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In July, Microsoft and Yahoo finally announced a long awaited deal that will give Microsoft a better footing to take on Google’s dominance in Internet search and help Yahoo return to profitably. In the 10 year deal, Microsoft will handle all of Yahoo’s search inquiries, while Yahoo will sell the ads associated with the search results.

Although Yahoo investors seem to be disappointed that they didn’t get a
“boat load of money” on the deal, the resulting cost savings are hard to ignore. If and when the deal goes through, Yahoo is expecting to save $500M in annual operating expenses and $200M in capital expenses. They also expect to add $275M to its annual operating cash flow.

Prior to the deal being announced, Barron’s magazine had highlighted Yahoo on their main cover of the June 22nd issue. Even though the new deal is a big game changer, I still believe some of the arguments presented in the article holds true. For one, Carol Bartz, who is the new CEO and was credited with increasing the annual revenues at Autodesk fivefold at her previous tenure.

Yahoo generates 88% of it’s $7.2 billion dollar revenue from marketing services. Does it really matter who is providing the search technology…

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The Vista alternative, Ubuntu

I’m sure you’ve heard it before how people made the switch to Vista and end up hating it.  Well I’m one of those people.  I was never a real big fan of Windows, but it was there and it worked… until Vista came along that is.

Some of the problems that I had with Vista included but not limited to the computer lags, network connection problems and just being a big resource hog.  Keep in mind that my computer is isn’t too shabby: 3.4 GHZ Pentium D with 3 GB of memory.

Rather than run the risk of downgrading by to XP and not be supported by Microsoft in the future, I went out looking for alternatives.  I have noticed that Dell had been offering Ubuntu with some of their systems.  So I decided to give it a try with Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop. Read the rest of this entry »

Old Media slow to change

Rarely is change easy for anybody, especially for the age old newspaper industry.  Yet even while  bankrupcies of local printings scatter accross the country they are quick to put the blame on the likes of Google for their failures.

The new age of information has been making their way to the center stage for some time now.  The next phase of this migration will come in the form of news being delivered straight to millions of hand-held mobile devices.

Now it would seem kind of silly to to blame your woes on a service that lists your articles to millions of potential viewers.  The complaint of the publishers is that the snippets and headlines give away too much of the story and should be illegal to reproduce without some sort of monetization. Read the rest of this entry »

The new BlackBerry: Bold

The new BlackBerry Bold went on sale today at AT&T stores for $300, after a $100 mail-in rebate and a two-year voice and data contract. The Bold operates on AT&T’s 3G network and comes equipped with GPS, 2-megapixal camera, media player and Wi-Fi.

In what seems to the latest evolution of the smartphone, third-party applications will be available for downloading onto the phone. But finding these applications are going to be a little tough, the official BlackBerry App Store has not open for business yet.

In the meantime, BlackBerry has preloaded the phone with applications such as AT&T Navigator, Yellowpages.com Mobile and access to music & video clips.

Yup you heard right, the Bold will allow you to upload your music and videos to enjoy. No need to have that separate iPod anymore. With 1 GB of internal storage space and exterior microSD slot, you can store pretty much everything you’d need for that next business trip.

When you get an unlimited data plan from AT&T, starting at $30 on top of your voice plans, you also have access to their 17,000 Wi-Fi locations. This includes Starbucks locations, who have switched over from T-Mobile.

Here are some more reviews: