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I read an interesting article on webpronews about a study conducted on entepreneurs and what their average ages are. Well it seems that your 10 year old is not part of that demographic.

The common belief that all entrepreneurs who start tech companies are in their 20s or teens is being challenged by a lengthy study that started in 1995 thru 2005 which found that only 1 percent of American founders were teenagers.

The study by Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and researchers at Duke and Harvard found that most U.S. born technology and engineering company founders are middle-aged, with the average and median age of 39.

The majority (92%) of founders had bachelor degrees, 31 percent had master degrees, and 10 percent had PhDs. Close to half of the degrees were in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. One third was in business, accounting and finance.

“While education clearly is an advantage for tech founders in the United States, experience also is a key factor,” Vivek Wadhwa, lead researcher, Harvard Law School Wertheim fellow, Duke University executive in residence, said.

“That a large number of U.S.-born tech founders have worked in business for many years also is important in understanding the supply of tech entrepreneurs.”

Close to half (45%) of the tech startups where started in the same state where the founders received their education. Of the tech founders receiving from California, 69 percent later went on to create a startup in the state, 58 percent did the same in Michigan, 53 percent in Texas and 52 percent in Ohio.

The top universities were tech entrepreneurs were most likely to earn their degrees include Harvard, Stanford, University of Pennsylvania, MIT, University of Texas, University of California-Berkeley, University of Missouri, Pennsylvania State University, University of Southern California, and University of Virginia.

“Because entrepreneurship is an indicator of economic vitality in regions and across the country, this study raises important policy questions about how to foster greater tech entrepreneurship to boost economic growth,” Robert Litan, Kauffman Foundation VP of Research and Policy, said.

Well looks like Microsoft has come to its senses and decided that the best web strategy is the one where it goes it alone and via partnerships then by buying other web giants that will come with bagage. For the shareholders of Yahoo this will be a blow for those that wanted to cash out and look for other viable investments. They are now going to have chug along with Yahoo as the company tries to get to grips with its business and competing with the other giants.

I think Microsoft can as a long term strategy break into the web space and gain greater market share, but they have to rethink how they do things. The web is consumer based ,not like the current space they play in so they need to start really thinking like a consumer and not a corporate

For Yahoo I think a deal with Google is bad as in the long term it will be their demise. I see it the same as doing a deal with the devil and hoping not to get short changed later. Yeah Right. I hope Yahoo has not based their decision purely on the “Don’t be Evil” marketing ploy Google uses, although I have seen decisions made by large corporations based on less.

Well here is the transcript of the letter that Steve Ballmer sent to Jerry Yang

May 3, 2008

Mr. Jerry Yang
CEO and Chief Yahoo
Yahoo! Inc.
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94089

Dear Jerry:

After over three months, we have reached the conclusion of the process regarding a possible combination of Microsoft and Yahoo!.

I first want to convey my personal thanks to you, your management team, and Yahoo!’s Board of Directors for your consideration of our proposal. I appreciate the time and attention all of you have given to this matter, and I especially appreciate the time that you have invested personally. I feel that our discussions this week have been particularly useful, providing me for the first time with real clarity on what is and is not possible.

I am disappointed that Yahoo! has not moved towards accepting our offer. I first called you with our offer on January 31 because I believed that a combination of our two companies would have created real value for our respective shareholders and would have provided consumers, publishers, and advertisers with greater innovation and choice in the marketplace. Our decision to offer a 62 percent premium at that time reflected the strength of these convictions.

In our conversations this week, we conveyed our willingness to raise our offer to $33.00 per share, reflecting again our belief in this collective opportunity. This increase would have added approximately another $5 billion of value to your shareholders, compared to the current value of our initial offer. It also would have reflected a premium of over 70 percent compared to the price at which your stock closed on January 31. Yet it has proven insufficient, as your final position insisted on Microsoft paying yet another $5 billion or more, or at least another $4 per share above our $33.00 offer.

Also, after giving this week’s conversations further thought, it is clear to me that it is not sensible for Microsoft to take our offer directly to your shareholders. This approach would necessarily involve a protracted proxy contest and eventually an exchange offer. Our discussions with you have led us to conclude that, in the interim, you would take steps that would make Yahoo! undesirable as an acquisition for Microsoft.

