GBOT

Apple officially announced the 3G iPhone on Monday at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference Keynote. The iphone is 3G capable which is 2.8 times faster than EDGE.

In the 2G iPhone users cannot browse the internet when they make a call but in the 3G version users can browse the internet and make a call at the same time. The 3G version would have built in GPS. It has a better battery life - 300 hours of standby, Talk-time 10 hours (as opposed to 5) on 2G networks, 5 hours of 3G talk-time (competition is 3 hour 3G talk time), 5 to 6 hours of high-speed browsing, 7 hours of video, 24 hours of audio.

The iPhone 3G will be available on July 11th in 22 countries for $199 for 8 GB and $299 for 16 GB. The 16 GB model also comes in white.

More updates will be given on this topic

Yahoo let Microsoft’s deadline for a response to its $40 billion-plus offer for the Sunnyvale Internet company pass without a word on Saturday, putting the ball back in Microsoft’s court.
Now, the stage is set for what could be a dramatic week.

Most analysts expect Microsoft to take its offer directly to shareholders at Yahoo’s annual meeting by proposing its own slate of directors for Yahoo’s board and letting stock owners decide then whether they want to accept Microsoft’s offer.

But there are other possibilities: Microsoft could withdraw its offer, at least for the time being, figuring it could always come back at Yahoo later. Or it could extend the deadline hoping to still hammer out a deal. And finally, Yahoo could announce it has a deal with another partner.

“We’ll see what next week brings,” Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Christopher Lidell said Friday.

If there’s no move from Yahoo, Lidell said, the company can either go directly to Yahoo shareholders or “walk away.”

The passing of the deadline prolongs a standoff that began Feb. 1 with Microsoft’s offer of $44.6 billion, or $31 a share, and Yahoo insisting it was worth far more. But the value of the half-cash, half-stock deal has actually fallen since it was first announced, as shares of both companies have declined. Yahoo shares closed Friday at $26.80; Microsoft’s at $29.83, down from $30.50 the day the deal was announced.

Yahoo has been scrambling without much success to find alternatives to a Microsoft deal, after postponing its annual meeting to give itself more time to weigh its options.

It has not set a date for the annual meeting and has until mid-July to hold one under the law in Delaware, where the company is incorporated. The deadline for nominating outside directors is now an unspecified date sometime later this year but before the meeting.
At this point, the issue is largely price. Yahoo is holding out for considerably more, and Microsoft has been holding firm at $31 a share.

Industry observers expect a deal to be struck, possibly for as much as $34 a share, but it’s possible that the issue won’t be resolved until the summer and Yahoo’s annual meeting.

Bernstein Research analyst Jeffrey Lindsay predicted in a note Friday that the acquisition would be over before the end of July at a “slightly improved price.”

“It will be a good, old-fashioned proxy fight,” Lindsay said in an interview, using the term for a battle for control of a corporate board. “At any time up to then, Yahoo can throw in the towel and negotiate.”

Microsoft has been growing impatient. The company’s chief executive, Steve Ballmer, complained in a letter to Yahoo’s board April 5 that despite “some limited interaction” between the companies, “there has been no meaningful negotiation to conclude an agreement.”

And Lidell said Thursday that Yahoo appeared to have “unrealistic expectations of value.”

As the next step, Microsoft would file to nominate its slate of directors. Yahoo will accept nominations up to 10 days after it announces its next annual meeting.

Yahoo spent weeks after Microsoft’s offer trying to come up with alternatives to the deal with Microsoft. Though its board and top executives explored possible deals with Google, America Online and Time Warner and News Corp., little concrete came of it. Yahoo did announce a test in which Google would handle Yahoo’s search advertising on a limited basis, but otherwise no other options have panned out.

Meanwhile, many Yahoo shareholders favored a sale at $31 or more.

Each company has been showing signs of age as the newer, nimbler Google dominates the lucrative business for Internet search advertising and begins to move into the area where Yahoo is strong: Internet display ads.

After years in denial, insiders say, Microsoft realized it had to catch up with Google before Google became the next Microsoft — so entrenched that no competitor could dislodge it.

The Internet advertising market “is increasingly dominated by one player,” Ballmer observed when he announced the offer for Yahoo on Feb. 1.

Both companies have been overtaken by Google, which had a better way of reaping revenue from ads placed on its search results pages. It rapidly outstripped Yahoo in online search advertising.

Yahoo has slumped badly in the past couple years. The day before Microsoft announced its offer, Yahoo closed at $19.18 a share — half what it sold for two years earlier.

