eBay is on the hook for about $63 million to LVMH Malettier, the parent company of Louis Vuitton and other exclusive brands, as ordered by a French court. The popular online auction site was found liable for sellers offering counterfeit goods, which LVMH asserted was tantamount to copyright infringement. The court agreed, though eBay intends to appeal the decision.
"This decision is not based on combating counterfeit material. It is based on LVMH's desire to protect its commercial practices and exclude competition," said a spokeswoman for eBay in Paris. "This is being done at the expense of the consumers and sellers to whom eBay is always offering opportunities," she added.
Adobe is working with Google and Yahoo! to deploy content search crawlers capable of better indexing online content delivered via the Shockwave Flash file format.
Overall, more content will be indexed and search engine result rankings will change to reflect the additional content and its relevance. The snippets will give better information about the page on the search results. You can also expect search engine optimizers to figure out ways to improve rankings of Flash-based Web sites just like they do with HTML-based sites.
For those enjoying the bleeding edge of software development, the Opera Desktop Team today issued the third release candidate for the upcoming Opera 9.51 web browser. Updates include installer tweaks, numerous bug fixes, and resolving a printing issued under Linux.
And one more RC for the upcoming 9.51! Lots of nice fixes in this one - and we need your feedback....
Hoping to cope with the increasing popularity of file sharing, Japan's prominent NTT Communications intends to soon cap each broadband subscriber's uploads to 30GB per day. However, unlike cap proposals recently surfacing among Western broadband providers, download limits will remain uncapped for now.
By targeting large uploaders the limits will likely hit the small portion of OCN's 7 million customers who operate file-sharing servers from their connections, said Tei Gordon, an NTT spokesman in Tokyo. The limit corresponds to about 7 full-length movies per day.
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Deriding the United States for falling woefully behind in consumer broadband service, a new report issued by the Baller Herbst Law Group is calling for an aggressive response. The report suggests an "affordable" 100Mbps service roll out by 2012, with 1Gbps service becoming available by 2015.
"We believe that great nations find the means to do what will make them and keep them great," says the report. "The United States has done this time and again—building canals and railroads, developing electric, telephone and highway systems, conquering outer space. Now, the time has come to build a world-class communications network."
LifeHacker.com is serving up a condensed Firefox 3.0 power user's guide featuring various tricks and customizations to demonstrate the new technologies and features packed into the newly launched open source web browser release.
You already know about Firefox 3's marquee new features, but now it's time to dig deep and unearth the shortcuts, tweaks, and even Easter eggs that Mozilla marketing doesn't mention. In honor of today's official release of Firefox 3—at 10AM Pacific Time—let's dive in past Firefox 3's most talked-about feature-set into its lesser-known power uses, tricks, and customizations.
The newly released Firefox 3.0 web browser stirred enough widespread public interest that Mozilla servers have been hard pressed to deal with the traffic loads. Various Mozilla sites experienced service outages throughout Tuesday following the software launch. The company's development blog details the tremendous bandwidth demands.
Thanks to overwhelming demand we’ve passed through 14,000 downloads a minute! This will put us well into the tens of millions of downloads in a 24 hour period if we can sustain it. Each download is about 7MB so that’s around 13 Gigabits/s of just download traffic. Not too shabby!
Skype 4.0 Beta is being hyped as the "biggest new release in Skype's history" by company president Josh Silverman. The distributed Voice-over-IP client is moving video chat to the forefront of the user interface, along with support for importing contacts from Hotmail, Outlook, Outlook Express, and Yahoo! Mail. Gmail support is noticeably missing, which is hardly surprising given the strained corporate tensions between Skypes' parent eBay and Internet heavyweight Google.
When you do a video chat, it really has the feeling of being in a video chat room. You can also pull in videos from Metacafe and DailyMotion (but not from YouTube). While Skype can handle up to 25 participants on the same call with voice, it is limited to one-to-one video chats at this point. Although, those can be combined with multi-party voice and text chats where everyone else just hears the audio.
Facing a failed Microsoft acquisition, which has spurred a near revolt among key investors, Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang would probably have a difficult time describing his first year as the company's top ranking executive as an overwhelming success.
Even now, a year later, it seems clear that the Yang/Decker team have no real vision for where the company will go. The dream may still be alive, but it’s not clear it will be for much longer. We expect Yang to step down as CEO shorty, or else the board will need to issue a statement of support.