We regard with particular concern your apparent planning to respond to a “hostile” bid by pursuing a new arrangement that would involve or lead to the outsourcing to Google of key paid Internet search terms offered by Yahoo! today. In our view, such an arrangement with the dominant search provider would make an acquisition of Yahoo! undesirable to us for a number of reasons:

- First, it would fundamentally undermine Yahoo!’s own strategy and long-term viability by encouraging advertisers to use Google as opposed to your Panama paid search system. This would also fragment your search advertising and display advertising strategies and the ecosystem surrounding them. This would undermine the reliance on your display advertising business to fuel future growth.

- Given this, it would impair Yahoo’s ability to retain the talented engineers working on advertising systems that are important to our interest in a combination of our companies.

- In addition, it would raise a host of regulatory and legal problems that no acquirer, including Microsoft, would want to inherit. Among other things, this would consolidate market share with the already-dominant paid search provider in a manner that would reduce competition and choice in the marketplace.

- This would also effectively enable Google to set the prices for key search terms on both their and your search platforms and, in the process, raise prices charged to advertisers on Yahoo. In addition to whatever resulting legal problems, this seems unwise from a business perspective unless in fact one simply wishes to use this as a vehicle to exit the paid search business in favor of Google.

- It could foreclose any chance of a combination with any other search provider that is not already relying on Google’s search services.

Accordingly, your apparent plan to pursue such an arrangement in the event of a proxy contest or exchange offer leads me to the firm decision not to pursue such a path. Instead, I hereby formally withdraw Microsoft’s proposal to acquire Yahoo!.

We will move forward and will continue to innovate and grow our business at Microsoft with the talented team we have in place and potentially through strategic transactions with other business partners.

I still believe even today that our offer remains the only alternative put forward that provides your stockholders full and fair value for their shares. By failing to reach an agreement with us, you and your stockholders have left significant value on the table.

But clearly a deal is not to be.

Thank you again for the time we have spent together discussing this.

Sincerely yours,

Steven A. Ballmer
Chief Executive Officer
Microsoft Corporation

As I discussed yesterday that GPS manufacturers needs to start adapting to a changing market place as mobile phones will be looking at taking their place in the consumer market as users are looking for the all in one device. I want a cellphone/Ipod/GPS and many other nifty pieces of software on my phone.

Well it looks like a company called Dash is try to bring some new features to you stock standard GPS unit , but at a cost, which might not totally work with some users.

I would suggest you read the venturebeat article

 Navigation 2.0 arrives today with Dash Navigation’s Dash Express GPS navigator (global positioning system). The gadget represents a new generation of smarter car navigation devices because it has two-way communication between Dash and the user.

One-way GPS systems from the likes of Garmin, Mio Technology, Magellan, and TomTom and can only be so helpful to you. They can show you where to go, using satellite signals to fix your location as you drive. You can search the on-board memory of the devices for “points of interest” that you may want to visit, like the city hall in a town. Some of them even send you traffic conditions over a one-way radio for a fee of $10 a month or more.

But Dash connects your gadget back to the company’s servers over cell phone (the nationwide GSM/GPRS network of Jasper Wireless) or Wi-Fi wireless Internet connections.

Dash uses “crowdsourcing,” where its own fleet of users communicates back their positions, speeds, and other data (including traffic reports from Inrix in Kirkland, Wash.) so that Dash can calculate traffic on both freeways and major side streets. This is a big advantage over other kinds of GPS navigation systems, and Dash recently decided to cut its price from $600 to $400. It goes on sale today at Amazon.com.

“There is an element of Web 2.0 meets GPS here,” said Mark Williamson, director of services for Dash. “Others get you from point to point. We can tell you what is around you.”

My colleague Matt isn’t so fond of the Dash Express, which I will acknowledge has some drawbacks. One of the problems is that it costs $12.99 a month to use some of the best features beyond GPS navigation. The question is whether users are going to care about all of the slight advantages that Dash has over other dumb GPS gadgets.

Maybe we might see an acquisition of Dash by one of the GPS manufacturers to shore up sales in a slowing market.

I read an interesting article on Gigaom which says the GPS market is slowing down as the main producer of GPS chips is expierencing a slowdown. The reality is that people are looking for an all in one device. Play music , find me a place (GPS) make a call , surf the web etc…

Mobile producers such as Nokia understand this are constantly working to give the fickle consumer what they want.

