Silicon Alley Insider has a close-to-real-time running tab of the deal’s value, which puts the Microsoft buyout bid at $28.77 per share.

Such a move may warm the hearts of investors, who, in turn, could put the screws to Yahoo’s board. The Post report says one effect Microsoft would be looking to achieve via an all-cash weighted deal is support from longtime Yahoo investor Softbank, which is represented on Yahoo’s board.

Cash is king in deal making, and Microsoft’s unsolicited bid for Yahoo may be throwing more greenbacks into the mix, according to a report in the New York Post.

Under its current offer, Microsoft is valuing the deal using a formula that is based on 50 percent cash and 50 percent Microsoft stock. As a result, the value of Microsoft’s offer rises and falls based on the performance of its own stock price.

The report, citing anonymous sources, says Microsoft is considering changing the way the deal is valued to 100 percent cash.

Disclosure: CBS, one of RockYou’s past clients, has agreed to acquire CNET Networks, publisher of News.com. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter.

Along with Slide, RockYou is one of the biggest companies in the social-network application development space. And with the $35 million, RockYou plans to work on “additional tools and services” to further improve its advertising platform for brands and marketing campaigns that want to jump on the social-application craze.

“DCM believes that RockYou will be the catalyst of this new global ecosystem that delivers next-generation advertisements through its innovative advertising network and social applications,” DCM co-founder and general partner David Chao said in a release. “With the current momentum, RockYou is positioned to become a top-10 Internet property in the world in the near future.”

That rumor of a $400 million valuation might not be too far off base: social-media application powerhouse RockYou announced Monday that it has raised $35 million in Series C venture capital.

It’s the kind of money that may raise a few eyebrows, considering many believe the social-application space doesn’t offer a proven business model yet. RockYou is responsible for a number of popular applications–SuperWall, Vampires, Likeness, X Me–on Facebook and several OpenSocial-compatible platforms (MySpace, Hi5, Friendster, Bebo, and Orkut), as well as an ad network. The company has already done marketing campaigns for clients like Paramount, New Line Cinema, Sony, Microsoft, and CBS, and claims to have 87.5 million monthly unique visitors with 2.7 billion page views.

The companies made no specific mention of an online component for the venture, but did make reference to “the digital marketplace of the future,” and offered this rather generic promise: “We are building an innovative service that will use traditional and new digital distribution technologies to bring great film and television entertainment directly to the consumer.”

The unnamed venture, and the unnamed channel it will produce, has the backing of Viacom and its Paramount Pictures unit; MGM Studios; and Lionsgate. Films to be offered will include new titles from Paramount and Paramount Vantage released in theaters after January 1, 2008, and new titles from MGM, United Artists, and Lionsgate released after January 1, 2009, according to a statement from the companies on Sunday.

A joint venture featuring heavyweight Hollywood studios is looking to fall 2009 to launch a premium television channel and video-on-demand service that will offer feature films and original television series.

In addition, the venture will feature new, original television series.

The net loss for the period that ended September 30 was triggered by declining sales, which fell 20 percent to 9.18 billion euros from 12.2 billion euros the prior year’s quarter. A write-down of the company’s weak Nokia Siemens Networks unit also put a big drag on the bottom line.

Net sales for the third quarter came in at 9.8 billion euros, down 20 percent from 12.2 billion in the year-earlier quarter.

Following the news, shares of Nokia stock fell 6.6 percent to 9.62 euros.

Though Nokia’s mobile phone sales managed to eke out some gains, overall revenues were hurt by a shortage of components for many of its products.

“The demand for mobile devices improved in many markets during Q3,” Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said in a statement. “With the average selling price of our devices holding firm quarter-on-quarter, our higher device volumes translated into increased net sales in our Devices & Services business. Our volumes and net sales were, however, somewhat constrained by component shortages we encountered across the portfolio.

The company said that its share of the mobile device market for the quarter was 38 percent, the same as in the year-earlier period and in the second quarter of 2009.

Nokia Siemens Networks, the network equipment unit formed in 2007 and co-owned by Nokia and Siemens, has struggled to turn a solid profit from the get-go. In a write-down of this failing business, Nokia was forced to spend 908 million euros.

(Credit: Nokia)

“The challenging competitive factors and market conditions in the infrastructure and related services business necessitated non-cash impairment charges at Nokia Siemens Networks,” said Kallasvuo.

