Microsoft and Yahoo are close to a long-discussed search and online advertising deal, which could be announced in the next week, according to another source familiar with the matter who is not associated with Icahn. The news was first reported by the AllThingsDigital blog, which said a deal would involve Microsoft paying Yahoo several billion dollars upfront to take over its search advertising business and guarantee certain payments back to Yahoo. The two companies have talked about cooperating for months, after Microsoft’s bid to buy Yahoo was rebuffed last year and Yahoo’s attempt to seal a search advertising deal with Google Inc fell apart under regulatory scrutiny. Yahoo Chief Executive Carol Bartz said in May that any deal to spin off or combine its search assets will require a partner with “boatloads of money.” She said at the time that Yahoo was talking “a little bit” with Microsoft, but gave no details. Bartz is currently out of the office for two weeks, following knee replacement surgery, according to an email that she sent to her employees earlier this month. Icahn, whose firm had a 5.4 percent stake in Yahoo as of March 31, said he remains a “strong supporter” of Bartz, who took the reins in January from Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang. Bartz has made a number of changes since joining Yahoo, including shutting down underperforming websites and laying off 5 percent of the Sunnyvale, California company’s staff. But many investors continue to see a deal with Microsoft as Yahoo’s best option, saying it will cut costs and create an online entity big enough to better compete with Google, the top search company in the United States.

The latest discussions involve a partnership in which Microsoft would handle search capabilities for Yahoo, while Yahoo could potentially handle online advertising for the two online sites. According to Kara Swisher, co-executive editor of AllThingsDigital, a group of high-powered Microsoft online executives flew to Silicon Valley on Thursday to iron out remaining issues related to technology deployment. They included Senior Vice President of Online Audience Business Group Yusuf Mehdi, search head Satya Nadella, top digital executive Qi Lu. Representatives for Microsoft and Yahoo declined to comment. Yahoo is scheduled to report quarterly results next Tuesday, and Microsoft on Thursday. Microsoft withdrew its $47.5 billion offer to buy Yahoo in May 2008 after Yahoo’s board said the price was too low. The software giant then offered to buy Yahoo’s search advertising assets for $1 billion upfront, and guarantee $2.3 billion in annual revenue for five years, in a proposal backed by Icahn. Google is the dominant player in the search market, with a 65 percent market share in June, according to comScore. Yahoo was second with 19.6 percent, while Microsoft was third with 8.4 percent. While Microsoft’s share remains small, its new search engine Bing has won positive early reviews.

The stakes are especially high this summer season when big budget movies like “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” which opened on Wednesday, play to a core audience of young, plugged-in moviegoers. Box office watchers say Twitter, a micro-blogging service that allows anyone to post on-the-fly wisecracks for all the world to see, is the latest weapon in an arsenal of cell phones and computers that audiences use to critique films quickly, often when they are still sitting in theaters. Such word-of-mouth publicity from fan to fan can boost, or bomb, ticket sales. “Has everything speeded up? The answer is yes,” said Adam Fogelson, Universal’s president of marketing and distribution. “Depending on how big your opening day audience is, word-of-mouth starts playing a factor immediately,” he said. Film marketers look at weekly declines in ticket sales to judge fan buzz. In recent years those “drops” have widened significantly as communication has speeded up thanks to the Internet and more recently social networking services like Twitter and Facebook. This summer, which is the most lucrative movie season and can make up as much as 40 percent of annual box office, ticket revenues for new films have dropped 51 percent, on average, from week No. 1 to week No. 2, a figure matched only in 2007, according to tracking firm Box Office Mojo. “If people don’t like the movie now on Friday it can die by Saturday,” said Paul Dergarabedian, president of tracking firm Hollywood.com Box Office.

Last Friday, actor Sacha Baron Cohen’s gay-themed comedy “Bruno,” which was distributed by Universal Pictures, made an impressive one-day debut of $14.4 million at U.S. and Canadian box offices, but the next day it suffered a large single-day drop, falling 39 percent to $8.8 million. Media reports speculated that “Bruno” suffered from the “Twitter effect,” meaning audiences reacted quickly online to raunchy scenes of sex and nudity, scaring people away. Soon after the movie’s opening, Twitter was awash with comments such as this from user Cathy Zhang: “Some scenes from Bruno I’ll never erase from my mind.” On the flip side, many Twitter commentators raved about “Bruno.” Universal’s Fogelson said even Twitter comments that seem critical can be good publicity because they show people are passionate about the movie and can spark discussion that increases attendance. He attributed “Bruno’s” lopsided opening day not to negative fan buzz, but to an unusually large crowd of Cohen’s fans rushing to see the film on its first day. Hollywood has a long history of both embracing and spurning new technology. In the case of Twitter, it is giving an early embrace. Sony Pictures, for instance, has been notably aggressive, creating Twitter pages for upcoming movies “District 9,” “Julie & Julia” and “The Ugly Truth.” Using Twitter, actor Ashton Kutcher has raised his profile and that of his production company among the most tech-savvy, and he is not alone. Filmmakers and actors often “tweet” from the set with the blessing of publicists looking to create interest in a film. “As much as it seems chaotic, it’s not. It’s just extremely quick and real-time,” said online marketing consultant Gordon Paddison.