So it makes sense that at some point Garmin and its likes will be just a memory of what things used to be like.

Here is a copy of the article from Gigaom.com

SiRF Technology (SIRF), a San Jose, Calif.-based maker of GPS chips, this morning said it was cutting jobs and trying to restructure its business due to softening consumer demand. Already the worst performing tech stock for the year, shares of SiRF nosedived in early trading this morning.

“SiRF experienced greater-than-expected softness in product demand from its customers, especially in the PND, or Personal Navigation Devices market,” the company said in a press release.

SiRF is the canary in the GPS coal mine. In other words, the GPS device market has hit the skids and we should expect more bad news, and more dominoes to tumble. Why? Look at SiRF’s customers: Tom Tom, Magellan, NAVIGON, Sony and European white-label GPS maker, Binatone. If the macroeconomic trends are putting a damper on SiRF and its chip-buying posse, it isn’t hard to extrapolate and see trouble for Garmin as well.

Looking further out onto the horizon, I think the standalone GPS device market is going to get cannibalized by mobile phones, which are getting increasingly sophisticated when it comes to personal navigation functionality. GPS devices were among the hottest-selling consumer items this past holiday season, with sales up 214 percent and revenues up 488 percent, respectively, year-over-year. 

Lets see if the GPS companies can overcome the mobile producers and come up with something that Nokia cannot add to a mobile device.

Just a thought why does’nt Garmin and Tomtom add mobile phone features to its devices.

It would seem that Microsoft is sticking to their guns with their bid and refusing to raise the offer anywhere close to what Yahoo is looking towards. If we look at Microsoft’s share price ,it has actually taken a dip which realistically brings the offer from 44 to 41 billion dollars. We know of couse that Jerry Yang does not want to sell out to Microsoft, as he definitely has an emotional attachment to the company he co-created. It is like giving your kid up for adoption and while you have visitation rights you cannot take the kid home. The harsh reality here is that the Yahoo has many parents also known as shareholders who need to see some sort of long term positive turn around strategy plan coming from the Yahoo board. Their only other option would be to take Microsoft’s offer and call it a day.

Obviously we all know that Yahoo is courting many other companies like News Corp to assist it ,but that is not a long term plan just a save me Microsoft one. Short term great , but in the long term this could be the downfall of Yahoo anyway.

Bill Gates has stated he will not be looking to raise the bid any further, which I think means if you don’t take this offer now there will be no other. The other plan would be for Microsoft to aquire shares slowly and then make an offer for the outstanding share capital. But what I do know is Microsoft will never be able to organically grow their online business as they are already so far behind that no amount of money could change that. They need a Yahoo type of company to bring them into the game and help them with the growth part of the business they lack.

So what are the alternatives hsould they strick out with Yahoo,

1. Aquire more small high growth companies that  could boost thier presence

2. Organically grow their online business by competing head on with Google ,Yahoo and every man and his dog

3. Accept defeat and see where the road thakes them (Obviously not Microsoft’s style)

4. Focus on their core business and forget about the Interent (When hell freezes over)

5. Buyout Facebook for $15 billion and turn it into a web platform

It is difficult to say but I would go with number 1 or 5 as options to not getting Yahoo as a division in your company. 

It would seem that after Yahoo set the bar higher Microsoft is looking at going at a more aggressive strategy to aquire Yahoo. I think for Microsoft it is more a case of catching up in the web world and Yahoo is the ideal way to do that, even though it is an expensive way to do so.

The aggressive way is what Microsoft is used to so they could probably work though the larger investors to get the approval they need. Unfortunately this makes Jerry Yangs job all the more difficult as he hold about $1 billion of stock and he would have to work hard to convince fellow shareholders that Yahoo holds more value as a seperate entity then being part of Microsoft.

If I was Yang I would’nt sell as Yahoo holds alot of untapped value which can be seen if they position themselves in the consumer areas that always grows despite what the markets say.

Heres a thought - What are the basics for consumers

Food

Travel

Sport

Housing

Money

Entertainment

So lets take each one of these and break them down into more focused areas and develop applications focused around them. Use the consumer to build the applications, see what they want and how they want it. Focus groups of radom individuals would be a great start. Go back to the basics and work from there.

The company also needs to generating more profits in order to boost that flagging share price which needs a kick. How would we do that ? Their new ad system is good but they need to look beyond that. Mobile applications is going to bring a new wave of opportunities. I think Yahoo should really put significant effort in this but focus on emerging economies where there is huge growth potential.

