Chip sales forecast raised again - thanks to consumer electronics and mobile device demand

The Semiconductor Industry Association said that sales of semiconductors would rise 9.8% to $249.6bn in 2006 compared with last year, up from a forecast in February of 7.9%.

And guess why? Well of course its consumer electronics and mobile phones driving demand yet again. Nice if you're TI - need to scrable even faster if you're Intel!!

TiVo jumps on Internet video bandwagon!

TiVo today unveiled broadband video downloads, marking the latest move by the digital video recorder company to expand its Internet-related services.

Through the new TiVoCast service, people can download broadband video clips to their TiVo boxes for free from a handful of Internet sites, such as woman-oriented iVillage, technology-focused CNET.com (a News.com sister site), entertainment-grooved Heavy.com, The New York Times, the National Basketball Association and Women's National Basketball Association, and news and political video blog site Rocketboom.

Apparently they plan to expand the number of web-sites they cover (boy will they need to!) and they will run ads alongside the videos to drive revenues. TiVo sure is fighting hard to differentiate themselves - and they need to given Cisco Systems and Motorola, are adding digital recording features to their cable set-top boxes.

I struggle to see though how TiVo survive into the future given that DVR will surely just become a feature within all set-top boxes and intelligent TV's. I guess their patents will help them for a while, but just piling into Internet video alongside everyone else will unlikely help them too much.

Oracle fights again to buy Portal Software

Oracle has extended a tender offer for all the shares of Portal Software, its second extension of its bid for the company in two weeks. The last offer expired at midnight Tuesday. The revised offer runs through June 20.

Oracle in April offered to pay $220 million in cash, or $4.90 a share, for Portal, which provides billing and revenue management software to communications and media companies.

Portal, once a multi-billion dollar hi-flying tech company has struggled over the last couple of years, since their founder fought with their ex-CEO and ousted him. A similar fate buckled i2 as well, proving how challenging it can be when techie founders of software companies bring in big company managers to help them expand and develop their business.

For Oracle the move is a sensible torjan horse into the Internet infrastructure layer within telecom and media companies, for Portal provides software which enables both to better manage billing and revenue generating services at high volume websites.

This could become a valuable application to drive more database and application server licenses into the telco/media space. Yet again, Oracle's M&A drive never quite ends...

Google founder fights for Net neutrality! Quite right.

Google co-founder and President Sergey Brin met with US lawmakers yesterday to press for legislation that would prevent Internet access providers from charging Web sites more for faster content delivery.

And he raises a good point - for Internet leaders such as Google would not have a problem paying for higher Net access fees for faster speeds - but all the smaller sites that they link to would appear more slowly when clicked on and so greatly reduce the overall customer experience when searching.

Net neutrality really is a bad idea in the making. The US government should lead the world in this raging debate and push back the telco lobbyers and CEO's. The US stands for open markets and freedom of access and speech - time they stood up for Net neutrality.

HP on a rip again!

HP today raised its full-year guidance after it announced a beneficial tax settlement with the US Internal Revenue Service and restated its earnings for the second quarter.

HP is on a rip and even back on the aquisition path, particularly in its dominant printing business, where today they added to its stable of digital photography services with the acquisition of Silverwire Holding, a Swiss maker of retail digital photo processing software.

Print and photo services seems to be where HP is headed and they are determined to take on publishers and traditional photo-producers as they dazzle us with plans to enable Internet bloggers and artists to print their own books and pictures - and now they are determined to help us all to print our own photos wherever we are - at home, at a Wal-Mart and presumably in a Starbucks soon.

Then they just need do a deal to photo and image print enable iPods and they'll have the entire market nailed!

Apple launches new U2 iPod

Apple today released a new version of its U2 Special Edition iPod music player, with a 30GB storage capacity and 14-hour battery life for $329.

Like the first version, the black and stainless steel iPod has a red navigation wheel and is engraved on the back with the signatures of U2's four band members. The new model holds up to 7,500 songs, 25,000 photos or up to 75 hours of video, Apple said.

And when you buy it you get a coupon which delivers 30 minutes of free U2 video footage. Nice device - so when do I get my Red Hot Chilli Peppers iPod?

Google to launch online spreadsheet!

The Wall Street Journal has just announced that Google is about to launch an Internet based spreadsheet called Google Spreadsheet - oddly enough.

This will sit alongside their recent acquisition of a company offering Web-based word processor Writely.

Add recently launched Google Calendar , Gmail and an online presentation application and Google finally have the answer to Microsoft's Office - but free and over the Web.

Look out Microsoft - Google is officially after your consumer applications franchise!

VC's paying dotcom prices for tech and healthcare start-ups again - Oops!

The FT today looked at the price of early stage start-ups shooting up to levels not seen since 2000. Oops!

"Valuations of technology start-ups before investment have soared to their highest levels since the dotcom boom as venture capitalists seek to deploy large amounts of cash in search of the next big thing in the internet, telecommunications and healthcare sectors.

A study released on Monday found that the median value of a pre-investment start-up hit $18.6m in the first quarter, up $3m from last year. The figure is the highest since the fourth quarter of 2000, when the median value of a company before accepting venture capital funding topped out at $23m."

And we know what happened after the last early stage price bubble in 2000?! It makes you wonder whether the value of early stage tech and healthcare startups has gone up or whether VC's have got too much money again (and too little sense!).

