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Yahoo on Monday responded to Microsoft’s merger deadline, reiterating its rejection to the software giant’s unsolicited buyout bid as “substantially” undervaluing the company.

But while Yahoo investors may want more money from Microsoft, it’s unclear whether that would translate into a re-election of Yahoo’s current directors, or if investors would support an opposition slate put forth by Microsoft in a proxy fight.

Yahoo, in closing its Monday note, said it wants Microsoft to provide “certainty of value and certainty of closing.”

Update, 2:30 PM:
Microsoft is also working to keep its troops up-to-date as the heat intensifies between the two companies.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Updated from the top Monday 6:10 AM PDT by Dawn Kawamoto, who also added a short update note at the bottom at 2:30 PM PDT.

Yahoo said its recent road show to outline its three-year financial plan to investors received “positive feedback from our stockholders.” The company went on to note that it had strengthened its view that it’s worth more as a standalone company than Microsoft’s current bid.

“Our position is simply that any transaction must be at a value that fully reflects the value of Yahoo, including any strategic benefits to Microsoft, and on terms that provide certainty to our stockholders,” the letter states.

Microsoft, meanwhile, could be hearing the clock ticking on the waning months of the Bush administration and feeling pressure to wrap up the regulatory process. The process can take anywhere from six to eight months to review, said one former high-level antitrust attorney with the Department of Justice who is now in private practice.

“Steve, you personally attended two of these meetings and could have advanced discussions in any way you saw fit,” they added in response to Microsoft’s claim that Yahoo has refused to enter negotiations.

On Saturday, Microsoft issued an ultimatum to Yahoo, giving the Internet search pioneer three weeks to enter formal merger negotiations and conclude a deal. In Monday’s letter, Yang and Bostock rebutted Ballmer’s claim that Yahoo has refused to enter negotiations, citing meetings the two companies have had in recent weeks.

Yahoo’s board of directors met on Sunday to review Microsoft’s ultimatum to close the deal within three weeks, according to a report in the Financial Times.

More importantly, Yahoo stated that investors representing a “significant portion” of its shares have indicated to the company that Microsoft’s offer substantially undervalues Yahoo.

Full coverage
Microsoft’s big bid for Yahoo Click here for the latest on the software giant’s attempt to buy the Net pioneer.

(Credit:
Yahoo)

“As a follow up to a recent meeting among our respective legal advisors we had on this topic, and at your request, we provided to you on March 28, a list of additional information we would need to further our understanding of the regulatory issues associated with any transaction. To date, you have still not provided any of the requested information,” Yahoo’s letter states.

“As a result of the decrease in your own stock price, the value of your proposal today is significantly lower than it was when you made your initial proposal,” Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and Chairman Roy Bostock wrote in a letter to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

Over the weekend, Microsoft threatened to launch a proxy fight and to take its offer directly to Yahoo investors in an exchange offer. A proxy fight would entail Microsoft seeking to get an opposition slate of directors elected at Yahoo’s next annual shareholders meeting, for which no date has yet been set. Should Microsoft’s slate prevail, the new board would likely vote on the issue to remove Yahoo’s antitakeover measure, otherwise known as a “poison pill.” Without a poison pill, Microsoft would be able to tender the shares Yahoo’s investors committed to the software giant as part of its exchange offer.

Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft’s platforms and services division, sent an e-mail to his employees Saturday, to inform them of the ultimatum Ballmer was issuing that day to Yahoo:

Yahoo: Reflect our true value
In its letter to Microsoft on Monday, Yahoo highlighted its global brand, recent sizable investments in its advertising platform, growth prospects, and its “strategic benefit to Microsoft,” in justifying a higher bid.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer

One major institutional investor said over the weekend that he had previously informed Yahoo’s independent directors that he may consider voting for a new board of directors, if the parties did not move forward in a deal.

“I wanted to make you aware that we sent the attached letter to the Yahoo! Board of Directors today.
We will not be commenting publicly or internally on the letter as we believe the letter speaks for itself.
I will continue to keep you updated as events warrant. Thank you for your continued focus on our innovation roadmap and business objectives.”

