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SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc on Sunday detailed plans for its forthcoming Web advertising management system that gives its ad sales-partners access to online ad space both on Yahoo and other major sites.

The widely anticipated system, known as AMP!, aims to simplify the process of buying and selling online ads for advertisers, ad agencies, fast-growing ad trading networks and Web site publishers.

The ad management system seeks to capitalize on Yahoo's strength as a Web site publisher that reaches 500 million Web users monthly and recent efforts to sell ads off of Yahoo through major partnerships or specialized ad-sales networks.

The planned advertising system, formerly code-named Apex, is the lynchpin of the company's strategy to reach outside its own base of users and increase its position as the “must buy” location for online advertisers.

While the strategy remains in its early stages, AMP! is one of the products which Yahoo management believes will help propel the Web pioneer's next wave of growth. It is also one factor behind Yahoo's reluctance to accept Microsoft Corp's unsolicited takeover bid currently valued at $42.4 billion, which executives believe undervalues the company's assets.

“This is really about creating a massively networking advertising ecosystem,” Yahoo advertising executive Mike Walrath said in an interview. Walrath founded Right Media, an ad sales exchange, in 2003 and sold it to Yahoo last year.

AMP! will be introduced in stages starting in the third quarter of this year, Yahoo said. It aims to give individual sites the capacity to sell ads across the Web, replacing single-site systems that still use e-mail and even faxes.

The move also is a response to major competitors Google Inc and Microsoft Corp, which have each acquired major competitors in the market for sales of online display ads used by corporate brand marketers. Google closed its $3.4 billion acquisition of ad sales management firm DoubleClick last month. Microsoft paid $6 billion for aQuantive last May.

AMP! is a suite of tools that offers precise geographic, demographic, and interest-based targeting across a vast network of Yahoo sites and ad sales deals Yahoo has struck with more than 600 newspapers, Comcast and eBay Inc.

It also includes niche Web sites such as WebMD, Forbes, the major ad networks, and thousands of smaller sites on the Web.

In its initial stages, AMP! is designed to expand the reach of dedicated sales forces at newspapers or sites such as WebMD to allow them to reach many times larger audiences outside of their own sites, where they can cross-sell their advertising.

(Editing by Lincoln Feast)

SEATTLE/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc has three weeks to accept Microsoft Corp's $31-a-share cash-and-stock offer or Microsoft may lower its bid and take its offer to Yahoo investors, Microsoft said on Saturday.

Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said in a letter dated April 5 and addressed to Yahoo's board of directors that “now is the time” to negotiate final terms of a deal, which, valued at more than $40 billion (20 billion pounds) would mark the biggest-ever takeover in the high-tech industry.

“If we have not concluded an agreement within the next three weeks, we will be compelled to take our case directly to your shareholders, including the initiation of a proxy contest to elect an alternative slate of directors,” Ballmer wrote.

Then he threatened to reduce Microsoft's offer if Yahoo failed to meet the deadline: “That action will have an undesirable impact on the value of your company from our perspective which will be reflected in the terms of our proposal.”

The letter marks the tightening of the noose in a classic Wall Street bear-hug merger strategy, wherein Microsoft aims to convince Yahoo directors to negotiate a friendly deal or else face a battle for their jobs at Yahoo's next annual meeting.

Yahoo's board is reviewing the letter, said a person close to the company. Directors of the Sunnyvale, California-based company have rebuffed Microsoft's original offer, saying the bid undervalues Yahoo and that it is seeking alternatives.

Ballmer said Microsoft was growing impatient more than two months after the Redmond, Washington-based software powerhouse made its unsolicited takeover offer for Yahoo. At the time, the bid represented a 62 percent premium to Yahoo's share price.

“Steve Ballmer is an emotional guy and the emotion comes through and it's frustration,” said Kim Caughey, senior analyst at Fort Pitt Capital Group, a Microsoft shareholder. “I really don't think it's going higher than $31. That ship has sailed.”

NOT LOOKING ANY YOUNGER

The Microsoft letter argues the economy and the market for Internet stocks have deteriorated in the intervening period, and that Yahoo's share of Web search and advertising business has declined, referring to industry market reports.

