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But as reported Tuesday, Icahn’s proxy fight is what’s keeping the controversial severance plans in play.

So, what are his options?

On Wednesday, in a letter sent to Yahoo’s chairman, Icahn called on Yahoo’s board of directors to rescind the company’s controversial employee severance plans, fearing it was an impediment to a Microsoft buyout deal.

C. Aim for something less than majority control over Yahoo’s board, which means the employee severance plan could be pulled 30 days after the shareholders’ meeting.
Icahn, who is currently running a proxy slate to fill all positions on Yahoo’s board, would be leaving that outcome up to Yahoo shareholders, who will be electing the company’s next board at the August 1 meeting.

Billionaire investor Carl Icahn is in a bit of a conundrum.

Icahn’s proxy fight is considered a “potential change in control,” which means Yahoo’s board can’t voluntarily remove the severance plans, attorneys say.

B. Get a hearing before the Delaware Chancery Court and ask the judge to invalidate Yahoo’s employee severance plan. Icahn, should he go this route, may want to act long before the August 1 meeting, because if his proxy slate is successful in winning a majority of the board seats, it would trigger the severance plans for the next two years.

Which option do you think Icahn will take?

A. Give up the proxy fight, wait for 30 days to pass, then Yahoo’s board can withdraw the severance plan. Whether this would all be done before the August 1 shareholders’ meeting, when Icahn was going to run his dissident slate against Yahoo’s current board, is another matter. Obviously, this scenario is highly unlikely.

Update:

We found a press release in an unexpected Inbox folder that gives a few more details on Microsoft’s announcements. All of the user-matching, cross-platform multiplayer, and other formerly-premium services via the Games for Windows Live Gold Membership should now be free (effective today, says Microsoft). The digital distribution comes this fall, along with a revamped user-interface.

The release also features the official announcement from Microsoft of DirectX 11. Features include support for GPU computing, and better use of multicore CPUs, among others.

Original post:

Free admission.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

We have an interview with Microsoft’s Kevin Unangst in a few hours, so we’ll be able to find out more shortly, but the basic news is that Microsoft has announced that it will be adding digital distribution to its Games for Windows Live program. It also plans to shed all user fees connected to its Games for Windows Live, whose Gold membership level previously required a $7.99-a-month fee for some advanced services.

Microsoft hinted at its plans to sell online game downloads a few months ago. Combined with no more user fees (which we’re not sure anyone actually paid to begin with), Games for Windows Live becomes a more direct competitor to Valve’s Steam service.

Thanks, Shack, for the heads up.

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The World Economic Forum opened today with a call for more collaborative innovation. Tim O’Reilly talks about software above the layer of a single device, but the attendees in Davos are being asked to consider innovation above the layer of a single developer/person/group.

Imagine that.

“‘The Power of Collaborative Innovation’ is the answer to all the big global challenges we are facing,” said Co-Chair Tony Blair, [former] Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1997-2007).

The sessions have titles like “Business: Competing While Collaborating.” I would assume the conference organizers have something more in mind than patent schemes to stripmine and undermine the rising open-source community. After all, Bill Gates has moved on to charitable work from his former work. But I could be wrong.

We’ve given a lot of pixels to electric cars recently, especially the hot Tesla Roadster. But there’s one electric car that can dust the Tesla and all the others off the line. It’s a 1972 Datsun.

Meet the White Zombie from Plasma Boy Racing. John Wayland of Portland, Ore., made the unassuming small
car in his garage as a project, and now the custom-made electric powerhouse is taking the drag strips by storm. In the video above, it toasts a bad-ass-looking Corvette, much to the ‘vette owner’s chagrin.

We’re not sure how practical a car like this would be, as it has to be recharged after each heat, but man it looks like it’d be fun to drive.

There’s also an option for a Blu-ray burner drive, but Dell doesn’t seem to be ready to disclose that price just yet.

Things are heating up in the Blu-ray laptop sector. Last week, Asus unveiled its M50 laptop, which has an integrated Blu-ray player, though it did not offer pricing details at the time.

The Inspiron 1525 made its debut at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show. The laptop features a 15-inch screen and an HDMI port for connecting to high-resolution displays and HDTVs. (Check out CNET’s review of the Inspiron 1525.)

The Inspiron 1525 line is a colorful crew.

The end of the next-generation DVD format battle may not mean a long victory lap for inflated Blu-ray prices after all.

(Credit:
Dell)

But even at a relatively low price, is Blu-ray a bargain on a laptop? Maybe not. The HD drive technology seems to put a serious hurt on battery life.

