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Icahn told Reuters on Tuesday that Yahoo directors may be held personally liable for signing off on the company’s controversial employee-severance plans. That plan, as previously reported, could financially hamstring Icahn’s dissident slate if it is successful in unseating Yahoo’s board and taking a majority of the board seats.

Carl Icahn

Billionaire investor Carl Icahn has issued a warning to Yahoo’s board of directors, mouthing the ever-fearful two words: “personally liable.”

“If they continue with this line, I believe they (the board) may be personally liable,” Icahn told Reuters after speaking to the New York Financial Writers Association.

Basically, companies usually carry insurance to cover their directors against various liabilities. But, like any insurance plan, there is a cap on the coverage limits. Icahn apparently is anticipating that any legal action against the board may exceed those limits or is willing to argue that the board abdicated its responsibilities, thereby letting the insurance company off the hook.

King’s Knight (1986, NES, 500
Wii points): Battle your way through five stages of ruthless enemies as you try to free the princess from her capture.

Powerball (1991, Sega Genesis, 800 Wii points): Control one of eight futuristic teams in Powerball. The game is more like a combination of rugby and football played on a normal 100-yard field.

Two new virtual console games for download today representing both ends of time. A classic knight tale and a futuristic sports game make up this week’s offering.

And the beat goes on. As XiTi Monitor’s data shows, Firefox has been on a European tear, gaining ground at a 20 percent clip to take 28 percent market share in Europe. The loser in the battle? Internet Explorer.

commentary (Credit:
Ars Technica (Data from XiTi Monitor))

Mozilla’s opportunity is both to help overcome the PC manufacturer lethargy away from IE and to encourage people to make the Firefox choice. The first requires business drive and acumen, and the second requires evangelism. Could Mozilla use an upgrade on both counts? Or do the numbers suggest its strategy is working?

The data also shows that
Firefox users upgrade more often than Internet Explorer (with the majority of IE users sticking with pre-IE7 versions). There’s a clear reason: People use Firefox by choice (they must download it, after all) and IE by Microsoft/PC manufacturer fiat. Most users take what is given to them and never think twice about it…until the malware hits.

The clues from a new alternate-reality game that seems tied to the Olympics and which is slated to start Monday.

According to the leading publication on ARGs, ARGNet, this game is called, Find The Lost Ring.

If you’re not familiar with these types of games, known popularly as ARGs, they tend to be mixed-media affairs that task players the world over with solving puzzles, both individually and working with others, online and in the real world, with the goal of reaching some ultimate solution.

I don’t know if that’s a valid error message, or if it’s related to the game. But I would guess that if it is a valid error message, that site will be live and begin to have some information on it as of Monday, which is, after all, March 3.

In the meantime, if you have any idea what these clues mean, feel free to drop me a note. I’d love to know.

Now, I’m not going to pretend I’m all that good at solving puzzles, so when the box arrived Friday, I was a bit at a loss to figure out what the included clues meant.

A clue on the back of the Olympic poster that came in the box reads, ‘It’s a secret someone has been keeping for a very long time.’

The way these games work, there will be months of developing story line, with players all over the world working together to try to keep up. There will be active Web sites and there could well be mobs of people running around various cities trying to solve different elements of the game.

Update March 2, 2008, 9:49 p.m.: I discovered just after I posted this entry that there should have been a slip of paper tucked into the ball of string in my box. I don’t know whether I missed it, or whether it wasn’t there. But according to the site, Despoiler.org, the slip of paper reads, “You will soon discover an alternate reality. The adventure begins when you meet Ariadne. www.findthelostring.com.”

Often, these games are put on as a publicity adjunct to some larger product. For example, I Love Bees, perhaps the best-known of this genre of game, was built around the larger story line for the hit Halo video game franchise and was timed to finish just as Halo 2 was set to launch.