“During these two months of inactivity, the Internet has continued to march on, while the public equity markets and overall economic conditions have weakened considerably.”

The deadline falls on April 26, four days after Yahoo and two days after Microsoft report their quarterly results.

Ballmer said Yahoo's board, despite its efforts, had failed to woo a competing offer from “others in the industry.”

Yahoo has held talks with News Corp and Time Warner Inc's AOL division about possible deals, but those discussions appear to have yielded nothing yet.

A Yahoo investor, whose firm met with Yahoo management earlier this week and declined to be identified, said the company emphasized the deal with Microsoft involved regulatory risks that would undercut a merger's potential value.

The management, according to the investor, presented alliances with AOL and Google as possibly better options.

Brendan Barnicle, who follows Microsoft for Pacific Crest Securities, said that by removing the hope of a higher bid, Microsoft had given Yahoo directors the legal cover to accept Microsoft's existing offer and fend off shareholder lawsuits.

It's part of a highly choreographed dance and parallels the take-it-or-leave-it bidding strategy Oracle Corp has used to win a string of deals to consolidate the software industry.

“The big overhang on Microsoft stock has been that they would have to raise their bid,” Barnicle said.

SINKING VALUE

Yahoo has adopted measures that make a merger with Microsoft more costly, Ballmer complained.

A few weeks after Microsoft's offer, Yahoo's board put in place a generous severance plan, commonly known as a “golden parachute,” to all employees if the company was sold.

The original 62 percent premium to Yahoo's share price on the day the offer was announced has declined.

Yahoo shares closed on Friday at $28.36 each, while Microsoft ended the week at $29.16. Both trade on Nasdaq.

Based on Friday's closing price, the premium to Yahoo's stock is about 45 percent, while the current total value of Microsoft's offer is $42.2 billion in cash and stock.

Microsoft has argued that the offer's premium to Yahoo's stock has, in fact, increased, because the Web pioneer's stock would have fallen in lock-step with its online rivals. Shares of Google Inc, Yahoo's most direct competitor, have fallen more than 16 percent since Microsoft's offer.

Microsoft's view of business conditions at Yahoo runs contrary to Yahoo's own outlook for itself. Last month, the company went public with a rosy revenue outlook for the next two years and appealed directly to shareholders during a road show that Microsoft's offer was not enough.

(Additional reporting by Anupreeta Das in New York; Editing by Philip Barbara and Peter Cooney)

Hasso Plattner of SAP and Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com squared off in a debate Thursday over which company has the best platform to run a company's business.

The event, at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, was billed as a debate over the future of enterprise software, although it never really tackled that question. Quentin Hardy of Forbes Magazine asked the questions and the two executives argued the merits of Salesforce.com's on-demand platform and SAP's traditional on-premise model.

Benioff, the chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com, was often faster on his feet than Plattner, an SAP co-founder and chairman of its supervisory board. A few times Benioff antagonized Plattner, who glared moodily off to the side.

“I want to figure out how to get SAP to build on our platform,” Benioff said. “They've had trouble getting into on-demand and they don't have any major customers yet. So when I look at that I say, 'How do I help them make it happen?' They need to write their apps on our platform, because they're never going to figure this out.”

“Don't overestimate your platform; the ship can sink” Plattner said later. “I'd like to give you some advice, but I don't know if you'll take it, because you are a bit younger.”

The debate began calmly enough. Benioff said we are witnessing “the creation of a new enterprise software industry… built around some fundamental principles that are different from the previous era.” Those principles are embodied by Google, eBay and Amazon.com, he said, which deliver loosely coupled services, like Google Earth, which can be combined with other services to build solutions.

That is the model of Salesforce.com, which offers on-demand CRM (customer relationship management) and development services that customers can extend with services from third parties or extensions built in-house. SAP provides traditional ERP (enterprise resource planning) software to many of the world's biggest companies, but it is slowly ramping up an on-demand effort called Business ByDesign, an ERP package for smaller businesses.