In its Monday letter, however, Yahoo said: “We are confident that our stockholders understand that our independent board is best positioned to objectively and knowledgeably evaluate our company’s alternatives and to maximize value.”

Yahoo said that an antitrust review could drag out and disrupt its operations, only to end with regulators nixing the deal. According to sources, shortly after Microsoft issued its unsolicited bid two months ago, Yahoo had begun inquiring into the antitrust ramifications and the likelihood that such a deal could get passed.

Antitrust concerns
Yahoo also highlighted its concern about a potentially rigorous antitrust review, both domestically and overseas, should it agree to a deal.

Throughout the takeover effort, Yahoo’s Yang has made a habit of sending reassuring e-mails to the troops at his company.

Jerry Yang, Yahoo's CEO

Under the Bush administration, Microsoft’s antitrust situation has been far less dicey than it has been with the European Commission. In February, the Commission slapped Microsoft with a $1.35 billion fine for failing to comply with its previous antitrust sanctions.

Microsoft launched an unsolicited bid for Yahoo on February 1 in a deal initially valued at $31 a share. But Yahoo rejected that offer as undervaluing the company.

The partnership with Placecast is extremely important for Trulia. The company is naturally affected by the downturn in the real estate market, and it relies on home ownership for success. Realizing that, Trulia executives needed to act and increase revenue as quickly as possible during these suspect times, and they evidently believe Placecast is their best bet.

In order to deliver that ad, Placecast works with publishers in categories such as travel, events, real estate, and weather to offer advertisements that not only try to appeal to visitors, but make their location a key factor in targeting them.

“Once we know the place a user is interested in, we can derive a lot of useful insights about what kind of consumer they are, and then serve them a very targeted ad,” Alistair Goodman, CEO of Placecast, said in a statement.

Real estate search site Trulia announced Wednesday that it has inked a deal with 1020 Placecast, an advertising company that uses location-based information to target audiences, that will see the site’s advertising become location-specific.

Once users input a location they want to learn more about on Trulia, Placecast will access that data and apply it as a key component along with common demographic data points like psychographic information to provide more targeted ads.

To fight back, Sony has unveiled such products as an ultrathin TV screen that resembles a flat-screen computer monitor and a plethora of devices in February at its electronics open house in Las Vegas.

The electronics giant is facing greater pricing competition on the TV front, while Apple is giving it a run for its money on the innovation front.

Howard Stringer

Anger-passion, combined with energy, innovation, imagination, and bold steps, is the ticket to get Sony back on track as it sets out its next three-year growth plan, Stringer is cited as having told the company’s staff of more than 1,000 managers during a closed-door annual management meeting in Japan.

Sony’s CEO Howard Stringer is bringing new meaning to the term “anger management.”

He wants Sony managers to get mad, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

“I’m asking you to get mad,” Stringer said, according to the Journal report.

If you want to only consume media, then get an iPod Touch, an iPhone, or some other handheld media player….The Linux revolution on the desktop, notebook, or Netbook may yet come in the years ahead, but it certainly won’t be 2009, and it certainly won’t be through even less powerful Netbooks than are available today.

It’s time to move on. Next year won’t be the year of the Linux desktop anymore than 2010 will be. Why? Because we don’t need a Linux desktop. We need to accelerate efforts toward the cloud, which is open source’s game to lose.

Remember: if you want to get real work done, you use a computer, not a smartphone. With today’s Netbooks offering 10-inch screens, 92 percent sized keyboards that are actually pleasurable to type on…people can actually do more than just consume media.

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Now Netbooks are giving Linux desktop enthusiasts yet another reason to proclaim a year of the Linux desktop, despite the fact that four times as many Linux Netbook customers as Windows customers return these machines because they find Linux unfamiliar and cumbersome as a desktop operating system. As ITWire suggests, 2009 is unlikely to mark any significant change in the Linux desktop’s fortunes:

While I do believe that Ubuntu, in particular, will make headway through its Linux leadership in Netbooks, I concur that 2009 is absolutely not going to be the year of the Linux desktop–just as it hasn’t been for the past decade, despite proclamations to the contrary.

