In May, HP announced it would buy EDS for $25 per share, or $13.9 billion. Under the deal, EDS will operate as a new business unit (called EDS) and will continue to be led by Ronald A. Rittenmeyer, its current chief executive officer. The EDS buy will pit HP squarely against IBM and make it second only to Big Blue in the realm of outsourced computer services.

But the enormity of the merged companies and culture differences between the two groups will make this acquisition challenging, Gartner analyst Ben Pring said at the time it was announced.

The deal won approval from U.S. antitrust authorities on June 30.

In essence, the Icahn-Microsoft duo are asking Yahoo’s current board to take a gun to itself.

Tick, tick, tick…

But that game plan failed to produce similar results when Icahn teamed up with Microsoft to push Yahoo into a search-only deal.

Investor activist Carl Icahn took a page out of his Oracle-BEA Systems matchmaker’s playbook to try to strike a deal between Yahoo and Microsoft on Friday.

In the Oracle bid for BEA, Icahn intervened when the parties called it quits and directly hammered out a deal with Oracle that he could live with, according to the blow-by-blow BEA filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. And once he got a deal he could be happy with, Icahn, BEA’s largest individual shareholder, took the Oracle proposal over to BEA with a proverbial shotgun in tow and said, “Take it, or else.”

Next week is a fish-or-cut bait week for Icahn, if he wants to allow enough time for influential institutional investment advisers like RiskMetrics, Glass Lewis & Co., and Proxy Governance to weigh in. These advisers to mutual funds, pension funds and asset management companies tend to make their recommendations to their clients on how to vote on proxy matters about a week to week-and-a-half before an annual shareholders meeting.

If Icahn truly wants Yahoo’s current board removed, he can use the gun himself and file his final proxy, or definitive proxy, and run a full slate of dissident directors against Yahoo’s current board.

Roy Bostock, Chairman of Yahoo said, “This odd and opportunistic alliance of Microsoft and Carl Icahn has anything but the interests of Yahoo’s stockholders in mind. Clearly, Microsoft, having failed to advance in search, is aligning with the short-term objectives of Mr. Icahn to coerce Yahoo! into selling its core strategic search assets on terms that are highly advantageous to Microsoft, but disadvantageous to Yahoo! stockholders. Yahoo’s Board of Directors will not allow that to happen. Yahoo’s Board remains open to any transaction that delivers full value to our stockholders - we just do not believe such a transaction should be dictated by Microsoft and a single short-term investor.”

Icahn is running out of time to make a decision whether to run enough candidates on his slate to seek control of Yahoo’s nine-member board, or run a short slate, which aims to get representation on the board but not control. A third option is for Yahoo to offer up a couple seats to Icahn as part of a settlement, but given the bad blood between the parties that may be a challenging path to take.

Mr. Bostock continued, “After negotiating among themselves without the involvement of Yahoo, Carl Icahn and Microsoft presented us with a ‘take it or leave it’ proposal under which we would be required to restructure the Company, hand over to Microsoft Yahoo’s valuable search business and to Carl Icahn the rest of the Company, giving us less than 24 hours to respond. It is ludicrous to think that our Board could accept such a proposal. While this type of erratic and unpredictable behavior is consistent with what we have come to expect from Microsoft, we will not be bludgeoned into a transaction that is not in the best interests of our stockholders.”

But isn’t that what proxy fights are for?

The proposal was made on Friday evening and Yahoo was given less than 24 hours to accept the proposal, the fundamental terms of which Microsoft and Mr. Icahn made clear they were unwilling to negotiate. After reviewing the proposal with its legal and financial advisers, Yahoo’s Board of Directors determined that accepting the proposal is not in the best interests of its stockholders.

BEA accepted Oracle’s offer, down to the exact penny Icahn said he was willing to accept.

Problem was–same play, different results.

Net income for the fourth quarter, which ended December 30, 2007, was $4.8 million, or 6 cents per share. That is a 56 percent decline compared to the same period in 2006.

SunPower on Thursday reported a drop on fourth-quarter earnings, but a sharp increase in annual revenues driven by large solar projects.

Revenues for the quarter were $224.3 million, over 200 percent higher than the same period a year earlier.

During a conference call with analysts, SunPower CEO Tom Werner said the company is on track to reduce the cost of solar power 20 percent by 2012. It will do that by increasing the output of panels and solar cells and reducing the cost of installation.

The company forecast that revenue in 2008 will be $1.2 billion to $1.3 billion and that sales in 2009 will grow between 40 and 50 percent higher, faster than the overall industry.