Plattner's argument was that big companies are too complex to use “generic” services that are delivered ready to consume and can't be customized for individual business needs. “We can't really change the core of Google Earth,” he said.

SAP's Business ByDesign is different, he argued, because it has 2,100 programming interfaces for connecting to other software. If Salesforce.com tried to extend its service to manage an entire enterprise system, Plattner said, “I will be scared to death.”

Benioff mocked SAP for losing out on a bid for chemicals company DuPont with SAP's CRM Online, its first attempt at on-demand software.

“I'm not criticizing the moderator, but we don't stick to the question,” Plattner grumbled. “Why did they win Dupont? Because we had a shitty CRM system.”

“Forget about the little ill-fated CRM Online,” he said later.

“Your customers won't forget about it,” Benioff quipped.

Benioff said enterprise software should no longer be only for big, rich companies, and said venture capitalists no longer write checks for software companies. “They're all software as a service,” he said.

Plattner argued that Salesforce.com isn't powerful enough to make its platform a de-facto standard, as Microsoft did with Windows.

At least one commentator declared Benioff the winner of the debate “by nontechnical knockout (no references to in-memory database systems).” A blog devoted to SAP ran a piece titled “Benioff v Plattner: let history decide.”

“As in all debates,” it said, “there was a great temptation to name the winning debater rather than the winning position.”

While Linus Torvalds' name is synonymous with the Linux kernel, Al Viro's may be one day, too.

Viro has contributed 1,571 changes to the kernel, which sits at the core of the Linux operating system, over the past three years, according to a new report from the Linux Foundation. That's more than any other individual developer, the report states. In contrast, Torvalds, the kernel's creator and steward, contributed 495 changes. Viro couldn't be reached for comment about the report.

During the past three years, the top 10 individual developers have contributed nearly 15 percent of the changes to the kernel, while the top 30 developers have submitted 30 percent, the report states.

But this group of coding superstars sails atop a roiling sea of newer community members, notes Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. Roughly 3,700 developers from more than 200 companies have contributed to the kernel since 2005, according to the report.

The statistic underscores the widespread penetration of Linux into enterprise computing. But the report was still necessary in light of lingering public perceptions, Zemlin said.

“I do think there continues to be groups of people out there who perceive open source and Linux as some kind of random hobbyist movement,” he said. “It's amazing that after Linux is running the New York Stock Exchange, that people would still doubt it's ready for prime time. Yet, I hear it, in kind of mainstream conversations.”

The report breaks up contributors into a number of categories.

The top-ranking one, with 13.9 percent of the kernel changes, contains developers performing work on their own time, with “no financial contribution happening from any company,” according to the report.

Coming in second was the “unknown” category– developers for whom a corporate affiliation couldn't be found– with 12.9 percent. “With few exceptions, all of the people in this category have contributed 10 or fewer changes to the kernel over the past three years, yet the large number of these developers causes their total contribution to be quite high,” the report noted.

Developers tied to companies and foundations ranked next, with Red Hat in the lead (11.2 percent), followed immediately by Novell (8.9 percent), IBM (8.3 percent), Intel (4.1 percent) and the Linux Foundation (3.5 percent) on the list of 30. A slew of other corporations round out the list with smaller contributions, such as Oracle (1.3) and Fujitsu (.5 percent).

“What we see here is that a small number of companies is responsible for a large portion of the total changes to the kernel. But there is a 'long tail' of companies which have made significant changes,'” the report said.

Zemlin suggested this is set to accelerate, given that many new products using Linux will hit the market in coming months: “Think about how many of those people will become kernel code contributors.”

Despite all the activity, the kernel project is in no danger of being hijacked by particular corporate interests, he said: “The companies understand the principles of the development process and the rules by which people participate. They understand it is built on trusting relationships, both individually and from a corporate perspective.”

Greg Kroah-Hartman, one of the report's authors and number 26 on the top 30 individual contributors' list, works on the kernel as part of his job at Novell but did it as a hobby prior to that, he said via e-mail last week.

Kroah-Hartman echoed Zemlin in discussing the kernel community's growth.