Microsoft has projected $1 billion in cost savings from combining the companies’ two Internet operations. Analyst Sandeep Aggarwal of Collins Stewart in San Francisco, assigning a 90 percent probability that Microsoft will acquire Yahoo, said he thinks Microsoft will absorb “a large portion” of Yahoo’s employees.

In any case, such a deal would remove a storied corporate headquarters from Silicon Valley and end an entrepreneurial saga that began in 1994 when two Stanford University graduate students created the search and Web directory technology that made Yahoo an Internet giant.

The students, Jerry Yang and David Filo, soon were attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors. They incorporated the following year and began charging for advertising on Yahoo’s Web site.

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The maker of the popular photo-editing software Photoshop on Thursday launched a basic version available for free online.

San Jose, Calif.-based Adobe Systems Inc. says it hopes to boost its name recognition among a new generation of consumers who edit, store and share photos online.

While Photoshop is designed for trained professionals, Adobe says Photoshop Express, which it launched in a “beta” test version, is easier to learn. User comments will be taken into account for future upgrades.

Photoshop Express will be completely Web-based so consumers can use it with any type of computer, operating system and browser. And, once they register, users can get to their accounts from different computers.

Web-based software is increasingly popular, and Adobe knows it’s got to get on that train, said Kathleen Maher, an analyst at Jon Peddie Research.

Many kinds of software are available for use online in a trend known as “software as a service,” or “cloud computing.” The earliest were e-mail programs, but they now include services to create and manage content and even whole operating systems. And they don’t require time-consuming upgrades because they’re maintained by the service provider.

Google Inc. provides a host of such services, as do Microsoft Corp. and others.

“This is the battlefield where Adobe and Microsoft and Google are going to fight some pretty big battles,” Maher said.

Photoshop enters the online photo-management arena many years after such services first appeared. Some companies have already made a big name for themselves, like 9-year-old storage solution Shutterfly Inc., photo-editing service Picnik or image-sharing site Photobucket Inc.

Adobe says providing Photoshop Express for free is part marketing and part a strategy to create up-sell opportunities. It hopes some customers will move from it to boxed software like its $99 Photoshop Elements or to a subscription-based version of Express that’s in the works.

Ron Glaz, a research analyst at IDC, says the move was necessary for Adobe to keep pace. Users are less likely to switch to a software they aren’t familiar with, he said.

“They have a whole market that they are missing out on, and they need to make sure that the market is aware there is a Photoshop solution for them. As that market grows and becomes more sophisticated, hopefully it will generate money,” Glaz said.

“It’s one of those things, if you can’t beat them, join them,” Glaz said. “If they don’t join them, the long run could be really painful.”

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Following a $4 million NASA budget cut, one of the twin Mars rovers will be deactivated while the other limited in its activities, mission team members announced Monday.

The budget cut was announced in a letter delivered Wednesday to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, which manages the rovers. JPL plans to appeal the cut.

It costs NASA about $20 million a year to keep the rovers going, and both are now in their fourth year of exploration.  The crafts were initially planned for three-month missions at a cost of $820 million.

The report comes on the heels of budget cutbacks at NASA headquarters, which is struggling to manage both the Mars exploration and projects to study the rest of the solar system.

The twin, solar-powered rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have impressed scientists and the public alike, with discoveries of geologic evidence that water once flowed at or near the surface of Mars.

Steve Squyres, principal investigator from Cornell University, told the Associated Press that last week’s NASA directive to cut $4 million means Spirit will be put to sleep in the coming weeks.

“It’s very demoralizing for the team,” Squyres added.

Prior to the budget cuts, Spirit was due to gather atmospheric measurements as it sat on sunny slope during the Martian winter.   But now, it will stay in hibernation mode for most of the winter and halt all gathering of measurements.

The cut comes amid an extensive exploration campaign by the robots, according to deputy principal investigator Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis.

“We’re not done. There is still a lot to explore,” Arvidson told the Associated Press.

Besides deactivating Spirit, scientists will likely also have to reduce Opportunity’s exploration, which is currently probing a large crater near Mars’ equator.  Instead of sending up daily commands to Opportunity to drive or explore a rock, its activities may be limited to every other day, said John Callas, JPL’s Mars Exploration Rover project manager.

“These rovers are still viable, capable vehicles in very good health,” Callas told the Associated Press.  “Any cut at any time when these rovers are healthy would be bad timing,”

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On the Net:

Mars rovers: http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/home/

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Sun Microsystems is gambling on using beams of light to connect processor chips, eliminating a bottleneck.

Sun Microsystems is trying to do for computing what all the king’s horses and men failed to do for Humpty Dumpty. For decades, the semiconductor industry has broken silicon wafers into smaller chips to improve manufacturing yields.

