Archive for the ‘Tech’ Category
Report: eBay has deal to sell Skype
September 1st, 2009 | 
Author: eBay is expected to announce Tuesday that it has reached a deal to sell its Internet telephone service, Skype, to a group of private investors, The New York Times reported late Monday.
The investment group will reportedly include Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital group launched in July by Marc Andreessen, the founder of Netscape and co-founder of Opsware, and Ben Horowitz, also co-founder of Opsware. A price was not revealed, but previous reports put eBay’s asking price for Skype at about $2 billion.
eBay representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Online auction giant eBay acquired Skype for $2.6 billion in 2005 with the plans to offer customers the ability to discuss their transactions in real-time. But over the course of the four years, eBay apparently found that its acquisition failed to provide the synergies it sought.
In 2007, eBay said it would take a $900 million so-called impairment write-down against the value of Skype, meaning that eBay had been forced to reassess the value of the Internet telephony company relative to its overall business. By recording a charge, the company essentially announced it had taken a loss on its original investment.
When eBay announced John Donahoe as its new CEO in 2008, Donahoe indicated that the company would take a year to evaluate the future of its online phone and video-conferencing service.
In April, eBay announced plans to spin off Skype, with an IPO in the first half of next year.
Meanwhile, reports surfaced that Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis were interested in repurchasing the company, with the aid of private equity firms KKR, Warburg Pincus, Elevation Partners, and Providence.
Source : http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10322833-94.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Posted in Communication, eBay, Internet, Tech | 
Tags: eBay, Skype, The New York Times | 
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Windows Mobile 6.5 phones coming Oct. 6
HTC’s Touch Pro2 is among the new phones expected to ship with Windows Mobile 6.5.
(Credit: Microsoft)
Microsoft is hoping that a new crop of phones this fall will help the company in its quest to stay relevant in the cell phone market.
The software maker said on Tuesday that the first phones running Windows Mobile 6.5 will launch worldwide on October 6 and will include phones running on AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon Wireless.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10322007-56.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Posted in cell phone, Communication, Tech, Windows, Windows Mobile |
Tags: AT&T, Sprint, Verizon Wireless, Windows, Windows Mobile |
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ZoneAlarm’s 2010 suites include encryption
Best known for its ZoneAlarm firewall, Check Point Software has announced updates for ZoneAlarm’s more full-featured security suites. Available in two versions, ZoneAlarm Internet Security 2010 gives users a robust firewall, antivirus and antispyware, and parental control package for $50, while ZoneAlarm Extreme Security 2010 adds Web browsing protection, system tune-up tools, backup options, and anti-phishing technology for $70.
ZoneAlarm is still best known for its firewall, but it currently offers users much more than that. See what’s available in ZoneAlarm Extreme Security 2010, which is similar to but has more features than ZoneAlarm Internet Security 2010.
Posted in antivirus, Internet, security, Tech |
Tags: antimalware, antispyware, antivirus, firewall, security, ZoneAlarm |
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High-end server chips breaking records
How would you like a single-chip microprocessor with more than four times the performance (on some applications) of Intel’s best Core i7?
Then consider that up to 32 of these chips can be directly connected to form a single server, achieving four times the built-in scalability of Intel’s next-generation Nehalem-EX processor.
That’s IBM’s widely anticipated Power7, which it described at last week’s Hot Chips conference. But if you’re interested, you’d better be prepared to spend a lot more than four times as much per chip. IBM isn’t talking about pricing, but large Power servers can cost more than $10,000 per processor.
IBM’s forthcoming Power7 server processor has eight cores, manages 32 threads, and includes 32MB of on-chip embedded DRAM cache. Power7 also has the highest levels of off-chip bandwidth ever achieved by a microprocessor.
64-bit Snow Leopard defaults to 32-bit kernel
Apple’s Snow Leopard operating system, released Friday, by default loads with a 32-bit kernel, despite running 64-bit applications.
While Mac OS X version 10.6 ships with a number of 64-bit native applications, the kernel itself defaults to 32-bit, unless the user holds down the “6” and “4” keys during boot time, at which point the 64-bit kernel is loaded. Only Apple’s X-Serve products, using Snow Leopard Server, boot into a 64-bit kernel by default.
“For the most part, everything that they experience on the Mac, from the 64-bit point of view, the applications, the operating system, is all going to be 64-bit,” Stuart Harris, software product marketing manager at Apple Australia said.
Harris said that at this stage there were very few things, such as device drivers, that required 64-bit mode at the kernel level but the option is available.
“But we’re trying to make it as smooth as possible, so people don’t end up finding that ‘oh, that doesn’t work’ because it’s not available yet,” he said.
Full Story :
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10320314-37.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
