TechPortal

Google is expected to unveil a tool Tuesday that measures Internet use to help advertisers identify the best places to buy ads that will reach its target audience, according to a report Monday on the Wall Street Journal Web site.

The measurement tools, which will be offered to advertisers and their agencies for free, will compete with services offered by established leaders Nielsen and ComScore. While those services base their estimations on selective surveys or customer panels, Google’s results would be based on data collected from Web servers, providing a deeper and broader picture of Internet behavior, the newspaper reported. By giving away the new tool, Google could attract more advertising business.

The news follows Google’s announcement last week that Google Trends had unveiled a new service that lets users type in specific domains and compare basic traffic information about any .com site using nothing more than organic user searches. Included are daily traffic numbers in users (sent from Google search), where in the world the users are coming from, and related sites that were either searched for or visited in that same session.

After news of the planned service hit the Web, ComScore shares fell $1.69, or 6.1 percent, to $26 after-hours trading. Nielsen is a privately owned company.

Source : CNET News

Chipmakers have been applying lessons learned in mobile computing to servers in an effort to increase efficiency by lowering power consumption. But a noted Google engineer threw some cold water on the approach on Monday, arguing the two styles of computing are too different.
“The data center is a different device than the key targets for mobile electronics, laptops, and mobile devices,” said Luis Barroso, a Google engineer who closely studies the company’s power consumption, speaking at the O’Reilly Velocity conference here.

And naturally, with at least hundreds of thousands of servers in operation and its data centers placed near power plants to cut electricity costs, Google is trying to get computing equipment makers more excited about efficiency.

“Maybe if you call this a land-held computer, perhaps they’ll help us,” he quipped, showing an aerial view of a sprawling Google data center.

The basic problem is that mobile devices and servers have different modes of activity.

Mobile devices have been improving through better exploitation of the fact that they spend a lot of time dormant with occasional bursts of activity. That lets processors and other electronics save power by spending most time in low-power sleep modes, then snapping awake for peak-power high-performance modes when necessary.

Google’s servers, though, have the opposite type of activity: they spend most of their time doing modest amounts of work, with frenzied moments of peak activity and complete lulls a rarity, Barroso said. The measurements are based on measurements of about 5,000 servers performing four different Google applications, he added.

The company’s servers simply can’t go to sleep, he said. Each machine is “rarely fully idle,” he said. “The fraction of time the servers are actually doing exactly nothing is very small.”

Thus, Google is urging electronics designers to create products that more gracefully reduce power demands as activity diminishes. Servers naturally consume peak power at peak activity, but what’s bad is that they still consume about half peak power when at zero activity.

Processors have gotten a bad rap for squandering ever more energy–indeed, Barroso himself, once a chip designer for Digital Equipment, has expressed such concerns. But chips actually are better than hard drives, memory, and network adapters at reducing power consumption during periods of moderate activity.

Some sophisticated hard drives, for example, can slow down their rotational speed to save power during periods of lower activity. However, “They need to bump to higher RPM to do something useful,” to read and write, he said, unlike processors, which can actually still process data when in low-activity modes.

Source: CNET News

And you thought a deal between Microsoft and Yahoo was over and done with?

Not so fast.

Microsoft has signaled that it is willing to sweeten its previous offer for a partial buyout of Yahoo’s search business, according to one major investor who has been in contact with both parties.

Neither Microsoft nor Yahoo had immediate comment.

After the termination of discussions with Microsoft less than two weeks ago, Yahoo’s board said in a statement that a sale leaving the company without an independent search business “would not be in the best interests of Yahoo stockholders.”

But the source noted that several of Yahoo’s nine board members, including its chairman, Roy Bostock, have since indicated a willingness to hold further discussions with Microsoft on a possible deal to sell the search operations.

“When Microsoft made its offer to acquire Yahoo’s search business, Yahoo rejected the offer outright. There was no negotiating beyond the ($9 billion offer) Microsoft was offering,” the source said.

After the Microsoft negotiations collapsed, Yahoo struck a search advertising outsourcing deal with Google. But that hasn’t impressed shareholders. Shares of Yahoo, which traded at $23.52 the day of the Google announcement, closed at $21.45 on Monday.

Meanwhile, rumors of an impending Yahoo reorganization–a big one that could come as early as this week–continue to swirl.

Investors clamoring for change have pointed to the approximately 35 percent decline in Yahoo’s share price since Microsoft’s $33 per share offer to acquire all of Yahoo. Microsoft withdrew that offer in May after failing to get a “yes” from Yahoo. Shares of Yahoo are now within hailing distance of the $19 per share trading level they hovered at prior to Microsoft’s unsolicited bid in February.

Meanwhile, the future of Yahoo’s CEO and co-founder, Jerry Yang, as well as a number of the company’s other directors, remains undecided. Yahoo has been stunned by a run of high-profile resignations in the last couple of weeks. But Yang has remained out of public since announcing the Google arrangement, feeding speculation about his future. The company’s annual shareholders meeting takes place on August 1.

The source questioned whether unrest about the stock price would force a change at the top as well. “A lot of Yahoo directors are fed up with the process of what’s been happening,” the source said.

Should Microsoft increase its buyout bid for just Yahoo’s search assets, and if the company’s investors find it appealing enough–even if Yahoo’s board does not–investor activist Carl Icahn may consider keeping with his initial game plan of running a dissident slate to win control the board.

But according to an institutional investor advisory services source, Icahn would still likely stand a better chance just running a partial slate of dissident directors for minority representation on the board–even if Microsoft makes a public statement of a sweetened offer to buy only Yahoo’s search business.

“If Microsoft would make a public statement, it would make a difference to a certain extent,” said the institutional investor advisory services source. “But, unless it was official like a tender offer, or unless shareholders could see the details and specific terms of the partial offer, it’s hard for shareholders to know how it will benefit them.”

This source noted that a mere press release saying the offer has been increased to a certain level will have even less effect, or meaning to shareholders: “I don’t think Microsoft publicly announcing even the terms of a sweetened bid would be enough for Carl Icahn to run a full slate, or motivate shareholders to replace the whole board.”

Source : CNET News

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