Dell, which has more than a little clout in the PC market, on Friday announced that consumers can now spend less than $1,000 to get a Blu-ray-equipped laptop. More specifically, the Round Rock, Texas, company said that it’s offering a Blu-ray disc playback option with its Inspiron 1525 laptops starting at $879.

Evri creates profile pages, which are like search results, that include a variety of lenses for an entity, such as top connections (entities most closely associated with the target entity), people, location, products, organizations, and events.

Evri is expected to go into beta testing in a month, Roseman said. Some of the processing will be done via Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud facility. He noted that scaling to cover more of the Web is very hard. Evri will be ad-supported and will not charge content partners. “We will give partners all the revenue,” Roseman said. “We want to build the network and get people to use Evri.”

Seattle-based Evri has 36 people, mostly engineers, and is wholly funded by Vulcan Capital. So far Vulcan has poured about $8 million into the company, including the acquisition of some technology and engineering talent from Insightful, Roseman said. The company plans to go for Series A funding round this year.

Evri also is planning to offer content publishers widgets that produce related content for a particular page, similar to what Sphere (recently acquired by AOL), Inform, and Aggregate Knowledge provide.

The profile pages are somewhat like what you get from Mahalo, which is human-powered, but closer to Powerset, Hakia, Twine, and and other new services that leverage semantic and natural language processing technologies to map concepts and meaning rather than keywords.

Evri profile pages show five top connections as a starting point for drilling down into the related content and concepts.

Evri has a new twist on content navigation and discovery. Debuting Wednesday at D6, Evri is not a search engine, according to CEO Neil Roseman, but a “data graph of the Web” that leads to “incremental content engagement.”

Click here for full coverage of the D: All Things Digital conference.

Roseman is focusing Evri as a consumer product. He spent 10 years at Amazon working on several projects, including searching inside books, the MP3 store, and the server side of the Kindle reader. Currently, Evri has parsed less than 1 percent of the Web, working with 20,000 to 30,000 top-level domains and some full-text providers. “Once we distribute the widget to content providers, we will incrementally add more to our deep parsing, and figure out what drives the most page views on a daily basis and build the network over time,” Roseman said.

“What doesn’t work well is when you get to other places on the Web,” Roseman told me. “We read sentences, extracting the subject, objects and verbs, and map to other content on the Web.” Evri uses entity extraction, natural language processing, statistical analysis, and other technologies to create relevant connections based on meaning and concepts without human intervention.

Investors may want to keep in mind this one sentence in the Wall Street Journal report:

According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, Microsoft has been sidling up to other companies about teaming up to make a bid for Yahoo, a move that would result in a breakup of the Internet search pioneer, with Microsoft retaining the search portion of Yahoo’s business.

Update at 10:40 a.m. PDT, with analyst report on potential break-up of Yahoo and updated stock performance

“We find a breakup would not yield compelling upside from the current stock price,” the research report states.

Some of the people familiar with these talks say they are preliminary and unlikely to result in a deal with Yahoo.

Yahoo shares shot up 6 percent in morning trading Wednesday, on word that Microsoft may seek partners to make another bid for the company’s search business.

A potential break up of Yahoo’s business would likely result in Microsoft acquiring Yahoo’s search engine, while a large media company could merge its Internet properties with Yahoo, the report states. Yahoo’s Asia assets and investments, meanwhile, could be spun off or sold.

Microsoft reportedly is talking to Time Warner and News Corp. about this arrangement, giving investors a sense of deja vu. Time Warner and News Corp. were among the white knights Yahoo had reportedly sought out after Microsoft announced its unsolicited bid.

The stock price jumped 6.3 percent to $21.48 a share early Wednesday, just a day after Yahoo’s shares fell below $20 to come very near the level where they were trading prior to the start of Microsoft’s buyout bid in February.

Meanwhile, analysts Clay and Fred Moran of the Stanford Group note in a research report Wednesday that breaking Yahoo’s business is unlikely to “drive value” for Yahoo shareholders.

Should such a breakup occur, Stanford Group’s “sum-of-the-parts” assessment would give Yahoo a value of $20 to $24 a share.

The keen interest in the Office file format comes amid two fresh EU antitrust probes, announced last month. One is examining Microsoft’s Web browser; the other is looking broadly at how well Microsoft’s products, including Office, work with those of competitors.

Ya think?

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European Union antitrust officials have asked Microsoft for information about its activities in the standards-setting process — an early step in an investigation — and are stepping up scrutiny of the issue, according to people familiar with the matter. The file format in question is computer code that describes how a document such as a letter or spreadsheet is digitally stored.

