Yahoo released their quarterly earnings report for Q1 of 2008 moments ago.  Apparently they beat analysts expectations by far.  Analysts were expecting Q1 revenue to be around $1.33 billion, $435 million net income or an EPS of $0.09/share.  But Yahoo surpassed these expectations with a Q1 total revenue of $1.8 billion, net income of $542 million, or $0.37 per share.

What does this mean for Yahoo and Microsoft’s bid on the company?  Apparently Microsoft announced this means nothing for their deal.  They said that the clock is ticking and their offer ends this week.  If Yahoo does not take the offer then Microsoft will get more aggressive with a hostile takeover.  Yahoo says that these new quarterly results shows that Microsoft’s offer is too low and they are still severely undervaluing Yahoo.

Other information taken from Tech Crunch:

• “Revenues were up 19% for the quarter compared to Q12007 in the U.S., and 11% internationally.
• Net revenues of $1,352 million were a 14 percent increase compared to $1,183 million for the same period of 2007.
• Operating income for the first quarter of 2008 was $121 million, a 28 percent decrease compared to $169 million for the same period of 2007.
• Yahoo has spent $14 million to date on outside advisors on the Microsoft deal
• They took a $29 million charge for severance arrangements.”

There’s a low blow to Microsoft today as the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals has thrown out the class action lawsuit appeal against them today.  The Class Action Lawsuit against Microsoft is now eminent.  The Plaintiff’s in the case, consumers that purchased PC’s during the 2006 holiday season, allege that Microsoft “artificially inflated” demand to increase PC sales for their Windows Vista operating system.

This is not a surprise as half of those “Vista Capable” PC’s didn’t have drivers supported for the Vista operating system.  Additionally, these PC’s mostly had between 256-512MB of system memory, far below the recommended settings for Windows Vista.  I personally would not recommend below 1GB of RAM as it’s a complete resource hog even with the most modern PC.  Some vendors, even to this day, are still having a difficult time with the Vista operating system.  For example, Sonicwall has yet to produce a fully functioning “non-beta” version of their 64 Bit Global VPN software.  Microsoft may be quick to dilute Windows Vista with a fast track release of Windows 7 but we won’t know this until the first beta versions surface to compare.

Looks like Apple will be selling iPhone’s in Italy without the burden of being locked into a contract.  This means that when consumers purchase the iPhone, they can use it with any compatible 3G service provider in any country in addition to Italy.  You can bet that US users will find a way to have these units shipped here.

Now why can’t they have this in the US?  Shows how much Corporations run this country.  Where every service that’s offered to consumers requires some sort of year long(at least) contract with an early termination fee.  The Inquirer reports that these particular units are more expensive in Italy.  I guess they had to make up for their loss contract profit somehow.

According to this articleover at The Inquirer, a Chinese Windows Enthusiast claimed to have gotten their hands on the latest milestone release of Windows 7.  They announced that the User Account Control(UAC) function has been toned down a bit and even added the ability to ignore tasks you’re doing for a few minutes so it doesn’t constantly bug you.  Its also been reported that the Vista appearance has been slightly tweaked and the Security Center is now known as the Health Center.

Microsoft has a long way to go before making a significant improvement over Vista, but so far they seem to be on the right track.

Intel has announced price slashes for their desktop CPU’s.  The Reg reports that the Core 2 Duo Quad Q6700 has been cut from $530 to $224.  Additionally, the Core 2 Duo E6850 was reduced by 31% from $266 to $183.  Intel also released a new part number this week, the Core 2 Duo E8300 spouting a clock speed of 2.83GHz, L2 Cache 6MB, and a 1333MHz Front Side Bus at $163.  Other cuts follow:

Intel Processor Models & Reductions
Q6700 -50% to $266
Q6600 -16% to $224
E6850 -31% to $183
E7200 -0% Intro’d at $133 NEW
E4600 -15% to $133
E2200 -12% to $74
E2180 -14% to $64
E1400 -0% Intro’d at $53 NEW
E1200 -19% to $43
Celeron 570 -0% Intro’d at $134 NEW
Celeron 560 -20% to $107
Celeron 550 -20% to $86
Celeron 440 -17% to $44
Celeron 430 -23% to $34

AMD has announced that their graphics division ATI is releasing the Radeon 4800(RV770) series early!  Amazing, considering AMD just recently announced their Q1 2008 earnings which touted a $358 million loss.  This is exactly what AMD needs to do.  Put the shortcomings and bad news behind them to push forward.  Nvidia has been killing the gaming and enthusiast market with their GeForce 8000 and 9000 series.  They have been untouched in terms of graphics horsepower.  The new specs of these units look promising and hopefully will also lower power consumption for those green friendly users in mind.

