The European Commission today issued a so-called Statement of Objections over Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems. Disclosed in a regulatory filing by Sun, the document gives formal voice to the EC’s concerns over the fate of Sun’s open-source MySQL database.
It was fun while it lasted, but Samsung has abandoned its bid to buy SanDisk. In a regulatory filing made nearly a year after its $5.85 billion offer for SanDisk was rejected as too low, Samsung officially called off the effort, which, had it been successful, would have combined two of the largest flash memory producers into a single NAND monstrosity.
What a costly blunder Skype has proven to be for eBay. A $2.6 billion purchase price. A $1.4 billion asset impairment charge. Missed financial targets. And now this: eBay’s plans to spin off Skype next year are being threatened by a legal dispute over the telephony service’s underlying technology.
When Google took a five percent stake in AOL for $1 billion in 2005, it valued the company at about $20 billion. Last year the search giant wrote down $726 million of that investment. And now, according to a regulatory filing, Google has gone and sold its share back to Time Warner for $283 million, about a quarter of what it originally paid for it.
Apparently, fear of a deepening recession alone isn’t enough to maintain tech worker loyalty these days–mounting job losses be damned. This week, Google repriced millions of employee stock options that had gone underwater as the company’s share price declined. Now eBay hopes to do the same. The reason: employee retention.
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
12:58 AM: Breakfast: Two schools of fish from Tokyo Bay. Calories: 782,000. How I was feeling when I ate this: confused, irradiated, hating my size.
11:37 AM: Exercise: “Taxi Stomp” (alternating legs, for 30 blocks). Calories burned: 148,900,183.
1983. The Beatles announce their first tour in thirteen years, but likewise announce that Michael Jackson will be going on tour with them as a one gigantic mega-concert event.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
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