For months now, I’ve been hearing whispers that a big new alternate-reality game was on the way. I never got any details of what it was about, but when a box arrived at my desk on Friday filled with clues, I knew this was it, and it seems that it’s linked to this year’s summer Olympics.

No such address exists.

The box itself, which came FedEx, had the return address of “T.L. Ring, 1920 Olympic Way, San Francisco, CA.”

There was also a ball of string and three postcards with historical Olympic images on them. The reverse sides of the three cards were endowed with the clues, “March 3, 2008. Find her…,” “March 4, 2008?? Find the others…,” “March 5, 2008? Find him…,” “March 11, 2008?? Find the secret…” and “August 24, 2008. Save the world.”

Inside the box, there was a reproduction of what appears to be a 1920 Olympics poster with a figure of a discus thrower on the front, and the text, “VIIe Olympiade. Anvers (Belgique). 1920 Aout - Septembre 1920. Subsidee par les pouvoirs publics.”

For years, ARGs have been existing just below the mainstream surface. To be sure, thousands upon thousands of people have participated in the most popular ARGs, but if you were to stop random people on the street, I’d be willing to bet that most would have never heard of the genre.

If the clues are to be believed, this game will kick off in earnest Monday morning. So be prepared, if this is your thing.

A visit to that Web address returns an odd error message: “SRVE0255E: A WebGroup/Virtual Host to handle / has not been defined.”

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET Networks)

On the reverse, there’s also the text, “It’s a secret someone has been keeping for a very long time.”

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

Each of the three postcards had clues on the reverse, each with a date and a cryptic command. The final clue reads, ‘August 24, 2008 Save the world.’

And August 24 is, in fact, the closing ceremony of this summer’s Beijing Olympics. As a result, it’s a fairly quick, logical jump to conclude that the ultimate goal of this game is to save the world at the closing ceremonies. Or some such.

The box included three postcards with historical Olympics pictures.

Others, apparently, got other post cards, all with the same clues on the back.

Unfortunately, a Whois check on that URL returned no useful information.

That the Olympics would be the subject matter for an ARG is rather exciting, it seems to me, because it’s almost certain to bring a great deal of attention to the game and the genre.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

No one knows who created this game, but you can be sure that it wasn’t the International Olympic Committee. Usually, an agency is hired by a client to put an ARG together. The leading ARG creation agency is a small company known as 42 Entertainment.

Building a site from scratch with Sampa is easy enough, if not especially fun. The site gives you several decent templates to chose from and lets you easily create blog posts for family events. You can also create separate standalone pages. I found some of the item-creation and editing screens busy and unattractive, though. This is not the site I’d point my grandmother at and expect her to have a good experience.

The authoring and management interfaces are straightforward, but not inviting.

This is a good service for building a family site. The old-school authoring interface and the lack of strong photo handling features keep it from being great.

On the plus side, there are features in Sampa that are just great for creating attractive Web sites with limited access from outsiders. Inviting people in to a site is very easy, yet still more secure that most blogs. Users don’t have to register or set their own passwords–they just follow the invitation link that’s sent them. The links are unique to each user.

There does not appear to be a video-handling function.

There’s also a MyBlogLog-like feature on the site, so your visitors can see who else is looking at pages. That makes perfect sense for a small community site.

See also Vox, Ning, Myfamily, Babysites, etc.

My biggest issue with Sampa is how it handles photos–arguably the most important function type when you’re building a family site. Sampa 2.0 does not have a good uploader. You have to locate each of your photos individually, and even then can only upload five at a time before you have to clear the Web form and start over. Apparently the previous version of Sampa had a drag-and-drop uploader app, but it is still being retooled for version 2. You can, though, attach a Flickr account to a Sampa site, to give users easy access to photos that might already be online.

I’m less thrilled with the family tree maker feature on Sampa. It’s clever to have that on the site, but the function is not best-of-breed. Partnering with Ancestry or Geni probably would have given the user a better experience.

Not an inviting photo upload function.

Yes, we are very proud.