Despite weakness in the mobile phone sector, Nokia is optimistic about its near-term outlook. The company now sees volume for its phones hitting 1.12 billion units for the year, down 7 percent from 2008, but better than Nokia’s earlier estimate of a 10 percent decline.

Nokia expects the market for its mobile infrastructure and related services market to fall 5 percent for the year from 2008 levels, an improvement over earlier estimates of a 10 percent drop.

However, the future remains cloudy for Nokia Siemens Network, which is likely to see its market share drop even further for 2009 than previously forecast, said the company.

During the third quarter, Nokia also completed its acquisition of GPS map specialist Navteq.

The Motorola Q9m is one of the three phones eligible for a new Verizon data plan.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

If you’ve got a Motorola Q9m, a Verizon Wireless SMT5800 (HTC) or a Verizon Wireless XV6800 (UTStarcom), you can now add a $29.99-a-month e-mail and Web browsing plan to your “qualifying” voice plan. Exactly what the qualifications are was left unsaid in Verizon’s press release.

Unlimited plans have been all the rage among the carriers lately, as they try and one-up each other with new pricing. With the growing popularity of smartphones, it also makes sense that pricing competition would start to become more common among the data services as well.

Verizon said it would include more phones in the new plan over the next few months. There’s already such a plan in place for BlackBerry users.

SupportSpace is a new tech-support network. It certifies independent tech experts and connects them with people in need. I’m unclear how this certification and rating works, but I imagine it’s based partly on feedback from users. The company provides call connection, desktop-sharing services, and other utilities to its contractors.

It’s a shame that this service (and its several competitors) is needed, but since the tech support we get from most companies is maddeningly poor, this evolution in UGS (user-generated support) is a workable fix. Plus, it could be another decent way for geeks to make a few bucks without changing out of their jammies. The service has been in beta for a while but is opening up to everyone at Demo 2008. See also one of my favorite UGS sites, Satisfaction (see Satisfaction is smart, crowd-sourced support).

It's like an adult chat network. Except they'll fix your PC.

The Chinese government is requiring that all PCs include the Green Dam-Youth Escort software to block pornography, but it also blocks access to content related to violent computer games, illegal drugs and political speech, said Ben Feinstein, director of research at SecureWorks, a managed security service provider.

Critics are worried that the Chinese government could use Green Dam, a free download, to block all kinds of content and monitor online activities of users, as well as worried that the software could allow for a massive botnet to be created, either by cybercriminals or the Chinese government itself.

Green Dam allows users to specify categories of sites to block.

(Credit: University of Michigan)

Feinstein and colleagues at SecureWorks’ Counter Threat Unit examined the Green Dam code earlier this month and found that it uses a variety of unsafe programming practices that have been banned at Microsoft and other U.S. companies, he said.

An example is the use of Strcpy, or string copy, a library function in the C programming language that copies memory from one buffer to another, according to Feinstein. If the copied string doesn’t fit in the destination buffer, it will overwrite memory and can be used in a buffer overflow attack.

“This software appears to be of low quality and to have not been developed with a secure methodology,” Feinstein said. “It likely suffers from a whole host of problems.”

The way Green Dam is designed to inspect all Internet traffic coming into and going out of a PC means more parts of the code are exposed to potential attack compared with programs that are more limited in scope and process less data, he said.

In addition, having the software on all PCs in China, as mandated, would create a huge install base and be an attractive target for attackers who could attack millions of computers by targeting just this one program, Feinstein said.

China historically has censored the Internet using filters on the network, blocking access to pages that deal with politically sensitive subjects like Tiananman Square, Falun Gong, and Tibet. Installing filtering software on the end-user computers will make it easier to block content than doing it in the network, according to Feinstein.

“You get efficiencies of scale if you push the filtering down to the end point rather than inspect huge Trans-Pacific pipes entering and leaving your country,” he said.
Green Dam was published by Jinhui Computer Systems Engineering, which is run by a former officer of the Peoples’ Liberation Army, he added.

Researchers at the University of Michigan issued a report two weeks ago that found two major security vulnerabilities in Green Dam that could allow someone to remotely take over a computer running the software. The software was later updated and patched, according to an update to the report issued a week ago, however the researchers said they had discovered an additional security hole that remained unfixed.

Separately, a security researcher said he had released on a public Web site an exploit for a buffer overflow that remained unpatched in the Green Dam update.

It’s not. It’s very common, and it can be solved.

Scaling a messaging platform is why IBM sells a boatload of MQ series, why the AMQP protocol was developed, and why JMS is nearly ubiquitous. Pretty much every large enterprise has similar scale issues related to messaging, especially in financial services. But they don’t have downtime, and if they did as frequently as Twitter, the people behind them would all get fired.

This is a topic I actually know something about. (Disclosure: my company develops an open-source enterprise service bus, or ESB, called Mule.) All of our use cases involve some kind of complicated messaging architecture, whether it be Web-service based, publish and subscribe, one to many, direct connection, etc. And most deal with data transformations and a vast array of protocols.

In my view, what Twitter needs is to adopt a bus-type of architecture that separates the transport from the application and uses a middleman to process the transactions. This is a very common enterprise scenario that needs to be applied. This is what an ESB does.

One example in the Web 2.0 world is OpSource, which is delivering billions of transactions a day as an SaaS provider using the ESB at the crux of the transactions. This is much larger than Twitter and has actual revenue impact. Maybe OpSource can host Twitter?

A longtime attendee of the countercultural arts festival, Meiners had been thinking about how one would explain what Burning Man is to someone who had never been. The answer, he decided, was obvious: an opera.

In typical Burning Man fashion, as he was standing in line at the port-a-potties, describing this epiphany to a friend, a man next to them piped up and said, in effect, “Are you talking about putting together an opera about Burning Man? I create operas. Can I help?”

Today, the fruits of those dusty conversations are on view for all to see: “A Burning Opera: How to Survive the Apocalypse,” which is currently in limited engagement at the gorgeous Teatro ZinZanni here.

While Meiners is no longer directly involved, executive producer Dana Harrison, Mark Nichols, who scored the show, and well-known culture writer Erik Davis, who wrote the libretto, ran with Meiners’ idea and over the course of the last three years, have put together this show. The core goal is still the same: to provide a moving picture of what the event, held each summer in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, is really all about, as well as some of its history.

As an 11-time Burning Man attendee, I was excited when I heard about the opera, especially given its explicit mission: communicating “the transformational madness of the (Black Rock Desert) to the ‘burning curious.’”

A Burning Opera has a promising central story line: the experience of a pair of newbies–otherwise known as first-time attendees–who arrive in the desert thoroughly unprepared for what’s in store for them, apparently thinking that time at Burning Man is akin to any other camping trip.

Dressed in street clothes for an event where every kind of attire (or lack thereof) goes, save for street clothing, the pair–presented as a young, attractive, heterosexual couple–quickly discover things are not at all as they seem.

That, of course, is the springboard for two hours of colorful examination of various elements of the Burning Man experience.

For years, several specific stereotypes have been widely disseminated about Burning Man. The most frequent are that the event’s thousands of attendees are focused primarily on drugs and sex and that they are largely, to paraphrase, “a bunch of hippies.”

To buy into that is to ignore the fact that what really goes on in the Black Rock Desert for a week leading up to Labor Day each year is much, much more complex. There are hippies, of course, but there are equal numbers, if not more, of tech industry executives, rocket scientists, accomplished sculptors, singers, dancers and painters, firemen and firewomen, and so on.

And while there can be no denying that drugs–and the much more common alcohol–are a significant factor, and that there is plenty of nudity and sexual behavior, anyone who has actually been to Burning Man will tell you that the dominant elements are large-scale art, welcoming communities, music, and a culture of participation.

The Burning Opera tries to address the core components of what some attendees call “That Thing in the Desert,” but in my opinion, focuses too much on the easy stereotypes.

While it’s true that the show tries to dispel the myth that it’s all about drugs–the man in the newbie couple is seen struggling through the effects of an acid trip, only to be told, in a singing number, that there is much more to Burning Man than mind-altering substances–it certainly does nothing to make anyone think that such substances aren’t a major part of what goes on in the desert.

Similarly, an attempt to show the woman from the newbie couple coming to grips with sides of herself she’s never allowed to see the light of day are expressed by having her stripped topless by a band of burners and left that way for much of the show.

In the moment, the show’s writers were trying to make two simultaneous points: that transformation was the goal of attending, and that it should not be exploited. The latter point was driven home by virtue of a scene in which a photographer tries to shoot the topless woman and is quickly chided for doing so.

The transformation of one of the newbies–on the right–begins in a scene from A Burning Opera: How to Survive the Apocalypse.

(Credit: Michael Rauner)

If she had then put her top back on, the point would have been made, and we could all have moved on. Yet she remained bare-chested for nearly the rest of the show.

And the focus on sexuality didn’t stop there: one grand number near the end featured many of the performers dancing vigorously to a song about polyamory–again something that is seen by some as a common element of the Burning Man world. To me, this was overplayed because while you can find polyamory there, it is hardly the dominant paradigm.

Leaving the show, I worried that its creators had taken the easy route: stay close to the things most people know about Burning Man and it would be more attractive to general audiences. But they, in my opinion at least, had neglected to spend much time at all on what I believe is much more important: art and community.

Still, I wondered if my conclusion was a result of being too close to it all and looking for reasons to nitpick. After all, the theater had been packed to the rafters with hard-core burners, and most of them–including some high up in the Burning Man organization–seemed pretty happy with what they’d seen. Indeed, two of the organization’s six board members are actually in the show, as is at least one other very senior staffer. Clearly, Burning Man itself has given a thumbs-up.

So, perhaps, I thought, I should filter my opinion through someone the show was actually trying to speak to: an audience member who had never been to Burning Man.

For that, I spoke with a 58-year-old gentleman named Rich Caragol, who told me that he had some familiarity with Burning Man through his ex-girlfriend but that he’d never been himself.

“I enjoyed how (the show) began, the transformation,” Caragol said. “That’s the big message I got…People were moving through whatever emotional state they were in, and people had some metamorphoses.”

He said he concluded that transformation was the major message of the production due to the number of characters dealing with and emerging from a series of challenging situations–relationship problems, culture shock, physical problems, drug aftermath, and so on.

Caragol also pinpointed the sartorial change that the show’s newbies went through, having arrived at Burning Man in street clothes and emerged later in the kinds of colorful and outrageous garb burners are known for.

“It is about change,” he said of his impression of Burning Man, “even in what they wear, they get out of their suits and ties.”

And he even felt that while the show did put its newbie characters through an ecstasy trip and the aforementioned LSD experience, the message was not that attendees are all under the influence all the time.

“It was a lot more than (just the) drugs, I thought.” Caragol said. “That was just one element. I didn’t think that was a focus of the show.”

Indeed, where I came away missing a dramatic discussion of community, Caragol found it, pointing to the end of the show when the performers invited the audience into their inner circle to sing and dance. “That felt like it brought it all together,” he said. “You could feel the power. I could just feel the resonance of what they were trying to communicate.”

I guess, then, that it’s all in the way you see things. From a literal perspective, I think that’s true. Some of what was going on in the production was hard to see, as the Teatro ZinZanni is a theater in the round, and I believe that the Burning Opera is not well-served by such a venue. Of course, ZinZanni is a stunning space for its own performance and offered an opportunity to do the opera there, how could the producers of the opera refuse? That said, I’d like to see the show again in a standard theater.

Ultimately, I felt that the show needs some work, which is not surprising given that it has only been performed a few times in front of audiences and that it is still being refined. And as I’ve written, would do well to put more emphasis on community and art. But I was pleased to hear Caragol interpret the show as having been about transformation. Because, in the end, I do believe that that’s what Burning Man is all about.

I asked him if he was now planning on attending That Thing in the Desert.

“Absolutely,” he said. “I’m just going to go and do my own thing.”

With more processing power and memory, plus shrinking components and smarter software, you will end up with a supercomputer in your hand. And if Steve Jobs has his way, Apple will have a generous share of the market and lead on the innovation front.

In reality, Apple is late to the smartphone corporate e-mail and applications space, and the
iPhone is still a blip in the overall market. But, for those who care about fit and finish, usability and aesthetics, Jobs is unbeatable. You have to wonder what he will pull out of his bag of tricks next, and if he doesn’t have another major hit, how Apple will fare.

Check out our comprehensive coverage here. We’ll have video from the event, more photos, and ongoing analysis.
See also the swarm from the blogosphere on Techmeme.

Steve Jobs unveils the iPhone application platform

(Credit:
Corinne Schulze/CNET Networks)