Domain Magnate

Domain news reports:

As promised, we are keeping you up to date on this developing story…  As  we reported yesterday, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer had held firm with the original offer, insisting it was fair in light of Yahoo’s eroding profits during the past two years. He threatened an attempt to oust Yahoo’s board if the 10 directors, including Chief Executive Jerry Yang, didn’t accept the offer by April 26th.
Since Yahoo has forced the issue by letting the deadline pass, Ballmer appears ready to put more money on the table. Microsoft’s board reportedly met earlier this week to consider raising the bid as high as $33 per share. It wasn’t clear whether Microsoft presented that figure, which would translate to about $47.5 billion for the deal, to Yahoo Friday. read more »

Update: bidding up to $500K now, reserve seems to be $800K

Pizza.net at TDNam at 420K, 4 days left and reserve not met yet.

I do NOT believe this.. I could see the .com going at that price, but the .net? Looks much like shill bidders trying to capitalize on the big pizza.com slice. As long as the reserve not met it doesn’t count. We’ll see if it’s true or not, my bet is it won’t sell. The description also says:

The ORIGINAL Pizza Search Engine It includes 60k pizza restaurants, Prior art to Microsoft’s zip code patent

But that doesn’t add much value. The site looks quite simple, you could get a similar one built for a couple hundred bucks with the ready database.

View the pizza.net discussion on DNF for more info

Either way good luck to the seller.

In a report published on Monday, Google said it was concerned about the free flow of information on the Internet if Microsoft was to succeed in acquiring Yahoo.“We would be concerned by any kind of acquisition of Yahoo by Microsoft,” Chief Executive Eric Schmidt told reporters.

“We would hope that anything they did would be consistent with the openness of the Internet, but I doubt it would be.”

Schmidt pointed to Microsoft’s past history and “the things that it has done that have been so difficult for everyone,” but he did not elaborate. read more »

The Domains reports

AOL Annouced today that it will pay $850 million in cash to acquire social media network Bebo, which has total global membership of more than 40 million.

Bebo is one of the largest social networks in Britain, and is ranked number one in Ireland and New Zealand and number three in the U.S, according to AOL.

News Corp. , which also owns the Fox television and movie studios, in addition to newspaper and Internet holdings, bought MySpace for $580 million in 2005, but has estimated the network is now worth more than $15 billion.

Facebook Inc., which owns the Internet’s second-largest social network behind MySpace, now arguably has a $15 billion market value, based on Microsoft’s purchase late last year of a 1.6 percent stake for $240 million.

There is still rumored talks between Yahoo and AOL.

Internet Explorer 8 Has Arrived. Now you can download the new version of IE here.

Personally, based on my long experience using MSFT products, I’m keeping my XP and firefox in 2008. New products from microsoft usually come with many new bugs and run slow.

It’s notable to mention that Miscosoft previously only promised to release IE8 in June and they are usually late by their own predictions, but this time the new browser came in early.

More info about the new release from pcmag: read more »