Now Sun has found a way to reconnect the chips so they can communicate with each other at such high speeds that computer designers can build a new generation of computers that are faster, more energy-efficient and more compact.

The computer maker, which is based in Santa Clara, Calif., plans to announce on Monday that it has received a $44 million contract from the Pentagon to explore the high-risk idea of replacing the wires between computer chips with laser beams.

The technology, part of a field of computer science known as silicon photonics, would eradicate the most daunting bottleneck facing today’s supercomputer designers: moving information rapidly to solve problems that require hundreds or thousands of processors.

Processor and memory chips are currently made by etching hundreds or thousands of identical circuits onto a single wafer of silicon and then slicing that wafer into fingernail-size chips. That manufacturing process ensures that if there is a defect at a single spot on the giant wafer it will not ruin the entire batch of chips.

The drawback in the approach is that wires have to connect the chips in a computer. This causes a fundamental limit in processing power because data moves between chips at lower speeds, creating significant bottlenecks.

The wires that connect chips are analogous to the on and off ramps that cars use to move between freeways — just as cars slow down as they move onto city streets from multilane highways, electrical signals run more slowly between chips. The bottlenecks also generate additional electrical current and heat.

“All of a sudden it’s better to have an optical superhighway,” said Greg Papadopoulos, chief technology officer and executive vice president of research and development for Sun.

Computer scientists have long sought a way to make faster and cheaper computers by making larger chips on a single wafer of silicon, a manufacturing process called “wafer scale integration.” If the Sun researchers’ idea can be proved technically feasible and manufactured commercially, it would be possible to create more-compact machines that are a thousand times faster than today’s computers, the company said. Each chip would be able to communicate directly with every other chip in the array via a beam of laser light that could carry tens billions of bits of data a second.

The Sun researchers acknowledge that their project is a significant gamble.

“This is a high-risk program,” said Ron Ho, a researcher at Sun Laboratories who is one of the leaders of the effort. “We expect a 50 percent chance of failure, but if we win we can have as much as a thousand times increase in performance.”

Silicon photonics has become hot recently with major semiconductor and computer companies as well as start-ups investing heavily in efforts to build optical networking directly into processors to replace electrical wires.

Last week, the NEC Corporation, the Japanese supercomputer maker, announced that it had made an advance in optical connections between chips that will pave the way for a supercomputer able to reach speeds up to 10 petaflops, or 10 million trillion instructions a second. That is about 20 times faster than the world’s fastest computer.

Sun’s partners on the project are Stanford and the University of California, San Diego, and two silicon photonics firms, Luxtera and Kotura. The Sun bid was chosen over three competing teams from Intel and Hewlett-Packard; I.B.M.; and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The five-year program is being financed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and it builds on a Sun research project that was intended to interconnect chips electrically by stacking them edge to edge.

In 2003, a group of Sun researchers led by Ivan Sutherland, a computer industry pioneer, reported that they were able to transmit data inside a computer much more quickly than current techniques allowed. In an interview at Sun’s research laboratory last month, Jim Mitchell, a Sun vice president, said that the original technology was now moving closer to commercialization.

However, the new approach, which is based on the company’s ability to accurately align chips with high precision making it possible to transmit beams of light across the surface of the chips in ultranarrow channels called wave guides, could have a much bigger impact.

The Sun researchers refer to their new system as a “macrochip.” They said that the technology would make it possible for computer architects to completely rethink the organization of circuitry on a computer.

“It’s like the difference between having someone next door and having to get on an airplane to fly across the country,” said Alan Huang, an optical networking designer at the Terabit Corporation in Menlo Park, Calif. “This would be a way of breaking Moore’s Law.”

Moore’s Law is an observation by Intel founder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors on a computer chip doubles roughly every two years.

The Sun researchers said they believe that their alignment technique, which they plan to describe in a scientific paper, will make their systems more compact and easier to manufacture than their competitors’.

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Will the building block of life become the building block of the semiconductor industry? It’s possible.Scientists at IBM are conducting research into arranging carbon nanotubes–strands of carbon atoms that can conduct electricity–into arrays with DNA molecules. Once the nanotube array is meticulously constructed, the laboratory-generated DNA molecules could be removed, leaving an orderly grid of nanotubes. The nanotube grid, conceivably, could function as a data storage device or perform calculations.

“These are DNA nanostructures that are self-assembled into discrete shapes. Our goal is to use these structures as bread boards on which to assemble carbon nanotubes, silicon nanowires, quantum dots,” said Greg Wallraff, an IBM scientist and a lithography and materials expert working on the project. “What we are really making are tiny DNA circuit boards that will be used to assemble other components.”

