IT Spot

Yahoo’s pulse, err, make that stock price, is beating a little stronger these days. And it’s not necessarily driven by its big, splashy, three-year financial game plan it unveiled two weeks ago, say several hedge fund managers.

Rather, Yahoo’s 12 percent share price increase over the past two weeks may stem from its quiet notation in its financial game plan announcement that its first quarter performance is expected to fall in line with Wall Street’s current assessment.

“Their stock price has risen, not because of their plan, but because they reaffirmed their first quarter guidance,” said one hedge fund manager. “Investors were scared that if they puked on their first quarter performance, Microsoft would lower its bid or not bump it up.”

Ah, yes, the Microsoft factor. You remember, it’s that little software company that originally offered Yahoo a buyout offer initially valued at $31 a share.

Yahoo on Monday closed at $28.93, up 12 percent from where it closed the day before Yahoo unveiled its financial plan and first quarter guidance reconfirmation two weeks ago. That’s a pretty sizable pop, compared with the Nasdaq, which climbed 4.7 percent during the same period.

Another hedge fund manager said rumors on the street last week had speculation that Microsoft would offer anywhere from $34 to $36 a share for Yahoo, as well as talk that the Redmond giant would be willing to offer an all-cash buyout of $34 a share.

Meanwhile, investment bankers and proxy solicitors say Yahoo is likely done with its intelligence gathering, err, make that investor road show presentations. They note companies can usually get a good feel within two weeks which way investor sentiment is leaning towards - be it a hostile merger proposal, an IPO, etc.

“Some investors will be blunt, some will say let me think about it and some say nothing,” said Bruce Goldfarb, chief executive of proxy solicitation firm Okapi Partners. “A company will collect the information and then think about their next step.”

Goldfarb and one investment banker said the message that is coming through loud and clear with Yahoo’s rising stock price is that investors “expect more money.”

Now that that’s clear, onto ACT II?

(Credit: Jose Nazario, Arbor Networks)

Don’t click on that silly April Fool’s Day e-mail, says one security expert.

In a blog, Arbor Networks’ Dr. Jose Nazario reports that within the last 24 hours he’s seeing new releases of the Storm worm designed to take advantage of the first day of April. This new spam campaign is a lure to infect new computers that will become part of the larger Storm worm botnet.

The e-mail body is spartan: the words “Doh! April Fools” followed by a numeric URL. If a user clicks that URL, the default Internet browser will open to page with a cartoon character. A download is supposed to start within five seconds. “If your download does not start, click here and then press ‘Run.’”

The compromised computer will then install the downloaded file as C:\WINDOWS\aromis.exe. Dr. Nazario reports that the botnet file opens the firewall using the netsh firewall set command, makes a lot of outbound connections, then listens on a random UDP port.

With all the talk about social network aggregators over the past few weeks, you’d think they were going to reverse global warming.

Technology blogs have been chirping enthusiastically about “lifestreaming” services like FriendFeed and Socialthing, which claim to provide an answer to growing complaints about “social-networking fatigue.” They sort updates across networking and community sites into a single destination–which, in a sense, actually might be the social-media world’s equivalent of reversing global warming.

Unfortunately, they still don’t get rid of the hot air.

Let me get this straight: The last time I checked, I had accounts on Facebook, MySpace.com, Twitter, Flickr, Plaxo, Digg, Tumblr, Pownce, and probably a bunch of others I’m forgetting–that’s not even counting whatever I do with my Google and Yahoo accounts. Now I’m supposed to choose between Pulse, FriendFeed, Digsby, Socialthing, Spokeo, Profilactic, and goodness knows what other start-ups that offer me the ability to aggregate my contacts’ activity from all the aforementioned social networks, and more. Oh, great.

Don’t get me wrong. I think we need some way to tidy up the messy social Web. What OpenID is trying to do for log-in and password management, lifestreaming services are hoping to accomplish for the voyeuristic itch to know exactly what all our online contacts are doing. That’s a good thing.