Originally a general-purpose site-building tool, the service is now focused on family Web sites and has some new features that serve this mission well. However, this release is also missing a few features, so my recommendation for the product is not as strong as it could be.

If you are looking for a quick way to build a Web site for your family or to share news about a new baby with your relatives, you could do worse than to look at Sampa, which launches its version 2 service today.

Could intuition have played a role in Mark Cuban selling Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.9 billion in stock and immediately hedging that stock against a market crash, all at the peak of the dot-com bubble? How many dozen entrepreneurs rode the market down?

Apparently, a stuck check valve in our irrigation system had been dumping precious water faster than our well pump could pump it. Our holding tanks were dry.

As for me, my feelings are so bottled up I wouldn’t recognize intuition if Albert Einstein materialized in my living room and recited the theory of relativity.

So I’m sitting here trying to figure out how my wife knew something was going to happen. She couldn’t possibly have known. Wait, I know. She sabotaged the irrigation system just to appear prescient. Nah, that’s just crazy.

As for me, I buy the survival mechanism thing. I also think intuition is related to feelings, perhaps on a subconscious level, as opposed to conscious reasoning. It might be more pronounced in people who are more empathetic or sympathetic, I’m not sure which. That shows how much I know about this stuff.

And did a little voice in Jerry Yang’s head say, Don’t do it; you don’t have what it takes when the board offered him the CEO job? Did he ignore it, figuring, What the hell, what’s the worst that can happen?

I don’t suppose we’ll ever know what role intuition plays in our lives. But if you’re one of those people with a little voice in your head, I’d pay attention to it. Who knows, you may become the next Bill Gates … or avoid becoming the next Jerry Yang.

Was it intuition that got Bill Gates to agree to come up with an operating system for IBM, even though Microsoft wasn’t in the OS business? Not to mention forgoing development fees in exchange for non-exclusivity and per-unit royalties. He couldn’t possibly have known how lucrative that arrangement would turn out to be.

When you live in a rural mountainous area, this sort of thing happens from time to time. That means every few years.

Last night, as the Bay Area cooled down from a three-day heat wave, my wife said, “It would sure be nice to get water in the pool in the next two weeks.”

According to the dictionary, intuition, as it applies here, means: “the power or faculty of attaining direct knowledge or cognition without evident rational thought and inference.”

You’d think someone would do a study on number of offspring versus IQ.

“Uh huh,” she said.

Of course, those same scientists think that advanced medical techniques, technology and civilization have all but stopped evolution in its tracks. So give up on those sci-fi books that postulate huge-brained superhumans in the future. If anything, it’s more likely that we’re getting dumber.

In my wife’s case, she seems to get these feelings every so often and they usually turn out be right. She says that when she met me 19 years ago her intuition was to run. Hard to be skeptical with hard evidence like that staring you right in the face.

No water meant the pool guys couldn’t do their thing. An hour later, the whole gang packed up and left.

I replied with a blank, bleary-eyed stare.

When I asked her about it, she said she’d just had a feeling.

The next morning, my wife pulled the pillow off my snoring head and announced, “We have no water.”

Einstein was definitely intuitive, but what’s that got to do with technology? Well, there are logical reasons for most of the runaway technology successes that come to mind, but a few make me wonder.

That got me thinking: Is there such a thing as intuition? And if so, what is it and how does it matter to you and me?

Still, it might explain women’s intuition, if indeed that theory - that woman are more in touch with their emotions than men - is still in vogue.

Some scientists believe intuition is an evolutionary survival mechanism. If you were a caveman, for example, and you sensed danger, you would hide in a cave and avoid being eaten by some blood-crazed saber-toothed tiger, or something like that. Since you survived, you got to reproduce and pass your “intuition-sensing gene” onto your offspring, and so-forth.

“What do you mean?” I exclaimed, “You know the pool company is scheduled to come out tomorrow and fill it up on Tuesday. Two weeks? We’ll be swimming in two days!”