Flickr.com co-founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield are the latest high-profile Yahoo! executives to resign from the beleaguered Internet giant. The news arrive just days following similar decisions by company staffers Ian Rogers, Jeff Weiner, Jeremy Zawodny, Matthew Berardo, and Usama Fayyad.
Their departure, while perhaps not an immediate problem from a management standpoint (both had played a limited role at the company for several months), is a psychological blow for the company. Fake and Stewart are both highly regarded in Silicon Valley's start up community and helped give Yahoo, considered stodgy and slow by many, some street cred.
Cnet Networks, founded in 1992, owns many sites including Cnet, ZDNet, Cnet news.com GameSpot, TV.com, UrbanBaby, Chow, Search.com and MySimon. CBS, based in New York, will combine Cnet's sites with its own, which include CBS.com, CBSSports.com and CBS Radio upon the deal's closing, which is expected in the third quarter.
CBS CEO Les Moonves said in a conference call with analysts that Cnet offers his company a platform to boost existing interactive businesses as well as launch new ones. He said it will also increase online advertising and international opportunities, particularly in China.
For those into bleeding edge software development, Microsoft has issued fresh beta releases for Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 Framework.
Earlier today we shipped a public beta of our upcoming .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 releases. These servicing updates provide a roll-up of bug fixes and performance improvements for issues reported since we released the products last November. They also contain a number of feature additions and enhancements that make building .NET applications better (see below for details on some of them). We plan to ship the final release of both .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 this summer as free updates.
A proof of concept crafted by the Information Security Research Team (INSERT) demonstrates how a security flaw in Google Gmail can turn the free email provider into a bulk spam distributor. The flaw remained exploitable as of Monday afternoon.
As of 3:00 PM (GMT -0400) today, the flaw we have reported remains unpatched and exploitable. We have ran a new experiment where we were able to use our attack to send 2,000 messages using one Gmail account. We would like to clarify to the security community that we have contacted Google about the issue more than a week ago and no response was provided despite our clear intent of cooperation regarding this matter.
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The Motion Picture Association of America suggests popular Bittorrent tracker site The Pirate Bay pay $15.4 million in damages for aiding in the public distribution of four movies and thirteen television episodes. Add the amount to $2.5 million in damages already requested by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, plus another $1.1 million by Sweden's Anti-Piracy Agency.
Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde (Brokep) is not impressed by Hollywood's claims, he told TorrentFreak in a response: "They know they are losing, and try to make us look like big criminals by adding some zeros to a claim for a made-up crime."
"The worst thing is that I lost 100 kronor on a bet on the number they would come up with," Sunde added. "And, it sucks that they didn’t claim more than for Napster and the other sites. It’s cooler to break the record."
Regardless of whatever Microsoft ultimately decides to do, many feel Yahoo! could still benefit from an immediate cash infusion. One asset of particular interest is Flickr. Yahoo! acquired the photo sharing site for an estimated $40 million in 2005. Given the current, albeit somewhat disturbing uptake in dot come valuations, Flickr could now potentially be worth billions of dollars based upon monetization from proven traffic growth and already established premium accounts.
If Flickr could get $5/CPM, that would generate $10-million in advertising/year based on the assumption it’s getting about 100 million global pageviews/month. It’s not a lot of revenue given the conservative approach to how much advertising Flickr would present and how much it would charge but, nevertheless, it would give Flickr an additional $250-million based on Blodget's formula. Then, you're looking at a company worth $1.75-billion to $3.25-billion. Add on a takeover or IPO premium of perhaps 25%, and you’re looking at a valuation of $2.2-billion to $4-billion.
Looking to sell a piece of high-end electronics? As Timothy has found out the hard way, there could be better venues than attempting to secure legitimate bids for a notebook computer via an eBay auction. The online auction house remains a strong player in cheap merchandise and even profitable niche market items, but these days one could perhaps be just as well off posting truly big-ticket items on Craigslist or similar.
The cool thing about eBay's support system is it will always answer your question; unfortunately, that answer will always be a form letter on how to reset your password, as Timothy discovered when he tried to figure out how to sell his laptop to someone who wasn't a Nigerian scammer. [....] Timothy's email went on for about two weeks, so we've tried to edit it for length.