“[Insert year here] is the year of the Linux desktop!” That has been the Linux community’s refrain since at least 2001. Yet it never comes true.

As I wrote recently, we already have the Linux desktop: it runs in the cloud and is called Facebook, Google, etc. There is little need to have Linux running on my local laptop when the real game is in the cloud now.

I am an ardent open-source advocate, but I admit to perplexity as to why the Linux community so desperately wants its year on local systems. Who cares?

2009 isn’t the year of the Linux revolution, after all, but (rather) more of the same delusional fantasy land that Linux users have been living in the past few years.

The U.S. Senate on Friday unanimously passed a bipartisan bill backed by groups like the recording industry and the labor movement that would increase federal protections over intellectual property.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who pushed to have the controversial Justice Department provision removed, was still dissatisfied with the state of the bill.

The Commerce Department said it is still reviewing the legislation as it was passed.

Along with the recording industry, the bill is backed by the Chamber of Commerce, and labor groups like the AFL-CIO and Change to Win.

Rick Cotton, executive vice president and general counsel of NBC Universal, said concerns that the bill goes too far are unfounded.

Other groups opposed to the bill also spoke out Friday.

“At a time when the entire digital world is going to less restrictive distribution models, and when the courts are aghast at the outlandish damages being inflicted on consumers in copyright cases, this bill goes entirely in the wrong direction,” said Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge.

“Over the last 20 years, the flood of physical counterfeit projects and the scale of digital theft (have) gone off the chart,” he said. “What drives (the U.S. economy are) precisely technical invention, innovation, and creativity–if we don’t protect that, we dramatically undermine our economic future.”

The legislation still provides increased resources for the Justice Department to combat intellectual property theft and provide coordination for federal and state efforts against counterfeiting and piracy. It also increases penalties for intellectual property infringements.

Not all of the Bush administration’s objections with the legislation were addressed, however. The bill replaces the body that currently enforces intellectual property law with a White House Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator. The new coordinator will chair an inter-agency committee to combat counterfeiting and piracy. In its letter, the administration said the establishment of a White House IP coordinator was “objectionable on constitutional grounds.”

“At a critical economic juncture, this bipartisan legislation provides enhanced protection for an important asset that helps lead our global competitiveness,” RIAA Chairman and CEO Mitch Bainwol said. “Additional tools for intellectual-property enforcement are not just good for the copyright community but for consumers who will enjoy a wider array of legitimate offerings.”

The bill was stripped of a controversial measure that would have given federal prosecutors the power to file civil lawsuits against peer-to-peer users who violate copyright laws. The Commerce Department and Justice Department voiced their opposition to the provision in a letter this week, saying it would create “unnecessary bureaucracy.”

Introduced in July by Sens. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Arlen Specter, R-Pa., the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act now moves to the House of Representatives, where it will be taken up either Friday or Saturday, before Congress adjourns.

The Recording Industry of America gave resounding praise for the bill.

This post was updated at 4:25 p.m. PDT with more details.

“The legislation still includes provisions that overzealous federal prosecutors could misconstrue to allow the seizure of important components of our Internet infrastructure,” he said in a statement.

However, then I shook off this conception in favor of a simple explanation: perhaps it’s the men these women are choosing (not) to have sex with. The slightly more than 50 percent who could not give up on, as Richard Nixon would put it, fornication, were possibly either fortunate to be in a rare, healthy relationship with a man or preferred the intimacy of women.

(Credit: CC Jared)

While I am obviously unable to help with the immediate need for finding better sexual partners, I can, in an attempt to influence Dawn’s poll, offer Six Deadly Reasons why sex will always outscore the Internet.