“The big sell for these sorts of products is the tipping point at which users will see these as a viable alternative to manage their many profiles,” social media strategist Oz Sultan told me in an interview. He compared it to the rise of universal instant-messaging clients like Adium and Trillian several years ago, which took off amid the disconnect between chat software from AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, and more. “It becomes either overkill or a system resource hog,” Sultan said.

But taking overkill and putting it all in one place doesn’t mean that it’s not overkill anymore. Consider it social-networking’s first identity crisis.

To anyone with more than three or four social-networking profiles, lifestreaming services should be a godsend. That is, until you consider the flip side: too much information, and for the most part, not much flexibility on the picking-and-choosing front. A single, giant feed of dozens of Flickr photo albums (”Grand Canyon Vacation Album #3!”) alongside Facebook status updates (”Brad is at the office”) and Twitter minutiae (”I really need a shower!!!”) turns us on to the realization that even our friends broadcast a whole lot of dumb stuff that we don’t really care to read about.

“Right now, we just simply feed all this stuff in, and it can be a bit overwhelming,” said Matt Galligan, founder of Socialthing. One of the company’s goals, he explained, is to be able to showcase “interesting” updates without requiring the user to do a whole lot of manual prioritizing. “Getting the most important stuff to you is what I really want to do,” he said.

To an extent, the lifestreaming services have an excuse. “A lot of (lifestreaming) is early to market,” Sultan said. This is, after all, the fast-paced world of Web applications, where it’s common to announce or roll out a product eons before it’s truly ready (hello, OpenSocial). With small start-ups, it’s less likely that someone else will replicate the idea first, although the fact that there’s already a glut of lifestreaming services does sort of render that point moot.

So it’s understandable that something as new as a social aggregator has a long way to go, Sultan continued. “They still need to enhance functionality to allow you to dial it down or filter only what’s relevant,” he said. “When either AI (artificial intelligence) technology, ’smart’ filters, or other user-based filters are implemented, the model has a high chance of taking off.”

Then there’s the fact that, despite the information overload that a social feed aggregator provides, it’s still feature-light. Plaxo Pulse and FriendFeed, perhaps the most “social” of the bunch, let users comment on items and add favorites; many of the others, like Socialthing, are meant to be more along the lines of a personal reference. In either case, none of them replace the need to still log in and visit all the Flickrs and Twitters and Diggs from which they collect data.

“Social-media aggregators provide a high-level view of activity taking place on social networks, but do not replace the experience of being immersed within them,” commented Eric Litman, chairman of social-media agency Aux Interactive. “So much of the tone of the dialogue in social networks is set by the user experience of the networks themselves.”

That’s really the final word on lifestreaming services: they help out, but simply don’t do enough to clean up the social-media experience. Beyond simple aggregation, it’s a whole new can of worms–I can handle multiple e-mail and IM accounts through Digsby, update Twitter and Pownce and Jaiku through Twhirl, and take care of all my photo- and video-uploading needs through the Flock browser. That’s enough to make any geek want an aggregator for the aggregators.

Whoever manages to mesh all this into a single “social dashboard” just might be the next hero of the Web.

If you’re a fan of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and the gospel of Pastafarianism, then you have to love what’s going on in Crossville, Tennessee.

There, as I discovered today on Laughing Squid, some members of the local chapter of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster have gotten city approval to erect a statue of “His Noodly Appendage” outside the local courthouse.

Members of the Crossville, Tennessee chapter of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster sought and received approval to install a statue of the Flying Spaghetti Monster outside the city’s courthouse.

(Credit: Ariel Safdie)

I talked briefly by phone Monday with Ariel Safdie, one of the local chapter members involved with building and installing the statue, and she said that for her and her fellow members, the issue involved in building the statue and seeking and acquiring approval to install it wasn’t about religion, but about freedom of speech.

That seems perfectly appropriate to me, since the whole point of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is to make the point–via free speech–that if communities are going to give credence to one theory of the origins of life in their schools, then they also have to give credence to others.

Safdie and others applied for permission to install their statue, and it was granted by the city
of Crossville.

This is the official form granting approval to install the statue.