“Okay,” I replied, “I’m getting up.”

And how about intuition that people don’t pay attention to? I’m just shooting blind here, but I wonder if any of HP’s board directors flinched subconsciously at the choice of Carly Fiorina as CEO? I mean, she looked great on paper, but was there something intangible lurking beneath the surface that gave them pause?

“The pool guys are all here and we have no water.”

If you’ve ever been involved in any sort of home construction, you know it always takes longer than the contractors say it will. For the past 10 weeks, the Tobaks have been doing a swimming pool project. So far, so good.

Considering the turmoil over at Yahoo, the three-year agreement could be either a home run or a strikeout.

Yahoo announced Thursday that it has teamed up with MLB.com, the digital arm of professional baseball’s operations, in a partnership that encompasses both video distribution and ad sales.

On the video side, content from Major League Baseball’s MLB.tv will be syndicated on Yahoo Sports through the 2010 season. This means that if you’re a Yahoo user, you’ll be able to watch live and on-demand baseball games on Yahoo Sports–provided that they’re not in your home market. MLB.com says this will amount to more than 2,400 games each year. Yahoo Sports will additionally broadcast game recap show FastCast and other MLB.com video.

The MLB.tv content will be available on a co-branded player on Yahoo Sports in 11 countries, including the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Currently, access to live out-of-market games on MLB.com’s MLB.tv requires a subscription of between $14.95 and $19.95 per month (or $89.95 and $119.95 per year), depending on quality. Yahoo users will pay the same subscription amount for the co-branded Yahoo Sports player.

Yahoo will also be the exclusive advertising partner for MLB.tv in the 2009 and 2010 seasons. In the 2008 season, Yahoo will use its Clickable video ads as well as preroll and postroll ads provided by MLB Advanced Media. After that, Yahoo will take over completely by using its new AMP graphical ad system.

That whole Microsoft thing, or Google thing, or News Corp. thing, or whatever it is now, could shake things up, though.

Most of the agreement is typical language, but [Red Hat] explains the parts that are specific to this agreement, which is groundbreaking. It’s living proof that the GPL can function as intended, and without compromise, while still dealing with US patent law.

This is a watershed moment for open source and, as Groklaw notes, for the GNU General Public License:

Now we have the proof [PDF].

Red Hat continues to demonstrate open-source business leadership by not compromising its standards. It deserves accolades for protecting downstream open-source users. Microsoft should take a page out of Red Hat’s book as it seeks to entice open-source developers to its platforms.

commentary

A few weeks ago Red Hat reported that it had reached a groundbreaking patent deal with a selection of patent trolls that put the community, not Red Hat, first.

“Typically when a company settles a patent lawsuit, it focuses on getting safety for itself,” said Rob Tiller, Vice President and Assistant General Counsel, IP [Red Hat]. “But that was not enough for us, we wanted broad provisions that covered our customers, who place trust in us, and the open source community, whose considerable efforts benefit our business.”

Here, my friends, is 3.5 inches of touch-screen bliss on a compact point-and-shoot from Nikon, the Coolpix S60. The only buttons on it are for power and the shutter, everything else requires some finger-on-display action.

For example, should you want to take a portrait shot you’ll be able to use the new Portrait One-Touch Zoom function that’ll automatically zoom in by tapping on the subject and set the shot up with the correct framing and focus. You’ll of course need your fingertips–or the included stylus–for more than just taking pictures.

Since we haven’t tested one yet I’m on the fence as to whether “all touch-screen, all the time” is a blessing or a curse (likely a little of each), but from strictly a feature standpoint it sounds like a fun camera.

In playback mode, you use your fingertips to scroll through your pics and touching the screen lets you instantly zoom in. There’s also a Draw Function for adding notes or drawings to the images.

The 10-megapixel camera features a 5x Zoom-Nikkor lens, an HDMI jack, and all the shooting modes you’re likely to find on this year’s models including Smile Mode and Blink Warning.

