Microsoft has withdrawn its bid for yahoo. Yahoo killed the deal by not accepting microsoft’s offer even after they increased the bid by additional $5 billion. See the press release here. Contrary to popular belief, microsoft decided not to go the hostile way as that would have led to serious value erosion in yahoo.

In a letter to microsoft employees, steve ballmer has outlined microsoft’s strategy going forward. It basically involves 3 components
· Deliver on the basics. We will continue to improve search relevance and build out our ad …

There has been a pagerank update by google recently. Unfortunately binaryday.com has suffered a drop in pagerank from 4 to 3. Couple of other blogs i.e abhisays.com and bishtblogs.net have undergone a similar drop in the pagerank. I am not sure if google has decreased the pagerank of blogs across the board or there is something wrong with binaryday itself.

There is an unprecedented outrage in India over the IPL Cheerleaders. The outrage has been created by both the players and politicians. Shahid afridi said that the skimpily dressed cheerleaders are distracting the batsmen. Afridi went on to say that cricket does not need cheerleders as cricket is an entertainment itself. Fair point there.

Next Rahul Dravid said that IPL cricket should be called bikini cricket because of the cheerleaders present in IPL.

On the political front the moral brigade are saying that the cheerleaders are …

Inspite of the disappointing start to IPL yesterday, I have decided to cover the IPL series on this blog. Following is the final scorecard of the match between Kolkata Knight Riders and Bangalore Royal Challengers.
Scoreboard
Kolkata Knight Riders:
Sourav Ganguly c Kallis b Khan 10
Brendan McCullum not out 158
Ricky Ponting c Kumar b Kallis 20
David Hussey c White b Noffke 12
Mohammed Hafeez not out 5
Extras: (b 4, lb 4, w 9) 17
Total: (for 3 wickets in 20 overs) 222
Bowling:
Praveen Kumar 4 0 38 0 (1w)
Zaheer Khan 4 0 38 1
Ashley Noffke 4 …

Hitwise has released the latest numbers for the search engine market. Google reaches an all time high with 67.25% market share. Microsoft and yahoo continue their downward movement. Ask.com was the only other major search engine to gain market share.
Domain Mar.-08 Feb.-08 Mar.-07
www.google.com 67.25% 66.44% 64.13%
search.yahoo.com 20.29% 20.59% 21.26%
search.msn.com 6.65% 6.95% 9.01%
www.ask.com 4.09% 4.16% …

After almost 6 months of work by the entire wordpress community and some delayed release deadlines, wordpress 2.5 got released. you can download it here
Some important features of wordpress 2.5 are
Table layout has not been changed in this release, so many plugins are expected to work fine with 2.5.
Few-click plugin upgrades — if the plugins you use are part of the plugin directory then wordpress automatically downloads and installs the upgrade for you.
Friendlier visual post editor — The editor doesn’t mess with your code anymore. version 3.0 of …

Google Summer of Code 2008 is on! Google Summer of Code is a program that offers students stipends to write code for various open source projects. The programme which aims to Get more open source code created and released and Inspire young developers to begin participating in open source development, is in its fourth year.
Even though this is not a recruitment programme, Google will use the results of the program to help identify potential recruits.
To be eligible to apply to the programme you must be enrolled as a …

Have you ever felt that you have a killer idea, but you are not able to work on it due to lack of funding. And you think that writing business plans is not worth your time. Well here is a good news. You do NOT need a business plan to get funded.
Y Combinator is now accepting applications for the summer 2008 funding cycle. Here is what they say about their way of evaluating investment ideas.
How do we choose who to fund? The people in your group are what matter most …

A consortium of six international companies that includes Google and Bharti have executed agreements to build a high–bandwidth subsea fiber optic cable linking the United States and Japan. The construction of the new Trans–Pacific infrastructure will cost an estimated US$300 million.
The initial capacity is targeted to be available in the first quarter of 2010. It is expected to address broadband demand by providing much needed capacity to sustain the unprecedented growth in data and Internet traffic between Asia and the United States.
I find the news significant for 3 reasons
…

Pakistan’s government has banned access to the video-clip website YouTube because of anti-Islamic movies posted on the site, an official said yesterday.
The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority told the country’s 70 internet service providers that the popular website would be blocked until further notice.
However The News was speculating that the youtube.com blackout was connected to some other videos that had been uploaded to the site on Thursday. These videos implicated a certain political party in “election rigging” and showed party activists stamping ballot papers en masse.
Results from Google News Here

Yahoo’s board and users may not like microsoft. But yahoo’s shareholders love microsoft for sure. Since yahoo’s board has rejected microsoft’s offer, shareholders are starting to file case against yahoo.
Why are the shareholders so upset?
Before microsoft made the offer, yahoo’s shares were trading at 19$. So the 31$ offer by microsoft is almost 60% premium on the market price. More importantly yahoo has lot of cash on its balance sheet. The cash is equivalent to 12$ per share.
Now the market price of a share (19$) = cash on balance …

First of all I was thinking of a name for the MS Yahoo deal. Micro-ahoo doesn’t sound too good. Please suggest some creative names…Will be fun.
Anyways the Question is where does the deal lead us? How’s it gonna effect the today’s win-win situation of the Internet? Some say that MS has in a way accepted that it can’t beat Google on its own that’s why it needs Yahoo’s support. Now the question arises …even if MS accepts it’s defeat from Google, will it be able to defeat Google after the …

Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux Operating System, thinks that OS X Leopard is worse than Windows Vista in some aspects.
Geek enough to be interested?
Read on here.

Newyorktimes is reporting that IBM has asked close to 700 employees to leave after they failed to perform well in newly introduced performance tests. Asking people to join a company and then asking them to leave is absolutely criminal in my opinion. If a company has to perform some performance test, then they will be better off doing so before asking the person to join.
You can read the details here

Looks like all is not over for microsoft on internet. Yesterday Microsoft offered 44.6 billion dollar for buying Yahoo. Half of the amount shall be paid in cash and half will be paid in stock. You can read the entire offer details here. The bid price of 31$ per share represents more than 63% premium on the last closing price of yahoo shares. This may be master move by microsoft against google and because of anti-trust laws google shall not be eligible to bid for yahoo. It will be really …