Western Digital launches a new 300GB Raptor to their hard drive arsenal.  This one still touts the 10,000RPM spindle speed of its predecessor but there’s something different about this one.  It has 2 x 2.5″ platters inside its 3.5″ housing.  This shrinkage sports a comfortable 35% increase in data transfer rates.  That’s impressive considering how fast the current Raptor hard drives are.  Can’t wait to see some real world performance benchmarks to see if this is really true.  The Reg reports.

Fire in the hole!  Literally.  For those gamers out there with Xbox 360’s beware!  The Reg reports that a family’s house in Arkansas has burned down because of the power brick of the Xbox 360.  The fire caused $100,000 worth of damage to the home and according to the video below was not the first fire incident with these units.  Do I smell a class action lawsuit brewing?

Here we are another chapter forward in the Windows XP saga.  XP3 has been released to manufacturing and OEM’s.  Which means Dell, HP, and the rest of the big dogs will get it first.  Followed by trickling to the Microsoft Tech/MSDN subscribers and then the Microsoft Download Center(on or about April 29th).  Finally, home users will be able to get the Service Pack from Microsoft’s Automatic Updates in early June.

Sources: The Reg, Microsoft Forums

The Internet is in a transition period from the Web 2.0 era(about 1998-2008) to Web 2.5(2008-2010).  During this time a whole slew of different applications and innovations will come about that will be the determining factors for the Internet of tomorrow.  There’s no definitive era’s or time frames of what makes each version of the web except for what the experts and industry leaders have been touting off.  So these are my personal estimates.

Web 3.0, as stated on Wiki, is estimated to begin in 2010.  So these next two years will be crucial to the transformation of the foundation for the new Internet.  Starting as early as 2005, and the majority in 2007, there have been online web applications popping up.  These include web based CRM software, corporate Wiki’s, web office applications, and others.  I believe this will be the heart of the Web 3.0 evolution.  Everyday applications that are currently used on the PC will move over to web based versions.  This will create subscription based content and modules.  Additionally this will also help combat piracy as it’s much harder to replicate an online application as it is for an offline application.

2008 has become the cornerstone for these web apps and now the bigger issue is…  What if your Internet or server goes down?  Company’s still need the ability to work even if they lose connectivity.  Welcome to Web 2.5 and 3.0, where there are offline versions of the online web apps that will sync up the next time you reconnect to the Internet.  Take for example, Etelos, which was founded in 1999 and provides on-demand, browser-based applications such as CRM and Project for Google Apps.  The Etelos Marketplace (TM) also allows developers to license, distribute, and host their applications.  According to this TechCrunch article, Etelos has announced that their new platform will allow web apps to run offline.  Then re-sync with the online version once you reconnect.

I think these technologies still have maturing to do.  For example, in regards to Google Apps, any document or data you create on their service becomes Google property.  I don’t think corporations will like this very much as it creates privacy issues.  There must be some sort of change in this arena to give corporations or any user for that matter a warm fuzzy feeling inside about their data.  Until then, we will be stuck in this transition period.

eBay purchased Skype for $2.6 billion back in 2005 with the intent of integrating the service into the eBay auction site.  A perfect harmony of buyers and sellers asking each other questions about items for sale via voice.  But the idea never took off and for several reasons.  eBay never really had a full plan outlined on the project.  It was a great expensive(and I cannot emphasize anymore on this) idea to integrate the two services.  But if there’s no planning involved for the project to move forward how can such an idea be executed in the first place.  If you go to eBay’s website, look through the pages, the auctions, the buyer and seller profiles, you don’t see a way to contact these users via Skype communications.  Same thing on Skype.com, no sign of eBay’s ownership or service integration.  You can send Paypal payments to Skype contacts but what good is that?  If you could chat via voice and/or video with buyers and sellers it could give each person more confidence with bidding or completing a sale.

