As Microsoft Walks Away,Yahoo Enters Google Ad Pact: WSJ

Moves May Prompt
Industry Scramble,
Regulator Scrutiny
By MATTHEW KARNITSCHNIG and JESSICA E. VASCELLARO
June 13, 2008; Page B1

Microsoft Corp. abandoned its pursuit of Yahoo Inc., opening the way for Yahoo to complete a search-advertising pact with rival Google Inc. that pits the industry's two biggest forces against Microsoft.

Microsoft told Yahoo that it was no longer interested in pursuing a takeover, even at the $33 a share it offered for the Internet company last month. That price would have valued Yahoo at nearly $50 billion.

Microsoft also unsuccessfully floated an alternative proposal to acquire Yahoo's search business. It isn't clear how Microsoft valued the business, but as part of that deal, Microsoft said it was prepared to acquire an additional 16% of Yahoo for $35 a share, or about $7.73 billion, according to people familiar with the situation.

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So much for the scare stories: Economist

Jun 6th 2008
From The Economist print edition

Illustration by David Simonds

New evidence shows that the gains outweigh the losses

BRITONS have long been fairly sanguine about traditional forms of globalisation such as trade and international investment. But the outsourcing of work formerly done in Britain to foreign countries has aroused fears, not least because it opens up the protected underbelly of services to international competition. Until now hard evidence of its overall impact on the British economy has been elusive. New research* should dispel most of the anxiety for those who prefer crunchy facts to scary myths.

Economists at Nottingham University's Globalisation and Economic Policy Centre delved into the accounts of over 66,000 firms in order to trace the effects of offshoring. Big companies with overseas affiliates are the most assiduous offshorers. Accordingly, the study paid particular attention to 2,850 British multinationals with foreign subsidiaries.

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Pakistan joins world’s lowest telecom tariff club: The Post

Associated Press of Pakistan

ISLAMABAD: India can no longer claim of being amongst the world's lowest telecom tariffs", as Pakistan boasts of far more competitive mobile services, especially for international (ISD) calls.
So while Indian telecom consumers have been celebrating the benefits of competition and low calling rates, they can now happily push operators and telecom regulators to lower their tariffs further.
The international calls to some of the most frequently called countries from India and Pakistan - such as United States of America (USA), United Kingdom (UK), Canada, Germany and Hong Kong - present a stark comparison of how Pakistani mobile users are so much better-off than the Indians.
"Pakistani operators offer such ISD calls at rates as low as (Pakistani) Rs 1-1.99 per minute. In comparison, Indian mobile subscribers are still paying Rs. 5-6 per minute to call these countries.
In some cases, the ISD rates from Pakistan while calling mobile phones in these countries are slightly higher, but far lower than those available to Indian consumers," says Shalini Singh, a renowned journalist of India, wrote in an article recently published in a leading Indian newspaper.

For more on this article, please click on the following link: Pakistan joins world’s lowest telecom tariff club: The Post

The Worlds Biggest IT Tower to be in Pakistan: Daily.pk

The multi-million rupee IT Tower project will take about 2 years to complete after which it will be the biggest call center in the world, said City Nazim Mustafa Kamal.

The call center in Sydney is presently regarded as the biggest with 8,000 call seats but the IT Tower in Karachi will have 10,000 call seats under one roof.

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City unveils huge wireless network: CNN

OKLAHOMA CITY, Oklahoma (AP) -- When Oklahoma City firefighters received a report that a body had been buried in a shallow grave at Lake Overholser, they consulted detailed topographical maps from the field as they pinpointed where to look.

That wouldn't have been possible without access to the city's new Wi-Fi mesh network, said fire Capt. Jim Kruta, who held a display of the network applications with police and other city officials outside City Hall.

"We pulled up a topographical map and were able to see where the water had receded and where someone might try to bury a body," Kruta said, adding, "We actually did find it."

The $5 million Wi-Fi network system covers a massive 555-square-mile area and was funded with money from a public safety sales tax and city capital improvement funds.

City officials say it's the largest city-owned and -operated Wi-Fi network in the world.

The network, which is used only for public safety and other city operations, includes 1,200 nodes, or routers, attached to street lights, utility poles and other spots across the city.

It's structured as a "mesh," meaning that if one node or router goes down, another fills its purpose.

For more on this article, please click on the following link: City unveils huge wireless network: CNN

Rummaging through the internet: Economist

Jun 5th 2008

From The Economist print edition

Computing: New techniques to navigate and gather information online promise to revolutionise web browsing

THE web has changed in many ways since it first emerged in the mid-1990s. The first web pages contained only text, and there was a big debate about whether pictures should be allowed. Today, by contrast, it is quite normal for pages to be bursting with photos, animated graphics, video clips, music and chunks of software, as well as text. In one respect, however, the web is unaltered: the clickable hyperlinks between pages are still the way users get from one page to another.

But now a Norwegian computer scientist named Frode Hegland has cooked up a new sort of navigation. His free software, a browser add-on called Hyperwords, makes every single word or phrase on a page into a hyperlink—not just those chosen by a website’s authors. Click on any word, number or phrase, and menus and sub-menus pop up. With a second click, it is possible to translate text into many languages, obtain currency or measurement conversions, and retrieve related photos, videos, academic papers, maps, Wikipedia entries and web pages fetched by Google, among other things.

All that information, of course, can already be accessed by web users willing to root around, opening a series of new browser windows or tabs. The goal of Hyperwords, Mr Hegland says, is “reducing the threshold” of satisfying curiosity, by making the quest faster and easier. Later this year he will release a new version that extends this trick beyond the web browser, turning any word in any window into a clickable “hyperword”.

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Battlechips: Economist

Jun 5th 2008 | SANTA CLARA

From The Economist print edition

As once-distinct markets start to overlap, chipmakers come to blows

FOR YEARS the chip industry had only one story: AMD's David pitted against Intel's Goliath, as the two Silicon Valley firms fought it out in the market for microprocessors that power PCs and servers. But a flurry of announcements this week shows that things are no longer so simple, and chipmakers that once ruled separate markets have started to come into conflict.

Intel has long dominated the market for PC and server chips, but there are two other big classes of processors: those for high-end graphics and for mobile phones. Most graphics chips are made by ATI Technologies (now part of AMD) and Nvidia; most mobile handsets are powered by processors based on technology from ARM Holdings, a British chip-design company.

These markets have been largely separate because different processors need to be good at different things: PC chips must be able to run ever more complex software; graphics chips have to be good at rapidly crunching data in parallel streams; and handset chips must balance performance with power consumption. But the borders between these markets are blurring as the PC matures and portable devices become more elaborate and capable.

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