Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and his wife Akiko Yamazaki donated $50 million for a green building at Stanford University, which, fittingly, will be called the Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Environment and Energy Building, according to the Stanford News Service.

We find it heartening that Yang found time to attend the opening the other day, but we also can't help wonder if this hefty donation isn't a sign that he's slowing down. By most accounts, Yang is hellbent on preventing a Microsoft takeover and on turning Yahoo around, but in our book, it's mostly the retirees who are freaked out about their legacy who donate buildings to their alma mater.

Incidentally: It's expensive to get a building named after you at Stanford these days. Bill Gates only paid a reported $6 million for the naming rights to the Stanford computer science building which opened in 1996. (Adjusted for inflation, that's about $8 million).

Photo: Flickr/Jurvetson

It's been seven years since Steve Ballmer introduced the world to his exotic monkeyboy dance, and he hasn't lost his touch. In a wide-ranging interview yesterday with venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki at a conference in Las Vegas, Ballmer took a minute to reenact the famous dance, this time yelling "web developers." When he was done, he asked for fifty cents from the guy in the audience who apparently requested the performance.

"If your buddy behind you just gave you a buck, I want fifty cents," Ballmer said.

During the interview, Ballmer knocked Kawasaki's MacBook Air ("This is heavier than my PC. True! That thing is heavier than the Toshiba I carry," he reportedly said.)

On the topic of Microsoft's stake in Facebook, Ballmer claims that neither he nor Mark Zuckerberg were involved with the $15 billion valuation.

"Neither one of us was involved in the specifics. Mark tends to focus in on the big picture, getting the technology right, product essence. He does a fantastic job. I’m well known not to be the world’s best negotiator," he said, according to a Reuters report.

 

The big news out of the Apple event in Cupertino today was that venture capitalist John Doerr, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, is ponying up $100 million for an iPhone development fund called iFund. Say what? That's an awful lot of money -- enough to fund every whim of every Mac developer worldwide.

"The iPhone is bigger than the personal computer," Doerr said at the event.

But perhaps Doerr is getting ahead of himself. The iPhone is still in its infancy and given its modest user base, it could be hard to justify big-budget applications.

"I think the iFund could conceivably enable people to tackle some larger scope app ideas that
would require larger teams, but I'm not really sure there will be that many compelling iPhone apps that would necessitate that kind of investment," Buzz Andersen, a longtime Mac developer, told EPICENTER's Megan McCarthy.

Nor is it clear that the iFund will do anything to quelch competition in the immediate future. While Apple is scrambling to meet its sales goal of 10 million iPhones in 2008, BlackBerry recently lifted its subscriber growth projections based on better-than-expected post-holiday sales.

"I don't think this is a major blow to [Research In Motion]," said an analyst who covers the company. "I mean, if you look at the iPhone, it's $399 or $499 while BlackBerry is one of the cheapest smart phones out there. And the usability is much better on the BlackBerry. Try typing 100 words on the iPhone -- it's a different experience. I'm not saying these guys aren't going to succeed, but there's enough space out there for everyone to grow. And in North America Apple will still be tied up with AT&T for some time. People aren't going to stop buying BlackBerries."

Photo: Flickr/M@cropako

See Also:

• Apple iPhone SDK Event Planned for March 6
• More Potential iPhone Apps Emerge, Including BBC's iPlayer and ...
• IPhone Users Are Prodigious Googlers
• IPhone Sales: 5 Million Down, 5 Million to Go?
• Apple Announces iPhone SDK, Corporate Features, VoIP Support
• AT&T Beefs Up 3-G Network Ahead of Next-Gen iPhone Launch
• The Best Web Apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- Forget individually packaged software applications tailored for specific devices. The real future of computing, according to Hewlett-Packard's CTO Shane Robison, is in the cloud -- a cloud that will serve up intelligent, device agnostic services wherever you are.

At an HP Labs event held at the company's corporate headquarters on Thursday, Robison and other HP executives talked about this new generation of cloud services, speculating that they will one day anticipate your needs based on real-time information about your location, your own personal preferences, and even the time of day.

