Subzero Blue

Microsoft Offers $44.6B for Yahoo

WOW…

Microsoft Corp. has pounced on slumping Internet icon Yahoo Inc. with an unsolicited takeover offer of $44.6 billion in its boldest bid yet to challenge Google Inc.’s dominance of the lucrative online search and advertising markets.

The surprise offer of $31 per share, made late Thursday and announced Friday, comes with Sunnyvale-based Yahoo in a vulnerable position.

In a statement Friday, Yahoo said it will “carefully and promptly” study Microsoft’s bid.

[…]

In a letter to Yahoo’s board of directors, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer indicated the world’s largest software maker is determined to bring the two companies together.

To underscore its resolve, Microsoft is offering a 62 percent premium to Yahoo’s closing stock price Thursday.

[Source: Yahoo News]

Rumors have been going around for quite some time now that Microsoft would eventually attempt to buy Yahoo, and now they have come true.

If Yahoo shareholders decide to sell, what would it mean for the Internet?
Would it make the companies’ combined portfolios better suited to take on Google?
What would happen to all the different Yahoo services? Especially if they have existing competing Microsoft services? It’d certainly be a shame to see services like Flickr or Delicious take a down turn because of this.
Many questions, and still too early to know for sure what the answers are.

Personally, I would prefer for this deal not to happen, because the way things are now allows for more competition and more creativity. Anyway, even if the deal goes through, I’m not sure it will change much in Microsoft’s position against Google, especially if they start trying to take Yahoo the Microsoft way and start MS’ing their products and services and badly re-branding them.

If the deal goes through, what I think they should do is leave Yahoo a lot of its independence and spirit, not change the product/service names, drop MSN altogether and study quantitatively and qualitatively competing products in the portfolio to take decisions on which to integrate everything into as a brand.

Anyway, I guess we’ll just wait and see how all this plays out. But it has the potential to change a big part of the geography of the online world.

Internet Outages Hit Middle East

Internet goes down, everything goes down…

Life came to a standstill in Dubai, home of the renowned “Media City” and modern “electronic government,” after an extensive Internet failure affected much of the United Arab Emirates…

[…]

Besides the Internet, the outage caused major disruption to television and phone services, creating chaos for the UAE’s public and private sectors.

[…]

The outage heavily crippled Dubai’s business section, which is heavily reliant on electronic means for billions of dollars’ worth of transactions daily.

[Source: CNN]

And all around the Middle East and beyond as well:

Internet services and usage have been disrupted across large parts of the Middle East after an undersea cable in the Mediterranean was damaged.

Egypt’s telecoms ministry said 70 per cent of the country’s internet network was down on Wednesday.

India was also affected, losing more than half its bandwidth initially.

Residents of Gulf Arab countries reported a slowdown in internet connectivity and disruption of services…

[Source: Al Jazeera]

This is what’s so scary about technology; we quickly get so used to it, we integrate it into our everyday lives and work, we become dependent on it for everything we do, and then when it fails for one reason or another our lives stop, we’re left crippled and helpless; we can’t go back and we can’t move forward; we just have to wait for things to be sorted out so we can go back to life as usual.

We’re too dependent on technology, and we don’t have a fail-safe plan; a major technological meltdown in the future could bring the whole world to a stand-still; and blow us back centuries into the past.

Bionic Eyes: Contact Lenses With Circuits And Lights

Remember those bionic eyes some of our favorite sci-fi characters had to zoom in on far-away things, have useful facts pop into their field of view, or create virtual crosshairs?
Well those could become an attainable reality for everyone soon enough.

Engineers at the University of Washington have for the first time used manufacturing techniques at microscopic scales to combine a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights.

Looking through a completed lens, you would see what the display is generating superimposed on the world outside; opening many doors for useful applications of these contact lenses.

Installing or removing the bionic eye would be as easy as popping a contact lens in or out; and even thought the current prototype contact lens does not correct the wearer’s vision, the technique could be used on a corrective lens.

Future improvements will add wireless communication to and from the lens. The researchers hope to power the whole system using a combination of radio-frequency power and solar cells placed on the lens.

