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What investors want to know about Microsoft and Yahoo these days is this: Are they, or aren’t they? Talking to each other about Microsoft’s $40 billion-plus takeover offer, that is.

Don’t expect enlightenment from the chatty executive ranks at Microsoft, who have made public statements galore even though, sadly for newshounds, their accounts of talks (or nontalks) appear to conflict.

CEO Steve Ballmer, a man who should know, said of the deal at a German technology conference, “There’s been a range of dialogue and there’s a range of alternatives being considered.” Then, after that shocker, he demurred, “I think it’s best for me not to get into the detail.”

Last Friday, Jean-Philippe Courtois, who heads the company’s international operations, said to an Agence France Press reporter that Microsoft and Yahoo are having “a very close dialogue.”
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Microsoft’s Silverlight browser plug-in will be bringing videos and other rich media to Nokia smartphones later this year.

The two companies on Tuesday at Microsoft’s Mix ‘08 conference are scheduled to announce that Microsoft will write a version of Silverlight for Nokia’s Series 60 (S60) smartphone software that runs on Symbian OS. The software, which will be available later this year, will also run on Series 40 devices and Nokia Internet tablets.

For people with compatible devices, it means they will be able to see content, notably video, written for Silverlight, which Microsoft is pushing as an alternative to Adobe’s Flash Player. Microsoft has been signing on content partners to use Silverlight for media streaming, including MLB.com and online Olympic games broadcasting with NBC.

For Microsoft, the deal with Nokia is a step in its pledge to make Silverlight “ubiquitous,” that is, capable of running on multiple operating systems.

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Traditionally, the big names of the IT industry make their predictions the day before CeBIT opens. This time, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer was one of them and predicted ground breaking changes for the future.

While Bill Gates was considered the chief visionary among the Microsoft leadership, it seems that Steve Ballmer has taken on this role now. In his opening speech at CeBIT, he did not touch on any of the problems currently dogging the software giant, such as its intended takeover of Yahoo or the multi-million Euro fine imposed by the EU Commision. Instead, he gazed into his own personal crystal ball and shared what he saw with the crowd. His favourite word? Computing revolution. “In my 28 years at Microsoft, I’ve lived through four computing revolutions.” In his opinion, the first was when computers became affordable for a wide audience, the second was the development of the graphics user interface, the third the rise of the internet, with the fourth being the interactive Web 2.0.

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The Intel Corporation, the semiconductor maker, lowered its profit forecast Monday for its first quarter, blaming a steep drop in prices for memory chips for the shortfall.The company said slumping prices for a type of memory called NAND flash had depressed profits more than anticipated. NAND flash is used in portable electronic devices like digital cameras and MP3 players.

Intel said its gross profit margin — a crucial measure of profitability that gauges a company’s ability to control manufacturing costs — would come in at 54 percent of revenue, plus or minus a percentage point. That was down from its previous forecast of 56 percent, plus or minus a couple of percentage points.

The company said its other guidance had not changed, including its expectation of $9.4 billion to $10 billion in revenue for the quarter. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial on average expect Intel to ring up sales of $9.7 billion.

Other companies have also been hurt by falling memory-chip prices. The Samsung Electronics Company’s profit sank more than 6 percent last year, dragged down by plunging prices for NAND flash chips and DRAM, or dynamic random access memory, the most common type of memory chip in personal computers.

Source: NYTimes

This week, NASA unveiled a new website that touts spin-offs from its technology that have found uses in the bathroom, kitchen, grocery store, and other places. You can find the website by following this link and clicking on “NASA Home and City” in the menu.

Some previous bragging about NASA spin-offs has raised eyebrows, even within the agency itself. Agency staffers questioned earlier boasts about a variety of smoke detector technology that NASA was said to have had a hand in developing.

I had a look at the spin-off website, and although some of the claims are surprising, each is accompanied by a link to further information to back it up.

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