The Smooth DJ

So Ballmer backs off and Microsoft withdraws their offer for Yahoo!. Is this saga over? Not yet. Jerry Yang will be under immense pressure to show that Yahoo! is really worth what he thinks it is ($37/share), because the market certainly disagrees. And some pundits, like The Buzz's Paul R. La Monica think Yahoo! could come crawling back to MSFT eventually.

I think Steve Ballmer played this well. Most thought he would just pay more for Yahoo! to get the deal completed. But walking away turns up the heat on Yang and Co., and will certainly make shareholders less patient (some are already huffing mad).

Ballmer may be creating an opportunity to come back with his original offer that a more wary Yahoo! will accept (in lieu of shareholder lawsuits and Wall Street disgust). With such a significant strategic objective aired in public, Microsoft better have a good plan B to right their internet ship. More likely, however, they are hoping to make this deal happen at a later time.

From Modernbeats, an e-book to get you started making hip-hop beats [link]. It's a bit studio focused for the average DIYer, but seems to cover all the bases.

Not an iPhone killer, but to those who prefer a touch keyboard, the Blackberry 9000 seems to deliver. I'm surprised RIM doesn't have tighter control of their developer phones. How did this one end up on eBay?

Nag Champa (Afrodisiac for the World) by Common.

Apparently not. Given the sensationalism one can expect in MSM headlines, you have to wonder if this new service by CNN [still in beta] is a PR nightmare waiting to happen. Making $15 T-Shirts from stupid headlines?

Click to enlarge and laugh uncontrollably.

A good recap by Kevin Ohannessian at FastCompany.

Interesting point from Matthew Yglesias

It's interesting...that we're seeing the emergence of a bifurcated media landscape and political conversation. People over a certain age exist in a universe where it's almost as if the web doesn't exist and things like the nightly news, the daily paper, and the cable networks are utterly dominant. For people below a certain age, the nightly news is totally irrelevant, the daily paper is primarily a website, and things like blogs and web videos matter a great deal.

This is one thing people forget when discussing...that people who watched Nixon debate Kennedy on television liked Kennedy, but those who listened on the radio liked Nixon. In 1960 television was still a relatively new technology, and an older, late-adopter segment of the population didn't have it and listened to debates on the radio. That was a Nixon-friendly demographic, just as early-adopters of web technology today are Obama-friendly.

Hat tip Andrew Sullivan.

By monitoring what they import - Via Fortune's Apple 2.0 Blog:

“Knowledge is power,” declares ImportGenius’ promotional material. “Whether you are looking to keep tabs on your competitors with Supply Spy, identify suppliers with ImportScan our easy to use online software makes it easy. You get access to records on nearly every container that entered the United States from 2006 to the present.”

Who knew?

The above quote from a post detailing ImportGenius' claim that a recent spike in shipping activity by Apple is evidence that the rumored 3G iPhone has reached our shores.

As Mozilla drops FireFox 3.0 and Microsoft releases IE8 this year, there's some chatter out there of a browser war redux.

Browsers stand to become more important as so-called cloud computing becomes more common. Ultimately, your surfing experience will approach something closer to using desktop software. Browsers will serve as a personal way to organize your productivity, and the notion of page refreshing will be a thing of the past.

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