Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang is high on billionaire investor

Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang is high on billionaire investor Carl Icahn's hit list, but he might be out of reach for the time being.

Should his dissident slate of directors gain control of Yahoo's board, Icahn plans to seek the ouster of Yang as the company's chief executive. Icahn apparently is irate over newly released details from a shareholders lawsuit unsealed Monday that show the lengths to which Yahoo went to create a compensation program that critics say was aimed at making a takeover bid more costly.

But Jerry Yang wouldn't be banished from Yahoo, should Icahn's dissident slate succeed in unseating Yahoo's current board at the August 1 shareholders meeting. Icahn is willing to let Yang hold onto his employee identification key as "chief Yahoo," though his current CEO title would have to go, according to a letter Icahn sent to company Chairman Roy Bostock on Friday.

Also Friday, making his first public statement on a specific purchase price for Yahoo, Icahn told Bostock to offer up Yahoo to Microsoft for $34.375 a share. That letter is one of several Icahn has sent to Yahoo since launching his proxy fight.

The company issued a response Friday to Icahn's latest letter: "His suggestion that we put out a price publicly to see if Microsoft will alter its stated position is ill-advised. As we have stated numerous times publicly and privately, we are open to any transaction including a sale to Microsoft if it is in the best interests of shareholders."

Yahoo had sought to keep the details of the shareholders suit from being made public, but a Delaware Chancery Court judge unsealed the information on Monday.

Among the juicy details is the revelation that Microsoft proposed buying Yahoo in January 2007, it was willing to pay "about $40 per share," according to the suit. The suit charges that Yahoo's directors breached their fiduciary duties by their actions, including failing to negotiate a deal with Microsoft and enacting the compensation plan. It seeks invalidation of the compensation program as well as an injunction barring the directors from engaging in actions contrary to increasing shareholder value.

In the amended lawsuit by two Detroit retirement funds, Yang is portrayed as the architect of a controversial employee severance program, which would be triggered if Yahoo undergoes a change in control.

Under Yahoo's employee severance plans, full-time employees are eligible for severance if they are terminated, wish to resign for a "good" reason, or have their jobs and duties substantially changed within two years after Yahoo undergoes a change in control.

That could prove to be a hurdle to Icahn's efforts to get his slate elected, in essence by potentially punishing any investor who votes to remove Yahoo's current board. The severance plans, if triggered, could cost Yahoo up to $2.13 billion in potential severance payouts.

On Wednesday, in a letter sent Bostock, Icahn called on Yahoo's board of directors to rescind the company's controversial employee severance plans, fearing it was an impediment to a Microsoft buyout deal.

Apple harvest
Apple CEO Steve Jobs will take the stage in San Francisco on Monday to address a gathering of Apple's developers and the media. This year's WWDC is sold out to the development community, who will be hearing formal presentations by Apple on both Mac and iPhone development during the week's sessions and meetings.

Anyone with even a passing interest in consumer electronics is probably aware that Apple is expected to unveil the next generation of the iPhone in the near future. Apple is expected to include GPS technology inside the latest version, another development that could pique the software development community's interest in the iPhone.

A source at a software company that has been working on a native iPhone application tells us the company is getting ready to launch that application on Monday, which could also imply that Apple's App Store will be up and running that day.

Apple is also expected to provide developers with an early version of Mac OS X 10.6 during the conference. The new OS is also rumored to be Intel-only. Users of older Macs running PowerPC chips were able to upgrade to Leopard, but this would mean that Apple will drop PowerPC support with the next release.

Another part of the presentation could involve Apple's .Mac service. One interesting thing to watch for concerning any new version of .Mac is how much of the service Apple keeps in-house, as opposed to bringing a Web-savvy partner like Google into the mix.

News.com will have a live blog up and running during the keynote, which is expected to run from about 10 a.m. PDT on Monday to about 11:30 a.m., so make sure to come back and read about what's actually rolled out, as it happens.

