MacRumors

Reuters reports on rumors that have started circulating that Microsoft is in talks about acquiring Yahoo Inc.

Investment bank Goldman Sachs is advising on the process, the paper said. The bank declined to comment. One banking source said that investment banks had been pitching Microsoft on the idea of buying Yahoo for months.

Yahoo's stock has jumped up almost 18% in response to the rumors. According to the reports, the companies have held "informal" talks over the years, but this latest round comes after increasing competition from Google. Google recently acquired online advertising company DoubleClick Inc, which Microsoft was also pursuing. After the deal was made, Microsoft urged U.S. regulators to scrutinize the potential deal on anti-trust grounds.

"The minute you hear Microsoft start arguing against something on antitrust grounds, you know they are desperate and need to do something big," said one [NYPost] source.

While not directly Apple related news, the implications of a Microsoft-Yahoo acquisition would be far reaching.

Update: The Wall Street Journal is stating that the deal is unlikely to happen.

...the merger discussions are no longer active, these people say. The two companies may still explore other ways of cooperating.

Businessweek compiled their 2007 list of the 50 most innovative companies.

Apple leads the pack for the third year in a row.

As our first-place innovator for the third year in a row, Apple reigns again. The iPod creator is a master of superb product, store, and experience design. Now that it's invading the living room and the cell-phone market, will it continue the winning streak?

The list was compiled based on volunteer surveys sent to executives of the 1,500 largest global corporations.

Meanwhile, it was recently revealed by Forbes that despite an official $1/year salary, Apple's Steve Jobs is the highest compensated CEO in America this year at $646 million.

Macworld notes that for the first time ever, an iTunes Exclusive song has debuted in the Billboard Top 10.

The track (iTunes Link) was "I'll Stand By You" performed by Carrie Underwood during last week's American Idol "Idol Gives Back" charity episode. Macworld reports that the song has been purchased over 100,000 times in less than a week.

Of course, while most of the boost in sales reflects the cross promotion from a popular television show, it still represents a notable shift towards digital music sales.

MacNN details several patent applications from Apple surrounding their Dashboard technology in Mac OS X.

The patent application surrounds efforts to organize sets of dashboards, much like Apple's upcoming "Spaces" feature in Leopard to organize workspaces. The MacNN blog takes a bit of a leap and suggests that these features will be seen in Leopard, but there is no clear evidence that this is the case.

The first example details methods for organizing widgets by theme: "For example, the user can create and configure one dashboard to contain widgets related to work, and another for widgets related to personal matters." Meanwhile, in another implementation, widget groups are organized by tabbed folders.

Finally, one possibility listed brings back the 3d cube interface that Apple has used for other transitions:

Apple's use of Dashboard widgets extends beyond desktop Mac OS X and has also made an appearance on Apple's iPhone interface, so some of these concepts could be translated to Apple's iPhone. The filing date for these patents, however, was back in February 2006 so they may simply represent unfinished concepts that won't make their way into a shipping product.

Steve Jobs released a statement today giving insight on how Apple intends to become a greener, or more environmentally friendly, company. Major high points in the essay are the removal of toxic chemicals and an attempt to dramatically increase the amount of product recycling.

While the decrease of impact on the environment is commendable and this essay shows Apple is going to take a more direct stance on its role, what's more interesting to the rumor scene is the upcoming unannounced introduction of LED-backlighted displays.

To eliminate mercury in our displays, we need to transition from fluorescent lamps to light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to illuminate the displays. Fortunately, all iPod displays already use LEDs for illumination, and therefore contain no mercury. We plan to introduce our first Macs with LED backlight technology in 2007. Our ability to completely eliminate fluorescent lamps in all of our displays depends on how fast the LCD industry can transition to LED backlighting for larger displays.

Apple's updated their site to reflect the new ProCare, One to One and Personal Shopping services that they are now providing.

One to One
http://www.apple.com/retail/onetoone/
Our trainers experts in all things Apple create a program customized to your level of experience. You can choose individual sessions covering everything from getting started on a Mac to making more out of your memories. Or explore any topic you like. All for just $99 per year.

ProCare
http://www.apple.com/retail/procare/
ProCare membership starts with a complete setup of your Mac. Then stay up and running with premium benefits like same-day service at the Genius Bar, Rapid Repairs, yearly tune-ups, and more. All for just $99 per year, for up to three computers. Ask a Mac Specialist about ProCare. Your Mac will thank you.

Personal Shopping
http://www.apple.com/retail/personalshopping/
Personal Shopping is a whole new way to shop at the Apple Store. A free service where you and a dedicated Mac Specialist explore and test-drive products to find out which ones are best for you. We know the store can be busy, so when youre ready to talk, Personal Shopping is a way for us to give you our undivided attention.

Apple has posted version 1.1 of their 2007-004 update released earlier this month. The new update corrects some bugs introduced in the first update (note: only affects very specific versions of Mac OS X, seen notes):

AirPort
Available for: Mac OS X v10.3.9
This update corrects an issue where the AirPort connection may be lost after waking from sleep. This issue only affects Mac OS X v10.3.9 with Security Update 2007-004.
FTPServer
Available for: Mac OS X Server v10.4.9
Security Update 2007-004 applied an incorrect ftp configuration file for Mac OS X Server v10.4.9 systems. Users with ftp access, who would normally be restricted to certain directories, may be able to access directories outside the normal scope.

In addition, Apple posted Quicktime 7.1.6 updates for Mac and Windows which address a recently discovered security hole:

QuickTime 7.1.6 delivers numerous bug fixes, addresses a critical security issue with QuickTime for Java and includes support for:
- Final Cut Studio 2
- Timecode and closed captioning display in QuickTime Player

This Quicktime update fixes the browser exploit discovered in the $10,000 MacBook hacking contest that was won 10 days ago.