So many men can be, as they put it across distant shores, toerags. And the sexual quality that was (not) enjoyed by this worrying percentage of females might reflect male insensitivity and incompetence, rather than some lasting lust for the Web.

Does she look really happy to you?

When I read that nearly half the women surveyed felt this way, I had a number of purely instinctive reactions.

First came the notion that the Harris Interactive surveyors, at the behest of Intel, had merely been screening women who work in information technology. This would have made the results entirely understandable–for so many reasons.

When a man crashes, he generally does so after sex. A laptop will often choose to crash right in the middle of the video you’ve been just dying to see.
Sex takes up so much less time than the Internet. With sex, 20 minutes can give you a considerable spike of adrenalin and even a little tingling of the fingers in the company of a living and, usually, breathing human being. With the Internet, you can lose untold days socially networking, till your fingers believe they’ve just played Rachmaninoff’s 3rd at the Lincoln Center. And what do you get for it? A bunch more imaginary friends.
When it comes to sex, you’ve normally had dinner first. Which means that it is far less messy than most people’s evenings on the laptop. They perch it on their knees, fingering the keyboard with their left hand while reaching for Domino’s finest cheese, pepperoni, and green pepper with their right. If they’re not crisp with their bite, the cheese stretches out like a ghost in a cartoon movie, until it makes contact with the keyboard, sticking to it and sliding into the cracks between the keys. Before they know it, their Apple is cheddared.
Sex exposes you for exactly who you are. There you lie, entirely denuded of pretense, being as much yourself as you could ever be outside of, perhaps, when you play golf. On the Internet, by contrast, everyone lies. The interactions you have are as false as a flamenco dancer’s eyelashes. How can anyone take pleasure in that?

Sex gives you something to talk about. It gives the tabloids something to write about. Which gives people something to read about. Which gives them something to talk about. Can you ever imagine a publication solely devoted to what Britney Spears and her fellow cohort of stars do on the Internet? How crashingly dull that would be.
The internet will always be there tomorrow. What about your lover?

I have been almost permanently disturbed since reading Dawn Kawamoto’s revelations about a survey suggesting that women would rather forgo sex for two weeks than give up Internet access.

The project is being led by IFTF researchers Jamais Cascio–a co-founder of WorldChanging.org, Jane McGonigal–a leading designer of alternate-reality games like The Lost Ring and World without Oil, and Kathi Vian, who leads the IFTF’s Ten-Year Forecast program.

(Credit:
Institute for the Future)

That was the word Tuesday from the Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based think tank that focuses on identifying the directions that mankind will take down the line.

It “begins with the findings of a fictional supercomputer that, after a year-long analysis, predicts the extinction of the human population” by 2042.

The IFTF said Tuesday it is launching a new research platform composed of massively multiplayer forecasting games–a play on the increasingly well-understood massively multiplayer online (MMO) games genre–designed to “address real-world problems by harnessing the wisdom of the crowds.”

As has become increasingly obvious over the last few years, games are being used more and more as tools for helping people and organizations work their way through all kinds of problems and scenarios.

That’s been the reasoning behind the steady growth of initiatives like the serious games movement, whose practitioners promote the idea of deploying games in education, government, military, and other sober institutions that need new ways to resolve troubling issues.

First up is a game called Superstruct, set in 2019, which tasks players with identifying resolutions for five “superthreats” endangering the world’s population such as large-scale homelessness, a worldwide fuel war, food shortages, and others.

The institute plans to launch a series of the so-called MMFGs this fall that they hope will attract participants from around the world eager to participate in futurist research in the guise of game play.

The game will be played across a wide array of social media including wikis, blogs, forums, social-networking sites, and more.

The Institute for the Future is launching a series of what it calls ‘massively multiplayer forecasting games’ designed to help researchers come up with solutions to long-term global problems. The first game, Superstruct, will launch October 6.

And now it appears that an august group of futurists is hoping that they can employ large numbers of people to play collaborative games in search of solutions to some of the world’s most vexing problems.

Stay tuned to this space for more on the game and the institute’s other MMFGs.