I personally think this is a very cool invention which could be used in several areas, for serious and professional purposes as well as for leisure purposes too.
I can’t wait to see this rolled out and the different uses it will be applied in. I’d certainly want one, that’s for sure.

[Source: Science Daily

Tunisiana’s GPS Weenee Brings GPS To Tunisia

GPS Weenee Just a couple of days ago I was wondering when GPS would finally make it to Tunisia, and to my great surprise today, by accident, I came across a new website launched by Tunisia’s first private mobile operator Tunisiana publicizing a new product they’re launching called GPS Weenee. (Weenee in Arabic means: Where am I? or Where is it?)

The product should be currently available at Tunisiana’s service centers in the Grand Tunis area: Les Jardins du Lac, La Marsa (Zephyr), Ariana, Medina, Tunis-Carthage Airport.

The details of the service are as follows:

– Coverage: The Grand Tunis area and inter-urban Tunisia for the time being.
– Vocal and symbolic guidance
– 2D and 3D Maps
– Multilingual: Tunisian accent, Arabic, German, English, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese
– Search for interest points in the proximity, sorted by distance
– Search for addresses in the Grand Tunis area
– Automatic route recalculation
– Optimised route calculation (time/distance)
– Possibility to save favorites and last addresses
– Alerts when speed limit is exceeded
– Positions for hotels, restaurants, fuel stations, …etc.

I’ve found no information about the price on the website, so I guess I’ll have to pass by one of the service centers to check that out. Hopefully them not putting the price doesn’t mean it’s really expensive.

I can’t understand why I had to find out about this by coincidence, where is the communication a product like this deserves? where are the ad campaigns? where are the billboards?

Personally, I find this very very interesting, a great move by Tunisiana, a product everyone needs and that simply sells itself, something I’ll totally go for if the price is right.

Update: The information I got about the price from a Tunisiana insider is a one-time 900 DT for the device. Very expensive and unpractical, I think.
A friend of mine rightfully joked after hearing the price: You could spend your whole life getting lost in Tunis and taking taxis to wherever you want to go and it still wouldn’t amount to 900 DT.

Singapore Contest For Next-Generation Search Engine

Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research has launched an eight-month contest to lure software engineers and researchers to develop the next generation of search engines, offering them a cash prize of $100,000.

The aim is build a search engine that works across multiple media platforms, that not only searches for text in websites but also for terms within music and video files.

The top five teams will be flown to Singapore for the finals at Fusionopolis, a science and technology research centre set to open in October.

An international advisory panel will oversee the competition. Applicants have a registration deadline of February 29.

It seems like everyone is on Google’s tail, trying to come up with the next big search engine that will take over the world. I wonder who gets there first and what factor will tip the scale to their side.

[Source: Physorg]
[Via: Truemors]

Blogger Does Arabic, Hebrew And Persian

Blogger is finally available in Arabic, and two other Middle Eastern right-to-left languages: Hebrew and Persian.

Besides localizing the Blogger interface into these three languages, they have added right-to-left templates and new toolbar buttons for bi-directional text editing in the post editor.

I think it’s great that they’ve done this, it will make a lot of people’s lives easier. I know many people who’ve been using Blogger to publish their blogs in several languages like Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and Hebrew for some time now.

Some of these people who have a little technical know-how were able to play around with their blog designs and templates to flip them around into something nice and presentable, but the result with others wasn’t such a nice view, even though they eventually got to get their ideas across, which is what counts most I guess.

Anyway, very welcomed move from Google’s Blogger team. May blogs from this corner of the world flourish even more.

[More: Blogger Buzz, Mashable]

Apple’s MacBook Air, The World’s Thinnest Laptop

Apple just introduced the world’s thinnest laptop in this year’s MacWorld.

The MacBook Air turned out to be a reality, and what a beautiful, amazing reality it is.

Features

– .16 to .76-inch thickness on top
– Weighs only 3 pounds
– 5 hours of battery life with everything running
– Intel Core 2 Duo Processor at 1.6 or 1.8GHz
– Motherboard the length of a pencil
– 13.3-inch screen, LED backlit
– 2GB RAM standard
– 1.8-inch 80GB HD or 64GB Solid State Drive
– Multitouch trackpad with gestures. Pans, zooms, rotates, etc.
– 802.11n and Bluetooth 2.1
– Optional external HD for $99, USB-bus powered
– Built-in iSight
– Full backlit keyboard
– It’s “Green”: Mercury and Arsenic free LCD and glass, Aluminum frame can be recycled. PVC free on circuitry, and less packing.

