In a letter to employees on Friday, a Microsoft executive said the company had offered to buy Yahoo's search assets for US$1 billion and invest $8 billion in the remaining company, before talks between the two ended.
Microsoft's offer, which would have included a long-term search partnership, would have increased Yahoo's operating income by more than $1 billion above the search provider's current levels, Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft's platforms and services group, wrote in the letter to employees.
"Taken together, we believe that our proposal would have created total value for Yahoo's shareholders in excess of $33 per share," he wrote.
His letter comes a day after Yahoo said that it had concluded negotiations with Microsoft and decided to start carrying advertising from Google alongside its search results. Yahoo said it expects the Google deal to generate an annual revenue opportunity of $800 million for Yahoo.
Yahoo's stock had slumped to around $23.47 at the end of the day Friday. Microsoft recently pulled an offer of $33 per share for the whole company.
Johnson's letter, made available by Microsoft's press department, is the software maker's first public comment on Thursday's agreement between Yahoo and Google. That deal "would start to consolidate over 90% of the paid search advertising market in Google's hands," Johnson wrote. "This will make the market far less competitive."
He also hinted at potential difficulties the arrangement may face. "There are many experts who suggest that a host of legal and regulatory problems lie ahead for Google and Yahoo," he said.
Yahoo and Google have said they don't believe the deal needs regulatory approval, although they have submitted it "voluntarily" for review by the U.S. Department of Justice anyway. Google argued in a blog posting Thursday that the deal would be "good for competition."
Others have also expressed concern about how the deal might only strengthen Google's already dominant position in search advertising. U.S. Senator Herb Kohl, who is chairman of the U.S. Senate Antitrust Subcommittee, said Thursday he would examine the competitive and privacy implications of the deal. "This collaboration between two technology giants and direct competitors for Internet advertising and search services raises important competition concerns," he said in a statement.
Other such far flung organizations as the National Black Chamber of Commerce and the American Corn Growers Association have expressed their concerns about the deal's impact on search advertising.
In the meantime, Microsoft plans to continue to execute on its stated plan to boost its search and online advertising position including through internal development, Johnson said.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Support grows for universal power adapter
A technology that could help the environment by eliminating the need to ship a power adapter with every electronics device got a vote of confidence Friday from consumer electronics maker Westinghouse Digital Electronics.
Westinghouse said it had committed to using a smart power technology developed by a start-up company, Green Plug, that aims to let people use a single "universal adapter" to power their laptops, cell phones and other electronics gear.
Most products today ship with a custom adapter that converts AC power from a wall socket into the correct DC power required for each device. Green Plug's technology allows each device to communicate its individual power requirements to the power adapter, allowing several devices to share one adapter.
The technology's success depends partly on getting support from electronics manufacturers, who will need to embed Green Plug's firmware into their devices so that they can send their power requirements to the adapter. That's why Westinghouse's support is significant.
"We know we're not the largest [electronics company] but we are the first, and somebody has to be first," said Darwin Chang, CTO of Westinghouse, which makes LCD televisions, computer monitors and digital photo frames.
Besides helping the environment, the Green Plug technology will also help Westinghouse to cut its costs, Chang said. Eventually it could stop shipping power adapters with its products because customers will already have a universal adapter at home, he said.
Each adapter will act like a hub that several devices can plug into. The first are expected to go on sale in the first quarter next year for under US$100, Chang said. The adapters also will shut off the power supply when a device has finished charging or is turned off, giving further energy savings.
It remains to be seen whether other electronics vendors will follow suit. Green Plug also needs semiconductor makers to build its technology into chips that will go into the universal adapters. Green Plug CEO Frank Paniagua said his company already has one chip-maker on board, though he won't say yet who it is.
Westinghouse made its announcement at the second meeting of the Alliance for Universal Power Supplies, a group comprising electronics vendors, power supply makers, utility companies and others promoting standard power systems to reduce e-waste and inefficiency. The meeting in San Francisco was attended by representatives from Fujitsu, Motorola, Intel and Broadcom, among others.
The stakes for the environment are high. More than 3 billion power adapters will be shipped worldwide this year, up from 2.2 billion just three years ago, according to Greg Lefebre of the environmental consultancy ESS. The growth has been driven by the proliferation of devices like cell phones, MP3 players and digital cameras.