"We're now entering what I like to call the era of everything as a service," Robison said. "What we're really doing (at HP) is presenting our technologies as services or through other services."

During his talk Robison recalled the decade of rampant software development that followed once the PC was established as a true platform. He said we're at the same point today with the internet and cloud services.

In a broader sense, Thursday's event wasn't just about cloud computing, but also about the new restructuring and refocusing of HP Labs.

"We have a plan," said Prith Banerjee, director of HP Labs. "We will make 20-30 big bets on high impact research areas by putting the entire resources of HP Labs behind them."

That's a significant cutback for the world's number one PC manufacturer. Previously, there were as many as 150 separate research projects going on at any given time at HP Labs. Under the new R&D scheme, the company will now focus 1/3 of its efforts on basic exploratory research, 1/3 on proprietary research and 1/3 on advanced product research.

The fruits of some of that research were on display, too, including BRAIN (Behaviorally Robust Aggregation of Information in Networks), a web-based collective wisdom extraction tool that turns predicting the future into a game for Fortune 100 companies; FaceBubble, a photo clustering tool that uses face recognition to comb through thousands of photos and retrieve the precise picture you want; and CloudPrint, a free web-based service that lets you share, print and store documents and photos using any mobile phone.

Ultimately, HP Lab's decision to cut back on many of its superfluous projects and refocus on what it calls "high impact" research may underscore the pressing need for coming up with new ways of acquiring and analyzing the glut of information now on the web.

Indeed, taming all that data is going to be a daunting (and expensive) task if you believe Banerjee, who says that the amount of information we will create in the next five years will be more than the amount that's been created in our entire history. Therefore, finding intelligent crowd-sourcing tools, coming up with ways to access long tail content and developing additional service-oriented technologies will become paramount for PC maker.

"If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there," concluded Robison. "For us, we know where we're going and we just want to choose the right path the get there."

A certain Jonathan Moreland says it's time to short Google. The basis of his thesis? Google insiders are selling like mad, the ad market is likely to tumble, and the stock has fallen hard.

Our take? We don't really buy it. It's possible that Google shares are poised to fall, but we're not convinced that insider sales are all that significant in this case. In fact, if you look at the number of trades made by Google insiders in the first two months of 2007 versus the number of insider transactions in the first two months of 2008, they're actually down.

When a high-level insider orders a stock trade, he or she has to file a Form 4 with the SEC to disclose the transaction. In January 2008, there were only 17 Form 4s filed, down from 105 Form 4s filed in January 2007 -- that implies an 84 percent decline, year-over-year, in Google insider trades in January.

Moreland, founder of InsiderInsights.com, a weekly newsletter that analyzes insider stock trades, told the Wall Street Journal that he's not concerned about sales made by Google's founders -- Sergey Brin and Larry Page -- but he is worried about sales made by lower-level executives and the lack of insider stock purchases.

"So many of these insiders have been so anxious to sell or exercise their options, and so unwilling to hold much of anything long, and that's a particular red flag to me," he told the Wall Street Journal.

Here's the thing: There is no way to track lower-level executives' trades. The SEC only requires disclosures from directors, officers, or executives who own 10 percent or more of a class of shares, so we're not really sure which lower-level execs he's referring to.

Also, this advice comes from a guy who has built his career around insider trades. His investment strategy may have merit, but we're not sure how insider trades among Googlers helped him arrive at that conclusion. Moreland says it's a complex analysis that can't be simplified with a thesis like, "Insiders are selling, therefore I must short the stock." He also notes that Google is one of 13 stocks he has a short position on.

Still, if Eric Schmidt sells a block of Google shares, we would argue it indicates that he's going to buy another jet, and not necessarily that it's the end of the world.

Africans don't need cool web apps -- they need great text messaging applications for their phones.

At least that's what DataDyne.org's Joel Selanikio argued in a presentation at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference wrapping up in San Diego Thursday.

Selanikio found himself continually surprised at how useful and ubiquitous cell phones are in Africa. There were 82 million cellphone users in Africa in 2004, but even by 2007, only 4.7 million Africans had broadband connections.

