Is it time to fire Steve Jobs ???

Investors expressed concern today regarding the latest reports about options grants made to Apple Computer's enigmatic chief executive officer Steve Jobs. New reports about Apple's options backdating have investors concerned about how much CEO Steve Jobs knew. But analysts doubt Jobs will have to step down. The Financial Times reported that Apple's board gave Jobs 7.5 million stock options in 2001 without the approval of the company's board, and said the company later falsified documents that purportedly showed a full meeting of the board had taken place to approve the options grant. The newspaper also reported that Jobs later surrendered the options without exercising them.

Shares of Apple (Charts) fell about 1.1 percent Thursday afternoon on the news after sliding as much as 2.3 percent earlier. NOTE: This comes a day after an online legal publication.


Steve-Apple Story
Apple, more so than many other companies, is a firm that is widely associated in investors' minds with its CEO. Jobs, who co-founded Apple, left the company in the mid-1980s and Apple hit a rough patch shortly thereafter. Jobs returned in 1996 and took over as interim CEO a year later. Since then, he has been widely credited with making the company relevant again with products such as its iMac computer and the ubiquitous iPod media player and iTunes online store.

My Intuition
Despite the fact that Jobs' name has surfaced more prominently in the most recent accounts of Apple's options problems, Wall Street analysts largely shrugged off the news and said that it's highly unlikely that Jobs would be forced to leave Apple.

"Any time a CEO is at risk of being, for lack of a better word, forcibly removed, then investors should be concerned. But do I believe that Steve Jobs' job is at risk? That's an unequivocal no," says Jonathan Hoopes who is an analyst with ThinkEquity Partners.

To that end, Apple said in a press release in October that "in a few instances, Apple CEO Steve Jobs was aware that favorable grant dates had been selected, but he did not receive or otherwise benefit from these grants and was unaware of the accounting implications" and added that independent investigators "found no misconduct by any member of Apple's current management team."

So ... Steve survives [for now ;-)]

World’s first keychain phone

The concept of the V-Phone is that it's a small portable device that you can take anywhere and your phone number will follow you, as well as the added benefit of inexpensive VoIP minutes.



Price
Calling plans for the V-Phone are identical to their traditional service offerings. It costs $15 per month for 500 minutes, $25 for unlimited residential service and $35 for business use. The V-Phone isn't a replacement for a traditional Vonage phone line. In fact, if you are currently a Vonage customer with an existing Vonage number, you have to order a separate Vonage phone number for the V-Phone. Vonage doesn't offer the ability to have a single phone number married to both. This would actually be a nice feature - simply take the V-Phone when on the road and your home phone calls are automatically routed to your laptop/PC when you plug in the device.

Conclusion
Though arguably a cellphone can do the same exact thing (carry your phone number). You could argue that the V-Phone lets you make calls using inexpensive VoIP minutes instead of expensive cell minutes. However, many cellphone service providers offer a large bucket of minutes or even unlimited plans for a fixed price, which negates VoIP's advantage over cellphones. With this in mind, you have to wonder why a person would even need the Vonage V-Phone !!! I will say V-Phone could come in handy if you make a lot of international phone calls since cell phone calls to international destinations are still outrageously expensive.
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Gaint Squid Filmed For The First Time

A Japanese research team has succeeded in filming a giant squid live -- possibly for the first time -- and says the elusive creatures may be more plentiful than previously believed.

The research team, led by Tsunemi Kubodera, videotaped the giant squid at the surface as they captured it off the Ogasawara Islands south of Tokyo earlier this month. The squid, which measured about 24-feet long, died while it was being caught.

"We believe this is the first time anyone has successfully filmed a giant squid that was alive," said Kubodera, a researcher with Japan's National Science Museum. "Now that we know where to find them, we think we can be more successful at studying them in the future."

Giant squid, formally called Architeuthis, are the world's largest invertebrates. Because they live in the depths of the ocean, they have long been wrapped in mystery and embellished in the folklore of sea monsters, appearing in ancient Greek myths or attacking the submarine in Jules Verne's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea."

The squid, a female, was not fully grown and was relatively small by giant squid standards. The longest one on record is 60 feet.

Kubodera and his team had been conducting expeditions in the area for about three years before they succeeded in making their first contact two years ago. Last year, the team succeeded in taking a series of still photos of one of the animals in its natural habitat -- also believed to have been a first.

Until the team's successes, most scientific study of the creatures had to rely on partial specimens that had washed ashore dead or dying or had been found in the digestive systems of whales or very large sharks.

Kubodera said whales led his team to the squid. By finding an area where whales fed, he believed he could find the animals. He also said that, judging by the number of whales that feed on them, there may be many more giant squid than previously thought.

"Sperm whales need from 500 to 1,000 kilograms (1,100-2,200 pounds) of food every day," he said. "There are believed to be 200,000 or so of them, and that would suggest there are quite a few squid for them to be feeding on. I don't think they are in danger of extinction at all."

Courtesy: AOL Click Here!

MySpace tops Yahoo for first time

HighLights
• MySpace recorded 38.7 billion U.S. page views in November
• Yahoo recorded 38.1 billion U.S. page views in November
• A one-month change could represent an aberration
• Yahoo: Page views diminished by new tools that enhance use

The online hangout MySpace got even more popular in November, beating Yahoo in Web traffic for the first time, a research company said 13Dec2006. News Corp.'s MySpace recorded 38.7 billion U.S. page views last month, compared with 38.1 billion for Yahoo Inc., according to comScore Media Metrix. MySpace's growth was 2 percent over October and triple the 12.5 billion recorded in November 2005.

ComScore warned, however, that a one-month change could represent an aberration. Furthermore, Yahoo's page views could be diminished by the company's growing use of Ajax technology for maps, e-mail and other services. Ajax is a set of tools that speeds up Web applications by summoning snippets of data as needed instead of pulling entire Web pages over and over.

Fox Interactive Media ranked sixth at 73.8 million, including 57.2 million for MySpace. Unique audience is a measure of how many people visit in any given month; page views reflect how often they come back and how long they stay.

Including other Fox properties such as IGN Entertainment Inc., comScore said Fox had 39.5 billion page views in November. In a statement, Peter Levinsohn, president of Fox Interactive Media, credited strong traffic at game site IGN.com due to the release of Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Co.'s Wii video game consoles.

Does Microsoft Own RSS?

If you've added headlines from a news site to My Yahoo, or subscribe to blogs on a site like Bloglines, you've used RSS, a technology that's growing increasingly popular for distributing headlines and articles from blogs, news websites, and more. But now, two recently published patent applications reveal, Microsoft (MSFT) is claiming it invented RSS.

Microsoft executive Don Dodge, while not involved in the patent applications, says he suspects the filings were made to defend the company against "patent trolls". (The filings were made shortly before Microsoft announced plans to build RSS technology into its upcoming Vista operating system.) Still, if granted, the patents would give Microsoft a legal cudgel to wield against other companies using RSS.

That's a long shot, however: "Prior art," the patent-law term for earlier examples of the technology in use, should be easy to show, since RSS has been around for years. The most likely outcome will be that Microsoft's patent is rejected - and no one else will be able to patent RSS, either, keeping the technology free for everyone to use.

I DID IT !!!

Folks...finally I tasted the MCSD soup...
YEssssss... I passed the final Microsoft Certification in the MCSD series...
[stands for Microsoft Certified Solution Developer]
And My CEO, CTO congratulated me !
And My parents are here... :-)
This feels like WOW!!!!!!!! [I feel like the guy with the Victory Sword...Click on the image for a BIGGER pic...]

Thank You GOD!

ps: The SOUP tasted damn gud!