(Credit: Ariel Safdie)

This is the text of the statement they made at the installation ceremony, according to the blog of the Crossville chapter of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster:

“We are lucky enough to live in a country that allows us, its citizens, the freedom of speech. I have chosen to put up a statue of the Flying Spaghetti Monster to represent the discourse between people of all different beliefs. The many faiths, ethnicities and backgrounds of Cumberland County’s residents make our community a stronger richer place. I respect and am proud that on the people’s lawn, the county courthouse, all of these diverse beliefs can come together in a positive dialogue. Here, we are all able to share the issues close to our hearts whether it is through a memorial to the soldiers killed fighting for our country, the Statue of Liberty honoring our nations welcoming promise to all, a group’s fight to stop homelessness, or powerful symbols of faith. I greatly treasure this open forum between everyone in the community.”

Montalvo Systems, the super secretive company that wants to compete against Intel in chips for portable computers, has a big internal announcement coming tomorrow, according to sources, and the news may not be good.

The company may internally order layoffs and cutbacks, according to a source close to the company. Montalvo, which has raised more than $73 million, has been seeking an additional $100 million and burning through bridge loans. New investors haven’t materialized, which could lead to cutbacks.

“They have to. They are way to big,” said one VC, who had been approached by Montalvo for funding recently. Sources say the company employs more than 200.

The news may not all be bad. The company has also been trying to get its hands on samples of a chip based around its architecture. Montalvo has designed a chip, but as of a few weeks ago, it didn’t have one. Fujitsu has agreed to manufacture the chip on behalf of Montalvo. Thus, this might be the news. The cutbacks, though, seem more likely.

Staffed by alumni from would-be Intel competitors like Transmeta and NexGen, Montalvo has designed a chip that can run the same software as processors from Intel and AMD. The trick is that the chip, which contains four cores, is asymmetrical. Two of the cores are high-powered, geared for running complex applications, and two run on less energy. The idea is that this can prolong battery life in smart phones or thin notebooks.

While the architecture is intriguing, competing against Intel is no easy task. Several companies have tried and most have failed, badly. AMD has done the best and it has lost more money than it has made in its 30-plus year life.

Like with other stories, Montalvo declined to comment on this story.

LAS VEGAS - There’s almost as many people buying smartphones as there are people buying laptops, and that trend is about to turn the computing industry on its head.

“We do see that gravitational pull of the single-use device being played out in the market,” said Nigel Clifford, CEO of Symbian, during the opening presentations of Smartphone Summit here at CTIA 2008. “This is not just about multiple devices, it’s about knocking aside some other forms of communication.”

Symbian CEO Nigel Clifford takes questions from the audience at the Smartphone Summit.

(Credit: Tom Krazit/CNET News.com)

At CTIA, smartphones are still a niche product. The Smartphone Summit was held in two generic meeting rooms deep inside the maze of twisty passages that is the Las Vegas Convention Center, while hundreds of cranes and forklifts careened around the show floor, setting up for tomorrow’s main event. The math is simple: smartphones like Nokia’s N95, LG’s Voyager, and Apple’s iPhone make up around 10 percent of the global market for mobile phones

But that’s already a serious number. With the mobile phone market crossing 1 billion units in 2007, that’s 115 million smartphones that were purchased worldwide last year. In the PC world, notebook shipments are gaining on desktop shipments, but on a worldwide basis still make up less than half of the 271 million PCs shipped last year.

The PC isn’t going anywhere, but it’s increasingly competing for attention with the smartphone. This is an old story in Europe, where teenagers searching for flashy phones and Web access have been served by carriers hawking inexpensive phones, said Pete Cunningham, a senior analyst with Canalys.

But in the U.S., people are just waking up to the possibilities presented by having the Internet in your pocket. Credit Apple and the iPhone for the surge in interest on the part of Americans, said Jonathan Goldberg, senior analyst with Deustche Bank.

The title of a slide used in Clifford’s presentation was “Brands are Transitioning From the Desk to the Hand.” The slide contained a who’s-who list of Internet properties, including Google, Yahoo, eBay, and the usual suspects, and was making the point that the PC is not the only avenue to the Internet.

LG’s trying to make sure people notice its smartphones, taking up the whole front of the Las Vegas Marriott with this ad.

