Research In Motion (RIM) has unveiled its newest smartphone, the BlackBerry 9000, called BlackBerry Bold in reference to its gorgeous display and its symbol of accomplishment and aspiration.

For customers seeking a smartphone that makes a bold statement, Research In Motion (RIM) introduced the admirable BlackBerry® Bold™ smartphone. Crafted from premium materials, inside and out, that radiate elegance with a dramatic presence, the BlackBerry Bold is designed to give business professionals and power users unprecedented functionality and performance in an intuitive BlackBerry® smartphone. It is the first BlackBerry smartphone to support tri-band HSDPA high-speed networks around the world and comes with integrated GPS and Wi-Fi®, as well as a rich set of multimedia capabilities. From its lustrous black exterior, satin chrome finished frame and stylish leather-like backplate, to its stunning display, sophisticated user interface and newly designed full-QWERTY* keyboard, the BlackBerry Bold smartphone is a symbol of accomplishment and aspiration. [RIM Press]

BlackBerry Bold Smartphone features:

• Wi-Fi (802.11a/b/g) and Bluetooth 2.0 connectivity
• 480 x 320 displaywith 65,000 colors
• 624MHz Intel PXA270/Marvell Tavor PXA930 mobile processor
• 128 MB Flash memory plus 1 GB on-board storage memory, as well as a microSD/SDHC memory card slot
• Runs BlackBerry OS 4.6
• Applications include phone, email, messaging, organizer and browser and GPS
• DataViz® Documents to Go® suite preloaded to download Word, Excel or PowerPoint files and edit them directly on the handset.
• MP3, WMA, AAC, DivX4 and WMV3 codec support
• 2MP camera with flash
• 4.5 x 2.6 x 0.55-inches, 4.7 ounces
• Battery life: 5 hours of talk time, and 13 days on standby time

Price for the new BlackBerry Bold smartphone was not disclosed but it is scheduled to be available from wireless carriers around the world beginning this summer.

Research In Motion is still the smartphone market leader although it is facing increasing competition from Apple’s iPhone.

Powerset, the startup founded in 2005 with the objective of challenging Google with the development of an improved search engine, made its official launch to the public today.

As we anticipated last February, Powerset’s search engine, which uses “natural language” to organize and search documents, will initially only index content from Wikipedia.

Powerset created an index of Wikipedia by studying the meaning of entire sentences rather than the relationship between words. Users will be able to type language queries in the form of a question instead of conventional keyword searches and quickly obtain information from many different sources.

Exceeding initial sales expectations, Take-Two Interactive said today that its popular video game Grand Theft Auto IV has officially surpassed all-time entertainment records for day one and week one sales by dollar value.

Released on Tuesday, April 29th, Grand Theft Auto IV has sold through to consumers approximately 6 million units globally with an estimated retail value of more than $500 million in the first week. Grand Theft Auto IV sold approximately 3.6 million units on its opening day with a retail value of approximately $310 million globally.

Headquartered in New York City, Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. is a global developer, marketer, distributor and publisher of interactive entertainment software games for the PC, PLAYSTATION®3 and PlayStation®2 computer entertainment systems, PSP® (PlayStation®Portable) system, Xbox 360® and Xbox® video game and entertainment systems from Microsoft, Wii™, Nintendo GameCube™, Nintendo DS™ and Game Boy® Advance. The Company publishes and develops products through its wholly owned labels Rockstar Games, 2K Games, 2K Sports and 2K Play, and distributes software, hardware and accessories in North America through its Jack of All Games subsidiary. Take-Two’s common stock is publicly traded on NASDAQ under the symbol TTWO. [Take2Games]

A Silicon Valley startup called Tesla Motors designs and manufactures high-performance, highly efficient electric sports cars. Tesla Motors cars not only produce zero-emission, they combine style, acceleration and advanced technologies that make them among the fastest and most energy-efficient cars on the road.

Tesla Motors, which unveiled its electric sports car Roadster in 2006 and went into production last month, said it has already pre-sold all the 600 Roadsters the company planned to produce in 2008. The company is now taking orders of the 1,500 cars it plans to produce for 2009.