In what now appears to be a near daily experience, the European Union is investigating Microsoft for antitrust violations related to its attempts to get its Open Office XML file format standard accepted as an international “standard.” As the argument goes, Microsoft apparently fought hard to get OOXML ratified as a standard.

I don’t think anyone comes out of this inquiry looking clean. Hopefully, the EU will take some time to look at the suggested “standard” itself, since OOXML itself is the ugliest thing of all in the whole fracas.

I think there’s little doubt that Microsoft used anticompetitive measures to get OOXML approved (only to fail in the end). But the same is almost certainly true of the other side (IBM et al.). Microsoft has accused IBM of playing dirty. It is probably right.

Miner returned often to the theme of openness during his 20-minute presentation on Android, noting that “once you start talking open, you don’t come back from that.” He also emphasized that no one party would control Android, in that Google plans to release the code for the operating system under an open-source license.

Google's Rich Miner had little new to say about Android, the company's almost-live mobile operating system, during a conference in San Francisco on Thursday.

But Google plans to make sure that the first Android customers know who designed their phone’s software. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the first Android phones will emphasize Google’s brand on the handset. Miner did not take questions from the audience following his keynote speech, and refused to answer questions regarding the report outside the auditorium following the conclusion of his talk.

Google has spent almost a year finalizing its plans for Android, a Linux-based combination of nuts-and-bolts software with applications and a user interface designed to run mobile phones. The idea is to give the mobile industry an open operating system that they can use as they see fit without breaking application compatibility across a wide variety of handsets.

(Credit:
Tom Krazit/CNET News)

Google’s Rich Miner had nothing new to share Thursday with Mobilize attendees regarding the company’s Android software for mobile phones, except that it will be really, really cool.

Android is set to make its debut next week in the form of an HTC handset running on T-Mobile’s network, but Miner ran through Google’s standard pitch for Android in San Francisco for an audience of mobile industry insiders already very familiar with Android’s potential. He painted Android as the answer to the industry’s search for a truly open operating system that erases the headaches of the past.

Click here for full coverage of Google Android

(Credit: Hitwise)

One of the really great things about the online medium, that makes it fundamentally different from broadcast and print, is that you don’t have to perform surveys or polls or browser intercepts to get an idea of who’s doing what, when, or where. You can measure usage at the source. Some company is going to step up to the plate and figure a way to collect this data from site publishers, audit it, and package it in a way that really works. I would place my bets on Google (using Google Analytics as the Trojan horse to gather the data) to be the service that becomes the actual measurement broker for Web 2.0. I really don’t see the current media survey companies becoming more relevant as the Web, and how users interact with it, gets more complex.

You’ve got to start somewhere, though, so I don’t quite understand why anyone is either surprised or worried that Twitter is mostly unknown outside of Silicon Valley. It’s a compelling social service and it has every chance to enter the mainstream.

I’m already dissatisfied with Internet measurement companies like Comscore and Nielsen/NetRatings, which use incomplete sampling techniques to measure users and page views. Neither do they do a good job of taking into consideration users’ interactivity on Ajax-heavy or Flash-based sites, nor do they measure user contribution on individual social sites or blogs (although Avenue A | Razorfish has interesting Web-wide data on social participation).

But this post is not really about Twitter. It’s about my favorite topic of late, APIs. The Hitwise analysts recognize that their numbers don’t take into account non-site access to Twitter. Indeed, according to clever ReadWriteWeb research, 44 percent of all Twitter posts come from sources other than the Web site. They’re from services like Twhirl which rely on the Twitter API, and the IM interface, which when used doesn’t count towards Web utilization. As I’ve said (see “How I got burned by Twitter’s API, why it matters, and how to fix it”), Twitter has got to get its hack-job of an API converted into a serious platform if the service is to grow into a mainstream app.

Ultimately, surveys for measuring traffic are all flawed, or at best incomplete. And I do not buy the common argument that the flaws are the same for each measured site, so you can use the data for comparative purposes at least.

The beginning of Twitter's growth, or the end?

Twitter is, I believe, unique among social platforms in its reliance on APIs and non-Web access to its service. But as more Web 2.0 services open up and as developers start to build better interfaces for them (like Viewzi is doing for search engines and AlertThingy does for Friendfeed), the story of Twitter’s multiple access methods will become more typical. And the need for measurement companies to track real service usage will become critical.

Hitwise released research this week reporting that Twitter had a nice relative growth spurt this year. The key word is relative. The site grew from a market share of a whopping 0.0005 percent (U.S. Internet visits to Twitter.com) to 0.0016 percent in April. That places the Twitter.com site at number 439 on the list of social networks. I’ll bet if you try to name the 438 social nets above Twitter you’ll run out of gas well before you hit 50.