He said the company forecasts that supply of silicon–a key constraint for solar cell manufacturers–will be “abundant” this year.

Solar sector stocks across the board have been hurt in the past several weeks as investors fear that companies’ stocks are over-valued. SunPower’s stock is down more than 40 percent since the beginning of the year.

The company said the jump in revenue was due to strong demand for solar electric equipment and the installation of a few large projects, including the Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas, Nev. SunPower blamed the profit decline on special charges.

Chief Financial Officer Emmanuel Hernandez said that despite signs of a recession in the U.S. economy, SunPower and the solar sector overall will not be significantly affected because of rising electricity prices and strong demand for alternative energy sources.

With more silicon available, there will be downward pressure on product price. To avoid losing revenue as this happens, SunPower is developing its “downstream channel” to sell more to installers, Werner explained.

For all of 2007, revenue was $775 million, more than triple the amount in 2006, company executives said.

So said venture capitalist Fred Wilson of at the Web 2.0 Expo here in his keynote entitled “New York’s Web Industry From 1995 to 2008: From Nascent to Ascendent.” A longtime leader in Gotham’s culture of digital innovation, Wilson, of Union Square Ventures, gave a short “history lesson” to the hordes of conference attendees, many of whom had come from hundreds of miles away.

And the term “Silicon Alley,” he said, is one that the city should shake off. “We are one of the largest cities in the world,” Wilson said. “We are one of the largest Internet development communities in the world. Let’s bury the name Silicon Alley.”

Fred Wilson, with Union Square Ventures, gave a keynote address at the Web 2.0 Expo.

(Credit: Union Square Ventures)

New York’s technology community is still considered an afterthought in comparison to the Bay Area, and Wilson, though he has invested in companies like Delicious and Twitter over the years and runs one of the Web’s most influential venture capital blogs, isn’t yet in the league of true Valley legends like John Doerr.

But the numbers, Wilson said, show a very different trend. In 1995, 230 early-stage companies in the Bay Area received venture backing, and only 30 did in New York. By the end of the year, 2008’s numbers should be 360 in the Bay Area and nearly 120 in New York. “We have grown here in New York by four times in 14 to 15 years, and Silicon Valley has grown by 1.5 times,” Wilson said. “We’ve gone from being one-eighth of the activity of Silicon Valley to one-third. In my mind that’s very significant.”

The keynote took the audience back, in fact, to 1979, when New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program was first formed. “It started in an art school, the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU,” Wilson said. “I think that still to this day defines a distinguishing characteristic of the New York Internet community.”

The timeline went on: the rise of interactive ad agencies in 1995, along with the debut of The New York Times Web site, which first launched in conjunction with the visit of Pope John Paul II to New York; the debut in the mid-1990s of digital businesses like iVillage, The Knot, and Star Media; the sale of Total New York to AOL, and the IPO of DoubleClick in 1997–New York’s first tech company to go public.

In 1996, Wilson started his first tech venture firm, Flatiron Partners. “We first were going to call ourselves Acme Ventures. We were going to use the Road Runner as our logo. That didn’t work out,” Wilson said with a laugh. “We started out with the Flatiron Building as our logo. We got sued. That’s a long story.”

He then went through the heights of the dot-com boom and subsequent bust, when “all hell broke loose.” One of the companies he spotlighted was Kozmo, the delivery service that was arguably Gotham’s most famous dot-bomb. “To me, Kozmo was kind of a definitive company. We invested in it, we lost a lot of money, but it was a great company,” he said. “To this date, my kids ask me, ‘Explain to me why Kozmo’s not around?’”

Then, in 2000, the dot-com dream started to collapse. “The market broke in March and all these companies had huge burn rates, they could no longer finance themselves, and they went out of business one by one.” Still, Google opened its first New York office in an Upper West Side Starbucks that year. In 2006, as Wilson noted, it took over the historic Port Authority building in Chelsea. With 750 engineers, he said, “it’s the largest engineering operation they have outside of Silicon Valley.”

Things started to turn around for New York in 2003. Nick Denton launched blog empire Gawker Media, and Delicious–which was sold to Yahoo after being funded by Wilson’s Union Square Ventures–was founded in a Manhattan apartment. The rest, as they say, is history.

Wilson’s address, overall, was an idealistic one–perhaps excessively so. No mention was made of the September 11th tragedy, which shook every industry in New York to its core, including technology, and no mention was made of the very recent Wall Street crisis that could result in a dramatic shift in fate for many tech start-ups. Judging by what Wilson said, the future is infinitely sunny.

