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Jerry Yang finally gave in and said that he'd step down as Yahoo's CEO as soon as the board could find a replacement, returning to his job as "chief Yahoo." Shares jumped in response, but anyone who thinks that the change in CEO paves the way for a change in the company's fortunes are going to be disappointed. That is because Yang was more symptom than cause of the malaise that has engulfed the company.
Virgin Mobile cutting ten percent of its staff in the U.S.; China Mobile will open its own online app store; Meraki tries to jumpstart municipal Wi-Fi networks; Google is supporting Adobe's Flash on Android; Alvarion plans a WiMAX "kit" for Africa; and the feds can find mobile users without help from carriers.
Yang to step down as CEO of Yahoo; SEC charges Mark Cuban with insider trading; Proxim Wireless announces scheme to use dual 802.11n radios for 300 Mbps transmission speeds; OpenOffice five times more popular than Google Docs, but Microsoft Office far more popular than either; gadgets break down - a lot; and Cisco security software on switches and routers can significantly slow the devices down.
When HomeAway announced that it had raised $250 million in private financing led by Technology Crossover Ventures, the eyebrows raised. First, the company has been around for about ten years and is already profitable. Second, many in the tech industry had been assuming that venture funding would be tight. Third -- $250 million? So we chatted with General Partner Woody Marshall about this investment and his view on where VCs are going in the financial crisis.
The fastest way to raise the hackles of most U.S. IT professionals is to mention offshore outsourcing. Among them, there is a common perception that U.S. corporations are cutting IT budgets by laying off lots of IT professionals and shipping their IT jobs overseas, and generally wrecking a lot of IT...
AMD is targeting what Intel calls the netbook market, but not completely. Here's a tale of semantic fun on Friday night. When I read Brooke Crothers report on how AMD wasn't entering the netbook market I was shocked. After all, I was one of those people that interpreted AMD's musings Thursd...
Fired employee allegedly kills three at fomer employer SiPort; consumers face slashed credit card limits; Microsoft tries to position Xbox 360 as social network gateway; people start tiring of standalone instant messaging apps; and Canonical plans on ARM version of Ubuntu.
Google creates voice recognition search front end for iPhone users; open networks may pull consumers away from control of telephone carriers; experts say that telcos have bad consumer interfaces to the Internet; and Nortel and Alcatel-Lucent look at the profit that carrying video might offer.
Microsoft sells software at its own web store and probably gives heart failure to resellers; game companies continue raking in the bucks; HomeAway got big funding, partly to buy stock back from employees and early investors; students turn from finance to engineering; AMD bets on Shanghai; and Mark Papermaster countersues IBM, which must put up $3 million bond to keep an injunction that prevents the exec from starting work at Apple.
It's official: Sun Microsystems is laying off 15 to 18 percent of its workforce. Such announcements from tech companies offer as little surprise as a single-day multi-hundred-point movement in the Dow. The tactic has become a management truism, with Wall Street often rewarding the "courageous" decision with an uptick in share price. The rationale is that companies will save beaucoup bucks; Sun hopes to see $700 million to $800 million in annual savings. Unfortunately, layoffs are too often proof of bad management by executives in mortal fear for their own hides. At best they generally provide no net benefit and long-term disaster at worst.
ADC Telecommunications owns key 4G patents; HTC Android-based phone costs an estimated $144 in parts and materials; DoCoMo bets heavily in India; people want cheap TV; and BT Group will cut an additional 6,000 jobs.
Microsoft offers zero percent financing on ERP and CRM software licenses; retail for computers is really, really bad; IBM partners on Internet over power lines in rural areas; Classmates.com sued for misleading advertising; and Gawker Media closes Valleywag.
It's been an interesting time for accusations of price fixing. Late in August, a class action was filed in California claiming that AMD and Nvidia were fixing prices of GPU processors and graphics cards -- just before Nvidia settled a lawsuit on the same topic. And just yesterday, LG Display Co. Ltd., Sharp Corp., and Chunghwa Picture Tubes Ltd. agreed to pay a total of $585 million in fines as the result of a U.S. Department of Justice antitrust investigation into two separate incidents of LCD display price fixing â€" and that doesn't include some other unidentified LCD makers that were involved.
Business-critical applications continue their push into the mobile world and, increasingly, that world includes the iPhone - giving the popular device more respect as a business tool, instead of just a toy, and giving IT administrators one less reason to insist on the Blackberry as a preferred hands...
Microsoft is reportedly close to landing Verizon Wireless in a search deal at the expense of Google. Why? Money. The Wall Street Journal reports Verizon Wireless is now favoring Microsoft over Google. The money paragraph (literally): Under the terms now being considered, Microsoft would share re...