“If you look, there is no huge majority of a single company doing all of the work with no one else,” he wrote. “It is spread out over a handful of very involved companies, and a large number of semi-involved companies. Because no one company controls it, everyone works together, which is a requirement in order to do this kind of development.”

“Why wouldn't Linux be appealing to corporations and they support it?” he also noted. “When was it last considered 'grassroots?' Seriously, anyone who has had any glimmer of kernel experience has been instantly snapped up by corporations hiring them to do this kind of thing full time for a very long time now.”

Enterprises don't want to have to use two different management systems to support mobile devices in the warehouse and smartphones for executives, and so Good Technology, with sister company Symbol, plans to offer products that can support all types of mobile devices.

“A Symbol device on the loading dock doesn't have the same security policies and applications as smartphones, but you don't need two products to manage them,” said Brian Havener, group product manager at Motorola's Enterprise Mobility team.

In the coming months, Good plans to unveil more products and services that let an enterprise manage devices from the “shop floor to the corner office” using the same systems, he said.

Since Motorola acquired Good last year, Good has been working on ways to combine its enterprise e-mail offering with products from Symbol, which was also acquired by Motorola in 2007. Currently, the companies offer a variety of products in different “silos” within the same group, Havener said. “In the last six months we've been working on: Where does it make sense to put the investment to break the silos and have a common foundation of services and products,” he said.

Good's product comprises two pieces: the e-mail client and the back-end server. In the next release, expected to become available in a couple months, the server will have many more management and security features, he said. It will support other mobile applications in addition to e-mail and will allow IT administrators to secure and manage devices as they operate over cellular networks and Wi-Fi networks.

Despite Good's ties to Motorola and Symbol, the technology will continue to support devices made by any manufacturer, Havener said. Other mobile-device management providers, like Nokia's Intellisync, have similar policies, but it's one that sets Good and Intellisync apart from a notable competitor: Microsoft.

“We don't have a single customer today, nor will we tomorrow, that has Exchange 07, all Windows Mobile 6.1 devices and the chops to essentially deploy a [Network Operations Center],” said Havener. In order to use Microsoft's Mobile Device Manager, enterprises must be running Exchange 2007 and only use mobile phones running Windows Mobile 6.1, the software that will become available possibly as soon as the second quarter this year.

Good argues that deploying its system will be easier than Microsoft's product and can offer some advantages. Because traffic to and from devices running Good's software passes through Good's network operations center, IT administrators can monitor that traffic. Checking the Good management console, they can discover a range of data about each device, including pending messages, device status, connection to networks and other history. He doesn't expect that Microsoft's Mobile Device Manager will offer all of those types of information about users.

Also to come in the near future is integration between the Good client and the PBX, Havener said. That will allow mobile users to take advantage of PBX features on their phones, such as four-digit dialing, conference calling and unified phone numbers.

NEW YORK - U.S. military officials seeking to boost the nation’s cyberwarfare capabilities are looking beyond defending the Internet: They are developing ways to launch virtual attacks on enemies.

But first the military will have to figure out the proper boundaries.

“What do we consider to be an act of war in cyberspace?” asked Lt. Gen. Robert J. Elder Jr., who heads the Air Force’s cyberoperations command. “The military is not going to tend to do that (use virtual strike capabilities) until you cross some line that constitutes an act of war.”

Elder said initial uses likely would be limited to diverting or killing data packets that threaten the nation’s systems, the way the military may intercept a foreign ship carrying arms in international waters.

The remarks came late Friday during a New York chapter meeting of the Association For Intelligence Officers, a nonprofit group for current and former intelligence agents and their supporters.

In an interview afterward, Elder said that in the future, the military might rely upon network warfare to disrupt an enemy’s communications system, replacing the need for conventional weapons like bombs.

In any such scenario, Elder said the military would be restricted by the same rules of engagement — such as requirements for a formal declaration of war — that apply to conventional attacks.

Elder said that during the early days of the Iraq war, rudimentary forms of cyberattacks were used by the United States, including electronically jamming Iraqi military systems and using network attacks to hinder Iraqi ground units from communicating with one another.

The military’s offensive capabilities have improved since then, he said.