On a less depressing note, what Wilson also didn’t mention was that New York City has elected a tech mogul as its mayor: Michael Bloomberg’s eponymous company revolutionized the world of finance, and Bloomberg has promised to foster digital culture further with an annual Internet Week New York festival and an official early-stage tech venture fund.

The Web 2.0 Expo traditionally keeps its keynote addresses very short, so Wilson had only a half hour to fit in a decade and a half of New York’s digital history. Indeed, he admitted that his timeline would be incomplete. “There’s certainly no way that I was able to include every important person, every important company, and every important event,” he said.

Wilson gave us the history. But when it comes to the future of technology in New York, I hope the conversation goes on. Despite the fact that the tech economy has held up in the wake of serious economic troubles so far, many people aren’t sure how much longer that will be the case. The health of the financial services industry has grown precipitously worse in a matter of days, and that’s a dark cloud looming over all of New York, not just Wall Street.

Fred Wilson is right. Let’s scrap the term “Silicon Alley.” But in doing so, let’s acknowledge that New York’s digital industry is New York itself, not a sort of frosted-glass microcosm insulated from the rest of the metropolis. The beauty of New York’s technology industry is that it’s so connected, running through the same veins as the most influential names in some of the world’s biggest industries; Wilson made a note of that at the end of his keynote, identifying New York’s tech community as “more creative, more artistic, more connected to media, advertising, (and) business.”

The road ahead for tech innovation in New York is indeed bright, but along with the other industries the city fosters, there are difficult times and plenty of uncertainties ahead as well. And at the very least, keeping the tough times in mind, as well as the good ones, is just another safeguard against making sure that those “rock bottom” days of 2002 don’t return to the tech industry in full force.

Disclosure: Fred Wilson’s Union Square Ventures is an investor in Tumblr, which employs my significant other.

Click here for full coverage of Web 2.0 Expo

The new TV channel will be majority-owned by Japan Broadcasting or NHK, which will issue new shares through private placements with the 13 investors to launch the new TV service. NHK will own a 60 percent in the new TV service and the 13 investors will have stakes of less than 5 percent each. News of the new channel, which is the first of its kind in Japan, was first reported by the Japanese financial newspaper Nikkei and was picked up by Thomson Financial.

The new channel is expected to reach some 10 million households in North America, Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, Southeast Asia, and other parts of the world, according to the news reports. In addition to providing 24-hour TV broadcasts, NHK is working with Microsoft and NTT, to distribute video content via the Internet.

The chip industry’s finest minds will be descending on San Francisco this week for the International Solid State Circuits Conference, and Intel plans to present 14 papers highlighting some of its recent work, said Justin Rattner, Intel’s chief technology officer and head of Intel Labs. Chief among them will be its low-power Silverthorne processor, Intel’s latest plan to infiltrate the world of handheld devices.

“This is the smallest (x86 instruction set) processor we’ve built in the last 15 to 17 years,” Rattner said, speaking of Silverthorne in a briefing for reporters prior to the conference. Silverthorne is expected to arrive in the second quarter in so-called mobile Internet devices, but it’s really a stepping stone for Intel toward a lower-power future.

The ultimate goal for Intel is to design a chip that will fit into the next generation of mobile devices and smartphones, carving out a niche for PC software and programming techniques in a world dominated by chip designer ARM and its partners, such as Texas Instruments and Samsung. With a power consumption range between half a watt and two watts, Silverthorne doesn’t quite fit into the appropriate thermal profile occupied by those chips. But it can run any piece of software written for PCs at the performance level achieved by one of Intel’s 5-year-old Pentium M processors.

Silverthorne is a departure from the rest of Intel’s designs in that it’s an in-order processor, as opposed to the out-of-order design used in just about every other chip the company makes. That means pretty much what it sounds like; in-order chips have to process tasks in a defined order, but out-of-order chips can process tasks separately and reassemble a finished product later. Out-of-order means better performance, in-order generally means lower power consumption.

The chip also incorporates a new low-power state, allowing it to essentially shut down in between processing tasks and limit power consumption. And just in case the software industry starts producing more multithreaded applications, Intel added an old friend, hyperthreading, to Silverthorne. Hyperthreading allows Silverthorne to present itself as a dual-core chip to software, even though it only has one physical processing core.