I think eBay has the resources to still pull this off, especially with Skype’s current member count of 309 million users.  Also, how many eBay commercials have you seen?  A lot, even during Superbowl’s.  Now how many Skype commercials have you seen?  None.  eBay treats Skype like the red headed step child that it is.  But there is so much more potential behind the service that’s untapped.  eBay may seem more willing to just let Skype go and not even bother.  Especially with the recent talks of selling the service.  As Ars Technica says in this article, Google may be the best company to purchase Skype.  They definitely have the resources and the new Android cellphone platform to push it to consumers.

Microsoft has signed the letter of intent to acquire Xobni.  Xobni is “Inbox” spelled backwards and this company has changed the way you look at email.  TechCrunch reports:

“Two independent sources tell us that the Microsoft/Xobni deal is moving along and that the two companies signed an acquisition LOI in the last week. I have not yet been able to track down the price, but a previous offer of sub-$20 million was supposedly rejected by Xobni.

Bill Gates has publicly complimented the service, calling it “the next generation of social networking.”

Xobni, which launched at the TechCrunch40 conference last year, offers an outlook plugin for Windows users that significantly improves the desktop email experience (particularly search). They recently hired notable Yahoo’er Jeff Bonforte as CEO.

The timing on this is perfect as the New York Times and others are doing their seasonal focus on the problems with email. Xobni is one of the top startups trying to fix the problem.”

So you’re browsing the web after work one day at home.  You misspell the website you’re trying to access.  We have all done it, even the best writers in the world have typo’s.  But this article over at The Reg says that Internet Service Providers purposely bank off customer’s typo’s.  Those websites that you misspell and open up a blank page with a bunch of advertisements could be your ISP trying to make additional money from you.  Security researcher Dan Kaminsky said at this years ToorCon that these technique’s ISP’s use to make additional revenue could be insecure to the customers.  ToorCon is an annual hacker conference in San Diego where they discuss everything from device hacking, reverse engineering, to cryptographic algorithm’s.  Here’s an excerpt from the article:

“Comcast, Verizon and at least 70 other Internet service providers are putting their customers at serious risk in their quest to make money from mistyped web addresses, security researcher Dan Kaminsky says.

Speaking at the ToorCon security conference in Seattle, Kaminsky demonstrated an exploit class he dubbed PiTMA, short for provider-in-the-middle attacks. A variation of man-in-the-middle attacks, it stole authentication cookies and injected arbitrary content into trusted web pages by exploiting weaknesses in an ad server Earthlink used when returning results for non-existent addresses.

Once upon a time, mistyped domain names resulted in a browser returning a simple 404 error that said the address didn’t exist. Then ISPs realized they could make money by returning a failure notice that included banner ads and other content. This ad injection is done through the magic of the domain name system. As a result, browsers get fooled into thinking a request for qww.microsoft.com is a legitimate address that’s controlled by the same network responsible for www.microsoft.com.

“Guys, anything goes wrong on that subdomain [and] it isan element of the parent,” Kaminsky said. “It can access cookies, it can do other things. Normally a subdomain is trusted by the parent. Not this time.”

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency(The Pentagon) announces three contenders that are racing in its Vulture project.  This “craft” is expected to fly unmanned in the stratosphere of the earth for 5 years.  Such a device can be used for surveillance, voice or data communications, or weather analysis. 

Here’s a concept video of what this wing ship is expected to do:

Now this idea is not new.  Another company called Sanswire Network, LLC. had a similar concept a few years ago.  They branded the concept called Stratellite’s.  Which are high altitude airships that would hover lower than an orbiting satellite(stratosphere), but far above the jet stream.  At approximately 13 miles above the earth, these units were supposed to be used for broadband Internet, mobile phones, digital television, and radio signals to a large region.  It was stated that 10-15 of these strategically placed around the United States would cover all the lower 48 states with all the said services.  Unfortunately Sanswire Network, LLC has since then suffered from a CEO change and an investigation from Securities and Exchange Commission for violations.

Here’s what the Stratellite looked like:
 

Microsoft has officially announced its upcoming online product to be released later this year(possibly 2009).  In an effort to compete with Google Docs, Microsoft has released a private beta test for their upcoming online office suite.  Codenamed “Albany” the suite includes Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007, Office Live Workspaces, Windows Live Mail, Messenger, and Photos client software, along with Windows Live OneCare.  According to the announcement, this online package may very well be subscription based.  But no news was released in regards to how much it will cost.  This suite will also have a media based version that you can pickup at retail channels such as Best Buy and according to the article, Office will only be able to save documents online via a plugin.  So it’s not quite as online as they tout it to be.  Especially since Microsoft products seem to break frequently.