ShareBy Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews
After 1 1/2 years of negotiations, which all began with a $44.6 billion bid by Microsoft for Yahoo!, the two companies have come to a more limited agreement, one involving their search businesses only.
That first deal was flatly turned down by Yahoo! and then-CEO Jerry Yang, but since Carol Bartz took over [...]

ShareBy Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews
Oracle has snatched Sun Microsystems from the jaws of IBM, agreeing to a deal worth $9.50 a share or $7.4 billion ($5.6 billion net of Sun’s cash and debt) on Monday.
IBM and Sun earlier seemed set for a deal, but Sun balked when IBM lowered their offer from $10 a share to [...]

ShareBy Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews
Troubled U.S. automaker General Motors has teamed with Segway, maker of those two-wheeled, self-balancing, upright scooters, to build a new type of two-wheeled vehicle designed for crowded urban environments. The name of the project is PUMA, for Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility.
My first thought is: given they have only a 60-day [...]

ShareHere’s our usual weekly summary of featured items from Gizmos For Geeks.
Starting off the week were a set of novelty Stone Ice Cubes – just the ticket if you worry about harming the planet when making ice cubes. We also featured a set of kitchen scales that has a neat pull out display.
We wondered out [...]

ShareBy Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews
On Monday, number 2 overall hard drive manufacturer Western Digital announced it had purchased SiliconSystems for $65 million in cash, thus entering the solid-state drive (SSD) market via acquisition.
Just last November, WD was still cautious on SSDs (to say the least) saying:
“Western Digital enters markets that exist, announces products when they are [...]

ShareBy Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews
Still playing catch-up with Netflix, Blockbuster announced on Wednesday it has inked a deal with TiVo to add its OnDemand service to TiVo’s DVRs. TiVo already has deals in place with Netflix and Amazon.com, and those deals will be unaffected by this new pact.
Blockbuster currently only offers its OnDemand service on [...]

ShareBy Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews
I’ve written about Pure Digital’s Flip line of camcorders several times now, and I have to tell you, though I know their initial products prior to to Flip were real misses, I love this line of camcorders, and so does the public: Flip currently says it has around 20% of the camcorder [...]

ShareBy Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNewsSony and Google announced on Thursday a deal whereby 500,000 public domain books from Google’s book digitization project will now be available for free for the Sony Reader Digital Book PRS-505 and PRS-700 devices.
Owners of the older PRS-500 readers are out of luck, however.
While this is a nice add for the two [...]