Given what's going on in the stock markets currently and the recently ill-fated IPO of Vonage, the deal hungry VC's should move with greater caution. And consider shedding certain partners!

EMI supports ad based peer-to-peer music service - could it one day rival iTunes?

EMI Group announced it will make its music catalog available to the first advertising supported peer-to-peer service as the entertainment industry embraces the same technology that once nearly crippled it.

The new service called Qtrax, developed by New York-based LTDnetwork and slated for launch later this year, will give consumers the ability to download music for free after watching ads, or the option of paying for a premium subscription version.

Ad based Internet music and TV/video services are going to be successful - there is no doubt. The likes of Apple's iTunes should beware. Both ad based services and subscription models could be the hammer that slams the first few nails into iTunes coffin if they do not respond in some measure.

Yahoo CEO paid $1, a fistful of options and scoops a $40M pad in Long Island - its tough at the top!

Yahoo has granted Chairman and CEO Terry Semel an option to buy 6 million company shares as a retention incentive. (You betcha!)

The Sunnyvale, Calif., Internet company said in a filing with the SEC that it also set Mr. Semel's annual salary at $1 for the 2006-2008 period. Semel had received a $600,000 salary for at least the past three years, according to Yahoo's most recent proxy.

In addition, he will be eligible for an annual bonus in the form of a fully vested stock option for up to one million shares, the company said.

And who said option based exec compenstaion was dead. And it seems to be making Semel a pile (as it probably should given his success with Yahoo!) - for he just forked out over $40M for five acres in Long Island. WOW - all that on a $1 salary!

Microsoft and Adobe head for court battle over PDF

Just when Friday was starting to get a little unexciting - of course putting to one side NYSE's acquisition of Euronext to create the first major trans-Atlantic exchange and the fact that US employment is slowing and the US economy stalling - which actually makes it a particularly exciting Friday afternoon.

Anyway - back to the point. Just as Friday....(na, just kidding!).

I'll try a third time - so who heard the one about the Irish man and the Nun/bottle of Guiness. OK, ok back to the business stuff.......zzzzzzzz.

Microsoft and Adobe look set to go to court with eachother over Microsoft's supposed abuse of PDF in Office - where they give it away. (Hey stay awake - this gets more interesting I promise!)

Adobe apparently wants to get paid for people to use PDF, which seems only natural, if against Microsoft wishes, which will see Microsoft straight back through their revolving door at the EU. OK, so its not Enron - but Microsoft and the EU are becoming the Laurel and Hardy of the antitrust universe. Aren't they?

OK, go back to your Friday afternoon nap!

Blogs challenge newspapers for readership - its proven!

Blogs written by so-called citizen journalists are increasingly challenging newspapers for readers. According to a recent study by Forrester Research, blogs and newspaper Web sites now have the same audience share - about 17% - among Internet users between the ages of 18 and 24.

And blog readership continues to gow, while newspaper readers are often flat at best. Newspapers are desperately trying to ride the blog big cahuna wave but with limited success, which is not surprising given that successful blogs are generally popular for their very independence and maverick nature.

Perhaps newspapers should try a different tack and partner with interesting blogsites rather than trying to control the medium themselves. Now there's an idea!

AMD takes the fight to Intel!

AMD is challenging Intel ever more. Today they unveiled their new dual core mobile chip for laptops that should improve battery life and performance. And earlier this week they announced that they will be investing $2.5bn in Germany to boost production.

According to Mercury Research, AMD had 21.1% of PC processor shipments in the first quarter, a sharp gain from the 16.9% share it had a year earlier.

And today, AMD said it expects to increase that share to one third of the micro-processor market by 2008. Now that's one heck of a challenge to Intel - the glove has been thrown down!

HP wants to help digital content creators produce professional print versions without publishers!

HP, like everyone else is throwing themselves at the world of user generated content with a new service designed to help bloggers, digital photographers and others to reproduce their works in print and you don't even need a publisher!

The computer maker has developed tools to allow amateur photographers, small businesses and other customers to connect to an array of printing services using the internet.

HP will take advantage of its sprawling printing technology portfolio to “reconfigure distribution” between content producers and publishers.

By removing the distribution barriers between users who create digital content and those who can turn it into products such as books, calendars and posters, HP hopes to capture a greater share of the more than 46,000bn “pages” of content produced in the world each year.

Now that's the future - one where content creators and artists will be able to control the process from soup to nuts entirely themselves - from content creation, packaging, distribution and marketing. Step, by step - the tools are slipping into place.

Ask.com launches blog search to rival Google and Technorati!

Ask.com last night launched a brand new blog search service available at Bloglines, their blogging service, which competes directly with Google's Blogger.com.

Instead of crawling the Web for blog postings to build an index to search like others do, Ask.com is using the index already created and updated by subscribers to its popular Bloglines site for searching, subscribing to, creating and sharing blogs and news feeds.

Apparently that means that the service delivers more up to date posts (which is vital in the fast changing world of blogging) and keeps blog spam at bay. The latter benefit would be a huge step forwards.

And Bloglines also sorts results and structures your page affectively, it even allows you to sort posts found by relevance (whatever that means!), date or popularity. Of course TechBoard is there in all its glory - mind you we are fast becoming one of the more visited blogsites around!