Top Items:
Matt Marshall / VentureBeat:
Microsoft to buy semantic search engine Powerset for $100M plus — Microsoft, the software giant flush with billions of dollars in its warchest, has agreed to buy Silicon Valley semantic search engine Powerset, we've learned. — The purchase price is rumored to be slightly more than $100 million.
Discussion:
The Inquisitr, L.A. Times Tech Blog, ReadWriteWeb, Search Engine Journal, The Guidewire, paidContent.org, Mashable!, Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life, mathewingram.com/work, UMBC ebiquity, Valleywag, ContentBlogger, BroadDev, Silicon Alley Insider, Furrier.org, WebProNews, Alt Search Engines and Beyond Binary
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Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Microsoft To Buy Powerset? Not Just Yet. — VentureBeat is reporting that Microsoft has agreed to buy semantic search engine Powerset for somewhere around $100 million, which is the price we previously reported was being offered to the company. — Our sources have been saying this deal …
Kara Swisher / BoomTown:
More on Yahoo's Reorg: Dietzen Is Garlinghouse Replacement — As BoomTown reported last night, the Yahoo (YHOO) reorg will be unveiled later this morning, with the slate of execs that this column outlined last week in its gory-oops, I mean, glorious-detail.
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Business Wire:
Yahoo! Announces Realignment to Support Core Strategies — Centralizes Audience Product Development; Forms New U.S. Region; — Realigns Technology Organization — SUNNYVALE, Calif.—(BUSINESS WIRE)—Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - News), a leading global Internet company …
Dan Frommer / Silicon Alley Insider:Yahoo Reorg Is On: New Jobs For Ash Patel, Hilary Schneider (YHOO)
BBC:
Internet overhaul wins approval — A complete overhaul of the way in which people navigate the internet has been given the go-ahead in Paris. — The net's regulator, Icann, voted unanimously to relax the strict rules on so-called “top-level” domain names, such as .com or .uk.
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Jason Keenan / ICANN:
Biggest Expansion to Internet in Forty Years Approved for Implementation — Paris, France: The Board of ICANN today approved a recommendation that could see a whole range of new names introduced to the Internet's addressing system. — “The Board today accepted a recommendation …
WindowsServer / Windows Server Division WebLog:
MICROSOFT.COM POWERED BY HYPER-V — Hi—I am Rob Emanuel, a Technology Architect on the Microsoft.com Operations team focusing on virtualization. I wanted to share the great progress we have made rolling out Hyper-V since my first blog a month ago. In that blog I discussed our success …
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Saul Hansell / New York Times:
Google Tries Tighter Aim for Web Ads — Google, with its deep reservoir of data about online behavior gathered by tracking hundreds of millions of computers, is for the first time testing ways to use some of that data to aim ads at Web users. — Ads that a person sees on one Google search …
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Saul Hansell / Bits:Google Tests Using Your Search Data to Tailor Ads to You
Discussion:
Search Engine Land
Ionut Alex Chitu / Google Operating System:
Google Tests the New iGoogle — Announced in April, the new version of iGoogle that brings social applications is tested in a small number of randomly selected Google accounts. — The new iGoogle places the tabs on the left-hand side of the page and you can expand the tabs to see the list …
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
The First Test App For MySpace Data Availability — The CrunchBase guys (thanks Henry and Mark) have been hacking away at the newly launched MySpace Data Availability APIs to create a test application that is now working, at techcrunch.com/myspace/app.php. You can sign into the account using …
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Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:MySpace Opens Up The Data Pipe With Full Launch Of Data Availability
Anil Dash:
Bill Gates and the Greatest Tech Hack Ever — Bill Gates has pulled off one of the greatest hacks in technology and business history, by turning Microsoft's success into a force for social responsibility. Imagine imposing a tax on every corporation in the developed world …
Caroline McCarthy / The Social:
Atom Films relaunched as Comedy Central sister site — NEW YORK—Two years after acquiring it, MTV Networks has shaped Atom Films into Atom.com, a sister site to its Comedy Central network dedicated to short-form, Web-based comedy. — Executives from the Viacom-owned MTV Networks held …
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Joseph Weisenthal / paidContent.org:
Napster Activists: Company Worth At Least As Much As Last.Fm — Back in May we mentioned that three subscribers/shareholders of Napster had launched an improbable proxy fight hoping to get themselves representation on the company's board. That still looks like a pretty tall order for the trio …
Discussion:
HipMojo.com
Dan Frommer / Silicon Alley Insider:
Palm Stinks Up Q4; No Big Deal (PALM) — Palm's Q4 was even worse than analysts' low expectations, and shares will probably drop Friday morning. (They're down 7.8% after hours, to $6.03, after losing another 4.4% during Thursday trading.) — But it doesn't really matter! Why not?
Russ Mitchell / Portfolio.com:
Yahoo's Loser Board — Russ Mitchell is not surprised. One way to compare the quality of Yahoo's board of directors to Microsoft's: look at the outside directors and the other public boards they sit on and see how they've performed. Take each company and compare its stock charts …
Discussion:
Valleywag
Ina Fried / Beyond Binary:
Icahn battles for Yahoo's gold — Proxy fights often leave shareholders feeling black and blue, but when it comes to the battle of Carl Icahn and Jerry Yang, it's a case of gold vs. white. — Icahn on Thursday filed his preliminary proxy statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission …
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Bruce Schneier / Wired News:
I've Seen the Future, and It Has a Kill Switch — It used to be that just the entertainment industries wanted to control your computers — and televisions and iPods and everything else — to ensure that you didn't violate any copyright rules. But now everyone else wants to get their hooks into your gear.
