm and Broadcom have been engaged in legal battles over various patents. Earlier this month, Broadcom sued Qualcomm in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California, alleging that Qualcomm’s sales and licensing practices amount to patent misuse.

Take a look at the 4.5-minute version of Gates and Seinfeld’s “Road to Somewhere 2.” In the first installment, the Kafkasesque “Shoe Circus,” Jerry Seinfeld looked as if he had really forgotten how not to act, but in this second installment, it’s hard not to warm to his buddy act with a new thespian who is clearly holding his own, Bill Gates.

As I said in my last post on this subject, this campaign is not aimed at techies. It is not even designed to sell products today. It is solely there to help you find some positive disposition toward the Microsoft brand.

The greater constituent of good communication isn’t information, but rather emotion. And the dominant emotional effect of this involving, funny, and distinctive piece of work is to give Microsoft the possibility of looking like a somewhat cuddly underdog.

However, those involved in this singularly brave attempt just might achieve something many thought impossible. The success of a movie called Smart and Smarter.

It isn’t just that they might not have created great products. They have lost sight of real, ordinary people–those who, like the family in this episode, have had slightly crotchety, loopy grannies wandering around their house for the last 12 years.

Having bumped into each other at Shoe Circus, the two protagonists decide to walk the tightrope and make a road movie.

In this episode, Bill and Jerry decide that they will commune with normal human beings. A fine idea for many in the tech world, some might say. In the middle of some truly heartening and funny absurdity, the courage that went into the writing makes the eyes and ears commune with a strange sense of the unusual.

If Microsoft manages to create at least an aura of underdoggery, the company and its ad agency will be seen as some of the brightest communicators to have ever survived the Large Hadron Collider Experiment.

I still can’t quite get out of my head that one 30-second version of the greatest Apple ad ever made–not the “1984″ thing, but rather the utterly brilliant “Here’s To The Crazy Ones”–actually ends with a shot of Jerry Seinfeld.

In answer to Bill’s questioning why they’re attempting to reconnect with real people, Jerry says, “Why, Bill? Because as we discussed, you and I are a little out of it. You’re living on some kind of moon house hovering over Seattle like the Mother Ship, and I got so many
cars, I get stuck in my own traffic.”

Whisper it very softly, but they just might pull this trick off.

My Las Vegas 51’s baseball cap goes off to the people at ad agency Crispin, Porter and Bogusky who persuaded Microsoft, in the person of Bill Gates himself, to admit to at least some of the company’s lesser judgments.

The more Apple continues to patronize Bill Gates, albeit gently and cleverly, the more it risks appearing to embrace just a tinge of smugness. (And what brand does that remind you of?)

But you have to be a little crazy to attempt a radical repositioning of Microsoft’s image. And no one at the company is sane enough to think the duckling will become swanlike overnight.

How many companies have been honest enough to admit their faults? How many would publicly declare they lost touch with the customers? How many would reach for self-deprecation in doing so? And would anyone have ever suggested Microsoft might be one of those companies?

In conjunction with the iTunes update, Apple also released an update to Front Row, its media application for that allows users to access music, movies, and TV shows in one place, although the company did not detail the update.

Apple released an update to its iTunes music management software on Wednesday, adding a host of enhancements as well as support for a new line of
iPod Shuffles it released earlier in the day.

Among the other enhancements Apple made:

In addition to some security fixes, iTunes 8.1 adds new features to Genius–a feature that lets you put songs together in your library that somehow “go great together”–and support for CD imports to iTunes Plus.

The update comes on the heels of Apple’s unveiling earlier Wednesday of a new iPod Shuffle. The new device, which is smaller than a AA battery, adds a new VoiceOver feature that can recite song titles, artists, and playlist names, as well as provide status information, such as battery life. Apple claims the gadget’s battery life clocks in at 10 hours.

•  Allows friends to request songs for iTunes DJ.


•  Adds Genius sidebar for your Movies and TV Shows.


•  Improves performance when downloading iTunes Plus songs.


•  Provides AutoFill for manually managed iPods.


•  Allows iTunes U and the iTunes Store to be disabled separately using Parental Controls.

Few will have noticed, but Microsoft’s Jim Kellerman just announced that he and a Microsoft colleague have “been cleared to contribute patches again” to Apache, and specifically to the Hadoop project.