Available in crimson red, espresso black, arctic white, burgundy, champagne pink, and platinum bronze, the S60 hits stores in September 2008 at an MSRP of $349.95.

(Credit:
Nikon)

(Credit:
Nikon)

Or how about London? Some of the most interesting open-source companies (Alfresco, Openbravo, Path Intelligence, Canonical, etc.) come from there. It’s not easy to get funding out of London, but it is the center of European customers. Remember those people? Customers? The ones that make a company worth a gazillion dollars (everywhere except in Silicon Valley, where “eyeballs” without “purchases” can still command a lot of money :-).

Fabrizio makes a good point in his blog highlighting Openbravo’s success but potentially also a shortcoming: The company is based in Barcelona, not Silicon Valley. For people in the Valley, the Valley Fetish is very strong. It is, after all, the source of all light and truth.

Silicon Valley is a great place. Some of my best friends and favorite food is there. But it’s a nice day trip to see them and eat the food. The rest of the time is spent with customers…virtually all of which are based outside of the Valley.

The larger point, however, is what Fabrizio thinks you’ll find in the Valley: Partners (true), funding (true), and maybe a big exit (probably not as true as Fabrizio states, for reasons stated above, as well as others). The one thing - the most important thing - that he’s missing is the thing that matters most:

Great people cost a lot less outside the Valley and are much easier to find. Just ask MySQL: Its inside sales and lead-gen people are based in Boise, Idaho. Open-source companies shouldn’t waste money on bloated salaries in the Valley. Not more than they can help, anyway.

What Fabrizio forgets (though of course he knows this) is that with each of the companies he notes, with the exception of Zimbra, the vast majority of the company was based outside the Valley. So if would-be buyers are only interested in a “head” with no “quarters” in the Valley, then by all means sham a Silicon Valley presence by moving an executive or two to the Valley. It won’t hurt to bloat their salary so long as you don’t have to waste more money on other employees there.

Where are the customers in that statement? The primary concern seems to be the exit. That’s very Silicon Valley. This is why I encourage Silicon Valley denizens to take field trips to the real world where technology is a nice complement to life, but not life itself.

Fabrizio’s point is unintentionally cynical: If you want to get bought for a “gazillion dollars,” move your company to the Valley:

commentary

Customers.

It’s our solutions/sales engineers who need to live closest to customers so we have them all over the place…and our one guy in Silicon Valley is thinking of moving away. This makes it possible for us to pay exceptionally well while being close to customers.

Really, though, people should live where they enjoy living. Work can be done from anywhere, including in Utah, Fabrizio. I’ve established Alfresco’s US sales in Utah because our low-cost model allows us to close business over the phone and email while living wherever we please (and while it’s nice you can occasionally enjoy yourself by getting on a plane, I can make the once every four months trip to the Valley to finish everything I need to do there…in half a day).

A much more sensible place to locate - if customers matter to your company - would be Boston, since it has both customers (all along the Eastern seaboard), developers, and venture funding.

Parking on 101 gets me no closer to either the customers or the family/fun.

You won’t find many of these in the Valley. Even MySQL, which ostensibly had a large percentage of “customers” among the Valley’s elite (e.g., Google) didn’t see much money from those customers, I suspect. Silicon Valley is a development center, and developers don’t buy software. Not much, anyway.

Why Silicon Valley for open source? Beside funding and partnering, think for a second about the open source companies that have been bought lately for gazillion of dollars: MySQL, Zimbra, Xensource, Trolltech. Where were they based? Utah? Barcelona? I do not thing so. They maybe started somewhere else, but they were headquartered in the Valley.

If our only concern was selling the company a move to the Valley might well make sense. But we’re actually more concerned with selling to customers and with enjoying the finer things of life (skiing, family, etc.) along the way. Customers are the ones who justify the gazillion-dollar valuations; families and recreation are what makes having the gazillion dollars worthwhile.