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The following email was sent to all Microsoft employees from CEO Steve Ballmer at 5:17 pm PDT (see Breaking: Microsoft Withdraws Yahoo Bid; Walks Away From Deal): From: Steve Ballmer Date: May 3, 2008 5:17:30 PM PDT To: “Microsoft - All Employees (QBDG)” Subject: Withdrawal of Offer to Acquire Yahoo! This afternoon I sent the attached letter [see update 2 here for letter to Yahoo] to Jerry Yang announcing that Microsoft has withdrawn its proposal to acquire Yahoo. We proposed the deal in the ...

When it comes to casual games online, they tend to be built in Adobe’s Flash (see Kongregate). But Microsoft wants people to start creating Web video games in its competing Silverlight. Today, it is taking a step to make that easier by introducing the Popfly Game Creator. Microsoft launched Popfly last year as an easy way to create widgets and mashups using Silverlight. With Popfly Game Creator, it is adding a simple Web-based authoring environment for creating casual arcade-style games. The ...

It’s hard to find a place to research food—the kind that you buy at the grocery store and put into your body every day. As people become more aware, and concerned, about what thy eat, a site like Zeer makes more and more sense. Zeer, which launched earlier today, is a product review site for food. It contains nutritional information for 114,000 food products, and each one can be rated and reviewed. Founder and CEO Michael Putnam used to work at the Markem Corporation, which makes the machines ...

With the ambitious Longhorn plans sitting in the trash, Microsoft produced a much more evolutionary OS. It has some interesting new technology under the hood, but unfortunately most of this is invisible to anyone using the system. What they do see is an uninspiring mess. The fit and finish of Vista is astonishingly poor. With Vista's UI guidelines, Microsoft has tried to take some things that MacOS has been doing forever and introduce them to Windows. For example, dialog boxes in Windows have ...

Microsoft’s i’m Initiative, which launched in March 2007, has expanded to include Hotmail. The program donates a portion of the ad revenue generated through Hotmail and Messenger to any of ten worthwhile causes. I like the basic premise behind the i’m initiative - it’s an opt-in and fairly unintrusive service that just puts an extra i’m-specific advertisement at the end of your emails, or an i’m icon next to your buddy list name. The more email and messages users send, the more money Microsoft ...

Khris Loux, the CEO of startup JS-Kit, thinks he’s finally come up with the killer widget. JS-Kit has all sorts of widgets used by blogs and other sites for ratings, reviews, polls, and comments. But the latest one he just launched is not just gee-whiz cute. It’s gee-whiz disruptive. It is called the JS-Kit Advisor. And it will bring ratings and reviews from trusted sources such as Experian and JD Power to businesses and product listings across the Web. The first data partner to go live is ...

« Google Named Top Global Brand -- Again | Main | Take Our 2-Minute Survey, You Could Win a Ticket to SMX Advanced » iGoogle is one of the most interesting products at the search engine. Reportedly the fastest growing of Google's offerings it's a personal start page or dashboard, but with potential to evolve into something more. Today Google announced "a sandbox for developers that helps them build richer gadgets for iGoogle, which will offer users more powerful and interactive features..." ...

Along with a bunch of other European firms exhibiting at Web 2 Expo this week (including 20 from Ireland) were a group of 21 UK startups selected from over 100 applicants by TechCrunch UK, working in conjunction with the UK government. Announced in March, the trip was dubbed WebMission and most of the firms had never visited the Valley before. So I thought I’d give you a heads-up about the firms, who, after a week of meetings and networking parties here, head back to the UK tomorrow - and will ...

Peter Gabriel knows a thing or two about music, and he thinks he’s come up with a better way for you to find new music that will rock your world. The latest digital music company he is backing is called The Filter. It is essentially a meta-recommendation engine for music, movies, and Web video. Right now, it works best for music. The site was announced today and we have beta invites. There are only 100 of them. So sign up here. You probably have about 30 seconds before they are all gone. The ...

Sprout - the impressive browser-based tool that debuted at DEMO in January and suddenly made it feasible for non-developers to create rich Flash-based widgets - has got even better with the release of v1.5. One of the most promising things about Sprout was that it integrated third-party services. At launch, publishers could add to their widgets, among other components, polls from PollDaddy and maps from Yahoo. Since there are countless other web services that could potentially widgetize ...