“The quickness of Lincecum’s small body is what scared off most scouts,” wrote Tom Verducci in Sports Illustrated last July, “that and what has become something of a trademark, a tilting of his head toward first base in the early phase of his delivery. The scouts equated his body speed with violence. That assessment, however, is akin to watching the Blue Angels air show team and not seeing the precision because of a fixation with the implicit danger. Lincecum generates outrageous rotational power (see video below)–the key element to velocity–only because his legs, hips, and torso work in such harmony.”

For Park and his team, having Lincecum be the cover star also was challenging for another reason: while they’ve done baseball games for years, Lincecum was the first pitcher they’ve featured. And that meant figuring out how to capture the pitching motion, something that is more important with a player like the Giants star, who, despite being stellar as a college player, scared off many of the pro scouts who watched him play.

The biggest laugh of all came when the director announced that Lincecum was going to hit a home run.

Last month, Lincecum, a diminutive 24-year-old whom you would never pick out of a lineup as a superstar ballplayer, won the National League Cy Young award, given to the league’s best pitcher. The same day, the San Francisco Giant found out that he’d been chosen as the cover athlete for Major League Baseball 2K9, 2K’s hit baseball video game.

That’s not a problem for the third shot, though, one in which Lincecum is supposed to stand idle on the mound.

Finally, he’s done with his pitching moves, and now it’s time for him to pick up his bat for the hitting shots (see video below).

So the mo-cap team had set up a short pitching mound covered in markers that were meant to be used by Lincecum for specific foot placements for his myriad moves.

“It’s a one-of-a-kind experience for me,” Lincecum said. “That’s stuff that kids dream about all the time…You see yourself in the game, and you’re like, ‘That’s me. That’s me out there, except in video game form.’”

For one, each of Lincecum’s moves–and he would perform dozens of them–was a quick set piece that took just seconds and which covered a very small, specific piece of ground.

But once Lincecum continues with actual pitching motions, he continues to have problems keeping the markers on his glove, meaning that after each shot, a couple of techs have to run out and put them back on.

“The foot placement is actually pretty important for us,” Park said, “for getting the right blend pose.”

Lincecum grins and asks if it was a good take.

This means that while 2K Sports will bring in a Lincecum or a Nash as their cover athletes, in order to capture their signature styles, most of the players in the games are actually represented by actors, guys who have played their respective sports at probably a high amateur level, such as college, and who can be trusted to look like they know what they’re doing.

At 2K Sports, everyone talks about the so-called “signature style” that they build for the real-life stars of their games. Essentially, said motion capture coordinator Steve Park, this means finding the stars’ unique and specific motions and movements, ones that would be very familiar to their fans, and building them into the games so that when the fans play the Lincecum character, for example, they recognize his explosive pitching motion and can easily distinguish it from the more pedestrian motions practiced by dozens of other, less stellar, pitchers.

“Thanks,” Lincecum said sarcastically.

Lincecum was on hand at 2K’s motion capture facility, about 30 minutes north of San Francisco, for a day of performance: dozens of individual pitching and batting moves that the technicians would lead him through, one by methodical one, all to be used in the new game and all so that the Lincecum character would look and feel like the real deal.

Soon, he’s ready, and after a brief introduction in which Park explains to the gathered crowd what, exactly, is going on, Lincecum begins his series of moves.

I asked Park how many other major league players they bring in for the creation of their baseball game, and he said that, in fact, the number is very small.

That’s because, Park continued, baseball motions are very segmented and specific, whether someone is pitching, catching, or swinging a bat.

After all the shooting was over, I asked Lincecum–who, by the way, is a big video game player and is currently spending his free time with Gears of War 2–what it was like to be featured in Major League Baseball 2K9.

He does that, standing totally still, until the director yells, “Cut.”

A computer model of Lincecum during the mo-cap session.

Right away, though, he’s having a bit of a problem with some of the reflective markers they’ve put on his baseball glove, which keep flying off during his violent motion.