The paucity of fiber optic internet backbone cables except for along the coasts, the expense of satellite data connections and the reliance on landline monopoly phone carriers makes it unlikely that broadband will grow as fast as cellphones, Selanikio said.

That's a key failure of the assumptions underlying the One Laptop Per Child program, Selanikio argued.

That means the question for non-profit and commercial developers alike is "What can you do with slow processors and slow bandwidth?"

Continue reading "ETech: Text Messages, not Web 2.0, Will Dominate Africa Tech Future" »

SAN DIEGO -- Stanford law professor and internet icon Larry Lessig called on geeks Wednesday night to be "heroes" who can help Americans believe in their government again, by creating tools to help drive the influence of money out of politics.

"We have had different times in this country requiring different heroes," Lessig said in a keynote speech at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference here.

"During World War II, we required soldiers as heroes," Lessig said. "We may be at a time when we need geeks as heroes."

Lessig says he needs help from coders, because problems like global warming can't be solved until elected officials are freed from the corrupting effect of campaign contributions.

Lessig recently flirted with the idea of running for Congress, but instead is launching a new campaign called Change Congress.

The new project is modeled on the Creative Commons project he started to help change how copyright works, which allows people to tag their writings and photography with alternative copyright badges.

The project, to be officially announced in two weeks, will give candidates for political office three choices they can support in order to get badges for their campaign website.

Continue reading "ETech: Lessig Calls for Geeks to Code Money Out of Politics" »

SAN DIEGO, California -- Imagine a drug that can reduce your need for sleep, increase your concentration and make you smarter, with minimal side effects.

Call it Morvigil.

What would such a drug do to society? Would governments ban it, would it become the drug of the rich or become a virtual prerequisite for your workday?

The best answers to those questions, writer Quinn Norton told conference-goers at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego Wednesday, is to be found in the history of another substance: coffee.

Coffee debuted in the late 17th century in Oxford, England -- leading to rowdy coffee houses, jittery arguments and even an attempt by King Charles II to ban the substance for inspiring seditious behavior.

The other consequence: the Enlightenment.

(Disclaimer: Norton is a Wired.com contributor and a friend, but her talk was clearly one of the hits of the conference.)

Continue reading "Drugs, Body Modifications May Create Second Enlightenment" »

What a difference swapping a chip can make. With 39 percent year-over-year growth, Apple was once again the fastest growing PC manufacturer in the world during the fourth quarter, according to preliminary results from an iSuppli market share survey.

The research firm attributed this consistent growth to "Apple’s reinvigorated Intel microprocessor-based products," which principal analyst Matthew Wilkins says are "obviously striking a chord with PC buyers."

While Apple managed to ship 2.2 million PCs globally during the quarter, its overall standing in worldwide market share didn't budge. The company is still ranked at no. 6 behind Toshiba, a position it has held since the third quarter of 2007. Its current market share hovers just under 3 percent.

Hewlett-Packard, by contrast, boasted a 19 percent market share for the quarter, followed by Dell with 15 percent. What's even more impressive is that HP, despite being the world's number one PC seller, still managed to increase its shipments by 25.5 percent year-over-year. But with a gloomy economic forecast and slower seasonal sales ahead, don't expect these kinds of numbers next quarter...from anyone.

See Also:

• Apple Market Share Gains Continue Through Final Days of '07
• Gartner Says Mac Market Share to Double in Three Years
• Apple Announces Record-Breaking Q4 Earnings
• Apple's Market Share Keeps Climbing
• Apple's Retail Slip Up Costing the Company Market Share?
• Apple's Mac and Safari Market Shares Surge

Continue reading "Apple Still the World's Fastest Growing PC Manufacturer " »

Struggling tech publisher Ziff-Davis has finally admitted defeat and filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy, which will allow the company to restructure its debt and prolong its financial agony. The move was not totally unexpected -- as recently as August 2007, the company missed a $390 million payment on its debt. Chief restructuring officer Mark Moyer has also discussed the possibility of bankruptcy with select employees, according to one insider. Moyer, the former CFO who was named chief restructuring officer in January, is rumored to be planning his departure in the spring.

