Rating the big takeover news

Microsoft gave up on Yahoo!
Good — ♣♣♣/♣♣
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Icahn’s moving forward to usurp the Yahoo! Board
Very Good — ♣♣♣♣/♣
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CBS is set to buy News Corp’s CNET for $1.8 billion
Terrible ♣/♣♣♣♣
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GE prepping to ditch its appliaces biz
Not pleasant, but necessary ♣♣♣/♣♣
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♣♣♣♣♣ == highest TBT rating of deal, product, announcement

i.e. ♣♣♣/♣♣ == 3/5 rating

Epic times; Yahooglezonsoft.

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. Charles Dickens pretty much summed up 2008 for the financial and tech industries without even knowing it! Now that’s talent.

One Internet company in particular that has felt the squeeze of 2008 is Yahoo! The past few months have been a roller coaster ride for Yahoo! if not an all out trip through a centrifuge – and the ride is certainly not over yet. To sum it up: Microsoft has been aggressively pursuing a hostile takeover of Yahoo! and it seems they’re just getting warmed up.

I am boggled and simultaneously fascinated by the latest events in this dramatic tug-of-war this week. It’s like in my 7th grade science class, really; we had a class snake, and every day, students would have the opportunity to feed the snake a small, white LIVE mouse and observe nature’s innate hierarchy in the food chain – or this case, 7th-grader-assisted hierarchy. So the snake would make its first move – daring, but not necessarily putting the mouse into a check mate situation. Once the mouse dodged the first potential attempt at its life, you could tell the snake was hungry – he wasn’t just darting after the mouse to flirt with it. When it’s lunchtime, snake’s gotta eat.

Now I’m not saying Microsoft is the snake and it can’t “help” itself from posing many threats to shaky antitrust laws and “consuming” everything in its wake…

====Tyler: tbc

Beam me (and my data) up, Scotty

Sun Microsystems (of Santa Clara, CA, USA) was awarded a $44M contract from the U.S. Pentagon to research the replacement of physical wires between computer chips with laser beams.

It has been sort of the semiconductor industry “gold standard” to break silicon up into tiny, tiny pieces and race to see which company can reconnect them the most efficiently and squeeze the greatest performance yield by doing so.

Sun thinks they can…and that they can do it with magic…a.k.a. lasers.

This ultimately means that Sun can create chips that will NOT be hindered by the latency inherent to physical wires…we’re talking major speed here. Not only that but volume/size of chips will shrink and energy-efficiency will sky rocket (hiiii Moore’s Law!).

Supercomputer designers will be quite pleased if/when this becomes commercially available (or at least stable enough for widespread use in academia). Essentially, one of the (if not THE) biggest headaches for computer architecture designers and engineers is actually getting those little (well, little is an understatement; read: microscopic) data bits from point A to point B across tens of thousands of silicon wafers.

Here’s the general flow (and hence reasoning) in making hundreds of thousands of individual “chips” that need to talk to each other:

1. “Imprint” (for lack of a better word) 100s-1000s of identical circuits on a big ol’ silicon wafer (sounds tasty).

2. Cut up that wafer into small (read: ~0.5×0.5 in^2) chips.

3. Repeat for other circuits/chips.

The beauty: this process ensures that if there is some manufacturing error at any spot on the “big” wafer, then it will not impact a whole batch of chips.

The downside: the fact that you need to connect the chips so that they can talk to each other and pass data along. This intrinsically caps your potential processing power since the data moves at slower speeds getting from chip to chip (or doesn’t move at all if there is a faulty connection), wreaking bottlenecking to the max.

Earth Hour

Go green by going black. DO IT.

Saturday, March 29, 2008 @ 8pm. Cities around the world have officially signed on to turn off all lights under their jurisdiction to do so, and encourage individuals to do the same. It’s not that complicated. It’s not supposed to be the solution for our energy consuption/emission problems. It’s supposed to be a statement about climate change awareness.

The movement started with 2 million people in Sydney, Australia last year and this year it’s full-on global. It more than likely holds a place in my heart because:

a) I grew up with the Lorax and saw how all the brown goop ruined everything and lifted the Lorax up by the seat of his pants, disappearing forever and

b) Chicago is the U.S. flagship city; so it’s been marketed very well here.

What I think is vastly interesting is the speed at which, in the Web 3.0+ days, this news has traveled. I think one of the biggest awareness promoters of this event is Google. They’ve made this event nearly instantaneously known to anyone who “googles” anything online with their search engine. Side note: it’s more than awesome that the previous sentence is completely grammatically correct since “google” is a verb.

Anyway, I digress.

The reason why Google has made their ubiquitousness arguably one of the visually fastest marketing messages I’ve ever encountered is that they simply changed the normally white background color of their main homepage to black. -INSTANT “whoa” alert to anyone who has even used Google one or two times before, let alone the tens of times myself or my peers probably use it per day. Genius. People will say, “what, why is this background black??” Then they will read the one word tag line explaining (in the standard surreptitiously witty Google way) what’s going on, directing to a link with more information. The blinding simplicity is what makes Google so successful, what makes this message for Earth Hour successful, and what I really enjoy and respect about them and their use of technology – particularly in this scenario.

The Start

I’ve kept a blog at work (also powered by WordPress) for awhile now writing about similar subjects (technology, business, and technology business) that I intend to explore in this public version. Unfortunately, the work-version is also laden with proprietary information and very industry-specific posts.

So I’ve decided to unveil http://techbiztalk.wordpress.com.

I hope it proves to offer an informational and, with any luck, interesting glimpse into the interplay between today’s technology and business. Or just technology. …or just business. Through my eyes.