It’s hardly surprising that Legg Mason is the only major Yahoo shareholder to speak out on Microsoft’s takeover bid thus far – strongly hinting it would be happy to sell if Microsoft raised the price.

It is the only one of the top institutional shareholders in Yahoo without a major stake in Microsoft as well. It can therefore see a clear profit from the deal, while the rest have been buried in silence as they carry out frantic calculations on how much their Microsoft holdings may be hit by buying Yahoo.

Financial risk-management analysis group RiskMetrics has also been doing the maths. It says the 13 per cent drop in Microsoft shares since it made the bid public on February 1 “does not bode well for the long-term value creation potential of the proposed transaction.”

It cites a 2004 study showing that in three-quarters of the deals that get an immediate thumbs-down in the stock market, the company concerned is still underperforming the market index two years later.

RiskMetrics lists the cross-shareholdings, starting with Capital Research & Management’s 11.36 per cent stake in Yahoo worth $4.076bn and 5.98 per cent share of Microsoft worth $16.4bn.

Legg Mason is next with a 6.59 per cent stake in Yahoo, worth $2.364bn, but only a 0.02 per cent stake in Microsoft, worth $66m.

Vanguard, Barclays Capital and State Street all have substantial holdings in both.

“We can expect shareholders who own both companies to pressure Yahoo directors to extract a material sweetener from Microsoft…that isn’t seen to destroy the perceived benefits of the merger,” RiskMetrics predicts.

The Zeemote on first use seems to be a solution looking for a problem.

This separate joystick controller for playing games on mobile phones appeared an unnecessary peripheral to me – who wants to carry around something extra in their pocket just to play a few games on their phone, when the regular buttons on the handset work just as well?

I gave it to my nine-year-old son to play with and he concurred. There was nothing he could do with the joystick that he couldn’t do using the normal phone buttons. Even flying was just as easy on the phone.

However, I spoke to Beth Marcus, Zeemote’s chief executive, who provided a few reasons to justify the device, which will be demonstrated at next week’s Game Developers Conference.

Firstly, my son’s hands were a lot smaller than those in the Zeemote’s target demographic – 18 to 25 year-olds – where frustrations abound when a wrong key is pressed. Second, it’s a different decoupled sit-back experience compared to putting the phone in your face in Blackberry-prayer mode. Third, there are moves you can make with the Zeemote that can take you to the next level of a game, which are almost impossible on a regular handset keyboard - I’ll have to trust her on that one.

She expects the Zeemote, which features a thumbstick and four assignable buttons, to be available in the first half of the year for less than $50. It could also be bundled with games and/or a phone and calling plan.

The Zeemote could also find other uses as a remote control and a smoother browser of maps and web pages, but the focus is on games for now.

The chief executive created the first force-feedback joystick for PC games, but there are no rumble effects in the Zeemote, which pairs up with the phone as a Bluetooth device.

“That would have been an extra cost,” she said. “And there’s a motor in phones that can already add vibrations to games.”

Some parts of Google are more romantic than others.

While my Google Mail and Calendar looked the same as ever this morning, Google Docs had turned pink, with hearts adorning the menu bar and broken-heart icons appearing against all the docs I’d not favourited.

The expected Google Doodle was on its home page, but, rather than young love, featured a pair of old timers heading into the sunset, hand in hand.

Now that couldn’t be a reference to Microsoft and Yahoo could it?

A bit like Victor Kiam and his Remington shaver, some bloggers liked the Seesmic video product they tested so much that they decided to buy the company.

Well, almost: a long list of industry “names” has been announced as investors in Loic Le Meur’s hot San Francisco start-up.

They include well-known bloggers Michael Arrington of Techcrunch, Dan Gilmor, Steve Garfield, a video blogger, and Jeff Pulver.

Also investing are Atomico, the investment group of Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, Steve Case, co-founder of AOL, Ron Conway, an early Google investor and Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn founder, among others.

This first round of funding is worth $6m. Seesmic allows users to make videos of their thoughts as easily as adding a comment to a blog post.

It is still in closed alpha, but Mr Le Meur’s clever cultivation of well-known bloggers as testers has garnered Seesmic influential support, plenty of publicity and now, loads of money.

Spore, the game that has been spawning cell-like in Will Wright’s imagination since 2000, was born as a fully-formed franchise idea.

At the Electronic Arts analyst day yesterday, the creator of The Sims showed off the eagerly awaited title and detailed numerous commercial spin-offs.

The Sims itself was not thought of as a franchise originally, he told us, with sales initially only expected to be in the hundreds of thousands.

But 98m units later, The Sims is not just a franchise but a whole division, one of four “labels” that now constitute EA.

Plans for this year include Simanimals, the expansion of MySims on the Nintendo Wii, a Sims movie, Simsonstage.com offering karaoke user contributions and SimsCarnival.com, a casual games site.

Mr Wright said Spore was conceived as a franchise from the start and deals have already been worked out with the likes of National Geographic, Comic Book Creator and Zazzle.

Spore is a game about evolution, with users creating creatures and moving on to shape entire planets. EA plans to release its Creature Creator software ahead of the game’s launch in September so that players can get a headstart on the life forms that will populate their individual worlds. Its Sporepedia will be a catalogue of parts and objects that can be acquired from both EA developers and user-creators – “pollinated content” that can populate other people’s universes.

Wright and his Maxis team, based in Emeryville in the Bay Area, seem to have caught the social networking bug as well. Players will have their own profile pages and can share movies of their worlds and inhabitants, with easy uploads to YouTube.