A whopping 434 million consumer electronics devices are "retired" in the U.S. each year, Lefebre said, including 130 million cell phones. In many cases those products, along with their chargers and power adapters, end up in landfills, he said.
Some vendors don't have an incentive to eliminate unique power supplies and connector cables, because they get supplementary revenue stream from selling replacements, Lefebre noted. He cited Apple, which uses a proprietary connector for the iPod, as a prime example.
There are other hurdles too. Code Cubitt of Motorola Ventures, speaking on a panel here, said product managers are fixated on providing a good "out of the box" experience. If the company ships a product without an adapter, and the consumer doesn't have a universal adapter at home, it creates a bad impression of the company.
Another issue is liability. If a company ships a product and a consumer plugs it into another vendor's universal adapter and it starts a house fire, all the parties involved could find themselves in court. That problem will be lessened if the product vendor can show it conformed to an industry standard, said Armando Castro of the law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius.
In China, where 500 million cell phones were manufactured last year, the government has regulated that all cell phone chargers, including those imported, have a standard USB interface and output voltage, so consumers don't need a new one with every new phone.
Such regulations are unlikely in the U.S., but if the industry doesn't get its act together then the federal government may start to intervene in some way, speakers here said.
Green Plug offers its firmware to electronics makers for free so they can make their devices support its power specification, and it hopes to make money by licensing the technology to chip-makers. The cost to vendors to include the technology in each device will be about $2, Paniagua said.
Westinghouse said it had committed to using a smart power technology developed by a start-up company, Green Plug, that aims to let people use a single "universal adapter" to power their laptops, cell phones and other electronics gear.
Most products today ship with a custom adapter that converts AC power from a wall socket into the correct DC power required for each device. Green Plug's technology allows each device to communicate its individual power requirements to the power adapter, allowing several devices to share one adapter.
The technology's success depends partly on getting support from electronics manufacturers, who will need to embed Green Plug's firmware into their devices so that they can send their power requirements to the adapter. That's why Westinghouse's support is significant.
"We know we're not the largest [electronics company] but we are the first, and somebody has to be first," said Darwin Chang, CTO of Westinghouse, which makes LCD televisions, computer monitors and digital photo frames.
Besides helping the environment, the Green Plug technology will also help Westinghouse to cut its costs, Chang said. Eventually it could stop shipping power adapters with its products because customers will already have a universal adapter at home, he said.
Each adapter will act like a hub that several devices can plug into. The first are expected to go on sale in the first quarter next year for under US$100, Chang said. The adapters also will shut off the power supply when a device has finished charging or is turned off, giving further energy savings.
It remains to be seen whether other electronics vendors will follow suit. Green Plug also needs semiconductor makers to build its technology into chips that will go into the universal adapters. Green Plug CEO Frank Paniagua said his company already has one chip-maker on board, though he won't say yet who it is.
Westinghouse made its announcement at the second meeting of the Alliance for Universal Power Supplies, a group comprising electronics vendors, power supply makers, utility companies and others promoting standard power systems to reduce e-waste and inefficiency. The meeting in San Francisco was attended by representatives from Fujitsu, Motorola, Intel and Broadcom, among others.
The stakes for the environment are high. More than 3 billion power adapters will be shipped worldwide this year, up from 2.2 billion just three years ago, according to Greg Lefebre of the environmental consultancy ESS. The growth has been driven by the proliferation of devices like cell phones, MP3 players and digital cameras.
A whopping 434 million consumer electronics devices are "retired" in the U.S. each year, Lefebre said, including 130 million cell phones. In many cases those products, along with their chargers and power adapters, end up in landfills, he said.
Some vendors don't have an incentive to eliminate unique power supplies and connector cables, because they get supplementary revenue stream from selling replacements, Lefebre noted. He cited Apple, which uses a proprietary connector for the iPod, as a prime example.
There are other hurdles too. Code Cubitt of Motorola Ventures, speaking on a panel here, said product managers are fixated on providing a good "out of the box" experience. If the company ships a product without an adapter, and the consumer doesn't have a universal adapter at home, it creates a bad impression of the company.