While Silverthorne is considered a huge part of Intel’s future, Tukwilla, the other major design being presented at ISSCC, is a remmant of Intel’s past. Tukwilla will be the next version of the Itanium processor, which Intel once thought could take over the server industry but has been relegated instead to a high-end niche.

Still, that’s a powerful niche. Tukwilla will be the first quad-core Itanium processor, and it will use a whopping 30MBs of cache memory. This is going to be a high-performance (read: expensive) chip for high-end servers, and it will also be one of Intel’s first chips that borrows design techniques employed by Intel’s rival, Advanced Micro Devices, to great effect.

Tukwilla will use point-to-point connection technology that Intel calls Quickpath to directly link processing cores together. AMD introduced this way back in 2003 with its Opteron processor, and it delivers a significant boost in performance as the chip industry moves into the multicore era. Intel’s current designs required signals traveling between two different processor cores to leave, then re-enter, the chip. Quickpath lets those signals stay on the chip, allowing them to travel a shorter distance at higher speeds. That’s good.

Tukwilla will also use an integrated memory controller, which is a similar concept. Integrated memory controllers, as the name implies, are integrated directly onto the chip. This allows this vital link between the processor and the main memory to run at the speed of the chip, rather than the slower speeds necessitated by the front-side bus design used by Intel’s chips.

Intel eventually plans to bring Quickpath and integrated memory controllers down to its Xeon line of server processors, which go into the vast majority of the world’s servers. That will arrive with the Nehalem generation of chips, due out later in 2008.

Intel’s researchers also plan to present papers in other areas, such as wireless technologies and memory research. The company has been working on radios that can employ multiple protocols, from Wi-Fi and WiMax to even cellular standards, and it plans to highlight some research in this area. The company is also investigating phase-change memory, one possible way to prepare for the end of Moore’s Law by discovering ways to represent the fundamental zeros and ones of computing with something other than a transistor.

These presentations are not for the faint of heart. An electrical engineering degree would be very helpful in deciphering the papers, although not exactly required. We’ll be on hand during the week to highlight some of the more interesting presentations, especially Silverthorne, which is a key part of Intel’s future plans.

Nokia China’s new headquarters were completed on the 21st in Yizhuang, Beijing, marking the birth of the world’s first mobile phone industry chain fully integrating research and development, management and production, as well as sales, according to Xinhua Net.

Located in Beijing’s Yizhuang Economic and Technological Development Zone, Nokia’s new headquarters building covers 7 million square meters, and is Nokia’s largest regional headquarters in the world. Apart from being the headquarters for the management of China’s entire market, this environment- friendly building, wrapped in a green glass curtain wall, will also harbor the research and development of its global market business.

The article later references an interview with a Nokia source, but aside from Xinhua-style odd English this could have been released by Nokia PR. Then again, much better for PR was The New York Times Magazine’s admiring profile of Nokia’s corporate anthropologist.

Lest we forget the turgid history of some other horrifically bad promotional videos from Microsoft that will forever be burned into our brains. Here are some of my top picks:

8. Steve Ballmer Sells Windows 1.0

Do plaid suits make you think of Crockett and Tubbs? Didn’t think so, but apparently now-CEO of Microsoft Steve Ballmer thought it would be an accurate attempt at making Windows Write look more useful than Word, which at the time was not yet working very well with Windows. In his pre-”monkey boy” days Ballmer could still get things cooking though. Who else would get this excited about Reversi?

7. Windows 98: It’s a Series of Tubes

What makes this one great is that this is probably what Alaskan Sen. Ted Stevens saw before making his famous “series of tubes” speech. An e-mail is sent out and makes a perilous journey through the neon tunnels of the Internets. When actually delivered, the e-mail comes into the woman’s laptop as a glowing sphere of light, as well as to everyone else including a young boy who is clearly far too young to be working as an employee of Global.com. Between that, the completely unnecessary espionage subplot, and the cameo by stillborn WebTV, this one is a keeper.

6. Microsoft Flight Simulator X (a.k.a. Virtual Air Traffic Controller)

See what they did here? You can buy a $50 software title and not even have to play it. You can just sit at home and help other people have fun by pretending to be an air traffic controller. Even better, couples can play together, the young and old can play together–it was like the
Nintendo Wii, but before its time. Then end it all with an obligatory multicultural odd-couple moment and you’ve got one of the greatest promotional videos ever made.

5. If MS Vista Launches, and Nobody is There to See it…

Can’t get anyone to buy your fancy new operating system? Try making a slick video of your company blowing a ton of money on promotions worldwide. Then combine footage with explosive techno music.