"Mark is committed to seeing the restructuring through, and then he'll determine what his options are," said Andy Brimmer, a Ziff-Davis spokesman.

In a copy of the bankruptcy filing, which TheDeal.com obtained, Ziff Davis lists 211* domains (including ExtremeCyborg.com) among its assets. The filing also lists Ziff Davis' creditors, which includes Limelight Networks and DoubleClick.

*We goofed in an earlier version of this post. There are indeed 211 domains listed.

Photo: Flickr/Louder

See Also:

• Ziff Davis Media Not Paying Its Bills
• Breaking News: PC Magazine Reshuffles Management
• IDG Chief Pat McGovern: No More Magazine Launches

SAN DIEGO, California - Your credit card, the lock on your front door, your cell phone's voicemail, your hotel television, and your web browser are all not as secure as you might like to think, as Pablos Holman, a hacker clad in all black, gleefully demonstrated on stage Wednesday like an evil Las Vegas magician.

Holman used caller ID spoofing to break into the AT&T voicemail of the organizer of the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference being held this week in San Diego.

Using the speaker phone, Holman changed the outgoing message of the target, Brady Forrest, while he sat helpless in a back row.

Don't chuckle too much. The hack works for all many AT&T users, including anyone with an iPhone.

Holman continued on to show how Schlage locks -- the kind that is likely on your front door of your house -- can be quickly opened by banging a filed down key with a small mallet.

Likewise, Holman used a snippet of Javascript to create a link that forced CNNMoney.com to load a modified Onion story saying that the iTunes store would soon be selling Tim O'Reilly's home movies for $1.99 a piece.

Like any magician, Holman called for a volunteer from the audience. This one, a young man sporting a headband, also had an RFID-enabled credit card.

Holman waved a magic reader over the kid's pocket and up popped the kid's credit card number and expiration date on the projection screen (with some middle digits SX-ed out.)

Turns out that after months of trying to figure out how to break the encrypted information transferred by the card, Holman just bought a merchant card reader on Ebay for $8.

"We complain about this stuff and nothing happens," Holman said. "The whole reason hackers bother with this stuff is to keep you from having a false sense of security."

Holman, a professional inventor who used to work designing space ships for Blue Origin, says he's bored with security since there are so many holes. But hackers trying to figure out how to break something can use what they learn to go build cool stuff, he argues.

"I want hackers back in product development building cool shit that I can spend your credit card money on," Holman said.

Photo: Quinn Norton

While the Microsoft-Yahoo deal is still up in the air, we've heard from various analysts in recent few weeks that a key obstacle to the merger could be a democratic presidential administration.

Conventional wisdom is that a democratic administration would treat a transaction of this size with more scrutiny than a republican administration. (Interestingly, about 68 percent of Microsoft's political donations in the 2008 election cycle have gone toward democrats, according to OpenSecrets.org, while the remaining 32 percent went to republicans.) Although it's a reasonable hypothesis, it's misplaced, according to economists and business school professors.

"Data suggests there really is no difference between democrats and republicans in their zeal for antitrust enforcement," says Craig A. Depken II, an associate professor of economics at the Belk College of Business at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. "Historically, there has been a perception that democrats are more like 'populists' who are quicker to jump on anticompetitive behavior. It's pure political rhetoric. It actually requires a lot of data analysis. It's much easier for people to say, 'Oh, republicans are in the back pocket of big business.' But when you look at case filings, there aren't that many differences [between the two parties.]"

The more important factor, according to Depken, is the economic climate.

"Antitrust filings tend to go up when the economy is strong," Depken says. "When the economy isn't doing well, you see antitrust filings drop."

Depken argues that Ronald Reagan, who helped cultivate republicans' reputation as hands-off in the antitrust department, inherited a recession when he won the presidency and was therefore less likely to pursue antitrust cases.