(Credit: Tom Krazit/CNET News.com)

Three things in particular are driving smartphone growth and interest among regular people: the increasing amount of time they spend online on things like social-networking sites, the impatience of having to wait until they get back to their home or coffee shop to get online to check messages or update their status, and the desire to look good while doing all that, he said.

For all the hubbub over the iPhone’s software development kit, it seems most people are content to spend their time in their browsers. Bill Hughes, principal analyst at In-Stat, surveyed U.S. smartphone users and found that they only downloaded 1.83 applications on average, and that many of those were games. The number of iPhone users in the survey was too small to be relevant, Hughes said, meaning that smartphone users with more open operating systems aren’t really taking advantage of them.

Obviously, you’re not going to find too many smartphone naysayers at an event called the Smartphone Summit sponsored by Symbian, the world’s largest smartphone operating system provider. But when you consider the trend more broadly, it’s hard to deny.

At some point, we’ll be able to retire the term smartphone, Goldberg said, in a development that will delight the editorial copy desk at News.com. Intel and ARM are pushing on each other to develop more and more powerful chips for mobile devices. Apple and Google are raising the bar for operating systems in terms of performance, user interface, and openness. And carriers are starting to recognize that in the future, they might be no different than a wireless ISP.

That means all our phones will be smart. In other parts of the world, where PC adoption is still just getting underway, a lot of people might just skip over the PC and start using a powerful phone that costs around $200 to $300, gets them online at broadband speeds, lasts all day, and fits in their pocket.

That’s a smart idea.

As I reported here a few weeks ago, professional video gaming leagues and organizations are hoping that, over time, their industry can be seen as a sport on par with soccer, baseball, football, and so on.

The Championship Gaming Series says it will open a training center in Wuhan, China.

(Credit: Championship Gaming Series)

Now, one of those leagues, the Championship Gaming Series, has decided to up the ante by creating a training facility and a dedicated game playing arena in the booming Chinese city of Wuhan.

I talked to Andy Reif, commissioner of the CGS, the other day, and he explained that the idea behind building the training center is essentially that you can’t build a new sport without also having what amounts to an incubator for talent.

That’s why the league is setting up its facility in Wuhan, a city that Reif told me has more than 50 universities and more than 1.5 million students. Truly.

The training center itself will be structured around bringing in potential players and testing them and training them on skills needed to compete at the highest levels of the nascent sport.

Really, that means looking for and developing players’ hand-eye coordination, as well as training players on the games themselves.

In addition, the league is building a 1,000-seat arena that will be used exclusively for matches.

The CGS got started with an inaugural player draft at the Playboy Mansion in June 2007, and it did its second draft at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, earlier this month.

The Championship Gaming Series conducted its inaugural player draft at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles on June 12, 2007.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

And while the league has managed to pull off some high-profile events and has some big money behind it–Microsoft, DirecTV, and others–I’m a little skeptical of the idea of building an arena and a training center.

On the one hand, it’s probably not that expensive to pursue such a venture in China, and it’s a good place to look for new talent, given the high degree of interest in that country in video games.

On the other hand, I kind of think video gamers are the types of people who are self-taught and might not respond well to the kind of indoctrination of a training center.

For its part, Wuhan seems like it must be an interesting place these days. Not only is it the CGS’ choice for setting up shop, it’s also where Second Life land baroness Anshe Chung has set up headquarters for her growing business. Among other things, Chung is using her facilities to train people to create content for Second Life and other virtual worlds.

Disclaimer: My wife works for Second Life publisher Linden Lab.

It’s been a long haul for phase change memory, but the goal is in sight.

Numonyx, the memory joint venture between STMicroelectronics and Intel, is already shipping samples of phase change memory (PCM) chips to customers and will start shipping PCM chips commercially later this year, CEO Brian Harrison said at a press conference Monday.

“We expect to bring it to market this year and generate some revenue,” Harrison said. “It is one to two years before it becomes widely commercially available.”

Hearing a CEO talk about existing samples and near-term commercial shipments is a big deal for PCM. The technology has been stuck in the proverbial “a few years away” phase for a long time.

“It could be cheaper than flash within a couple of years,” said analyst Richard Doherty in 2001, predicting it might hit the market in 2003.