As the military increasingly relies on networks and computer systems to communicate and coordinate conventional operations, the U.S. Air Force is planning to establish by October a Cyber Command for waging a future war that is fought not only by land, sea and air but also in cyberspace.

Hackers with a foreign government or terrorist group potentially could bring down military and civilian Web sites using what’s known as a denial-of-service attack — flooding the computer servers with fake traffic such that legitimate visitors can’t get through.

Enemies also could look for security vulnerabilities to break into key systems that run power plants, refineries and other infrastructure.

Already, the Chinese government has been suspected of using the Web to break into computers at the Defense Department and other U.S. agencies in what was dubbed Operation Titan Rain. Since 2001, Chinese “hacktivists” have organized attacks on and defaced U.S. Web sites to oppose what they call the imperialism of the United States and Japan.

Elder outlined several defensive initiatives aimed at deterring cyberattacks on the United States.

The military, for instance, needs to demonstrate that its conventional operations still could function even if the network is disrupted. To do that, he said, the military has been identifying “what if” loss scenarios and figuring out the backup capabilities needed to overcome them.

Forensics capabilities also are being developed, he said, to identify who is attacking, even if the attacker tries to hide by spoofing the identity of packets and rerouting them through intermediary computer servers. That way, the United States can make a credible threat of retribution.

Both Verizon Wireless and AT&T won enough spectrum licenses in the U.S. government's 700MHz auction concluded last month to roll out services a cut above what they offer today, though how fast they are for subscribers will be up to the carriers.

New Broadband Technology

Both service providers will use the frequencies, at least in part, for LTE (Long-Term Evolution), an emerging mobile broadband technology sponsored by the organization that backs GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications). AT&T said the licenses would provide the foundation for rolling out HSPA+, a technology further along in its development, as well as LTE. The carriers released some details of their plans last week after a quiet period imposed by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ended. Also, Qualcomm said it will use eight new licenses to expand its FLO TV mobile broadcasting service.

The 700MHz spectrum, which TV stations are required to give up by mid-February 2009 when they drop analog broadcasts, can reach farther and penetrate walls better than current cellular frequencies. The auction brought in more than US$19 billion, with Verizon agreeing to pay more than $9 billion and AT&T about $6.6 billion. At the urging of Google and other parties, the FCC set requirements for use of some of the frequencies by any application or device. Google didn't win any licenses, but it hopes, along with Microsoft and others, to take advantage of “white spaces” between channels.

Verizon won a nearly nationwide block of spectrum that is 22MHz wide. That's broader than the block where AT&T said it won licenses covering the 200 largest markets in the U.S. But though AT&T's block is only 12MHz, the two carriers may be on roughly equal footing, according to IDC analyst Godfrey Chua. Anything over 10MHz is enough spectrum to take advantage of LTE, which can deliver higher speeds than current technologies and is also more efficient, he said. AT&T also recently acquired valuable 700MHz spectrum from Aloha Partners. Those licenses, for which AT&T said it would pay $2.5 billion, cover about two-thirds of the U.S. population.

Speed Boost

As wireless technology continues its march through new standards, its speed can increase with each step. One of the latest, HSUPA (High-Speed Uplink Packet Access), will offer 600K bps (bits per second) to 1.4M bps downstream and between 500K bps and 800K bps upstream on average, according to AT&T. The carrier said it will finish building its HSUPA network using existing spectrum in the middle of this year.

But speed gains for individual subscribers don't have to follow that path directly, according to IDC's Chua. The bottom line is that LTE handles spectrum more efficiently, but carriers have to determine the best tradeoff between speed and subscriber base, he said.

“With that 22MHz, I can either serve more customers with less bandwidth or serve fewer customers with more bandwidth,” Chua said.

Even the higher speeds that LTE can deliver won't meet the expectations of many users, in the view of Albert Lin, a mobile analyst at investment firm Sooner Cap.

“Ask any moderate or heavy user, and they'll start rattling off features that won't exist even with LTE,” such as videoconferencing, certain types of community interaction and virtual sessions in enterprise applications, he said.