The Roadster car was developed with more than $40 million of venture capital from investors such as Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The 2-seat car goes from 0 to 60 mph in under 4 seconds and reaches a top speed of 125 mph. It ranges about 220 miles on one charge and can be fully recharged like a cell phone in about 3.5 hours. The 2009 Roadster base price is $109,000.

Tesla Motors recently opened its first store in Los Angeles and plans to open another one in Silicon Valley in the next 2 months. More stores will also be opened within the next year in Chicago and New York as well as Europe.

Adobe Systems announced it will start licensing its Adobe Flash Player software for mobiles devices at no cost to improve the mobile Internet experience.

The project, called the Open Screen Project, is supported by a group of industry leaders, including ARM, Chunghwa Telecom, Cisco, Intel, LG Electronics, Marvell, Motorola, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics, Sony Ericsson, Toshiba and Verizon Wireless. The project is dedicated to driving rich Internet experiences across televisions, personal computers, mobile devices, and consumer electronics. Also supporting the Open Screen Project are several content providers, including BBC, MTV Networks, and NBC Universal, who seek to reliably deliver rich Web and video experiences live and on-demand across a variety of devices.

The Open Screen Project is working to enable a consistent runtime environment — taking advantage of Adobe® Flash® Player and, in the future, Adobe AIR™ — that will remove barriers for developers and designers as they publish content and applications across desktops and devices, including phones, mobile Internet devices (MIDs), and set top boxes. The Open Screen Project will address potential technology fragmentation by enabling the runtime technology to be updated seamlessly over the air on mobile devices. The consistent runtime environment is intended to provide optimal performance across a variety of operating systems and devices, and ultimately provide the best experience to consumers. [Adobe PR]

According to Adobe, its Flash Player currently reaches over 98% of Internet-enabled computers and more than a half billion handsets and mobile devices. The company also said it is working on a version of Flash for the popular Apple iPhone.

Microsoft has officially withdrawn its bid to acquire Yahoo in a letter that Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer sent today to Yahoo’s Jerry Yang.

In a final meeting that took place today between Jerry Yang and David Filo from Yahoo and Steve Ballmer and Steve Johnson from Microsoft, Yahoo stated that the lowest price they would accept was $37 per share and Microsoft reported that they would not go over $33 a share. The offer was withdrawn shortly after during a phone call conversation between the CEOs.

Letter from Steve Ballmer to Jerry Yang:

May 3, 2008

Mr. Jerry Yang
CEO and Chief Yahoo
Yahoo! Inc.
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94089

Dear Jerry:

After over three months, we have reached the conclusion of the process regarding a possible combination of Microsoft and Yahoo!.

I first want to convey my personal thanks to you, your management team, and Yahoo!’s Board of Directors for your consideration of our proposal. I appreciate the time and attention all of you have given to this matter, and I especially appreciate the time that you have invested personally. I feel that our discussions this week have been particularly useful, providing me for the first time with real clarity on what is and is not possible.

I am disappointed that Yahoo! has not moved towards accepting our offer. I first called you with our offer on January 31 because I believed that a combination of our two companies would have created real value for our respective shareholders and would have provided consumers, publishers, and advertisers with greater innovation and choice in the marketplace. Our decision to offer a 62 percent premium at that time reflected the strength of these convictions.

In our conversations this week, we conveyed our willingness to raise our offer to $33.00 per share, reflecting again our belief in this collective opportunity. This increase would have added approximately another $5 billion of value to your shareholders, compared to the current value of our initial offer. It also would have reflected a premium of over 70 percent compared to the price at which your stock closed on January 31. Yet it has proven insufficient, as your final position insisted on Microsoft paying yet another $5 billion or more, or at least another $4 per share above our $33.00 offer.

Also, after giving this week’s conversations further thought, it is clear to me that it is not sensible for Microsoft to take our offer directly to your shareholders. This approach would necessarily involve a protracted proxy contest and eventually an exchange offer. Our discussions with you have led us to conclude that, in the interim, you would take steps that would make Yahoo! undesirable as an acquisition for Microsoft.