Or, as the magazine reported, “The normal stride length for a pitcher is 77 percent to 87 percent of his height. Lincecum’s stride is 129 percent, some 7.5 feet.”

As the crowd laughed, the director fired back, “More emotion.”

“He’s going to hit a home run, which is the first time in his life he’s ever done that, including Little League,” said Johnathan Rivera, an associate producer for 2K Sports.

(Credit:
James Martin/CNET Networks)

That’s because batters have very distinctive stances that begin with “waggles,” or nervous tics they express with their bats, as well as differing stances that can be wide or narrow, depending on the player.

The blend pose, Park explained, is what happens when the technicians take different recorded motions and blend them together to create a single, smooth move for the game. Because much of what baseball players do looks very similar, even when differing in one way or another, it’s crucial, Park suggested, to be able to create smooth blend poses.

To be sure, Nash’s movements were also set pieces, and lasted just seconds, but they tended to be more free-form, one technician told me.

NOVATO, Calif.–Sports Illustrated magazine called Tim Lincecum “the freak,” and for the motion capture specialists at 2K Sports, getting a good computer model of baseball star Tim Lincecum’s unique, and violent, pitching motion presented a special challenge.

That said, Park explained that, in fact, pitching is actually easier to mo-cap than hitting.

Hockey moves, said Park, are much more free-form and free-flow, and while building an NHL game also requires accurate blend poses, he added that it was much more important when shooting a baseball player that the player hit his foot placements precisely.

So while the specifics of mo-capping a baseball pitcher like Lincecum differ in some ways from what’s required for a hockey star like Nash or a movie character like Iron Man, much of what went on Tuesday was familiar ground.

“Part of the problem is that our development cycle is actually during the baseball season,” Park said, adding that the players are contractually prohibited from doing the kind of extracurricular work that Lincecum was doing Tuesday during the season. “I don’t know what our goal is…but it’s always a challenge for every sport.”

For me, this was not entirely new territory. I came here last May to cover a very similar event, the motion-capturing of Rick Nash, the cover star of NHL 2K9, 2K’s hockey game. In September, I also spent an afternoon at Industrial Light & Magic, watching the technicians there put my colleague Kara Tsuboi through the paces of the motion capture experience that Robert Downey Jr. went through while he was filming the blockbuster Iron Man.

All of which is to say that even if the mo-cap guys at 2K Sports had had experience with a pitcher, Lincecum would still have presented a singular experience for them.

So for some of the mo-cap technicians, the best part of bringing in someone like Lincecum was the opportunity to be able to build a digital model of “The Freak” in motion, something that they see as a very cool piece of digital data.

And because Lincecum does take the occasional turn at bat, the mo-cap guys had to film him hitting as well.

(Credit:
James Martin/CNET Networks)

It was important that Lincecum’s many moves be spot-on, so that the end of one move would look similar enough to the beginning of another–say his wind-up blending into his follow-through–that they could be combined in the game without any jerky transition.

Back at the 2K Sports mo-cap facility, Lincecum has taken the “mound,” and is now warming up for his session.

As with the Nash and the Being Iron Man events, Tuesday’s activities began with Lincecum donning a spandex suit and technicians placing a series of reflective markers all over his body. These, explained Johnathan Rivera, an associate producer for 2K Sports, are designed to capture and reflect the light from 56 mo-cap cameras spread throughout the facility so that the computers can record the minute movements of the actor–in this case, Lincecum–as he moves around. This is then translated into a 3D model of his skeletal structure that is used as the base for his in-game avatar.

San Francisco Giants pitcher Tim Lincecum throws a pitch during a motion capture session for the 2K Sports video game Major League Baseball 2K9. Lincecum is the cover athlete for the game and the 2008 National League Cy Young award winner. Click the image for a full gallery on the motion capture event.

Park admitted that much of what he and his team were doing Tuesday was the same as what I’d seen them do for Nash. But he explained that mo-capping baseball plays does differ in some material ways.