Microsoft renews Yahoo courtship - few details

sfgate_get_fprefs();

(05-18) 19:06 PDT --
After abruptly abandoning its coup d'etat command for Yokel Inc. 2 hebdomads ago, Microsoft Corp. said Lord'S Day that it have made a new, downsized offering to collaborate with the Sunnyvale Web portal while leaving the door unfastened to a amalgamation down the road.

Details of the proposal were vague. But the offering raises the possibility of everything from purchasing a portion of Yokel to an advertisement partnership in which Microsoft would put its advertisements on Yahoo.

Another possible is a joint venture in search, an country where the two companies have got lagged far behind industry dominator Google Inc. Inch recent years, some analysts had speculated about Microsoft and Yokel whirling off their hunt concern into a single company that they would both control.

In any case, the move reignites the wooing between the two engineering giants, which were not able to hold on a terms in the first form of their negotiations.

Now Microsoft executive directors are asking for new talks, reversing their determination to "move on" in the aftermath of their failing $47.5 billion command and jump-start their online advertisement concern without Yahoo.

"Microsoft is considering and have raised with Yokel an option that would affect a dealing with Yokel but not an acquisition of all of Yahoo," Microsoft said in a statement.

Microsoft said that there is no self-assurance that both sides will attain an agreement.

Yahoo's response was oblique other than confirming that Microsoft was uninterested in acquiring all of the company, at least for now.

Yahoo added that its board, which have been considering a figure of trades to resuscitate its slumping business, "will measure each of our alternatives, including any Microsoft proposal" while adding that it is "open to pursuing any dealing which is in the best involvement of our stockholders."

The overture to restart dialogues come ups four years after billionaire investor militant Carl Icahn launched a command to throw out Yahoo's 10-member board, which he accused of acting irrationally by opposing a merger. By proposing a slate of replacements, to be voted on at Yahoo's yearly stockholder meeting July 3, he trusts to coerce Yokel back to the negotiating table.

Although Icahn is legendary for forcing loath boards to act, Yokel President Roy Bostock responded to the onslaught last hebdomad by saying that Yokel will only accept a amalgamation that appropriately values the company.

A beginning familiar with the substance said Icahn hadn't been in contact with Microsoft about Sunday's proposal. But that doesn't govern out the possibility of the company cooperating with him later on.

Microsoft's proposal doesn't prevent it from trying to get Yokel outright in the future. That point was hammered topographic point by the company, which said Lord'S Day that it was "not proposing to do a new command to get all of Yokel at this time," but that it "reserves the right to reconsider that option depending on future developments and treatments that may take place with Yokel or treatments with stockholders of Yokel or Microsoft or with other 3rd parties."

To beef up its lagging concern and go more than feasible as an independent company, Yokel is discussing a assortment of trades with other companies, including a program to outsource some of its hunt advertisement concern to Google. An understanding may be announced within a week, according to beginnings familiar with the matter.

The possible unnerves Microsoft chief executive officer Steve Ballmer. In a missive to Yokel chief executive officer Kraut Yang on May 3, he cited a Google partnership as a major ground for withdrawing his amalgamation command and added that a trade would ache Yahoo's hereafter growing and raise serious antimonopoly issues as a effect of the No. One and No. Two hunt engines joining forces.

Ballmer's new proposal to Yokel may be aimed at disrupting the Google deal, which have already prompted an antimonopoly enquiry by the Department of Justice.

Kevin Johnson, a Microsoft president, said in an e-mail to employees Lord'S Day in preliminary to an advertisement conference this hebdomad that his company is on the route to reviving its Internet business, which have lagged financially in the human face of Google's success. He spoke of attempts to be announced this hebdomad to pass some of its online places including hunt and the MSN portal while bolstering advertisement sales.

"Regardless of the result of any new discussions," he said about the Yokel proposal, "it is of import that we go on to travel forward to beef up our online services business. The fact is that we are not where we desire to be in this concern yet and we've been in this place longer than we'd all like."

E-mail Jules Verne Kopytoff at .

UN teams up with Google and Cisco Systems to track global efforts to fight poverty

: The United Nations have teamed up with engineering giants Google Inc. and Lake Herring Systems, Inc. to establish a new Web land site that volition supply information and a bird's oculus position of planetary attempts to struggle poorness and ran into U.N. development goals.

The land site will track attempts by states around the Earth to accomplish the Millennium Development Goals for 2015, which human race leadership approved at a U.N. acme in 2000, by providing the up-to-the-minute statistics on health, education, malnutrition, women's equality and other measurements that lend to poverty.

On one part of the site, a Web surfboarder can also utilize Google Earth's map and artificial satellite imagination to wing anywhere on the planet and research from above the topographic points where work is being done.

The ends include cutting utmost poorness by half, ensuring cosmopolitan primary school education, reducing kid mortality by two-thirds, halting and starting to change by reversal the HIV/AIDS pandemic and cutting in one-half the proportionality of people without entree to safe imbibing water.

U.N. Secretary-General Prohibition Ki-moon called Thursday's launch "crucial" because for the first clip all information on the U.N. goals, known as the MDGs, will be available in one topographic point "for all who seek it, with a few simple chinks of the mouse." Today on IHT.com

Ban lamented that almost 1 billion people still dwell on less than US$1 a day; that billions of children decease every twelvemonth before their 5th birthday from causes associated with malnutrition; that infective diseases including acquired immune deficiency syndrome and malaria "are taking their worst toll on states that tin least afford it;" and that billions of people are living in slums.

"Clearly, we are facing a development exigency — and we necessitate exigency action," he said.

"For the first clip in history, the human race have at its disposal the agency to cut poorness in one-half in the span of a generation," the secretary-general said. "But ultimately, achieving the MDGs is a substance of political will. There is no Ag bullet, but the resources, cognition and tools for achieving the ends make exist."

The new MDG Monitor is one of those tools because it will harness the powerfulness of the Internet to supply information for policymakers and development experts who can larn from each other's successes and setbacks, and it will increase public entree and attending to achieving the U.N. goals, Prohibition said.

At the end of his speech, Prohibition set his manus on the mouse of a laptop computing machine computer together with Lake Herring Senior Frailty President Carlos Dominguez, Google's Michael Mother Jones who is main engineer for Google World and Maps, and U.N. Development Program Administrator Kemal Dervis.

A user who chinks the Google World logotype can wing anywhere in the human race and see all the undertakings and measure the advancement toward meeting the MDGs, Mother Jones said.

"They can see successes and detect those, and observe failures or deficits ... and redouble their country's committedness to prosecute those efforts. So it's very exciting for us," he said.

Dominguez said Lake Herring believes that engineering and human inventiveness "can effectively steer expertness and resources to those in demand while highlighting the success of others in reaching these of import goals."

The budget for the undertaking is US$200,000 (€139,000), and it received US$150,000 (€104,000) from corporate donors, according to the U.N. Development Program, which is facilitating the new Web land site for the U.N.

UNDP's Dervis said information on the MDG Monitor come ups from a assortment of U.N. agencies, the World Depository Financial Institution and governments, but he noted that statistics are sometimes hard to obtain, and can differ.

"We trust to gradually defeat these failings and unfastened the land site to all organisations who garner statistics to offer their information," he said.

___

On the Web: