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.

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.

VirtualLogix, a real-time virtualization software startup, has received an equity investment from Motorola.

The amount was not disclosed but Motorola’s investment follows similar moves by companies such as Intel, Cisco Systems, and Texas Instruments, which previously invested in VirtualLogix.

VirtualLogix allows cell phone manufacturers to create mobile devices that run multiple operating systems, sharing the resources in an easier and more efficient way.

VirtualLogix VLX for Mobile Handsets is a high-performance, real-time virtualization solution that is targeted at wireless devices using ARM core-based system-on-a-chip (SoC). VLX for Mobile Handsets allows multiple execution environments to simultaneously run on a single ARM processor core. The secure, fault tolerant architecture enables the isolation of each execution environment, allowing phone services, trusted services or device management functions to run unaffected by potential corruptions in an open operating system (OS) such as Linux and its applications.

Virtualization software enables smart phone functionality to be quickly introduced using feature phone architecture by enabling existing modem software and real-time operating system (RTOS) to co-exist with the open OS and its applications on the same processor core.

VLX for Mobile Handsets maintains real-time operating system (RTOS) performance guarantees, allowing handset manufacturers and wireless operators to deliver more reliable, lower-cost mobile phones with advanced features to the mass market. [VirtualLogix]

As mobile devices proliferate with continued short life duration, “demand for simplified product designs that allow dynamic mobile experiences will intensify,” stated Reese Schroeder, managing director of Motorola Ventures, when announcing the investment.

So far, programmers had to code every application (social networking services, games, email or any other features) for each of the different operating systems, including Windows Mobile, Symbian, or Google’s Android. But with virtualization, Motorola could for instance have a Web-browsing application written for one system, an e-mail application for another, and calling features designed for a third OS, and gracefully integrate them onto one single phone.

Jaxtr, a social communications startup that let users link their phones to the web, is now providing a service that allows sending free SMS internationally, without restrictions, whether or not the recipient is a Jaxtr member.

Recipients can reply directly with their cell phones, or click on a link, sign up to Jaxtr and send a free reply through their cell phone’s Web browser.

The service allows text-messaging directly from the member’s home page to cell phones in 38 countries. Jaxtr’s basic membership is free and includes access to the new international SMS service.

Jaxtr’s new service is ad-supported although they plan to incorporate a premium service for a fee in the future.

Mobile phone calls will be allowed on planes flying in European airspace under new rules established by the European Commission.

The decision took three years of hearings and negotiations, and pressure from business travelers, airlines and manufacturers of new in-flight mobile phone systems, but Europe now has a standardized code to match up technical and licensing requirements across borders.

However, at this time only 6 passengers on any given flight can get a signal at the same time, although there are plans to expand it to 12.

Airlines are currently thinking of ways to offer the new service. Among the ideas considered: mobile-free sections of the aircraft, or use at limited points in the flight.

Cell phones will have to be switched off during takeoff and landing, and will not operate over countries that prohibit passengers from using their cellphones in during flights.

To ensure that the phone calls don’t interfere with the airplane equipment, they will be linked to the ground through a mini cellular network stored in an overhead luggage compartment.

The network’s purpose is to create an area of coverage in the aircraft that connects, via a satellite, to mobile networks on the ground. Cell phone companies are expected to establish roaming rates as if they were international calls; depending on the provider, these could range from €2 to €3 per minute ($3.2 to $4.8).

A neuro-technology company called Emotiv has unveiled a revolutionary personal interface for human computer interaction that makes it possible for video games to be controlled and influenced by the player’s mind.

Emotiv Systems, headquartered in San Francisco, California, was founded in 2003 by four award-winning scientists and executives: internationally recognized neuroscientist Professor Allan Snyder, chip-design pioneer Neil Weste, and technology entrepreneurs Tan Le and Nam Do. These founders all shared the same inspiring vision: to introduce the immediacy of thought to the human-machine dialogue. Together they have developed a technology that utterly transforms the way we interact with computers.

While Emotiv is currently focusing on the electronic gaming industry, the applications for the Emotiv EPOC™ technology and interface span an amazing variety of potential industries — interactive television, accessibility design, market research, medicine, even security. Plans for introducing Emotiv into these and other broad realms are already in the works. [Emotiv]

 

The neuroheadset prototype, called Emotiv EPOC, uses a set of sensors to tune into electric signals produced naturally by the brain to perceive player thoughts, feelings and expressions. It connects via wireless with all gaming platforms, from PCs to consoles.

The device will be available later this year and will cost $299. It will be sold with a range of games designed by Emotiv, but users will be able to use it with existing PC games.

Yahoo has announced a partnership with rival Google to start testing Google-generated ads in its website during a period of two weeks. A starting date was not specified.

The test will involve placing Google search ads to about 3% of the queries made in the U.S. through Yahoo’s search engine. After the two-week trial, Yahoo will evaluate whether it generates more revenue by outsourcing ads from Google or through its own ad sales system.

Yahoo’s move is clearly an attempt to show Microsoft that it has other options besides taking its initial bid of $42 billion (or $31a share). Over the weekend, Microsoft set a three-week deadline for Yahoo to begin negotiations, a demand Yahoo declined by restating its contention the offer undervalues the company.

Microsoft fired back saying that a deal between Yahoo and Google would make the search market less competitive.

Indeed, according to ComScore’s MediaMetrix data, Yahoo’s market share continues to drop and accounts to 21.6% in February. In the same way, Microsoft’s share is also down to 9.6% for the month of February. In the meantime, Google’s share has grown to 59.2% for the same time period. If a Google-Yahoo alliance occurred, it would represent a total of about 81% of the total search market.