Kaiyzen Group

According to the Wall Street Journal people inside MS have stated that MS will not be raising their offer for Yahoo!

This is the latest update after a bit of radio silence on both ends.  The two parties supposedly got together to finally have talks several weeks ago.  Following those reported talks Yahoo! then released this powerpoint that was presented to investors before the takeover offer.

MS is probably just going to sit on the offer for a while as Q1 earnings are coming up around the corner.  If Yahoo! should stumble in any way shape or form and the stock slide just a bit MS will have an easier time getting those bigger shareholders in their corner to tighten the screws on Yang and crew.

Another thing to keep an eye out for is the board seat nominations.  MS has supposedly finalized their list and the participants are ready to step up if called upon.  The date for that is 10 days following the public announcement of their annual shareholders meeting.  Last year that meeting occured on June 12th.

Seems like you are not a “serious” web 2.0 company.., sick of the web 2.0 tag nowadays by the way.., until you open up your “platform” and launch your API.

A few up and comers have done so in the past couple weeks.

Imeem, the online media, social network, palylist manager service that is growing at quite a rapid click boasting over 24 million users.  They have launched an API for developers who want to build media and social aspects into their products/services.  Think of it as a facebook/myspace with the focus of just music.

FriendFeed is the friend news feed service launched by a few former Google employees.  They will keep tabs on your friends from all your diferent social networking sites and bring the data together for your viewing pleasure.  Their API aims to open the data they are aggregating , and of course get others to plug into their engine and feed it with more friend info.  Just think.., if they are successfull we will have a giant version of Facebook’s Beacon, and we know how much we all love that.

Of course we cant wait for these guys to infuse the wonderful Open Social standard into their setups as the vapor trail is shortening finally as Google is finally getting their shit together with it.

I am very interested to see how the whole telecom space plays out over the next 3-5 years.

The battle brews over tv/voice/internet as Comcast rolls out their phone service everywhere (just got the service recently in my area, not to bad so far), AT&T pushing their U-Verse setup, and of course Verizon with their FiOS move and starting to office television service as well.

The U-Verse setup is getting some serious marketing muscle of late.  Not more that two/three days go by where I dont see a commercial/ad, or some flyer that is mailed to the house.  The offering seems pretty sweet especially with the ability to choose your own channel package.  This type of offering is exactly what competition is ALL about.  Long have consumers wanted to pick and choose their channels w/o getting a bunch o crap they could care less about.

AT&T still has a way to go to boost their internet speeds in order to really start to appeal to the high end crowd that will happily drop $200/$250 month to continue optimal consumption of data/voice services.

I wish Verizon would get their arses out west with their FiOS setup.

VentureBeat has a great writeup about Verizon asking the FCC for permission to be able to cancel peoples cable service on their behalf when signing up new customers.  This will be a great move that will help add more fuel to the fire.

Then you have Sprint-Nextel floundering, especially after their $30+ billion writedown.  Maybe they should team up with Motorola.., they would make a hello of a duo.

PCWorld has a story about the House Committee on the Judiciary approving legislation intended to overhaul the U.S. Patent system.

The gist of the legislation is to make it harder to secure patents.., and easier to dispute them.

Overhaul in the patent system is becoming a pretty mainstream business topic in the past year.  Rediculous settlements like the one between RIM and NTP have the system looking for ways to limit/focus exactly what damages are to be considered in such disputes.

The USPTO has had their own internal reform efforts around boosting their workforce pretty drastically over the next few year.  People are correct in saying that simply increasing the number of examiners is not the answer and that we have to work at the root of the problem which is being stricter on patents that are actually granted.  Of course the hiring of more examiners is greatly needed since even with the new legislation in place since the influx of patents will not be decreasing with any legislation that is passed.

I am all for patent reform and love the aspect of making it easier to dispute them.  One thing that bothers me is the fact of how prohibitive it is to your startup business to chase down people infringing on your IP.  Usually as a startup you just have to send some cease and decist letters and hope the problem goes away.  All the while one of the big boys can infringe away knowing that by the time things would ever get settled they would just be able to settle and slap the people with a bit of $$ and go on their way.  Hopefully this reform will help speed up the process and possibly decrease the costs at the same time.  This will be key to spur innovation in the SMB sector that will lead to innovative new products/services.

Update: Ars has a great writeup on patent reform issues.  A great point in theirs is towards the bottom when they talk about the importance of restricting which locale you can file your complaint in, refering to the Texas Eastern District issue.

Amazon is starting to play hardball a bit.

TechCrunch has a post talking about how Amazon has made the decision to not allow competing print on-demand services sell books they produce through Amazon.

I cant blame them all that much.  I have been very intrigued by the budding print on-demand business for some time.  Amazon has the largest online shopping audience for books and they have delved into other services/products geared towards the independent author.

Thats right.., I am now OOOOOOOficially no longer party of the 20 year old crowd.

The big 3 - 0 is upon me.  The good thing is I am as imature and childish as ever so I think I have another 5 or so years before I have to start growing up a bit

Below is a pic of my wonderful bday cake that my friend Nellie baked for me.

For those of you SF dwellers…, we will be out in the Mission tonight.., there shall be mutch consumption happending.  I would also like those of you who made it out to the Brunos party.

Catchin up on the news from the day.  I attended the Hadoop Summit all day today.., will recap that in a later post.., TONS o stuff happening.  I will try to summarize here.

The OSBC conference is happening in San Francisco.  Couple interesting items Venturebeat.  One is about Microsofts general counsel Brad Smith speaking to the crowd about MS changing their tune with working with the Open Source world.  This sounds similar to the tone MS’s representative had at SugarCon this year.  Ha also talks about Smith dodging some questions regarding their stance towards Linux orgs and the patent threats.

Venturebeats Ha also writes about a talk given by Benchmark Capital’s Rob Bearden.  Bearden talked about companies making money from Open Source and that Benchmark is highly focusing Open Source and SaaS companies.  He also said.., to the disdain of many in crowd I would guess.., that Open Source is not a business model but a distribution strategy.

The last bit of Open Source news I have for the day is IBM investing $10 Million in EnterpriseDB’s C Round of funding.  Lots of people writing about this news today and saying that IBM and EnterpriseDB are taking direct aim at MySQL and Sun in a battle to be numero uno for developers in the web space.  No amount of money will help EnterpriseDB overtake MySQL in market share.  Over the long haul though.., they might generate more revenue than MySQL.