Paris Hilton must be breathing a sigh of relief.

Losing control of all the personal stuff on her Sidekick once was bad enough, without the threat that Microsoft would then just swallow it all. So for all the users of the “hiptop” device, the news on Thursday that the software company believes it can recover “most, if not all” of the data that was thought to have been lost after a data centre failure will come as a big relief.

It leaves some uncomfortable questions for Microsoft, though. Continue reading "That Sidekick data must be in here somewhere…"

As the Department of Justice gets further along with its investigation into how IBM maintains its dominance of the mainframe market, Lacy Edwards is certainly someone it will want to talk to.

Mr Edwards is the boss of Neon Enterprise Software, a small Texas company that is trying to make a living around the edges of the mainframe business.

Big Blue, however, is having none of it. It has written to some of Neon’s customers warning them that if they buy the company’s software, they could be in breach of their licences from IBM - even though it confesses it has yet to get a close look at Neon’s technology.

Does that sound like a case of FUD, designed to scare customers away from a rival’s product? That’s certainly the way Mr Edwards sees it. Continue reading "Living in Big Blue’s shadow"

Yes, it really looks like it’s finally over.

Sixteen years after the US justice department first started digging into Microsoft’s Windows monopoly, and six years after the European Commission ratcheted up pressure on the company, the end to Microsoft’s anti-trust battles is in sight.

A lot of lawyers will retire fat and happy on the proceeds of this saga. But what has it all meant for users of technology? On the face of it: not a lot.

Continue reading "Microsoft prepares to pack up its briefs and go home"

Internet advertising in the US may no longer be growing, as it still is in the UK, but the current downturn looks like being a short one, and some categories are still doing well.

The latest quarterly internet advertising figures from the IAB and PwC show a 5.4 per cent year-over-year decline in the second quarter, very similar to the 5.2 per cent of the first three months. After six years of uninterrupted growth that saw the market expand nearly four-fold, this setback bears no comparison at all to the much bigger slump that accompanied the dotcom collapse. Continue reading "Online ad recession in the US remains shallow"

How could an open source software project that we hear generates a modest 17m euros a year in Europe have held up a $7.4bn tech industry mega-merger ?

Unlikely as it sounds, Brussels has put the Oracle/Sun deal on hold while it takes a longer look at the fate of tiny MySQL, which Gartner reckons has a database market share of around half a percentage point.

Clearly, somewhere along the line Oracle has played its cards very badly. Continue reading "Brussels’ Sun delay leaves Oracle in a quandry"

What would you pay for a fast-growing private internet company with hundreds of millions of active users and revenues of more than $500m?

If the name on the door is Facebook the answer, apparently, is: $6.5bn. That’s the valuation implied by the recent offer to Facebook employees from Digital Sky Technologies (the Russian investment firm also bought a chunk of preferred stock from Facebook that the company claimed valued it at $10bn, but that sounded like hype given that the benefits attached to those shares were not disclosed.)

So the $3.1bn $2.75bn valuation that has just been slapped on Skype sounds respectable - and is certainly more reasonable than the laughably low offers of $2bn or so that eBay was being encouraged to entertain earlier this year (curiously, eBay will not explain the difference between the $3.1bn value implied by its deal and the headline figure of $2.75bn that it claims for Skype). Continue reading "eBay’s Skype blushes spared"

It’s hard to escape the view that what really annoys the European book industry about Google’s ambitious digital library project is that only US internet users will be allowed to browse in it.

According to some estimates, a third or more of the in-copyright books that Google is scanning in US libraries are from European publishers and authors, but European internet users won’t get to see these works. The legal settlement only involves the digital rights to display them in the US.

If this galvanises Europe to work harder to create the conditions for its own digital library, so much the better. But as EU commissioner Viviane Reding warned at the end of this week, there are some significant hurdles to be overcome. Continue reading "Europe’s digital library stuck in the slow lane"

Venture capitalists are professional optimists - they have to be. How else could they keep investing in new businesses where the obstacles to success would seem insurmountable to most people?

But sometimes reality just has to be faced, and the reality in front of the VC industry right now is not pretty.

Bill Gurley of Benchmark Capital sums it up here: half the industry could be swept away by the current downturn (though as an optimist, he clearly thinks he will end up in the fortunate half). Continue reading "The VC shake-out is finally at hand (really)"