“The company will invest Rs.1,000 crore to expand its cell sites to 2,400 by 2010 and presence to 1,200 towns in the state. By 2011 the number of cell sites will be 4,000 and the presence will be in 3,300 towns,” Himanshu Kapania, director (operations) of Idea, told reporters while launching the company’s services here Thursday.

Idea, which launched services in Tamil Nadu last month, now has has 1,700 cell sites in 600 towns in the state and has enrolled over 100,000 subscribers so far.

Citing Idea’s successful penetration into the telecom market in the state, Kapania said: “It only shows that subscribers are not satisfied with the existing service providers. The call drop numbers are huge. We hope to garner subscribers with our service quality.”

Idea will also set up a 2,086-km optical fibre network.

He added that 12 million of its total 43 million subscribers are in Karnataka, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh.

In Tamil Nadu the company will open 60 outlets to roll out its services.

Idea will will invest around Rs.7,500 crore this year to expand its services into new areas, Kapania added.

The original blue-and-silver Walkman was marketed in 1979 as the Walkman in Japan, the Soundabout in many other countries including the US, Freestyle in Sweden and the Stowaway in the UK.

Until 1999, every five years on July 1st Sony would come out with a new cassette model with new features and technology. In 1984 the Discman was launched and for years the Walkman and the Discman ruled the market till hard drive-based and flash-based digital audio players made an appearance.

In 2003 Sony’s NW-MS70D portable player got overshadowed by the iPod. It had only 256 MB of space and cost as much as a 15 GB iPod. Sony soon churned out hard drive and flash based MP3 players and finally after losing a major chunk of the market share to other companies tried to revive the Walkman brand through music-centric mobile phones marketed under the Sony Ericsson brand.

The device was built in 1978 by audio division engineer Nobutoshi Kihara for Sony co-chairman Morita, who wanted to be able to listen to operas during his frequent transpacific plane trips.

Such systems allow elderly or handicapped people to interact with the world through signals from their brains, without having to give voice commands.

BTCC’s new system fuses RIKEN’s blind signal separation and space-time-frequency filtering technology to allow brain-wave analysis in as little as 125 ms, as compared to several seconds required by conventional methods. Brain-wave analysis results are displayed on a panel so quickly that drivers do not sense any delay. The system has the capacity to adjust itself to the characteristics of each individual driver, and thereby is able to improve the efficiency with which it senses the driver’s commands. Thus the driver is able to get the system to learn his/her commands (forward/right/left) quickly and efficiently. The new system has succeeded in having drivers correctly give commands to their wheelchairs. An accuracy rate of 95% was achieved, one of the highest in the world.

Plans are underway to utilize this technology in a wide range of applications centered on medicine and nursing care management. R&D under consideration includes increasing the number of commands given and developing more efficient dry electrodes. So far the research has centered on brain waves related to imaginary hand and foot control. However, through further measurement and analysis it is anticipated that this system may be applied to other types of brain waves generated by various mental states and emotions.

Executives, who attended last week’s Cannes Lions 2009 ad festival, told Reuters that emerging economies were also promising though the lack of a global mobile phone standard could be a brake to speedy development.

As more consumers embrace new technologies and devices such as smart phones, personified by Apple’s iPhone, mobile advertising is seen growing at an annual average of 45 percent to reach $28.8 billion within 5 years from a current $3.1 billion, according to Ineum Consulting. “We have launched many mobile campaigns for the first time in the last three months. New people are coming in every week,” said David Kenny, Managing Partner at VivaKi, the digital arm of French advertising group Publicis. Social networks such as Facebook, which were becoming “increasingly mobile”, and applications for the iPhone would be key drivers, he said.

David Jones, global chief executive of Havas Worldwide and Euro RSCG Worldwide, said that advertisers needed to be more creative to fully benefit from opportunities offered by mobiles “If you are interrupted every two minutes by advertising, not many people want that. The industry needs to work out smart and clever ways to engage people on mobiles,” he said. Scott Howe, corporate vice president of the advertiser and publisher solutions group at Microsoft, predicted that mobile phone advertising will account for 5-10 percent of global media ad spending within five years. Mobile advertising was likely to attract interest from a niche of advertisers, such as small “mom and pop” local retailers which did not routinely embrace the mainstream online advertising, he said. These advertisers could shift their ad budgets away from local newspapers to mobiles for local highly-targeted campaigns. Emerging markets such as Latin America or Africa where “people probably have a mobile device before they have a wired PC,” looked promising, he added.