The demonstration made the personalisation available in The Sims look very Sim-plistic, while the creation tools seemed a major advance in ease-of-use compared to those of Second Life.

These days, no big industry conference is complete without a good deal of public posturing over global warming, and the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week is no exception. Nokia, the world’s largest mobile handset maker, and China Mobile, the world’s largest operator, have both jumped on the eco-bandwagon.

Wang Jianzhou, the chief executive of China Mobile, told delegates that companies had to take responsibility for climate change. China Mobile itself is taking action by collecting old mobile handsets, building mobile base stations that run on solar and wind power, and buying low-energy equipment from suppliers. They clearly want to be seen to be doing their bit ahead of the Beijing Olympics.

Meanwhile Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, CEO of Nokia, displayed a prototype phone made entirely from recycled materials such as tin cans, plastic bottles and old tyres. There is no hint of when, if ever, such a phone might be brought to market. But its an indication of what is possible, Mr Kallasvuo said.

Its very fashionable for companies to talk up the environment at the moment- without necessarily doing much. But these two mobile behemoths are of such a size that even first steps like these will have some impact.

John Riccitiello did not mince his words about the performance of Electronic Arts over the past year.

“This outright pisses me off,” said the chief executive at EA’s analyst day today, referring to a graph showing a three percentage point loss in market share in 2007.

He said he was even more annoyed by the downward trend in the quality of EA games – the average rating per title supplied by Metacritic has fallen from 77 to 72 over the past five years.

The company also bet on the wrong horse in the next-generation console stakes – favouring development for the PlayStation 3 first, which proved problematic, over the Xbox 360 and lastly the Wii. Wrong call, he said, as was the overinvestment in its Renderware middleware that caused slippages.

And then there was the bloating of headcount by 3,000 in three years and development costs increasing to the extent that they were the equivalent of nearly a third of revenues.

Three major franchises also disappointed with sub-standard iterations causing slumps in sales for the Need for Speed racing game, NBA basketball and Harry Potter.

Of course, it’s easier for Mr Riccitiello as an incoming CEO – he succeeded Larry Probst a year ago – to admit the company has made mistakes and wipe the slate clean. But his candour was refreshing nevertheless.

His vision for the company was also invigorating. He has set goals of $6bn in revenues in 2011 and metacritic scores of 80. Outsourcing and offshoring will bring down costs and two campuses have already been closed.

He said he was unconcerned about the merger of Activision and Vivendi’s games unit to create the largest publisher later this year.

“It’s really a non-event,” he said, arguing it would not make EA any more aggressive.

“We’re already at max tilt, we have been changing a lot, we are our own worst critics.”

He told analysts he had given an earlier version of his presentation to 225 top EA executives last August.

“It was brutal,” he said.

Apple is not the only Silicon Valley company trying to shake up the mobile world with more graphically rich phones.

Nvidia, known best for its PC graphics cards, unveiled an applications processor at the Mobile World Congress today that enables 10 hours of high-definition video playback and 100 hours of audio on a phone.

The Santa Clara company says its APX 2500 is the world’s lowest power HD computer on a chip.

The processor is the fruit of its $357m PortalPlayer acquisition in November 2006. The chip company was picked up after it lost a key Apple order for its iPods.

“PortalPlayer was the technology behind the first five generations of the iPod – a system on a chip that decoded the audio with very low power use,” says Mike Rayfield, general manager of Nvidia’s mobile unit.

“We’ve combined that with our graphics processors for handheld devices to make application processors.”

Nvidia saw a trend where the modem parts of mobile phones were being separated from application processors, which were becoming more like computer processors, he added.

Mr Rayfield sees applications such as immersive 3D maps and users plugging their phones into hotel-room TVs to play two-hour movies stored on the handset.

Nvidia expects full production of the processor to be underway by mid-year and is pitching it at Windows Mobile devices. It says it allows handset makers to come up with a “Smartphone 2.0” that can challenge the iPhone’s graphical richness, with Windows Vista-like 3D-overlays and transparency possible in the display.

The way to achieve a certain mystique for a mobile product is to not attend trade shows like the Mobile World Congress. Last year Apple stayed away, but the iPhone was the word on everyone’s lips. This year Android is the new, much discussed, threat to the establishment and Google’s presence is minimal - especially as Andy Rubin, head of the Android project, had to suddenly race back to the US, cancelling planned demos of the software. Was it really an emergency calling him back - or is it just the new style of brandbuillding?

Steve Berkowitz, once billed as a saviour for Microsoft’s internet business, has made little impact since he arrived two years ago, so it’s not surprising that he now looks to be on the way out. It seems that bringing in senior outside talent, something Microsoft has shown itself increasingly willing to do, has not always gone smoothly.

CNET is reporting that Berkowitz, once the head of Ask.com, is going as part of a reorganisation that will also involve the departure of Mike Sievert, a former AT&T executive. We can’t confirm all the details of that report, but the conversations we’ve had suggest that Berkowitz won’t be around too much longer.

A consumer marketing expert who really made his name in the publishing industry with the "For Dummies" series of self-help books, Berkowitz was meant to bring a dose of marketing and brand-building pizazz to Microsoft’s floundering online operations.

It looked like a tall order from the start. When we met him several months into his assignment he was already sounding frustrated at trying to bring order to a messy portfolio that mixed pure online brands like MSN and Live with older names like Windows and Office - not to mention navigating the Redmond bureaucracy. Maybe one day soon all those branding nightmares will be over and it will all just be called Yahoo.