We regard with particular concern your apparent planning to respond to a “hostile” bid by pursuing a new arrangement that would involve or lead to the outsourcing to Google of key paid Internet search terms offered by Yahoo! today. In our view, such an arrangement with the dominant search provider would make an acquisition of Yahoo! undesirable to us for a number of reasons:

— First, it would fundamentally undermine Yahoo!’s own strategy and long-term viability by encouraging advertisers to use Google as opposed to your Panama paid search system. This would also fragment your search advertising and display advertising strategies and the ecosystem surrounding them. This would undermine the reliance on your display advertising business to fuel future growth.

— Given this, it would impair Yahoo’s ability to retain the talented engineers working on advertising systems that are important to our interest in a combination of our companies.

— In addition, it would raise a host of regulatory and legal problems that no acquirer, including Microsoft, would want to inherit. Among other things, this would consolidate market share with the already-dominant paid search provider in a manner that would reduce competition and choice in the marketplace.

— This would also effectively enable Google to set the prices for key search terms on both their and your search platforms and, in the process, raise prices charged to advertisers on Yahoo. In addition to whatever resulting legal problems, this seems unwise from a business perspective unless in fact one simply wishes to use this as a vehicle to exit the paid search business in favour of Google.

— It could foreclose any chance of a combination with any other search provider that is not already relying on Google’s search services.

Accordingly, your apparent plan to pursue such an arrangement in the event of a proxy contest or exchange offer leads me to the firm decision not to pursue such a path. Instead, I hereby formally withdraw Microsoft’s proposal to acquire Yahoo!.

We will move forward and will continue to innovate and grow our business at Microsoft with the talented team we have in place and potentially through strategic transactions with other business partners.

I still believe even today that our offer remains the only alternative put forward that provides your stockholders full and fair value for their shares. By failing to reach an agreement with us, you and your stockholders have left significant value on the table.

But clearly a deal is not to be.

Thank you again for the time we have spent together discussing this.

Sincerely yours,
/s/ Steven A. Ballmer

Steven A. Ballmer
Chief Executive Officer
Microsoft Corporation

Press Release:

REDMOND, Wash., May 3 — Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) today announced that it has withdrawn its proposal to acquire Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO).

“We continue to believe that our proposed acquisition made sense for Microsoft, Yahoo! and the market as a whole. Our goal in pursuing a combination with Yahoo! was to provide greater choice and innovation in the marketplace and create real value for our respective stockholders and employees,” said Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer of Microsoft.

“Despite our best efforts, including raising our bid by roughly $5 billion, Yahoo! has not moved toward accepting our offer. After careful consideration, we believe the economics demanded by Yahoo! do not make sense for us, and it is in the best interests of Microsoft stockholders, employees and other stakeholders to withdraw our proposal,” said Ballmer.

“We have a talented team in place and a compelling plan to grow our business through innovative new services and strategic transactions with other business partners. While Yahoo! would have accelerated our strategy, I am confident that we can continue to move forward toward our goals,” Ballmer said.

“We are investing heavily in new tools and Web experiences, we have dramatically improved our search performance and advertiser satisfaction, and we will continue to build our scale through organic growth and partnerships,” said Kevin Johnson, Microsoft president for platforms and services.

The Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and the Xerox Research Centre of Canada are teaming up to test an innovative type of erasable paper and a complementary printer that produce documents that disappear after 16 to 24 hours.

This type of erasable paper, also known as a transient document, is exactly like regular printer paper but coated with photosensitive chemicals that change color when exposed to light.

The printer prints by exposing the paper to a UVB light source. Images remain on the erasable paper for eight hours before progressively fading away. Running the paper through the printer will also erase the current image, as heat is applied in the printer, which stimulates the erasing process.

Researchers are also developing a pen that writes on the erasable paper by using an internal light source.

The new experimental printing technology eliminates the need for ink and toners, which contribute significantly to reduce printing costs. However, the biggest impact will be the benefit to the environment since it could lead to significant reduction in paper and energy use.

The paper and printer could be out in the market in the next few years.