Week in review: iPhone answers business calls

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Yahoo and News Corp. continue to talk as well, discussing a deal under which News Corp. would sell its MySpace.com social network to Yahoo in exchange for a stake in the company, the report said.

However, Microsoft may be considering changing the way the deal is valued to 100 percent cash. Under its current offer, Microsoft is valuing the deal using a formula based on 50 percent cash and 50 percent Microsoft stock. As a result, the value of Microsoft's offer rises and falls based on the performance of its own stock price.

Meanwhile, Ask.com is cutting 40 jobs--8 percent of its workforce--as part of a restructuring to refocus the search company toward providing answers to women searching on entertainment, health, and reference topics.

In the Mix '08
Yahoo is certainly on Microsoft's mind. Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie opened his speech at Mix '08, the company's Web-focused confab in Las Vegas, with a talk about all of the things Microsoft has done in the online arena over the past year.

"And then there's Yahoo," Ozzie said, adding that there isn't much he can say about Microsoft's pending bid. "I can say it's already added some interesting twists to what promises to be a really, really exciting year."

He also justified spending Yahoo-size dollars by talking about the potential of the online advertising market.

Ozzie said he hoped in his speech to connect some of the dots between Microsoft's online services, which he acknowledged can seem from the outside to be somewhat haphazard.

The stars of the confab were a new version of Internet Explorer 8 and the Silverlight Web technology.

Although anyone can now download the IE 8 browser, Microsoft is gearing this release for Web developers. However, a second beta, slated to arrive this summer, is aimed at a wider audience, Microsoft's top browser executive told CNET News.com.

"It's public," general manager Dean Hachamovitch said of the Beta 1 released Wednesday. "It's out on Microsoft.com somewhere. Anyone can download it."

One of the new features, WebSlices, allows users to break a Web site into parts and only get updates from the part they want.

"In IE 8 users can subscribe to parts of a Web page," Hachamovitch said. He showed an example in IE 8 where users can use Web slices to subscribe to a single eBay auction.

Want to know how well IE 8 works? CNET's Robert Vamosi poked and prodded at the test version of the Microsoft browser, and found it's still very much a work in progress. Read his review here.

Microsoft also said it is making available a beta version of Silverlight 2, which will move the technology further beyond delivering video and into creating rich Internet applications. Among the features of Silverlight 2 is what Microsoft calls adaptive streaming: the ability of the client PC to decide how large a streaming file it can handle at any given moment based on its CPU and network resources.

Microsoft is looking to position its Silverlight Web technology as the coolest kid in school--one that is both popular and gets along with everyone.

Also of note
Facebook announced that it has hired veteran Google employee Sheryl Sandberg to be its new chief operating officer, replacing the outgoing Owen Van Natta...Hewlett-Packard unveiled a new plan for its research arm, HP Labs, saying it will sharpen its focus into fewer specific projects and promising a greater emphasis on exploratory research...Travelers using Denver International Airport's free Wi-Fi service may be shocked to learn that officials have blocked access to content they deem provocative on the airport's free Wi-Fi service...The U.S. Air Force accidentally sent e-mails that were meant to go to its base in Mildenhall, England, to a tourism Web site with a similar address.

[zato_3]

The so-called C|Net does it again

"Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers jumped into the fray by creating a
so-called iFund to invest in "Apple entrepreneurs" developing
applications for the iPhone..."

I'm so sure KPCB will be pleased to hear that they've "jumped into
the fray" with their "so-called" "iFund".

[Fil0403]

Week in review: CNET tries (again) to push iPhone sales up

"Apple has licensed the Microsoft ActiveSync protocol, which will make it much easier to do push e-mail and contacts with Exchange servers."

Isn't it ironic that Apple needs Microsoft again to (try to) make one of its products successful, LOL?


"Until now, iPhone users who wanted to get e-mail on their iPhones had to jump through a series of technical hoops."

Oh, did they? I thought the iPhone was a great perfect piece of technology that allowed you to easily check your e-mails anywhere. It must be a coincidence that CNET only admits that "iPhone users who wanted to get e-mail on their iPhones had to jump through a series of technical hoops" when Apple supposedly gets a fix for it, right? Right...? LOL.


"And as a result, a lot of business users, who would have otherwise bought the iPhone right away, have stood on the sidelines with their BlackBerrys or Windows Mobile phones drooling at the iPhone."

C'mon CNET, don't let that minor insignificant thing called "professionalism" stop you from using the word you want: you meant "m*sturbating", didn't you?


"The announcement is a huge deal for Apple, because it eliminates one of the barriers the company faced in addressing the business market."

Yep: 1 barrier eliminated, 24 more to go.


"CNET News.com readers debated the value of Apple's move; at least one reader wanted to revisit issues on the minds of many iPhone users."

Let's make it clear (or better: let's give the wrong impression) that only one in many readers opinated against Apple.


""It's fairly certain that whatever Apple's plan is, it isn't going to be enough to satisfy the thousands of homebrew iPhone application users," wrote one News.com reader. "Will Apple continue to release updates that attempt to prevent these users from utilizing their iPhones as they wish?""

Yep, fairly certain for any unbiased party, which obviously excludes CNET, as we can see.


"Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers jumped into the fray by creating a so-called iFund to invest in "Apple entrepreneurs" developing applications for the iPhone and the iPod Touch. The $100 million will fund several new companies that develop software or services on the Apple platform."

God, seemingly Apple doesn't only need Microsoft's help, it also needs people to pay other people to develop something for the iPhone so it doesn't suck so much, LOL.


"Want to know how well IE 8 works? CNET's Robert Vamosi poked and prodded at the test version of the Microsoft browser, and found it's still very much a work in progress. Read his review here."

Robert Vamosi? That name is not strange to me... Oh yeah! It's that guy who made that biased Internet Explorer 7 vs. Firefox 2 comparison where Internet Explorer was bashed for having a 1 cm button in the tabs bar that supposedly unneccessarily wastes valuable space.


Ah well, a usual biased week on CNET. And I keep asking myself the same question I know many other people do: will this Apple-praising / Microsoft-bashing ever end on CNET and the general tech media?

[gycafesor]

so play as an 3G iphone?