Day: February 1, 2008

Mobile Linux company, Azingo, formerly Celunite, today announced Azingo Mobile, a comprehensive suite of open mobile software and services designed to help companies deliver web 2.0 applications, music, video, vivid graphics and more to a wide range of mobile phones. Leveraging the economies of open source innovations and based on LiMo and its Ecosystem, Azingo Mobile provides a less costly and more flexible platform for designing and deploying mobile devices. The platform will be demonstrated at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, (Azingo booth 2.1D57 and LiMo booth 8B135), Feb. 11-14, 2008.Available for immediate licensing, the Azingo Mobile platform enables handset manufacturers and operators to leverage a rich suite of “out of the box” mobile applications that “plug-in” to a comprehensive and pre-integrated open mobile middleware framework and kernel. Supported by a powerful SDK and development tools, Azingo Mobile lets OEM, operators and ISVs build and customize innovative services and user experiences. Azingo Mobile’s one-stop-shop approach reduces development costs, shortens the time to bring new handset designs to market, and enables lower cost phones offering the latestmultimedia and UI innovations.Guido Arnone, director of terminals technology at Vodafone said: “We welcome Azingo’s mobile Linux platform to the LiMo Foundation. Azingo Mobile’s ability to provide lower-cost, Internet-enabled mobile phones helps support LiMo’s goal to create a true mass-market platform and surrounding ecosystem that will deliver compelling handsets and rich user experiences.” “Azingo Mobile has received significant interest from the industry’s leading handset manufacturers and operators,” said Mahesh Veerina, CEO of Azingo. “Our product is offered on 13 different hardware platforms from seven of the industry’s leading silicon providers. Azingo technology is a core component of the LiMo Foundation common integration environment and our support of LiMo specifications ensures that devices powered by Azingo Mobile will contribute to the growth and unification of mobile Linux.”About Azingo MobileAzingo Mobile includes all of the software, development tools, documentation and training required to design and commercialize new mobile phone products. Azingo Mobile platform applications are organized into four suites: Azingo Mobile Entertainment, Azingo Mobile Internet, Azingo Mobile Productivity and Azingo Mobile Communications. Azingo Mobile Entertainment provides music and video players, a photo gallery and more. Azingo Mobile Internet includes a variety of personalized mobile web 2.0 applications and content, RSS notifications and a feature-rich mobile browser. Other Azingo Mobile features include: Highly Configurable User Interface – Enables quick creation and deployment of several mobile phone models with unique user interfaces and capabilities. A convenient Quickbar rapidly launches any application from any screen using five-key navigation, keyboard, touch-screen and virtual keyboard interfaces. Complete internationalization, localization, multi-lingual text input, bi-directional text rendering, scalable fonts, editable themes, animations and transitions are also supported.Home Screen Customization – Provides an easy-to-design and configure Home screen that includes dynamic content from web and phone data sources. Operators can design and offer branded, integrated services for personalized experiences that offer RSS notifications for news, stocks, blogs, promotional offers, shopping and more.Mobile Internet – Uses widget run-time technology to deliver mobile web 2.0 experiences that include applications, games, graphics, animated wallpaper, themes and more.Multimedia – Plays or streams music and video normally found only in expensive, high end smart phones, on lower cost phones. Supports integrated ring-tone management, MIDI, audio, video, image and speech codecs, camera services, hardware acceleration and more.Customizable/Turnkey – Can be integrated to new handset and chipset designs. Azingo’s professional engineering services team can deliver market specific solutions, including creating operator-specific branded service applications.Azingo is privately-held with headquarters in Sunnyvale, California. Visit www.azingo.com.