Price: $1799

WOW…
I’m speechless, now that’s one great laptop.

[More: Apple MacBook Air Gizmodo, TechCrunch]

Questler, Where Minds Connect

Questler is a new online service that was launched into public beta a couple of months ago and which has an interesting social networking approach to learning online, finding answers to questions, and acquiring/sharing knowledge.

The idea of the website stems from the belief that everyone is a learner, seeking more knowledge on certain topics, and that learning best occurs when individuals interact with each other in free spaces, informally, to share knowledge and collaboratively create ideas.

So in other words, the goal is to try to tap into the collective knowledge of the crowd to acquire and share knowledge.

Questler users can put together a learning network by inviting and constructing a list of their contacts, as well as finding other individuals who share their same interests on the site.

Together they can use the service to start conversations about those topics and engage in knowledge sharing through posting their quests and discoveries on different subjects.

The interface is really simple and clear; well designed; well organized and straight to the point. I really like their simple logo and visual identity too.
It’s in English only for the time being; and I’m not sure if they’ll be adding Arabic soon.

I personally think it’s a really interesting approach and service, worth checking out and using. If you do join, you can add me as a contact, here’s my profile page.

Finally, my best wishes of success, growth and prosperity to the Questler team. It’s great to have such good projects coming out of the Arab world; from Jordan in this case.

NewsGator Releases New Free Versions Of Its RSS Readers

Interesting news from NewsGator…

NewsGator announced today the general availability of NetNewsWire 3.1, FeedDemon 2.6, and NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile 2.0. The public beta of NewsGator Inbox 3.0 also began today.[…]

NewsGator also announced that all of its client RSS reader products are now available free of charge and include free synchronization along with other services. Users can now enjoy the great features and performance of all of NewsGator’s Web, desktop and mobile readers for iPhone, Windows Mobile, and BlackBerry (powered by FreeRange), all synchronized to provide the same view of their RSS content no matter when or where they read it.

[Source: NewsGator]

Of all the NewsGator products, I personally tried FeedDemon, even before they bought it from Nick Bradbury, and it rocked, certainly the best desktop feed reader I’ve ever used, and believe me I’ve played around with my good share of them.

NetNewsWire was always the feed reader of preference for most Mac users I know.

Add to those two great products NewsGator’s online feed reader, mobile feed readers and the possibility to synchronize between them all, I think this is a really interesting and great offer.

I’m not really sure if it will tempt me enough to switch to it, after all I am pretty happy using Google Reader now, but if there is one thing that might lure me in it’s the synchronization between all the different devices.

Netscape Navigator Officially Dead

AOL just announced that Netscape Navigator, the browser that launched the commercial Internet in October 1994, and that they acquired in November 1998 as part of their Netscape Communications Corp. acquisition deal for $4.2 billion, will die on February 1, 2008.

Netscape Navigator is currently at version 9. Recent surveys suggest that Netscape currently has only 0.6% market share among browsers, compared to Internet Explorer’s 77.35% and Firefox’s 16.01%. This is down from more than 90 percent of the market in the 90s, when the browser wars began, then the Microsoft antitrust trial took place, before IE took over as leading browser.

To me Netscape Navigator died a long time ago, the last version that counted was somewhere around version 4.5 or 4.7; everything went downwards from there on for Netscape as a browser.

Still, we mustn’t forget the success of the Mozilla foundations and its projects, like the Firefox browser, which spun off of Netscape in February 1998. The legacy of Netscape will live on through Mozilla’s projects.

So, again, support for existing versions of Netscape Navigator will cease on February 1, 2008. A cool thing AOL will be doing though is setting up an archive where people will be able to download older versions of Netscape, without any support.

Rest in peace Netscape Navigator, you can rest assured your role in internet history will never be forgotten.

A history of Netscape Navigator can be found here on Wikipedia.

[Sources: Netscape Blog, TechCrunch]