Apple Tried To Buy Palm Before HP Won The Bidding War -- And RIM Completely Blew The Deal

The race to buy Palm earlier this year was fast and hot, with the company's bankers contacting 16 companies about the deal, including five serious potential suitors.
HP won the bake-off, acquiring Palm for $1.2 billion in late April.
But other companies involved in the talks included Silicon Valley's increasingly competitive rivals, Apple and Google, as well as BlackBerry maker Research In Motion, we have learned from a source familiar with the negotiations.
According to our discussions with this person:

• Apple was mostly interested in Palm's huge library of intellectual property and patents (450+ patents on file, another 400+ applications on file). And unlike some other bidders, Apple even seemed committed to funding Palm's operations, perhaps to challenge RIM's dominance in the keyboarded segment of the smartphone industry, our source says. (There's a bunch of problems with this idea, such as the idea of Apple supporting two rival app platforms, but that's what this person says.) Ultimately, Apple didn't bid high enough, while HP offered an amount the board couldn't say no to. (Recall that Steve Jobs tried to buy Palm years ago in its first life, too, when it was owned by 3Com.)

• RIM basically had the deal in its hands and "had to work incredibly hard to blow it," our source recalls. RIM initially came in higher than HP, but HP upped its bid, our source says.

• Google, likely interested in Palm's intellectual property, supposedly only wanted it because Google thought Apple might want it. But Google supposedly didn't know Apple was actually bidding for Palm, so it didn't proceed.

• Nokia, bizarrely, wasn't anywhere near the deal. That may prove to be a stupid move, which we'll expand on later.

Microsoft Pays $3 to Set Bing as The Default Search Engine!

Microsoft is going all out and doing everything humanly possible to eat into Google’s search market share. Google dropped by 1% in the month of June as Yahoo and Bing gained .6% each. Though the drop cannot be directly tied to Bings aggressive marketing tactics just based on 1 months results, it would be interesting to see if the trend continues.
Microsoft is currently paying $3 to anyone who decide to set Bing as their default search engine. The company has tied up with DonorsChoose.org where users can donate the $3 they earn by switching to Bing.
So here is how it works..

Millennial Media: Apple OS Grows By 36 Percent In June, Android Up By 23 Percent

Mobile ad network Millennial Media, which claims that its network reaches 82 percent of 72 million mobile web users in the U.S., is reporting that globally, Apple OS requests are up by 36 percent in June, after dropping 33 percent in May.
Android requests continued to rise, and grew another 23 percent month over month. Android is now up a whopping 439% since January. iPad requests are also increasing at a fast rate, growing 206 percent in June, after rising 160 percent in May. RIM ad requests increased percent month-over-month, posting a 41 percent increase in requests since January.
In terms of ad impressions, Apple’s OS remained the leading Smartphone OS on Millennial’s network in June with a 56 percent share of impressions and an 8% growth month-over-month. RIM was the second largest Smartphone OS for the eleventh consecutive month, representing a 17 percent share of impressions for June, dropping by 2 percent from last month. Android’s OS remained the third largest operating system in for the fourth consecutive month, representing 11 percent of impressions, dropping by 4 percent from May.
When splitting ad impressions by device manufacturer, Apple had the largest share increase of 4 percent with approximately 30 percent share of impressions in June. Motorola moved into the number four position, passing HTC and LG, with the mobile company’s devices representing an 8 percent share of impressions for the month. This growth is largely driven by the Droid device, says Millennial.