“We are making good progress,” said Stefan Lai, one of Intel’s flash memory scientists, in 2002.

Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel and the namesake of Moore’s Law, had an article in the September 28, 1970 issue of Electronics that predicted that Ovonics Unified Memory, another name for the same type of memory, could hit the market by the end of that decade.

The same issue of Electronics also included this article: The Big Gamble in Home Video Recorders.

The delays have largely stemmed from two sources. One, it’s not an easy technology to master. In phase change memory chips, a tiny laser heats up a microscopic bit on a substrate to between 150 and 600 degrees Celsius. The substrate is made of the same stuff as CD disks. The heat melts the bit, which then cools. When cooled, the bit solidifies into one of two crystalline structures, depending on how fast it gets cooled. The two different crystalline structures exhibit different levels of resistance to electrical current. These different levels of resistance are then interpreted as 1s or 0s by a computer. Data is born.

Both Intel and ST made a significant amount of progress in controlling the material in the past few years, Harrison said.

Second, the makers of flash memory have continued to improve their technology. Back in 2001, some believed that flash would hit a wall at the 65-nanometer level. Then that got moved to 45-nanometers. Today, manufacturers now mass produce flash at 65-nanometers and have samples at 45-nanometer. Numonyx has samples of traditional NOR flash at 32-nanometers. Why switch when the existing technology continues to work?

Again, in the past few years, Intel and ST have made progress and figured out a way to produce PCM chips on the manufacturing lines developed for standard chips. That has eroded the barriers to bringing PCM out.

Although Philips and IBM among others have made progress in PCM, only Samsung is close to coming out with chips commercially, Harrison said.

Why will the world want PCM? Performance, says Numonyx CTO Ed Doller. PCM chips can survive tens of millions of read-write cycles, he said, or far more than flash. Reading data to PCM chips takes 70 to 100 nanoseconds, or as fast as NOR flash. Data can be written to the chips at a rate of 1 megabyte a second, or equivalent of NAND flash. There is also no erase cycle, making it similar to DRAM.

In other words, you have the best attributes of three different types of memory and PCM will potentially use far less power.

The cost premium is also coming down fast. By next year, Numonyx hopes to make PCM chips on the 45-nanometer processes that can hold two bits of data per cell. If that’s possible, those chips would compete in price with single-bit-per-cell NAND flash, the memory that’s being put into solid state drives today, said Doller.

But the most important thing is that scientists believe that they will be able to increase the density of these chips comparatively easily. In the future, standard flash chips will need additional circuitry for error correction and other functions. Not so with PCM. The smaller the bits get the less heat that will be required to flip them, Doller added.

“The most important thing is that it is scalable,” Doller said.

For Apple to sell 45 million iPhones next year, it would have to quadruple its sales from 2008.

Yes, that’s more than a bit optimistic. The analyst who originally made that sales prediction for Apple back before the phone was even launched is at it again, though, on Monday explaining how he thinks it could happen.

(Credit: Apple)

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster insists–despite consensus that his prediction is entirely overeager–that Apple will do so by introducing a 3G version of the iPhone in the second or third quarter of this year, as well as a lower-price version of the device in the range of $200 to $300 by the beginning of next year.

Munster also predicts that making the iPhone available in new countries will double the market for the device this year and next, and that the addition of new games and features like remote purchases will add up to 45 million.

Sure, the iPhone is a popular device, but quadrupling sales? Digest this prediction with the usual grain of salt.

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is expected to announce the results of a vote over Open XML on Wednesday.

Representatives from 87 countries had until Saturday night to submit their vote on whether the Office Open XML (OOXML) file formats should be certified as ISO standards.

The final tally was expected to be communicated on Monday. But a spokesperson for the ISO told Reuters that it will issue a press release on Wednesday in order to notify member countries first.

Tallies of official and unofficial sources by two Web sites–one run by standards expert and ODF advocate Andrew Updegrove and the other by open-source advocates atOpen Malaysia–indicated that Open XML is expected to be approved.

Microsoft on Monday issued a statement saying that it will not comment on the matter until Wednesday “out of respect for the standards process.”