Microsoft Not To Raise Bid For Yahoo!

Chief Executive Officer of Microsoft Corp, Steven Ballmer was adamant and refused to raise its $44.6 billion offer for Yahoo! Inc. The CEO of Washington-based Microsoft said, “We know what Yahoo is worth to us. We offered a lot of money: $44 billion. It is not a lot of euros anymore. If their board thinks that’s fair, great. If not, we’ll move forward,"

Ballmer did clarify as to what he meant by ‘moving forward’. He however clarified that Microsoft would not make a bid for Google primarily for regulatory reasons.

Yahoo! has four days before Microsoft’s deadline to agree to its offer or face a hostile takeover fight and risk a lower bid. Earlier Yahoo! had rejected Microsoft’s offer and had argued that it’s worth more than the $31 a share in cash and stock that the latter offered. Yahoo! management and directors have said Microsoft’s cash-and-stock offer "significantly" undervalues their company.

Meanwhile, Yahoo! also announced its first-quarter financial results on April 22nd. These results were closely watched as these could make a statement in themselves and coax Microsoft for a higher bid. Revenue, excluding the amount paid to advertising partners, rose to $1.35 billion. That beat forecasts of $1.32 billion.

After the results, CEO and co-founder Jerry Yang reinforced that the Microsoft bid was low and said, "The quarter’s results underscore the fact that our strategy and investments are beginning to pay off. Our board and management are committed to choosing a path to maximize stockholder value and will not enter into any transaction that does not recognize the full value of this company."

Are these results good enough to compel Microsoft shell out a higher amount? At least Steven Ballmer does not think so. He has already threatened to take the proposal straight to shareholders if Yahoo doesn’t agree to its terms by April. 26. Prior to the declaration of the results, e had said, "I wish Yahoo all the success with its results, but it doesn’t affect the value of Yahoo to Microsoft."

Microsoft fell 17 cents, or 0.6 percent, to $30.25 in Nasdaq Stock Market trading yesterday. The shares have fallen 15 percent this year. Yahoo fell 1 cent to $28.54 yesterday and the stock has risen 23 percent this year.

Source- TheMoneyTimes

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Google Launches Developer Sandbox for iGoogle

Today, Google opened a sandbox for developers to help them build richer gadgets for iGoogle, which will offer users more powerful and interactive features. To ensure developers get the most out of their gadgets, we’ve also launched an updated developer website which guides developers through building and distributing gadgets to iGoogle’s growing audience.

iGoogle’s new features will include left navigation, a maximized or "canvas view" option for gadgets, and social features for gadgets using the OpenSocial APIs. These social features for gadgets will include a friends list and activities displayed through a special updates gadget. The features and functionalities as they appear in the sandbox are meant for development purposes only, and may not reflect the end consumer experience.

Developers are an important part of Google’s innovation ecosystem and we’re always striving to provide tools to help them innovate in new directions that will ultimately make the web richer for all users. By building more powerful and interactive gadgets for iGoogle, developers will have an opportunity to share their gadgets with the tens of millions of iGoogle users.

To see the video for developers on the iGoogle sandbox, please see:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6KVwATfCdM

Source- Google Press Release

Google’s Website Optimizer is now available

Today at the ad:tech conference in San Francisco, Google Website Optimizer™ launched out of beta as an independent product. Formerly a feature within the Google AdWords™ advertising service only, this free website-testing tool is now accessible through its own website (http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer) as well.

Google Website Optimizer helps improve user experience on the Web by showing its users what their visitors want to see. Rather than debating or guessing how a webpage might look best, users can continually test different combinations of website content, such as images and text, to see which one yields the most sales, sign-ups, leads or other goals.

Google Website Optimizer provides value "beyond the click" as part of Google’s suite of advertising tools offering heightened precision, accountability and scale. Together with Google AdWords, which drives traffic to your website, and Google Analytics™, which measures that traffic, Google Website Optimizer further helps you convert your traffic into customers.

The product is available in 27 languages worldwide: Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (Australia, UK & U.S.), Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil & Portugal), Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai and Turkish.

Check Out the Latest Google Earth 4.3 Beta

Google Earth lets you fly anywhere on Earth to view satellite imagery, maps, terrain, 3D buildings and even explore galaxies in the Sky. You can explore rich geographical content, save your toured places and share with others.

Here are the highlights:

• New navigation — We’ve created a new navigational experience so users can better take advantage of the 3D environment in Google Earth. The navigation takes the traditional pan-and-zoom approach associated with mapping programs and incorporates a first-person, ground-level perspective commonly used in video games.

• More, faster 3D buildings — Version 4.3 also includes dozens of photo-textured cities and towns, as well as thousands of user-contributed buildings around the world.  We’ve significantly enhanced our approach to rendering 3D data to greatly improve performance and realism of 3D data.

• Street View — The well-known Google Maps feature gets added to Google Earth with version 4.3. Street View is a popular, engaging feature that allows people to easily find, discover, and plan activities relevant to a location.

