TechDuty

New York Times has posted eight questions for Steve Jobs regarding its next iPhone release: 

• Hardware: Faster Surfing and What Else?
• Battery Life: Longer or Shorter?
• How Many Hardware Variations?
• What About the iPod Line?
• Behind the Scenes: What Is the Deal Between Apple and the Carriers?
• Software: What Can It Do?
• The Big Picture: How Big Can the iPhone Get?

Apparently, Apple has shipped boxes with Do Not Open till Monday labels on them.  You ca read the full post at NYT.

Recently, I came across a Lexical Translation technology developed at University of Washington in Seattle. It is based on the paper Lexical Translation with Application to Image Search on the Web. 

"This paper presents a novel approach to lexical translation based on the translation graph. A node in the graph represents a word in a particular language, and an edge denotes a word sense shared between words in a pair of languages."

The groundwork for this paper was lead by Oren Etzioni who also happened to be the brain behind the recent acquisition by Microsoft called Farecast.  Univeristy of Washington Tech Transfer has also created a demonstration site PanImages.org.  Would this technology revolutionize who the web is consumed?

New York Times reported -  "Carl C. Icahn told Yahoo on Friday that it should offer to sell the company to Microsoft for $34.375 a share, or about $48.7 billion. In his latest letter to Roy J. Bostock, Yahoo’s chairman, Mr. Icahn said that if Microsoft did not accept the offer “in a friendly and cooperative transaction,” he would push Yahoo to do a deal with Google if he won control of the Yahoo board."

This is a rather interesting development given thaat  Jerry Yang and team is admant on holding on Yahoo.  First they asked for more money then they had created various poison pills to make a merger too expensive for Microsoft.  Something to think about- May Yahoo has a real plan?

Complete Story

First it was Microsoft, now it is Intel.  The New York Times has reported today that "The Federal Trade Commission has opened a formal antitrust investigation of Intel, the world’s largest maker of computer microprocessors, for anticompetitive conduct, government officials and lawyers involved in the proceeding said Friday".

Seems like AMD Intel's main competitor is having its way in hurting Intel successfully.  Earlier this week South Korea ordered Intel to pay $25M in fines.  Japan and Europe are also on Intel's case for the same reasons.

Just a few years ago, having a web based personal assistant simply seemed to be a hype.  But today one of them got $100 million in funding. The company called Rearden commerce has a product called The Rearden Personal Assistant which helps people find and purchase the services they need. These services include travel planning, dining reservations, package shipping, web conferencing, event tickets, and more. They also provides people with the tools they need to manage those services, like calendar and address book integration, email invites, and mobile alerts.  The funding came from investors including JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE: JPM) and American Express (NYSE: AXP) with participation from Oak Investment Partners and Foundation Capital. 

Link to full press release.

Came across this rather interesting news about Broadcom CEO Henry T. Nicholas III.    He has been indicted for drugging technology executives and customer service representatives. (see indictment docs).  According the the story  "Broadcom Corp. co-founder Henry T. Nicholas III was indicted on federal narcotics charges that include allegations he slipped ecstasy into the drinks of business associates, maintained a drug warehouse and concealed his illegal conduct with bribes and death threats."

So I decided to do some research on Mr. Nicholas's background.  According to this page on Wikipedia, "Dr. Nicholas lived in Glendale, Ohio until he was 4 years old. His father was an attorney with the IRS and his mother was a teacher and later an administrator at the Princeton School district in theatre. At that time, his parents divorced and he moved with his mother (Marcella) and sister (Marsalee) to Los Angeles where his mother planned to get her Masters degree in drama from UCLA. It was at UCLA that she met Bob Leach, her second husband, and Nick’s “real dad.” Dr. Nicholas attended elementary schools in Malibu and Santa Monica High School."

"Dr. Nicholas received a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles, after having attended the United States Air Force Academy previously and then both a Masters Degree and Ph.d. in Electrical Engineering from UCLA. It was at UCLA that Dr. Nicholas met Dr. Henry Samueli, his future partner".

So, what is really interesting here is that this guy's father was an attorney yet he didn't think that it was necessary to follow the law.   Makes me wonder about the psychology when someone who is a billionaire gets involved into such illegal activities.  Is it just the feeling of being invincible? 

Broadcom Corporate Site