"I would argue that economists are running the show most of the time anyway," says B. Espen Eckbo, a professor of finance at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. "Antitrust has evolved so there's less intervention overall -- even under Clinton."

Photo: Flickr/skippy13

It's not the governments who censor keywords that worries Ethan Zuckerman, whose job it is to help dissidents around the world.

He fears that governments will simply decide to go after the Web 2.0 tools that activists are using to publish.

Increasingly dissidents in the Middle East, China and places like Belarus are turning to server-based tools like Facebook, Twitter and LiveJournal -- the communication tools at hand -- to get their messages out, according to Zuckerman, who works for Global Voices, a group dedicated to spreading online conversation.

"If you build tools specifically for activists they won't use them, but if you build tools not for activists, they will use them," Zuckerman told a packed room of attendees at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego Tuesday.

That's because for most activists outside the United States, it's not a lifestyle choice or a profession.

Continue reading "Seeking Tighter Censorship, Repressive States Target Web 2.0 Apps" »

For the past two and half years, Google employees have bet on internal company projects -- a tool known as a prediction market -, providing plenty of data for the company to mine to figure out how information flows internally.

The result is surprisingly ironic for the internet giant.

Physical proximity trumps all other factors in determining how people bet.

Essentially, people who sit near each other tend to vote like each other. Location far outpaces other factors such as what projects people have worked on in the past, job title, what internal email lists they are on, what colleges they attended or who has worked on code in the past.

Continue reading "ETech: Google Prediction Market Datamining Shows Meatspace Matters" »

Billions of dollars in commerce have moved online, but the Girl Scouts of the USA still strongly discourages its scouts -- or their parents -- from selling cookies on the internet.

"We think that would rob the girls of the experience of learning how to count change, not to be afraid of people, how to deal with customers and from trying different advertising techniques," says Michelle Tompkins, a spokesperson for Girl Scouts of the USA.

Meanwhile, a number of web-savvy merchants have picked up the slack online during this cookie season. A quick search on eBay returns at least a hundred listings for Girl Scout cookies. Some sellers claim that they're selling on behalf of their kids. We contacted a couple who said they're reselling cookies at cost and donating the proceeds to a local troop. (We still suspect there's a profit motive there, though.)

In any event, eBay merchants are addressing a huge market: Tompkins says the Girl Scouts of the USA sell about 200 million boxes of Girl Scout cookies every year, generating about $700 million in revenue. And although resales are a violation of the organization's policy, the Girl Scouts has not contacted eBay or sellers about pulling down the listings, according to Tompkins.

Given that the Girl Scout cookie program is supposed to be an "entrepreneurial program" for girls, though, you could argue that a lesson in online commerce is just as valuable as old-fashioned sales skills. And another potentially valuable lesson here: Follow the customer. If eBay merchants are making money selling Girl Scout cookies online, it's because they've gone to where the customers are (and where Girl Scouts aren't allowed for safety reasons).

"We encourage the use of technology, but not online selling at this time ... Until we have some sort of safety guard to ensure the girls' security, we don't encourage any kind of internet sales," Tompkins says.

Still, Tompkins says some web-savvy girls are already using the internet for marketing purposes.

"Some girls collect e-mail addresses of past customers and they send out a newsletter to let them know when they're selling cookies ... As the girls get more tech savvy, so do we. We're going to be where the girls are."

Photo: Flickr/Foxicat

Los Angeles based Demand Media has acquired social media platform creator Pluck Inc, the companies announced today.

Dave Panos, founder and CEO of Pluck, seemed excited about the acquisition. "I think we really found a great partner. It's a great outcome for everyone here, and our customers seem to be pretty excited about it as well. So it's a good story all the way around," Panos said. "This is what you work for. You work your butt off for 4-5 years for a fun day like today."

Pluck, based in Austin, Texas, begin in 2003 as an RSS  plugin for the web browser, but evolved to become a social media platform with the ability to host news stories, blogs, videos, and comments. Clients include many large press outfits like Conde Nast, The Washington Post, and Gannett/USA Today. (Disclosure: Wired.com is owned by Conde Nast.)