As advertising campaigns become increasingly global, the lack of compatibility between 3G phone networks in Europe and in Asia could however be a hurdle. “We have to have a common system and the technology has to have enough bandwidth for delivering the message,” said Martin Sorrell, the chief executive of WPP, the world’s largest advertising group by revenue. The LTE or Long Term Evolution standard, if it is widely adopted for new 4G high-speed mobile technology, could be a solution. But 4G is not expected to hit the mainstream before the middle of the next decade.

Microsoft said the new Zune, its answer to Apple Inc’s popular iPod digital music player, will also come with an Internet browser and a built-in HD radio receiver that offers higher-quality sound than traditional radio. It did not give a price or a specific date except to say it was due in the fall. The company added new features to Zune’s music service last year, enabling users to download music wirelessly and buy songs they hear on the device’s built-in FM radio.

As people search out advice online for everyday, personal decisions, the standard list of links served up by Google is not seen as intimate or trustworthy, Google Group Product Manager Ken Tokusei said Monday. For decisions such as choosing a restaurant or a day care provider, social networking sites or known review sites have an advantage, he said.

Such sites offer information from friends or acquaintances, and Tokusei said users tend to trust that information more. This puts Google’s results at a disadvantage.

“We haven’t gotten to the point where results are seen as if they come from someone you know,” he said.

The search giant has begun to offer tools for users to rate results and delete unrelated links, but it still has work to do, he said.

As Internet users gain savvy and experience, they also expect better-honed answers to queries. Sites such as WolframAlpha, launched earlier this month, comb the Internet for data, and analyze it to provide specific answers to queries, rather than a list of sites.

Google Inc. does something similar for some searches, providing price quotes for “Sony stock” or an answer for “Tunisia capital.” But it also provides the familiar list of sites to dig further, a strategy it is unlikely to change.

“It’s a matter of determining what kind of information the user is looking for. But we will always serve some links to pages with our results,” said Tokusei.

He spoke to reporters at Google’s Japanese headquarters in Tokyo, where he gave an overview of the company’s basic search tools.

Google has developed a host of expanding tools and services, from a mobile operating system to an online word processor, but it devotes 70 percent of its employees and resources to search.

The company still faces fresh competition from its traditional rivals, which are regrouping in an attempt to take back market share.

Microsoft has failed to make much headway in repeated Internet ventures. But the deep-pocketed company, which has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into improving its search engine, continues to develop a new search technology, part of which is called “Kumo” internally.

Yahoo, which has seen its share of total online searches conducted plummet to Google, is tweaking its search results, cutting out some links and emphasizing images and video.

Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer has said he is still interested in buying part of Yahoo after a proposed deal was turned down last year.

Researchers uploaded photos on 16 popular websites – including Facebook, Yahoo’s Flickr and Google’s Picasa – noting the web addresses where the images were stored and then deleted them.

The team said  30 days later, it was able to find them on seven sites, including Facebook, using the direct addresses even after the photos appeared to have gone, BBC reported Thursday.

Facebook, however, says deleted photos are removed from its servers “immediately”.

Joseph Bonneau, one of the PhD students who carried out the study, said, “This demonstrates how social networking sites often take a lazy approach to user privacy, doing what’s simpler rather than what is correct.

“It’s imperative to view privacy as a design constraint, not a legal add-on.”

The Cambridge University researchers said sites such as Flickr, Picasa did better and Microsoft’s Windows Live Spaces removed the photos instantly.

But a Facebook spokesman defended the company’s approach saying: “When a user deletes a photograph from Facebook, it is removed from our servers immediately.

“However, URLs to photographs may continue to exist on the Content Delivery Network after users delete them from Facebook, until they are overwritten. Overwriting usually happens after a short period of time.”

Yahoo has had conversations with companies about partnerships and “more interesting” possibilities, said Balogh, who is executive vice president of products at Yahoo. “I can guarantee you there will be some acquisitions, and we will do some stuff in house,” said Balogh, speaking by videolink to the Reuters Global Technology Summit in New York. Yahoo will introduce new products this fall that will make its network of websites easier to use and showcase the company’s strategy to grow again, he said.

The company is striving to revive its fortunes as sales decline because of the recession and competition from other Internet heavyweights, including Google Inc. In January, Carol Bartz took the reins as Yahoo CEO, succeeding co-founder Jerry Yang.