• Sunlight feature — This new addition is a playful way to control the sun’s location relative to the Earth. When zoomed out to a view of the Earth, you can control a time-lapse view of sunlight moving across the Earth.  While zoomed into a given city, you can watch the sunrise and sunset.

• Image acquisition date — One of our most requested features, 4.3 now includes an image acquisition date, which shows you on what date a given area of imagery was taken.

• New languages — Version 4.3 includes twelve new languages, including Danish, English (UK), Spanish (Latin American), Finnish, Hebrew, Indonesian, Norwegian, Portuguese (PT), Romanian, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish.

Download: http://dl.google.com/earth/GE4/GoogleEarthWin.exe
Home page: http://earth.google.com/

Salesforce.com and Google Introduce Salesforce for Google Apps

Salesforce.com ,the market and technology leader in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Google today expanded their global strategic alliance to make it easy for companies of all sizes to run their business in the cloud with Salesforce for Google Apps. The combination of the Google Apps™ suite of productivity applications and the Salesforce suite of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications enables businesses to effectively communicate and collaborate without any hardware or software to download, install or maintain. Salesforce for Google Apps also leverages the Force.com Platform and Google’s open APIs, opening up even more development opportunities for developers and partners.

"Google and salesforce.com have always had similar models and philosophies about delivering innovations made possible by the Internet," said Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. "Salesforce.com was a pioneer in Software-as-a-Service and a year ago we joined them in this mission to bring the benefits of cloud computing to businesses of all types. Together, we are making more applications and services available online so customers can focus on building their core business rather than the applications that support it."

Source- Google Press Release

Hands on: new Microsoft Live Maps improvements impressive

Microsoft made a major update to Live Maps this week that introduces a number of new features and improvements to the online mapping service. Users of the service can now export their maps in various GPS formats, see improved 3D renderings, and subscribe to RSS feeds for a certain region, among a plethora of other things. The improvements make it a stronger competitor to other popular mapping services (namely Google Maps), although Live Maps could still benefit from more mindshare from the general Internet-using public.
Like Google Maps, Live Maps has offered a bird’s-eye/satellite view for some time now (in addition to standard 2D view). But one thing that Live Maps has over Google Maps is 3D view, complete with pretty 3D renderings of buildings and roads. The Live Maps team rolled out "version 2" of 3D view with this slew of updates, which is currently limited to a few select cities: Las Vegas, Dallas, Denver, and Phoenix. 

Full story: ArsTechnica

Virtual Earth/Live Maps Updated

Today we launched a new version of the Virtual Earth API. The release has a host of new features and takes advantage of some of the capabilities you’ve been envying on Live Search Maps. Below is a laundry list of new features in Virtual Earth 6.1 that we added today. The good news is that 6.1 is fully backwards compatible to Version 6.0. You just need to update you JavaScript Link URL string to get the new version..The Interactive SDK was updated, as well as, the SDK on MSDN.

Here is a very quick summary of the new features-

• Export your Collection to Your Navigation/GPS device
• Improved 3D cities
• 3D modeling with 3DVIA Labels for Birds Eye imagery
• 1-Click Directions (Party Maps!) MapCruncher Integration
• Enhanced Explore of Map Content from across the web contributed by other People -
• Neighborhood Subscribe via GeoRSS
• Tour Enhancements including Hi-Def Movies
• Directions and Traffic Enhancements
• Improved display of KML files including Google MyMaps links

Source- Virtual earth Blog

Microsoft seen as winner as big media circles Yahoo

Yahoo Inc may have played its top two cards by pulling out possible deals with AOL and Google, but it does not seem to have changed Wall Street’s view that Microsoft will eventually win the takeover battle.

Yahoo announced on Wednesday a test to outsource Web search advertising to Google Inc. Sources say the test is part of a planned three-way alliance to combine Yahoo with Time Warner Inc’s AOL instead of Microsoft Corp.

But hours later, the world’s largest software company appeared to trump Yahoo’s announcement as the New York Times reported that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp was in talks to join Microsoft’s $42.3 billion bid for the Web pioneer.

"Everyone is just exploring. The best option is to accept the Microsoft deal," said fund manager Mike Binger at Thrivent Financial in Minneapolis, which owns small stakes in Yahoo and Microsoft.

Binger said an AOL-Yahoo merger made no sense. "I just see Yahoo as a mature brand and AOL as a declining brand," he said. As of December 31, Thrivent owned about 1.5 million Yahoo shares, or 0.11 percent, and about 6.3 million Microsoft shares, or 0.07 percent, according to regulatory filings.

The Wall Street Journal reported the Yahoo board would meet on Friday but said no big decisions were likely until at least next week. A Yahoo spokeswoman declined to comment.

A source familiar with the board’s activities told Reuters that Yahoo directors meet to discuss the Microsoft offer and alternatives to it as many as three times a week.

Source- Reuters