Consumers won't really benefit from the spectrum for some time. For one thing, some successful TV stations are likely to fight the handover of frequencies, Lin said. Verizon, for its part, said Thursday it doesn't plan to roll out LTE until 2010.

When it comes to being taken in by Internet fraudsters, men have a knack for losing cash, according to a new report from the Internet Crime Complaint Center.

Data compiled from more than 206,000 complaints received last year by the U.S. Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) shows that men lost US$1.67 to every $1 lost by women in online fraud.

Identifying Fraud Trends

The IC3 is the clearinghouse for online crime complaints in the U.S., and its database is used by regulators and law enforcement to get a picture of criminal trends and, in some cases, help hunt down the criminals. It is a joint effort run by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National White Collar Crime Center.

The organization says that buying patterns and human nature play into the findings.

“Historically men were more apt to purchase large ticket item like electronics… that could explain a lot of it,” said John Kane, the IC3 research manager who wrote the report.

But with women now spending more online, the difference is also due to the fact that certain types of schemes seem to suck men in. “Men tend to fall victim… to business investment schemes and some other schemes that have a higher dollar loss,” Kane said.

Investment fraud complaints, where the average loss is more than $3,500, were overwhelmingly submitted by men, Kane said. Compare that to something like auction fraud, where both men and women are frequently victimized. The average loss there is just over $480.

Men also tend to be the victims of check fraud (average loss: $3,000) and Nigerian letter fraud scams ($2,000), Kane said.

Crime Climbs

Overall, Internet crime is netting the bad guys more money than ever.

Total losses from 2007 complaints came to $239 million, up $40 million from 2006.

The 2007 data, released Thursday, shows that the total number of complaints received by the group was actually down for the second year in a row. In 2007 the IC3 Web site logged just under 207,000 complaints. In 2005 that number was over 231,000.

Kane credited the drop in complaints to increased consumer awareness, but according to Gary Warner, director of research in computer forensics with the University of Alabama at Birmingham, there may be another explanation.

Warner spends a lot of time studying the criminals and said that in recent months, researchers have noticed that credit card numbers have often been stolen and then not used. “One theory is that nobody wants to go to jail for stealing $40,” he said. “So when they get access to these accounts, they're using only the ones that they can get the most value from.”

Often, criminals will do a balance check and then sell only the cards with the highest balances. “I think there's a little bit of filtering on the criminal side that's at play here,” he said.

There was another interesting finding in the 2007 data. The IC3 found that many countries that were commonly linked with cybercrime were the sources of the incidents it tracked, but it did not list China as a top source of perpetrators. China has been named as the source of many online attacks over the past year, but it didn't make IC3's list of top 10 countries by perpetrators.

Leading the list were the U.S., the United Kingdom and Nigeria.

Panasonic has become the first cell-phone manufacturer to ship 100 million units in the Japanese market, it said Thursday.

The company first entered the market in 1979 when it launched its TZ-801 analog handset for the new car phone service of NTT Public Corp., the government-owned forerunner to the privatized NTT.

It followed this six years later with the TZ-802A in 1985. The handset was a shoulder phone, so called because it could detached from a car holder and carried around over the user's shoulder. It weight about 7 kilograms, which is about 70 times the weight of today's handsets.

The first handheld phone from Panasonic, the TZ-802B, was a brick-like model launched in 1987. It debuted its first digital model for NTT's PDC (Personal Digital Communications) network, a Japan-developed second generation standard that failed to take off overseas, in 1991, and by June 1997 had hit shipments of 10 million phones.

More recently Panasonic was one of the first phone makers to produce a handset for NTT DoCoMo's 3G service, which was the first commercial 3G service to launch when it started in 2001. At about the same time Panasonic hit shipments of 50 million handsets.

Today's phones from the company, like those from other manufacturers, are far removed from the handsets of even five years ago. They are packed with digital entertainment functions the most recent addition being mobile digital TV. The service is available free over-the-air and has proved very popular with users.

Its popularity has led Panasonic to put some of the know-how from its flat-panel TV business into its latest phones. The newest models carry the same Viera brand-name as its big-screen TVs.