Don’t Hack or Mod the Droid X, Unless You Want a Useless Paperweight

Droid X owners, beware: If you mod or tinker too much with your shiny new phone it could suddenly turn into a useless brick, according to reports surfacing from people who have attempted to hack, root, mod or tinker with the massive smartphone.
In the first place, the device is difficult to hack due to an encrypted bootloader. If you then change or compromise the bootloader, kernels or ROM of the device, it will become completely unusable. The only solution is to take it in to a Verizon store, where you will likely be charged for a fix since you voided the warranty.
The security features focus around a technology called “eFuse,” which is designed to verify you are using the versions of your bootloader, kernels and ROM. If this check fails, the bootloader is permanently corrupted, making your Droid X useless.
You can find a more detailed explanation of how this technology works on the My Droid World forums, but it boils down to this: Motorola doesn’t want you hacking your phone, even though you purchased the device and it’s legally yours.
If you buy a new Droid X phone and intend to hack it, tread lightly. Otherwise, your expensive smartphone might become about as useful as a paperweight.

BP shares rise after crude leak stopped

(Reuters) - U.S.-listed shares of BP Plc (BP.L) (BP.N) jumped 7.6 percent on Thursday after a company executive said no oil was leaking from its blown-out well into the Gulf of Mexico for the first time since late April.
Kent Wells, BP's senior vice president of exploration and production, told a media briefing that a new cap had completely shut in the flow of crude oil while the company conducts a critical pressure test on the stricken well.
Investors are closely watching the company's efforts to stop the crude flow, which has caused the worst U.S. environmental disaster. BP's setbacks and progress in recent weeks have caused big swings in the stock price.
BP shares ended at $38.92, up $2.74, on the New York Stock Exchange. After the close of regular trading, the company's stock rose further to $39.15.
News that the crude stopped flowing also gave a lift to other so-called "spill stocks."
Shares of Anadarko Petroleum Corp (APC.N), a U.S. oil and gas company that owns a 25 percent stake in the ruptured well ended 3.2 percent higher at $49.08. U.S.-listed shares of Transocean (RIGN.VX) (RIG.N), which owned the rig that sank in the April 20 accident, ended the session up 4.5 percent at $54.70.
(Reporting by Caroline Valetkevitch in New York and Anna Driver in Houston; Editing by Kenneth Barry and Steve Orlofsky)

Thai Team Wins Imagine Cup

Microsoft Sponsors Eighth Annual Student Technology Festival

Team Skeek from Thailand won top honors at last week's Imagine Cup Worldwide Finals in Warsaw. More than 325,000 students from around the world participated in the eighth annual Imagine Cup, a competition sponsored by Microsoft Corp. that challenges high-school and college students to create technology solutions for the world's toughest problems.

The awards ceremony capped the weeklong Imagine Cup World Festival, where students demonstrated their projects and competed for cash prizes totaling $240,000 through five competition categories and six achievement awards.

"These student projects are sophisticated technology accomplishments that highlight the incredible things that can happen when inspired ideas and the will to make them happen come together," said Jean-Philippe Courtois, president of Microsoft International, in announcing the awards. "These students should make us all proud, as they are taking concrete steps to help others and make our world a better place. With their passion and the assistance of technology, these young adults can and will affect the future."

Team Skeek won the $25,000 grand prize in the software design category for its project, eyeFeel, which lets the hearing impaired communicate with other people through an augmented-reality environment.
According to Microsoft, this year's projects concentrated mainly on education, healthcare and the environment. Competition categories were Digital Media, Embedded Development, Game Design, IT Challenge and Software Design. In addition, there were six achievement awards categories: Envisioning 2020 Award, Interoperability Award, Next Generation Web Award, Touch & Tablet Accessibility Award, Windows Phone 7 "Rockstar" Award and Windows Internet Explorer 8 Award.
The Imagine Cup began in 2003 with 1,000 student participants and has grown to become the premier student technology competition worldwide.

Facebook Preparing To Announce 500 Million Users

Facebook is about to announce that they’ve hit 500 million users — a milestone that cements (as if it hadn’t already) the site’s status as one of the web’s biggest successes ever. Of course, at Facebook’s growth trajectory it hasn’t been a matter of if the social network would be hitting 500 million, but when it would (in fact, the movie poster for the upcoming movie The Social Network uses the 500 million stat in its tagline). Still, it’s finally about to become official. So how do we know?