Another issue is liability. If a company ships a product and a consumer plugs it into another vendor's universal adapter and it starts a house fire, all the parties involved could find themselves in court. That problem will be lessened if the product vendor can show it conformed to an industry standard, said Armando Castro of the law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius.
In China, where 500 million cell phones were manufactured last year, the government has regulated that all cell phone chargers, including those imported, have a standard USB interface and output voltage, so consumers don't need a new one with every new phone.
Such regulations are unlikely in the U.S., but if the industry doesn't get its act together then the federal government may start to intervene in some way, speakers here said.
Green Plug offers its firmware to electronics makers for free so they can make their devices support its power specification, and it hopes to make money by licensing the technology to chip-makers. The cost to vendors to include the technology in each device will be about $2, Paniagua said.
EBay to open up merchant tool to developers
EBay will open a tool used by 700,000 of its merchants to external developers, the next step in an ongoing effort to promote the creation of applications for its online marketplace.
For the first time, eBay will feature third-party applications within Selling Manager, a tool merchants use to manage their eBay listings, the company plans to announce Monday at its annual eBay Developers Conference in Chicago.
"We're taking our open [application development] platform to the next level," said Max Mancini, eBay's senior director of mobile platform and disruptive innovation.
Selling Manager is the most popular tool among eBay merchants, but so far has only featured applications created by the company. However, eBay now recognizes that it can't extend the tool's functionality on its own in a way that meets all of its users' demands and requirements, Mancini said.
By turning Selling Manager into an open platform, eBay believes it will be able to enhance the visibility of third-party applications for the benefit of both the developers who create them and the merchants who adopt them.
The initiative, called Project Echo, is now in a closed, early-stage testing phase, and will open up to public testing at the start of the fourth quarter. A more advanced public beta test is slated for the first quarter and the official launch is planned for mid-2009.
Merchants will be able to browse and search an applications directory for tools and applications that could help them run their eBay business. In addition, eBay will also deliver to them contextually relevant promotions for such tools and applications, based on what the company knows about the merchants.
Mancini offered the hypothetical example of a merchant that sells its 10,000th item, a milestone that could trigger a promotional suggestion for CRM (customer relationship management) applications. "The point is to help sellers scale their business," he said.
EBay hasn't yet decided whether developers will have to pay for their applications promoted via the new contextually-relevant suggestion system, as in an advertising program. It's still early in the rollout of the system and eBay will settle on specifics later based on feedback from developers, Mancini said.
EBay is trying to help external developers market more effectively their applications, by giving them more direct and targeted access to the type of professional seller that typically uses Selling Manager, Mancini said.
"One of the biggest requests from developers is how we can help them to promote and distribute their applications to sellers," Mancini said.
Developers who participate in Project Echo will also get access to previously unavailable merchant data via new APIs, so that they can enrich their applications with additional functionality, Mancini said.
Meanwhile, PayPal, eBay's online payment division, will also court external developers next week when it announces a new Developer Central portal, designed to support the creation of applications for PayPal.
"The goal is to help developers be more productive," said Glenn Lim, PayPal's General Manager of Alliances and Developer Services.
The PayPal Developer Central portal will debut in July and will contain free business and technical kits, including marketing materials, sample code, training information and discussion forums.
The portal will also feature a directory where merchants can find developers who have been certified by PayPal for building tools and applications for the online payment system.
A preview version of the portal is already up.
In addition to the portal, PayPal will also announce several new APIs and fraud filters, including a Recurring Payments API for building subscription billing into an applications and a Reference Transaction API to ease transactions with repeat customers.
PayPal's Developer Program, established in 2001, currently has some 35,000 active developers, 300 of which have the PayPal certification. The eBay program, founded in 2000, has about 70,000 developers.
For the first time, eBay will feature third-party applications within Selling Manager, a tool merchants use to manage their eBay listings, the company plans to announce Monday at its annual eBay Developers Conference in Chicago.
"We're taking our open [application development] platform to the next level," said Max Mancini, eBay's senior director of mobile platform and disruptive innovation.
Selling Manager is the most popular tool among eBay merchants, but so far has only featured applications created by the company. However, eBay now recognizes that it can't extend the tool's functionality on its own in a way that meets all of its users' demands and requirements, Mancini said.