Microsoft Corp. today announced that it has made a proposal to the Yahoo! Inc. Board of Directors to acquire all the outstanding shares of Yahoo! common stock for per share consideration of $31 representing a total equity value of approximately $44.6 billion. Microsoft’s proposal would allow the Yahoo! shareholders to elect to receive cash or a fixed number of shares of Microsoft common stock, with the total consideration payable to Yahoo! shareholders consisting of one-half cash and one-half Microsoft common stock. The offer represents a 62 percent premium above the closing price of Yahoo! common stock on Jan. 31, 2008. “We have great respect for Yahoo!, and together we can offer an increasingly exciting set of solutions for consumers, publishers and advertisers while becoming better positioned to compete in the online services market,” said Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer of Microsoft. “We believe our combination will deliver superior value to our respective shareholders and better choice and innovation to our customers and industry partners.” “Our lives, our businesses, and even our society have been progressively transformed by the Web, and Yahoo! has played a pioneering role by building compelling, high-scale services and infrastructure,” said Ray Ozzie, chief software architect at Microsoft. “The combination of these two great teams would enable us to jointly deliver a broad range of new experiences to our customers that neither of us would have achieved on our own.” The online advertising market is growing at a very fast pace, from over $40 billion in 2007 to nearly $80 billion by 2010. The resulting benefits of scale along with the associated capital costs for advertising platform providers make this a time of industry consolidation and convergence. Today this market is increasingly dominated by one player. Together, Microsoft and Yahoo! can offer a competitive choice while better fulfilling the needs of customers and partners.“The combined assets and strong services focus of these two companies will enable us to achieve scale economics while reaching R&D critical mass to deliver innovation breakthroughs,” said Kevin Johnson, president of the Platforms & Services Division of Microsoft. “The industry will be well served by having more than one strong player, offering more value and real choice to advertisers, publishers and consumers.” The combination will create a more efficient company with synergies in four areas: scale economics driven by audience critical mass and increased value for advertisers; combined engineering talent to accelerate innovation; operational efficiencies through elimination of redundant cost; and the ability to innovate in emerging user experiences such as video and mobile. Microsoft believes these four areas will generate at least $1 billion in annual synergy for the combined entity. Microsoft has developed a plan and process that will include the employees of both companies to focus on the integration of the combined business. Microsoft intends to offer significant retention packages to Yahoo! engineers, key leaders and employees across all disciplines.Microsoft believes this proposed combination would receive all necessary regulatory approvals and expects that the proposed transaction would be completed in the second half of calendar year 2008.Microsoft is also committed to working closely with Yahoo! management and its Board of Directors as they, along with Yahoo! shareholders, evaluate this compelling proposal.

“The Nokia N82 seems somewhat odd, however –it wedges into Nokia’s otherwise consistent range and then provokes a natural question – Is there any real need in this phone? But the answer is right on the surface, you just need to take a better look around to figure out that the N82 is in fact striking back at Sony Ericsson’s flagship – the Sony Ericsson K850i. This is what Nokia has set to do – roll out a direct rival for the K850i with comparable price tag and an edge in the form of S60. Speaking in favor of this guess is the fact that only now does a Nokia-branded device employs a motion sensor for auto menu rotation, not only in the camera application. The N82’s Xenon flash is another tribute to its imaging department. So, these two phones share a whole lot of features, plus Nokia has quickly released the N82 into the wild, which is not exactly typical of this company – all these facts seem to add up. The Finnish manufacturer had to launch its solution before the Christmas season and trip up the Sony Ericsson K850i. Hard to say for sure, but as I see it, the company has coped with both goals.” Read more here:

“Palm has just released a new ROM update for the Sprint Treo 755p. Palm’s support page for this update, referenced as ROM version 1.07, is surprisingly short on details, even by Palm standards. The entire list of improvements in this version states: “This software update is a tune-up that improves audio, stability, software quality and device usability.” Though we can only speculate without any release notes or details, It’s possible that some lingering bugs left over from the 700p-era OS in the initial 755p ROM are addressed, perhaps bringing the 755p closer to Centro levels of performance and reliability. Whatever the specifics, this update is certain to be welcome news to Treo 755p users who feel they have forked over considerable more money for a “forgotten” device that has been left in the dust as Palm focuses the majority of their attention on the newer, flashier, and much cheaper Centro. Palm’s new 1.07 update for the Sprint 755p is approximately 18.4 megabytes in size and is available in both Hotsync and SD-based installers for Windows uers. Mac users are required to perform the memory card-based install method. Palm advises that the update will take 45 minutes to complete. The Sprint Treo 755p launched in May of 2007 and the device was recently been rolled out on the CDMA networks of Alltel, Canada’s Telus and most recently, Verizon Wireless. ” via palminfocenter.com