On the green
Car battery company EnerDel predicts that consumers will start getting a two-year payback on hybrid electric cars, once a new generation of batteries is mass-produced. The chairman of parent company Ener1 said lithium ion batteries in development will bring costs down substantially.

He said EnerDel intends to have a manufacturing line operating in 2010 that is capable of making 300,000 car batteries a year for hybrid electric vehicles that run partially on a battery and partially on an internal combustion engine.

Related computer blog: http://cpu-hitech.blogspot.com/

By Steven Musil

Why Mark Cuban's only half right about tiered broadband

Mark Cuban's onto something important with his frank ruminations on the subject of imposing tiered broadband. It's not a popular argument, but it is one worth consideration.

When it comes to broadband internet access, you can have speed or large volumes of data transfer. You can't have both. One certainty in the broadband world is that for those of us with cable or DSL modems connecting us to the Internet, there is still a finite amount of bandwidth available. When a user consumes a disproportionate and significant amount of bandwidth, it can and will slow down everyone. I hate that.

If the choice is between your being able to download more movies or other video and my getting the best possible speed from my Internet connection, I'm thrilled when you get kicked off. It can't happen soon enough. Speed is what I need. Take all your P2P downloads and get the hell off my Internet.

Cuban, who set league record in NBA fines as the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, is famous for speaking his mind. And he doesn't mask his irritation with folks who abuse the Internet to download megafiles. His blunt advice: leave now and "take your bit torrent client with you."

I have no sympathy for bandwidth hogs. You all are productivity killers for the rest of us. People who are working, people who are trying to play games, people who are in virtual worlds, people who are networking, people who are just trying to watch a YouTube video or their favorite TV show, you all are the reason why we get incredibly annoyed by slowdowns and buffering.

Maybe he was being flip but Cuban also suggested paying the extra monthly fee to add a DVR to your regular service. "If you want to watch those shows on your laptop, connect the composite video out in your DVR to the composite in on your laptop. Same with movies."

If he set out to strike a nerve, consider it mission accomplished.

Give Cuban credit for shining the spotlight. But is tiered pricing a reasonable--or even workable--proposal? Even as a short-term fix, there's likely to be a mountain of resistance to putting a cap on uber-downloaders. ISPs already face a credibility gap with the public. Who in their right minds still trust the Comcasts of the world to fairly meter a tiered service for heavy users? Besides, the cable companies have already frittered away any lingering good will by gouging customers at each opportunity. (The complaints get even louder in regions where there's only one cable Internet service provider.)

The bigger question that Cuban's post doesn't address is how to create the kind of infrastructure that can handle the load. Every time I watch my page stall out, I can't help but become green with jealousy thinking about Japan and Korea, where 100Mbit sustained connections to the home is no big deal.

Fact is that Bit Torrent is relatively efficient at transferring big chunks of data across the cybernetwork. Maybe even more big content providers should be using it, so people don't seek out less bandwidth-efficient alternatives.

This week Comcast began testing a new way to manage traffic in Chambersburg, Pa. and Warrenton, Va. Later this summer the company will expand the testing to Colorado Springs, Colo. Of course, everyone knows the real solution, though nobody in a position of influence has the cojones to say it out loud: we need a national broadband build out--the likes of which would be on a par with the Eisenhower administration's national highway system. Maybe Barack Obama or John McCain will have something to say before November? Probably not, but one can hope.

I'd like to believe that tiered access would incent the ISPs to invest in fatter pipes. But I don't expect that will happen. This country's perfectly fine with its pathetic 15th ranking out of 30 countries for broadband penetration rates (according to a 2006 survey by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.)

So it is that at this this stage of the game, we're reduced to finger-pointing.

Related computer blog: http://cpu-hitech.blogspot.com/

By Charles Cooper

Microsoft denies it's running call-in 'save XP' petition

Callers flood support lines after Neowin.net posts a notice claiming Microsoft has been tallying calls in support of extending Windows XP's availability

After a popular technology Web site reported that Microsoft was logging calls from customers who requested that the company extend the retail availability of Windows XP , some users claimed that they couldn't get through to the support lines.