Demand Media was founded in May, 2006, by Richard Rosenblatt, former CEO of Intermix, the company which incubated social network MySpace. Rosenblatt orchestrated the sale of MySpace to Fox Interactive Media, a division of News Corp. 

Pluck has raised $17 million since its launch in 2003. Austin Ventures and Mayfield Fund participated in a $10 million Series A while news outfit Reuters invested $7 million in Pluck's product in October of 2006.

The purchase price was not disclosed, but reports suggest that the deal was worth $50-75 million.

Among search geeks and online marketers, Matt Cutts is like an internet god. As head of the quality team at Google, his job is to keep unwanted spam from landing prominently in search results, which, in some ways, pits him against online marketers whose goal is to move their content up to the top of Google search results.

He's been with the company since 2000, during which time he became known as the "Porn Cookie Guy," because he offered his wife's cookies to anyone who found unwanted porn in their searches. He's enough of a corporate icon that he got his own cereal box on the Google campus and his obsessive fan base seems to grow all the time: Groupies can even make their own Matt Cutts paper doll.

Last week we solicited search-related questions from readers for a Q&A with Cutts. We met with him yesterday to chew the fat about the future of search, search-engine optimization and Google bombs. We received a lot of questions from readers, but we chose a select few based on which questions were most relevant to the widest audience.

WIRED NEWS: Does SEO (search-engine optimization) work?
MATT CUTTS: It does to some degree. Think of it this way: When you put a resume forward, you want it to be as clean as possible. If the resume is sloppy, you're not going to get interviewed for the job. SEO is sort of like tweaking your resume . . . It's helpful if you just think about which words people would use to search for your content. If you're writing something about Mount Everest, for example, people are probably going to look for 'How high is Mount Everest?' . . . If done responsibly, [SEO] can be a great thing.

WN: Where do you see search in two to five years?
MC: There will be a lot more people storing data in a cloud .  .  . My laptop, for example, has been shutting down randomly lately, so I don't trust it with data. I don't know what's going on there. Storing your data in a cloud will be a big trend in the future.

[Cloud computing refers to shared computing resources, so data is stored on a virtual platform, rather than on an individual hard drive.]

Personalization is also really interesting to me. So if you search for 'diamond,' [the search engine will know] if you're looking for jewelry or baseball.

WN: What about social search?
MC: Social search is interesting, but it would require so much work . . .  With personalization, the user to give up some information, but then [the search engine] just sits back, watches you and helps. That's pretty interesting.

WN: Will you ever roll out for-fee webmaster tools?
MC: I doubt it. I'm not going to preclude it, but the more information we give webmasters, the better it is for them, the better it is for Google.

WN: On video search, is there a bias toward YouTube videos?
MC: I've asked around about this issue and the people I've spoken with strongly deny it. We are actively trying to promote diversity and we take that as a high-order goal.

WN: If you were to start a web-based business tomorrow, what key things would you do?
MC: First, I would create great content. That's a fantastic way to get a head start. Then you need to promote it -- that can be done free using webmaster tools. Third, tweak snippets. [Snippets are brief descriptions of web pages that appear in certain search results.] Changing meta description tags can increase your traffic. Fourth, tweak your text. Look at existing search logs to see how people find you now. It's the easiest way to increase your conversions.

WN: What's going on with Google bombs -- are you still seeing them?
MC: They're relatively rare and don't really do much harm. They're more like pranks. Our main concern was that people might think [the link bombs] represent [Google's] opinions. I wouldn't claim that our fix is 100 percent perfect, but we don't see many.

Photo: Courtesy Google

Facebook has hired Google operations executive Sheryl Sandberg as its new COO.

Sandberg spent six years at Google where, as Vice President of Global Online Sales & Operations, she shepherded sales for AdWords and AdSense. Prior to Google, she served as Chief of Staff to Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers during the Clinton administration. Sandberg will join the social network on March 23, filling the void that former Facebook executive Owen Van Natta left when he departed Facebook last month.

This new appointment marks the first time that Facebook has named a female major executive.