While the core enthusiasts among the Linux community are unlikely to migrate any time soon, Sun Microsystems is poised to increase market share among the corporate sector of the open source community by today launching the first official release of the OpenSolaris operating system. The platform has been in preview status for quite awhile, but going gold could attract the interests of companies. Either way Sun Micro is learning from the Linux crowd, and OpenSolaris could be a compelling corporate solution given the company's well earned track record with the UNIX platform in small business and enterprise-class environments alike.
OpenSolaris is based on the Solaris kernel and uses many of its features like the Zettabyte File System (ZFS) and Dynamic Tracing (DTrace), which offers predictive self-healing capabilities. Although Sun’s Solaris OS is most often associated with large business clients, OpenSolaris is aiming for a different audience, one that has traditionally used Linux — startups and developers working with popular new web technologies like Ruby on Rails. OpenSolaris ships with the new image packaging system, which works much like apt-get on Linux, making it easy to download and install Solaris packages like Apache, Ruby on Rails, PHP and other development tools.
Despite paying $35 billion for Nextel back in 2005, Sprint is now reportedly considering either spinning off or potentially even selling the ailing division. Speculation points toward Deutsche Telekom AG, the parent company of T-Mobile, being interested in a possible Nextel acquisition.
Sprint Nextel is the third-biggest provider of cell phone services in the U.S. and has a market capitalization of approximately $22 billion. AT&T Inc. and Verizon Wireless are the top two U.S. providers. T-Mobile is No. 4 in the U.S. market, but the unit has proved key to Deutsche Telekom, given that just slightly more than 50 percent of its annual sales now come from markets outside of Germany, its home base. Last year, the company posted sales of $100.8 billion worldwide, including $29.8 billion from T-Mobile.
Microsoft retracted its Yahoo! acquisition offer over the weekend, but word on the street is Yahoo! executives were somehow unaware of the final $33 per share offer even being available. Whether a true miscommunication or a brute force tactic, Yahoo! is now facing an relatively uncertain future. The Internet giant is not likely to disappear anytime soon, but it eventually could be forced to pursue corporate partnerships with Google, News Corp., and others if Microsoft does not return to the negotiating table in the upcoming months.
People close to Yahoo said that Microsoft indicated at Wednesday's meeting it could raise its bid per share a "couple" or a "few" dollars. But Yahoo learned that Microsoft was willing to make a specific offer of $33 a share only in Mr. Ballmer's letter to Mr. Yang Saturday, these people said. "We did not know what the offer was," said one person close to Yahoo.
Naturally, Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang says the company would be open to a new round of bidding, be it from Microsoft or other interests. The previous level set by Yang and his associates was $37 per share, but now he is offering little public guidance. Microsoft's $33 per share offer was certainly fair enough, or at least investors seemed to think so given the market's subsequent response.
Yahoo, the most-visited U.S. Web site, turned down a $33 a share offer from Microsoft, which withdrew its bid on May 3. Yahoo was cut to "sell" by Citigroup Inc. and ThinkPanmure LLC analysts today, and its stock dropped 15 percent. [....] Yahoo fell $4.30, the most in almost two years, to $24.37 at 4 p.m. in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The shares have gained 4.8 percent this year. Yang, who co-founded Yahoo in 1995 with fellow Stanford University student David Filo, lost $232.7 million in the value of his Yahoo holdings today.
Many investors are non-too-thrilled either, and it would not be surprising to see even more lawsuits filed due to Yahoo! executives' rather poor handling of the situation. The company is already facing seven lawsuits related to the ordeal, and those were filed even before Microsoft issued the competitive $33 per share offer.
"I think it's pretty hard for the Yahoo board to turn down $33 when they've shown no ability to turn around their stock price," said Stuart Grant, managing director at Grant & Eisenhofer, a law firm that specializes in bringing investor lawsuits. "There's going to be breach of fiduciary duty lawsuits and I must tell you they are looking pretty good right now," he said.
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After a week of waiting, additional information about the eBay lawsuit against Craigslist has finally surfaced. eBay has published a related complaint document, which details how Craigslist forced a stock restructuring following a series of business breakdowns originating when eBay introduced its Kijiji classified advertising site in the United States last year.
In October 2007, the two Craigslist directors began meeting with their lawyer on corporate governance issues, without eBay’s involvement. On January 1, 2008, they reorganized the company’s stock structure, issuing one "reorganization" share of Craigslist stock for every five shares of common stock. That diluted eBay’s stock from 28.04 percent to 24.85 percent and, as specified in Craigslist’s bylaws, eBay lost its ability to elect a director. Thus, the lawsuit.
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