Wednesday, however, Microsoft denied that it organized any kind of call-in petition and pleaded with users not to dial its technical support numbers to ask for an XP extension.

On Friday, Neowin.net posted a notice titled "Microsoft Taking Official Petitions to Keep XP Alive" that claimed Microsoft has been tallying calls made to the support lines.

"Word has been passed down to the tech support teams (and then on to Neowin) that they are to begin logging any calls that come in for the sole purpose of requesting an extension to the retail life of Windows XP," said the notice. "The calls will be logged and, if enough complaints are filed, Microsoft will consider giving XP some more time."

Neowin also listed the toll-free telephone numbers for Microsoft's XP and Vista technical support desks in the U.S., the U.K. and Canada.

[ Make your voice heard: Join the more than 200,000 other people who have signed the petition demanding that Microsoft keep XP for sale beyond June 30. And find out why XP is so worth saving. ]

Microsoft has set June 30 as the date when it will stop providing large computer makers and retailers with copies of Windows XP. After that OEMs and retailers will be able to continue selling from their stock but will not be able to order more licenses or boxed copies from Microsoft. Some exceptions apply, most importantly an extension until the end of June 2010 for makers of low-cost notebook and desktop PCs.

Within hours of the Friday posting, people claimed that they had dialed the numbers and received only a busy signal. "Line's been busy for hours," said a user identified only as "jayr0" in a comment left about six hours after the notice appeared.

Microsoft said it is not running any kind of XP-related poll, a company spokeswoman said today in an e-mail reply to questions. "Microsoft is not organizing any official petitions to extend sales of Windows XP," she said. "The phone numbers claimed on Neowin's Web site as capable of logging calls requesting an extension for Windows XP are actual Microsoft support numbers. They are designed for people seeking technical solutions and help; they are not intended to receive official complaints or suggestions regarding the lifespan of our products."

She also urged users to stop dialing. "As a courtesy to customers in need of technical assistance, we ask callers not to call Microsoft Customer Support Services to request an extension for Windows XP."

Microsoft declined to comment on whether its support lines had experienced a call volume spike starting last Friday, when the Neowin notice first appeared.

Some users commenting on Neowin.net were skeptical from the start that Microsoft was counting calls. "This is all pretty much [a] waste of time," said someone named "Somnus" last Friday. "It is not likely that Microsoft will extend the sales of Windows XP past the current deadline, no matter how many people call in."

"What the hell?" asked a user labeled as "MMaster23," also in a Friday comment. "Surely, you have got to be kidding me...those support numbers are there for a reason."

The talk of a phone-in petition may have gained credence from Windows users because of comments made by Microsoft's CEO, Steve Ballmer. In April, Ballmer said that Microsoft might reconsider its decision to pull the OEM and retail plug on XP if it received enough user feedback. Later that same day, however, a company spokeswoman said that Microsoft's position on XP's final days had not changed.

Some save-XP petitions are, in fact, circulating on the Web, including one organized by InfoWorld, a Computerworld sister site. According to InfoWorld, more than 200,000 people have "signed" its petition as of Wednesday morning.

By Gregg Keizer
Computerworld

Yahoo president discusses growth plans, Microsoft

Yahoo President Sue Decker is making the rounds Wednesday, talking about the company's Wal-Mart and Havas Digital advertising deals at the Advertising 2.0 conference in New York and then discussing Yahoo's growth plans on CNBC's Power Lunch.

Here's what Decker had to say during her Power Lunch presentation:

On display ad deals:
"We think this is a really exciting time for display inventory, which is really how the Internet got started with advertising. When after five years of that, and most of the innovation was in search, and we now really feel that display is about to hit a Renaissance, which takes the friction out of the buying and selling of advertising. It's very difficult to do that online today. It takes two weeks to put a campaign out and find all the right audiences. So Yahoo is really focused on how do we make that process less painful and really release the creative resources and energy around building brands and driving products."