Finally, Apple also released the Airport Extreme 2007-003 updater, which "is recommended for all Intel-based Macintosh computers and includes compatibility updates for certain third-party access points configured to use WPA or WPA2 security."

A Channelweb article describes a new product from Microsoft called Silverlight which is a new web browser client for "advanced, browser-based video functionality."

Silverlight is said to be going head-to-head against Adobe's Flash, and is said to offer advanced functionality.

Netflix plans to adopt Silverlight as the foundation for its instant-viewing feature; a demo showed off high-quality streaming video overlaid with DVD-like menus and controls. A preview of forthcoming on-demand video functionality from MLB.com had attendees clamoring for the developing new features to hurry up and get finished.

As impressive as the demos were, the most remarkable aspect of the demo was Microsoft's commitment to make the platform "open" and "interoperable" with Mac support from the start:

While Microsoft is famed for its halfhearted or nonexistant support for running its software on rival platforms, the company vows Silverlight will be different: Version one is slated to run natively in Safari and Firefox as well as Internet Explorer (both version 6 and 7), and Opera support is in the works.

The demo stage reportedly had a number of Macs with a large portion of the demo devoted to their usage. Unfortunately, authoring support is only available on the Windows platform.

A beta version is available now.

Apple announced today that Steve Jobs will indeed be giving the Keynote speech at WWDC 2007.

The keynote speech will take place on Monday, June 11th at 10a.m. PT at San Francisco's Moscone West. Apple will be showing a "feature complete version" of Mac OS X Leopard and will be giving out beta copies to developers for testing.

As announced earlier, the final version of Leopard will ship in October.

The five-day event, scheduled to run from June 11 to June 15, will deliver more than 150 sessions and labs aimed at getting the most out of Leopard. The conference will also include new content to serve a wide range of developers, including Mac OS X Immersion Monday, designed to quickly get developers who are new to the Mac up to speed; a content and media track that shows developers the best ways to integrate animation, motion graphics, video, rich-media and web-based content into their applications; and dozens of hands-on labs that offer a unique opportunity to work directly with Apple engineers.

MacRumors has heard that Apple will be relaunching its ProCare product on Wednesday, splitting the $99 service into two separate $99 services.

Apple's current ProCare package offers a number of services for a $99/year cost. These services include:

Personal Training - up to 52 one-hour sessions over a year.
Fast Track - priority repairs and available same-day service at the Genius Bar.
Advance Reservations - schedule appointments for the Genius Bar and The Studio up to 14 days in advance.
Yearly Tune-up - system diagnostics, update your Apple software, and even clean your monitor and keyboard.
Computer Setup - transfer all your existing files to your new computer, organize everything into convenient folders, and set up your system and your new software.

Apple is expected to split their ProCare service into two separate $99 services, each with only a portion of the original features.

ProCare - $99.
Fast Track
Advanced Reservations
Yearly Tune-up
Complete Setup
Backup Consult (new)

One-to-One - $99. ($79 for teachers)
Personal Training - up to 52 one-hour sessions over a year.
Complete Setup

So, customers interested in purchasing ProCare should considering purchasing ProCare before Wednesday as benefits will reportedly be honored under the old terms.

Samsung has announced that they are beginning volume production of higher-density flash memory.

Samsung claims to be the first to accomplish the feat of mass-producing 16 gigabit NAND flash memory, which is being manufactured at 51 nm, down from 60 nm with previous 8 gigabit technology.

The new 16Gb chip which has a multi-level cell (MLC) structure can facilitate capacity expansion by offering 16 gigabytes (GBs) of memory in a single memory card. Furthermore, by applying the new process technology, Samsung has accelerated the chips read and write speeds by approximately 80 percent over current MLC data processing speeds.

Apple currently uses flash memory in many of its products, including the iPod Nano, iPod Shuffle, and the upcoming iPhone. Rumors have been circulating that Apple will adopt Intel's flash caching technology (featured in the Santa Rosa platform) in its future MacBook lineups. Some analysts have even gone so far as to claim that Apple may introduce a totally flash-based laptop.

USA Today interviewed Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer about his thoughts on the iPhone. While Ballmer gives credit to Apple's early move into the music arena, he doubts the iPhone will gain any significant marketshare:

Now we'll get a chance to go through this again in phones and music players. There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get.

(Note that Ballmer assumes that the $500 iPhone is subsidized, but there has been speculation and rumor that this is not the case.)

An unusual story has popped up on MobileGuerilla claiming to have found the first photos from an Apple iPhone on the web.

The search method seemed rather primitive... they simply searched for "taken with an Apple iPhone" on Google and found a set of Flickr images (now removed) tagged with the phrase. The phrase is automatically generated by Flickr based on the EXIF data from the camera itself.

Now, this is certainly not proof that the images were necessarily taken by an Apple iPhone since EXIF information is easily editable. The images where then set to private and then deleted from the Flickr account. Again, this alone would not be particularly convincing, however, based on publicly available evidence, it's clear that the photos came from someone in the position to have access to an iPhone.

As a result, it appears very likely the photos are authentic. (click images for larger versions, original size of 2nd photo not available)

Interesting EXIF info (submitted by Bill Baron) from one of the original images:

* Camera Make = Apple
* Camera Model = iPhone
* Picture Orientation = rotated 90 (6)
* Lens F-Number/F-Stop = 14/5 = F2.80
* Color Space = sRGB (1)
* Image Width = 1600
* Image Height = 1200
* Unknown tag: Tagnum = 0xa500 ===> data = 11/5
* Compression = JPEG compression (6)

So, the Apple iPhone does appear to encode orientation information (landscape or portrait) into photos based on whether or not the phone is held vertically or horizontally.