An example of this would be South African based mobile provider MTN which took a risky strategy of going into Nigeria. This proved to be very profitable for the company and propelled them throughout Africa and the Middle East.

Yahoo needs to start taking more risks and become more agile if they want to combat a takeover.

The Yahoo AOL strategy is not going to be any better for them. In the long run Yahoo as an entity on its own will work better for itself.

Well looks Microsoft is on buying spree as reported they have purchased Danger for a figure of around $500 million.

More of the story on venturebeat

Software giant Microsoft reportedly spent $500 million to acquire Danger, the company that developed software to power the youngster-popular Sidekick.

The figure, while not officially announced, was dug up in reporting by GigaOm’s Om Malik. We haven’t confirmed that exact figure, but we do have enough info that suggests investors made a very good return.

The acquisition comes after Danger swallowed some $225 million from investors, Om says, though I think that some of that may have been debt because we’ve been told the equity investment was less than that. The company’s chief executive Hank Nothhaft was insisting yesterday that the outcome was a “very, very strong exit” for its backers, and it probably was. The company’s valuation crept up steadily from 2000 from about $27 million to $190 million last year, according to our source. So investors pumping in money at these levels all appear to have done well, even the earliest ones who had their money locked up for eight years (we mentioned the investors in our story yesterday; Mobius, though, was the earliest backer).

More interestingly, however, is Om’s thought on why Microsoft is making the move — it wants to “pull an Xbox” on its mobile phone business. Not only does it want to extend beyond the business world and entice consumers, it also wants to use Danger’s software-as-a-service technology to offer “Microsoft Services” such as search, mail and instant messaging on the Danger platform, using it to compete with Google Android.

Like Om, we believe Microsoft should open up Danger’s platform in a more radical effort to make it attractive to developers. In the mobile world, it still has a lot less to lose than it does with an open strategy in the desktop software business, and in fact, it’s probably the only way it will win at this stage.

So lets says Microsoft puts the cash down and Yahoo agrees to the offer. The next step would be to integrate the products in order to have one cohesive look and feel. This is obviously going to be an issue as there some areas that both compete head on. Which one would Microsoft take the more open standard Yahoo way or their own. My guess goes with them taking their own way as that is the Microsoft way. So alot of products from Yahoo would be dropped like maps for example , messenger and those users would be migrated to Microsoft’s platforms.

This could have a disastrous impact for the Yahoo user base and maybe a boon for Google. Open Standards I believe work the best on the net. An open developer community always produces more innovation then a closed system with tons of rules and regulations.

From a branding point of view which brand do you work with as you possibly cannot run both at the same time. So will Yahoo slowly be migrated to an MSN brand ?  Or will it say a Microsoft company under the Yahoo logo.

this is very difficult as I think both companies will not want to alienate any of the user base as that could equate to millions fo dollars of lost revenue should you get a mass migration of users. But from an advertisers and business point of view one wuld have to make a decision on what the strategy of the new entity would be. You cannot run both companies independantly as that would be a waste of resources.

Would we also see further job losses at Yahoo ? Most definitely as Microsoft would be looking to cut costs and move towards their calculated ROI.

Should this deal go though and products begin to change we should probably expect to see alot of new startups competing in the those spaces.

I was just reading about Apple’s new Macbook Air. They seem to be doing all the right things these days. It also does’nt hurt to have Mr Showmanship himself punting the new products. I think Apple is doing an excellent job focusing on the entertainment  consumer market as that really is the way things are moving especially from the internets point of view. People want things on demand and when ever and where ever they feel for it.

Jobs said the iTunes Store now offers movie rentals from every major Hollywood studio. The service will offer 1,000 titles at launch and eventually every title on DVD. This is good news for consumers. We will just have to see how easy it will be from a userbility point of view.

Their was also an announcement for Apple’s new storage device Time Capsule.

The Time Capsule will be detected by any Mac running Leopard and Time Machine takes care of the rest. It’ll come in two flavors: 500GB for $300 and 1TB for $500, both with server grade hard drives. I think a big plus is ther server grade hard drives. 

Check out the Macbook Air here - http://www.apple.com/macbookair/

Check out the Time Capsule here - http://www.apple.com/timecapsule/