The work, which builds on the groundbreaking research on “DNA origami” conducted by California Institute of Technology’s Paul Rothemund, is only in the preliminary stages. Nonetheless, a growing number of researchers believe that designer DNA could become the vehicle for turning the long-touted dream of “self-assembly” into reality.

Chips made on these procedures could also be quite small. Potentially, DNA could address, or recognize, features as small as two nanometers. Cutting-edge chips today have features that average 45 nanometers. (A nanometer is a billionth of a meter.)

“There is nothing else out there that we can do that with,” said Jennifer Cha, an IBM biochemist working on getting the biological and nonbiological molecules to interact.

Right now, products get manufactured in a top-down approach with machinery and equipment manipulating raw materials. In self-assembly, the intrinsic chemical and physical properties of molecules, along with environmental factors, coax the raw materials into complex structures. It works with snowflakes, after all.

Getting the raw materials to behave in a precise, orderly manner, however, remains a challenge, which is where DNA comes in. DNA consists of specific chemical bases (guanine, cytosine) that bind and react in somewhat predictable ways with each other.

“The sequence (of base pairs in DNA) is well known,” said Cha. “Most people are acknowledging that DNA and these biological scaffolds are actually quite useful to at least pattern very small systems.”

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Microsoft and Intel are donating $20 million to two U.S. universities for parallel-computing research.

Imagine a man you know but whose name you can’t remember approaches you, and your mobile phone uses face-recognition capability to give you his name and information about him before he says hello. This is the kind of application that researchers hope will be developed from US$20 million Microsoft and Intel are giving two U.S. universities for research on parallel computing.

Analysts say that the more secure, stable and reliable Windows XP is, the less reason businesses have to upgrade to Vista in a hurry.

The upcoming release of Windows XP Service Pack 3 will further slow the rate of business adoption of Windows Vista by extending the life of the older operating system, some analysts say.

Microsoft quietly released Windows XP Service Pack 3 Release Candidate 2 to the masses Feb. 19. But the company finds itself in a Catch-22, given its need to provide comprehensive security to protect its large installed base of business customers still running XP while, at the same time, encouraging those customers to upgrade to the new Vista operating system.

But the more secure, stable and reliable XP is, the less reason they have to upgrade in a hurry.

“XP SP3 does lengthen the useful life of XP. People don’t like to move, particularly IT folks, and anything that makes it so they don’t feel they have to move will be well received and delay that move,” Rob Enderle, the principal analyst at the Enderle Group, told eWeek.

In addition, Windows XP is now on its third service patch and by any measure very mature, while Vista is only reaching its initial level of acceptable maturity with SP1, which is expected to be released in March, Enderle said.

Michael Cherry, the lead analyst for Windows at Directions on Microsoft agrees, saying that many customers are quite satisfied with Windows XP and that the release of a third service pack should only increase its stability and reliability.

“It also seems to run on older hardware—being less resource dependent than Vista is. Therefore it would appear many customers could be quite happy to stay with Windows XP for some time,” he said.

XP SP3 will also make support easier, and it could be the delivery vehicle for some new features such as support for the Network Access Protection client that works with Windows Server 2008, Cherry said.

Microsoft declined to comment.

While Chris Swenson, the director of software industry analysis for the NPD Group does not agree that XP SP3 is likely to slow down the adoption of Vista, he does acknowledge that the many businesses with older PCs will roll out SP3.

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Microsoft released the first beta version of IE8 a few days ago. The new version of the IE comes with many new improvements. Two major features are Activities and WebSlices. Look down for a bit more about these features.

Microsoft could have comfortably leave IE8 as an IE7 look alike that it standards compliant, but they went a step forward and actually brought something new to the browser industry, which will surely be mimicked in a near future in the form of an extension for everyone’s favorite fiery browser.

To start things off, one of the things that instantly drew my attention was the “Activities” feature that allows you to do those repetitive tasks like finding the location of something on google maps, or submitting an article to Digg, by simply selection an option from the context-menu when you right click.

Another nice feature is the Webslices feature, that allows a user to “capture” a part of a website’s code and place it as a link on your toolbar. Very similar to the new widget feature that Apple added in Leopard that allowed you to select an area from a website and create a custom widget for it. The only difference here is that in order for Webslices to work, the webdevelopers need to place a special code on their website, which renders the feature almost obsolete except for the select few websites (like Microsoft ones) that place the custom code.

Most other features are small improvements over the current ones, which makes IE8 a simple, yet capable, browser that earned my respect. Kudos to Microsoft!

[Download Internet Explorer 8]