Along with her sales and operations experience, Sandberg brings her deep Silicon Valley connections into the social network. She is married to former Yahoo Music executive David Goldberg, an advisor to iLike, a music service which was one of the breakout stars of Facebook's f8 platform launch. Sandberg's brother-in-law is Elevation Partners founder Marc Bodnick, whose partners include Roger MacNamee and U2 frontman Bono.

SAN DIEGO, Calif. -- Saul Griffith, the founder of the legendary geek innovation workshop known as Squid Labs, has crunched the global warming numbers and they are grim.

"In my grandfather's terms, my life today is 18 horsepower and it should be 3 horsepower," Griffith told conference goers Tuesday morning at O'Reilly's influential Emerging Technology conference in San Diego.

In order to cut carbon output to levels that will stabilize climate change at 2 degrees Celsius above the current global temperature, individuals need to slim their energy usage and industry needs to begin a crash course in harnessing solar, geothermal and wind energy, Griffith said.

"We are going to have to do calorie-counting on a mass scale," Griffith said, illustrating an energy usage equivalent of nutrition labels on food in the United States.

In perhaps his most powerful visualization, Griffith implored the audience to "think of your life in light bulbs."

A bottle of water? That adds 90 watts of power to your yearly usage, or the equivalent of what it takes to manufacture one light bulb.

A 12,000 watt per year lifestyle -- the average for Americans -- is the equivalent of 120 100 watt light bulbs running 24 hours per day for a year.

Griffith is now the president of Makani, a start-up green energy company spun-off from Squid Labs.

He calculated his energy usage, from his flights and driving to his share of the U.S. military's energy usage, and came up with 14,000 watts conservatively, and more likely 25,000 watts, per year. And that's for a man who bikes and takes a ferry to work, and lives in a small house in an urban area.

Griffith says he now has a 10 year plan for cutting his carbon usage down to something closer to 2,200 watts per year, requiring him to eat mostly vegetarian, drive to a surfing spot only twice a year, and flying to Australia to visit his family only every three years.

Griffith only touched briefly on why anyone would actually voluntarily limit their own activities for the abstract good of preventing London from going underwater in 100 years, when all of us will surely be dead.

"If you do what you want to do already, the goal will be reached," Griffith said, referring to eating less, spending more time with family, and living closer to friends.

Photo: Ryan Singel/Wired.com

Microsoft execs can't seem to stop themselves. Every chance they get, they keep talking up the Yahoo deal, as if they have to remind you that there's a bid on the table.

At a tech conference in Hanover, Germany, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said yesterday that the deal "makes sense with the price and structure we announced."

"There is a lot of merit for Microsoft and Yahoo, for Yahoo shareholders and for Microsoft shareholders, for advertisers and for consumers," he reportedly said.

Meanwhile, back in the U.S.A., Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell dished about the Yahoo deal yesterday at a Morgan Stanley conference, even though it was totally unsolicited and he didn't really have anything insightful to offer. When Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker asked him if there was anything he wanted to talk about in the last remaining minute, he brought up the bid.

"Well, no one asked me about Yahoo, which is interesting," he said, at the end of a Q&A. "Yeah. The small company that we're looking to acquire. There is -- there's no fundamental news. I mean, the -- you know, the company has not yet formally responded to our offer."

Bill Gates apparently also suffers the same Yahoo-related infliction. He said on a conference call a few weeks ago on a totally unrelated topic -- free software for students -- that the Yahoo offer was "fair". Then, he reiterated that sentiment again a few days later after talking to students at the University of Chicago.

Since Microsoft launched its unsolicited offer on Feb. 1, company execs have spoken about it at a couple investment conferences; they've sent out internal memos; Ballmer has given interviews to the press about it. In total, they've filed 13 425s with the SEC. (A 425 document is any sort of public communication -- such as an interview, conference call or even a webcast that pertains to a business transaction.)

Shareholders probably don't need to be reminded of the Yahoo offer. Since Microsoft launched its unsolicited bid, the stock has fallen 17 percent, indicating that this isn't really a deal they're getting behind.

Photo: Flickr/TaranRampersad