This is great news for Microsoft, and I think for open source generally. It means that Microsoft just became an open-source insider and may find it more difficult to sling mud as an open-source outsider in the future.

commentary

It’s also good to have Microsoft’s heft behind the Hadoop project, an incredibly cool open-source project that got additional help from CloudEra, a new open-source company helmed by former Sleepycat CEO Mike Olson that promises to help companies tap into the power of Hadoop. Who cares about Hadoop? Any Web developer that wants to “write and run applications that process huge amounts of data.”

Microsoft gets deep into open source and Olson comes out of retirement. This is turning out to be a Very Great Day.

Bezos’ sales pitch for the Kindle 2 is that it’s a necessity in a chaotic, information-clogged world, and that it’s time for the physical book to take its most radical new form since the days of the printing press. “Long-form reading is losing ground to short-form reading,” he said with a sense of urgency, adding that “we learn different things from long-form than short-form reading. Some things can only be taught or understood in hundreds of pages.”

Click here for more stories on Amazon’s Kindle.

In this economy, an easy way to push a geek toy into the mainstream is to slash the price or offer a lower-end version, and $359 is no bargain. But Van Baker said that while a hefty price cut could generate some buzz, it couldn’t turn a niche gadget into a mega-hit.

He had additional marketing help from legendary novelist Stephen King, who came onstage to make the announcement that a new novella, Ur, would be sold exclusively on the Kindle. It is, in fact, a story about a one-of-a-kind pink Kindle with magical powers. That is not a joke.

Even the celebrity power of Stephen King wouldn’t help much, he added. With regard to a Kindle-exclusive novella that stars a fantastical version of the gadget, he said, “It’s pretty gimmicky.”

But the announcement itself was underwhelming. The price, $359, remains the same. The battery life’s been improved by about 25 percent. The Kindle 2 is much skinnier than its predecessor, slimming down to 0.36 inches in thickness from 0.7, but it’s only a tenth of an ounce lighter. The storage capacity has jumped from 256MB to 2GB, or about 200 to 1,500 books, and the electronic ink display has improved from a 4-shade to 16-shade grayscale.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos holds up the Kindle 2 Monday in New York.

“Nice enhancements, but is it going to fundamentally change the value proposition of the Kindle? No,” said Van Baker, an analyst at research firm Gartner.

The Kindle 2’s arrival had been preceded by the usual blog blitz of leaked photos, rumors, and breathless wish lists. (A color screen! Better PDF support! International versions of the Kindle store!) Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos took the stage, Steve Jobs-style, with a slide show recap of the original Kindle’s success before making the big debut.

News.com Poll Kindle rekindled
Is Amazon’s Kindle 2 the spark to get you reading e-books?

View results

The layout of some of the buttons has been restructured, and the new Kindle also has a text-to-speech reader. In short, the improvements seem worthwhile, but there was no real curveball to give the Kindle a mainstream appeal.

NEW YORK–Were there an anthology of gadget launch announcements, the unveiling of Amazon’s Kindle 2 e-book reader would have one of the more anticlimactic storylines.

There are a few promising signs of more to come with the Kindle. One of them is “Whispersync,” a new feature in the Whispernet technology that provides the Kindle’s free Internet connectivity. With Whispersync, one Kindle can automatically sync with another; that’s not particularly earth-shattering right now unless you use two Kindles or want to transfer content from an older model, but Amazon has said that it “will also sync with a range of mobile devices in the future.” A Kindle app for the
iPhone, perhaps? Now that could be quite a plot twist.

“If the price is that, it’s a hard sell for anybody outside the mobile professional ranks,” he said, “but if they cut it by 50 bucks, would it make that much difference? No, it wouldn’t.”

“The Kindle has enjoyed very strong response from the mobile professional segment, the people who spend a lot of time on airplanes, who like to be reading multiple business books at the same time and maybe a copy of The New York Times and those kinds of things while they’re traveling, and for that segment of the population it’s a wonderful product,” Baker continued. “For the average consumer who gets up in the morning, goes to a job, comes home at night, watches the evening news, there’s no value proposition for the Kindle with or without these enhancements.”

Yes, Kindle 2 is just what I’ve been waiting for.
Not really. Is it that much of an upgrade from the original?
I prefer Sony’s PRS-505 Reader Digital Book
$359 for the Kindle 2? I’ll take my books in paperback, thanks.

The potential market? “Not that big”
Gartner’s Van Baker said that the problem with the Kindle is not that it’s defective, it’s that e-book readers simply will not be mainstream devices any time soon. “The Kindle is far and away the best executed version of the e-book reader in the marketplace so far,” he said. “They’ve got the biggest library, they’ve got wireless delivery, it’s a very well-done product, and for those (demographic) segments that value the ability to carry multiple books and readers easily, it’s a wonderful product. It’s just that segment of the population is not that big.”