4. Windows ME: It’s Hammer Time

Look it’s the same version of Windows Media player you’ve got in Windows 2000. But wait, we’ve got new keyboard protection in case your child attacks your computer with plastic hammers–forcing you to roll back your version of the OS to a more stable one. Oh yeah, there’s also a new version of Internet Explorer that you don’t need to upgrade your operating system to use. How ready are you to pay us $200?

3. MS-DOS 5 Upgrade (Give Me My 5 Minutes Back)

These working slubs were expecting a boring training session but look who turned up! It’s some guy that’s a cross between Bill Nye the science guy and crazy tax guy Matthew Lesko. He’s got The Dreams with him, too! With such awesomely bad lyrics as “Free more memory can’tcha see, spring those K’s that got to be free” how can you not want to upgrade?

2. Windows 386 Made Impossible

What could be in that large bag you ask? Why of course it’s a Mission Impossible-style self-destructing tape. What’s the impossible task? Using the latest version of Windows. How cute. That’s not the weirdest part though–when “Linda” goes New Wave and begins rapping about making her charts hot it’s an HR violation in the making. Don’t forget to check out Part 2 here, or else you’ll never know how the story ends.

1. The Windows 95 Ad that Offends Everyone

Parodies, bad costumes, even worse puns and the phrase “whip it on me” make this one of the worst offenders. Besides the fact that Windows 95 literally explodes out of a copy of MS DOS that’s cut in half with a chainsaw, it’s quickly followed up by screencasts put to saxophone music and an over-the-top actor who’s constantly putting out David Caruso-caliber one-liners. The worst part? It’s kind of enjoyable to watch.

The iPhone Dev Team said yesterday (thanks, Gizmodo) it has figured out a way to hack into the iPhone’s bootloader by taking advantage of the way the iPhone authorizes code that can be written to memory. After some modifications, this apparently allows any code to be written to the iPhone, such as applications that haven’t been authorized by Apple, and it should work with any new software version Apple releases, according to the team.

It seems the iPhone hacking community has already found a way to get unofficial applications on the iPhone 2.0 software.

(Credit:
iPhone Dev Team)

The team released a screenshot of what is supposedly an iPhone running external applications on the beta 2.0 software, which can be obtained by downloading the iPhone SDK. It’s hard to tell exactly which version is shown in the screenshot, although the inclusion of the App Store is a pretty big hint. Still, Adobe sells a lot of copies of Photoshop for a reason.

Unlike previous hacks, this one isn’t specific to the latest firmware version, it exploits the way that Apple designed the iPhone’s main bootloader. According to the iPhone Dev Team, the iPhone verifies whether or not firmware code has been signed with an RSA certificate before allowing it to be written to memory. The team has apparently figured out a way to disable that check and allow unsigned code to be written to memory. A detailed explanation of the exploit can be found here.

The hacking community believes this jailbreaking method (which will also let you unlock your iPhone) can’t be fixed by Apple in a production version of the 2.0 software. Even though Apple has released the SDK, it seems pretty likely that hacking will continue as long as the company maintains its one-carrier, one-country policy and if Apple chooses to exclude lots of third-party applications that conflict with its goals.

Panasonic DMP-BD35

Key features of the Panasonic DMP-BD35:

Blu-ray Profile 2.0
Onboard decoding for Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio, as well as bitstream output
Blu-ray and DVD playback at 24 frames per second
Ethernet port for firmware and content
Deep Color and x.v.Color support
SDHC card slot

Panasonic DMP-BD55

Key step-up features of the Panasonic DMP-BD55:

7.1 multichannel analog outputs
High-end internal audio components

The DMP-BD35 looks to have a pretty solid feature set. Profile 2.0 support means you’ll be able to take advantage of BD-Live features available on some newer Blu-ray discs, and onboard decoding for both Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio means you’ll be able to take advantage of both high resolution soundtrack formats with any HDMI-capable receiver. This model seems to be pretty close to the DMP-BD50 in terms of features, but we’re hoping it sports a price tag under $400.

While the step-up features on the DMP-BD55 look pretty minor, we’re happy to see this kind of product differentiation on Blu-ray players. The majority of home theater fans don’t need 7.1 analog outputs–and can opt for the cheaper DMP-BD35–while the few people that do need it can opt for the more expensive DMP-BD55. Of course, we’ll also be interested to see if there are any performance differences between these two players, and we’re hoping for improved DVD performance from players, as the DMP-BD50’s DVD playback had room for improvement.