By turning Selling Manager into an open platform, eBay believes it will be able to enhance the visibility of third-party applications for the benefit of both the developers who create them and the merchants who adopt them.
The initiative, called Project Echo, is now in a closed, early-stage testing phase, and will open up to public testing at the start of the fourth quarter. A more advanced public beta test is slated for the first quarter and the official launch is planned for mid-2009.
Merchants will be able to browse and search an applications directory for tools and applications that could help them run their eBay business. In addition, eBay will also deliver to them contextually relevant promotions for such tools and applications, based on what the company knows about the merchants.
Mancini offered the hypothetical example of a merchant that sells its 10,000th item, a milestone that could trigger a promotional suggestion for CRM (customer relationship management) applications. "The point is to help sellers scale their business," he said.
EBay hasn't yet decided whether developers will have to pay for their applications promoted via the new contextually-relevant suggestion system, as in an advertising program. It's still early in the rollout of the system and eBay will settle on specifics later based on feedback from developers, Mancini said.
EBay is trying to help external developers market more effectively their applications, by giving them more direct and targeted access to the type of professional seller that typically uses Selling Manager, Mancini said.
"One of the biggest requests from developers is how we can help them to promote and distribute their applications to sellers," Mancini said.
Developers who participate in Project Echo will also get access to previously unavailable merchant data via new APIs, so that they can enrich their applications with additional functionality, Mancini said.
Meanwhile, PayPal, eBay's online payment division, will also court external developers next week when it announces a new Developer Central portal, designed to support the creation of applications for PayPal.
"The goal is to help developers be more productive," said Glenn Lim, PayPal's General Manager of Alliances and Developer Services.
The PayPal Developer Central portal will debut in July and will contain free business and technical kits, including marketing materials, sample code, training information and discussion forums.
The portal will also feature a directory where merchants can find developers who have been certified by PayPal for building tools and applications for the online payment system.
A preview version of the portal is already up.
In addition to the portal, PayPal will also announce several new APIs and fraud filters, including a Recurring Payments API for building subscription billing into an applications and a Reference Transaction API to ease transactions with repeat customers.
PayPal's Developer Program, established in 2001, currently has some 35,000 active developers, 300 of which have the PayPal certification. The eBay program, founded in 2000, has about 70,000 developers.
FBI warns of child-support card scam
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation warned Friday that online scammers are now targeting single parents who use the EPPICard system to receive child-support payments.
The criminals are running a typical phishing scam, but one that is targeted at a new group of victims. "Individuals have reported receiving e-mail or text messages indicating a problem with their account. They are directed to follow the link provided in the message to update their account or correct the problem," said the FBI's Internet Crime Complain Center (IC3) in an advisory. "The link actually directs the individuals to a fraudulent Web site where their personal information, such as account number and PIN, is compromised."
In another scam, victims are asked to fill out an online survey and are then told that once they enter their account information, they will receive an EPPICard deposit as a token of thanks for their answers. Instead, their accounts are emptied by criminals.
EPPICards are issued by government agencies in 15 U.S. states. They work like debit cards, and are promoted as an easy-to-use alternative to child support payment checks.
The EPPICard association also warns about the scam on its Web site. "We will never request your personal information such as social security number, card number or PIN through any of these methods," the warning reads. "Please do not respond to requests like these."
Scammers have also been trying to get this information via the telephone, the association warns.
The criminals are running a typical phishing scam, but one that is targeted at a new group of victims. "Individuals have reported receiving e-mail or text messages indicating a problem with their account. They are directed to follow the link provided in the message to update their account or correct the problem," said the FBI's Internet Crime Complain Center (IC3) in an advisory. "The link actually directs the individuals to a fraudulent Web site where their personal information, such as account number and PIN, is compromised."
In another scam, victims are asked to fill out an online survey and are then told that once they enter their account information, they will receive an EPPICard deposit as a token of thanks for their answers. Instead, their accounts are emptied by criminals.
EPPICards are issued by government agencies in 15 U.S. states. They work like debit cards, and are promoted as an easy-to-use alternative to child support payment checks.
The EPPICard association also warns about the scam on its Web site. "We will never request your personal information such as social security number, card number or PIN through any of these methods," the warning reads. "Please do not respond to requests like these."
Scammers have also been trying to get this information via the telephone, the association warns.
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