On Microsoft talks:
"What I said today is pretty consistent with what (Microsoft CEO) Steve Ballmer said last week at the D-Conference and what (Yahoo CEO) Jerry Yang and I reiterated here at the (event)--that Microsoft has indicated it is in discussions with us about various partnerships and those have been engaged conversations. We have been engaged with them over the last four-and-half months on a number of different ideas they've had, and as long as they enhance shareholder value and maximize that, our board would be very interested in different ways to do that."

On Yahoo's controversial employee severance plans:
"Many companies have change-of-control agreements with acceleration in them or some way to keep employees upon a change of control. In this kind of situation, it is the asset that Microsoft is interested in and it's the asset that our board believes that we have is so valuable is our talent that's creating next-generation products and services. It would be very difficult for an acquirer if the assets left. And so this was designed to keep the talent there until the day we closed (a deal)."

On Carl Icahn's proxy fight and his comments that Yang's severance plans sabotaged the Microsoft deal:
"The $45 billion acquisition price was about keeping the talent, and since Yahoo didn't have any way to keep the talent in a situation (that) was very destabilizing, it meant that the board was appropriately trying to make sure that the value that Microsoft would pay afterwards would be intact if there was a deal."

On Yahoo's stock performance and doing a deal with Microsoft or any other party:
"The goal here with the company is to maximize shareholder value...As we said before, before Microsoft walked away from the deal, there was a discussion about what value was achievable and under what terms...certainty of value and regulatory certainty upon close, and we never got those (discussions) because there was a disconnect between what the company was worth from our board's perspective and what Microsoft was willing to pay...The board remains open to any conversation that maximizes shareholder value."

By Dawn Kawamoto

The Truth About Adware

Everywhere you look online you will see plenty of advertisements for various goods and services. While you may be so used to them that they don't even bother you, the fact that they may contain adware is something you should be very concerned about. If you happen to click on these downloads or advertisements you will quickly be infecting your computer with serious problems you don't want to have to deal with. Adware can even be attached to music you decide to download so be careful.

The best course of protection against such adware is to continually work to protect your computer. These types of programs attach without you knowing and that means you will have no idea they are present until you start having problems with your computer or someone wipes out your bank account. Since there is very little risk of getting caught when a programmer instills adware they continue to do it at your expense.

The most advanced types of adware include spyware that continues to cause damages to your computer. It also gives the third party access to your passwords which can be very detrimental to your activities conducted online. If you happen to get directed to a particular website you didn't try to access and you have double checked the URL, chances are you have become the victim of adware.

There are plenty of excellent anti adware and anti spyware programs out there you can choose from. They work hard to prevent such scams from being able to access your computer. They continually scan all of the materials and offer you updates to ensure you have the very best protection in place at all times. Some people simply classify adware as a form of SPAM but the reality is that it is a criminal act you need to defend yourself against.

Don't let someone else take advantage of your privilege to enjoy having a personal computer. It offers you plenty of convenience but you don't want to get involved in having to worry about everything you do online. You want to be able to access your accounts and buy items online without having to worry that someone else knows about how to access such accounts.

Make sure you invest your time in comparing various adware programs so you can get the very best protection offered. It is a good idea to have both an anti virus and anti spyware program on your computer. It only makes sense because it is computer programmers implementing these adware scams. You need all the protection against them that you can.

Don't wait until you have been infected with spyware to do something about it. The investment you make in a good quality adware tool will be more than sufficient to ensure you never have to worry about anyone getting access to what is on your personal computer. Pay attention to the information provided for proper installation and for updates that are offered. When it comes to your own information you can't be too careful.

Related Computer Blog: http://cpu-2tech.blogspot.com/

By Salihu Ibrahim

Google lets admins control site search

On a modest but significant scale, Google is sharing with its customers some of the control it wields over the search market.

As countless search-engine-optimization consultants can attest, Google maintains tight control over the parameters that rank the results of Internet searches. Google's power can be terrific for those who come out on top and a torment for those who rank lower.