(Credit:
David Carnoy/CBS Interactive)

“We’ve been selling e-books for years, and guess what? It didn’t work, until 14 months ago,” Bezos said, alluding to the original Kindle’s launch in November 2007. The device has been a more-than-modest hit, with sales possibly hovering around 500,000 and still on backorder. There are now more than 230,000 book titles available for it, up from 90,000 at its original launch. The new one starts shipping on February 24.

It started out like any other big press conference, with a line of reporters and photographers streaming out the door onto the chilly sidewalk outside the historic Morgan Library & Museum.

(Credit:
8e6 Technologies) (Credit:
Marshal)

8e6 offers an enterprise Internet filtering and Web usage monitoring appliance. Marshal sells e-mail and Web security products.

Executives said there were no lay offs planned.

The privately held combined company–Marshal8e6–will have more than 250 employees, more than 20,000 customers, the companies said. The headquarters will be in Orange, Calif., and the international headquarters will be in Basingstoke, U.K.

“This merger of equals is not a result of the current economic situation, but rather is a result of two successful companies with over $50 million in combined revenue seeing an opportunity to combine complimentary product lines and geographies to build a stronger company,” 8e6 President Paul Myer said via e-mail. “In fact, 8e6 has experienced approximately 30 percent year over year growth, while Marshal has achieved approximately 40 percent growth year over year.”

U.K.-based Marshal and U.S.-based 8e6 Technologies announced Wednesday that they are merging to create a company that will offer protection for corporate and Web-based e-mail, instant messaging, and Web surfing.

The driving force behind the move is to combine complimentary products and services for a comprehensive secure Internet gateway offering, the companies said.

A Chinese Web site has posted details of Advanced Micro Devices’ upcoming Phenom II desktop processors, of which at least two are due to be launched at the Consumer Electronics Show in January.

AMD will bring out its first generation of 45nm processors just as Intel is beginning commercial shipments of its second-generation 45nm product, the Core i7, which Intel officially introduced on November 17.

940 versus 940. That may be the confusing Intel-AMD processor model-number juxtaposing that consumers can look forward to next year.

HKEPC also lists triple-core Phenom II X3 processors and Athlon X4 processors.

Other processors listed include the Phenom II X4 810 and 805, both due in February, rated at 2.6GHz and 2.5GHz, respectively, according to HKEPC. These have 6MB of cache memory.

The post on HKEPC lists more than a dozen new models due to be launched during the next eight months. AMD is now moving its chips to 45-nanometer process technology from an older 65-nanometer process. Generally, smaller geometries result in faster and more power-efficient processors.

Processors listed include the quad-core Phenom II X4 920 and Phenom II X4 940 due in January, rated at 2.8GHz and 3.0GHz, respectively.

The site also posted a table showing new naming scheme for the processors.

Both the AMD and Intel models are 45nm quad-core desktop processors with large caches. High-end Phenom II processors come with 8MB of cache memory. Typically, the more cache memory, the better the performance.

Interestingly (and maybe not coincidentally), AMD’s high-end Phenom II X4 920 and 940 model numbers match those of Intel’s Core i7-920 (2.66GHz) and i7-940 (2.93GHz).

• Linux server revenue fell 7 percent to $1.8 billion. Linux server revenue was 13.6 percent of the market.

• Midrange enterprise server demand fell 14.5 percent year over year, with high-end enterprise server sales falling 7.5 percent.

• Blade servers represent the only category that had positive growth with gains of 16.1 percent to $1.4 billion.

• Unix server revenue fell 6.2 percent from a year ago to $4.9 billion. That accounts for 36.2 percent of market spending.

For full-year 2008, global server revenue fell 3.3 percent to $53.3 billion, even as units grew 2 percent to 8.1 million. IDC said it’s the first time the server market has topped 8 million units in one year. The rub: average selling prices were under pressure so revenue fell.

IBM held onto the top share position with 36.3 percent of the market.

This was originally posted at ZDNet’s Between the Lines.

Here is the fourth quarter, by the numbers:

According to IDC’s tally, worldwide server unit shipments in the quarter fell 12 percent from a year ago. The fourth quarter also represented the second consecutive quarterly decline.

• Volume systems revenue fell 16.8 percent compared with a year ago.

• Windows server revenue fell 17.8 percent to $4.8 billion. Windows server revenue was 35.3 percent of the market.

Server revenue worldwide fell 14 percent year over year to $13.5 billion in the fourth quarter, market researcher IDC said Wednesday.