But expectations are different for a Google service that lets Web site operators pay to use the company's search technology on their own properties. For those customers, Google now is sharing some control over the knobs and levers that govern search results.

Google launched the service in July under the name Custom Search Business Edition and expanded internationally in November. Now it's got the more palatable name Google Site Search, said Nitin Mangtani, product manager for enterprise and small-business search at Google.

The Business.gov site uses Google site search to scour its documents.

"With this launch, we are giving full control to the Webmasters for indexing as well as for customizing these search results," Mangtani said.

Google Site Search's annual fees correspond to the number of Web pages Google indexes at a company site: $100 for up to 5,000 pages, $500 for up to 50,000 pages, $850 for up to 100,000 pages, $2,250 for up to 300,000 pages, and custom pricing beyond that.

The change could be significant for businesses.

Direct view of customer intent
Customers increasingly are comfortable with using search as a way to get what they need out of the Internet. Search engines are able to infer, to at least a rough degree, the intent of a searcher.

That intent becomes all the more important once a customer has taken the trouble to visit a company's Web site. If done well, a search box can connect users with a product they want to buy, documentation to figure out how it works, forums to discuss company topics, the right contact in the sales department.

In short, getting customers to the information they want could drastically reduce the likelihood they'll head to a competitor

But in order for a company to be happy relying on Google search technology, they're going to want to make sure it can meet their own business priorities. The revamped Google Site Service makes that easier.

Google Site Search also can provide a window into what users desire. Google cites the example of TechSmith, a screen-capture software company that increased its Mac OS X development efforts after finding potential customers searching on the site for it.

What's new
Some things with Google Site Search haven't changed. Customers of the service endow their Web sites with a search box that presents Google's search results for publicly available pages on the site. They can customize the appearance of the results and share Google ad revenue if desired.

What's new is that customers now have three ways to influence the search results:

• With "synonyms," customers can upload a custom dictionary that Google can use to translate or interpret site-specific terms. For example, a banking company might want "SD" to be translated as "safety deposit" for searches on its site.

• With "date biasing," customers can ensure more recently published documents rank higher in search results.

• With "top results biasing," customers can make sure specific documents are high in the search results. That could be useful, for example, for a company selling digital cameras that has a promotional partnership with specific camera makers, Mangtani said. Or it could show online catalog results preferentially.

If that sounds like pay-for-play--a concept that has raised hackles in the search industry--it is.

But Google clearly was careful not to let the user-configurable search results affect the main Google search site. "Any special indexing we do for Google Site Search customers doesn't impact the ranking on Google.com," Mangtani said.

Under the covers, that's made possible because Google now augments the standard Google.com search index with a Google Site Search-specific index, he said. Google Web crawler software updates the index on a separate schedule from the regular Google index, he added.

Google Site Search is an example of software as a service--technology Google runs on its own servers that customers can employ. But the Mountain View, Calif.-based company also offers a search appliance--physical servers--that companies can install on their own sites. It's designed for displaying internal results such as information restricted to within the corporate firewall.

Related Computer & Technology Blog: http://cpu-2tech.blogspot.com/

By Stephen Shankland

EC to Fund African Tech Projects LUSAKA, Zambia

EC to Fund African Tech Projects LUSAKA, Zambia -- The European Commission has agreed to provide some €78 million ($121 million U.S.) to help fund IT infrastructure development in countries that are part of the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa.

Sindiso Ngwenya, assistant secretary general for programs at Comesa, said the financial support will help speed work on cross-border initiatives like Comtel, a telecommunications project that promises to link the regional economic agency's 21 countries with the rest of the world.

The EC funding will also support efforts to boost access to electricity in the member countries of the Lusaka-based organization, which include Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Kenya and Malawi.

Michael Malakata, IDG News Service

Briefly Noted Wolfgang Ziebart has resigned as president and CEO of Infineon Technologies AG over differences of opinion on "future strategic orientation," the Neubiberg, Germany-based chip maker confirmed last week. Executive Vice President Peter Bauer succeeds Ziebert as head of the company.

By Mike Bucken