Industry News Desk

Citrix Buys German Software Product
Citrix has bought sepago GmbH’s sepagoProfile software so user profiles in XenDesktop, XenApp and Provisioning Server are integrated. Terms were not disclosed but as part of the deal the Cologne-based sepago will continue developing the product for virtualizing application provisioning for the next year and a half. Sepago specializes in application provisioning on large computer networks.

Yahoo Watch
“We are not rebidding for the company. We reserve the right to do so. That’s not on the docket.” – Steve Ballmer, this past Tuesday at the D6 conference in California. The current talks, he said, are aimed at a “partnership.” That was after last Friday when Ballmer in Moscow called Yahoo non-strategic in and of itself. Reuters said he said, “Yahoo was never the strategy we were pursuing, it was a way to accelerate our online advertising business. We will spend money on some acquisitions. You can do a whole lot of things with $50 billion.” Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang also at D6 said, “Microsoft is no longer interested in buying the company” and that Yahoo is trying to understand the proposed alternatives.

More Yahoo Watch
Yahoo, whose CEO contends it’s not “under siege” while pleading for more time to turn it around, is telling shareholders to ignore any proxy cards sent to them by activist stockholder Carl Icahn, hoping to derail any attempt to unseat the Yahoo board. Meanwhile, industry analyst Rob Enderle thinks that Edward Kozel, the ex-Cisco CTO who resigned from the Yahoo board last week, won’t be the only Yahoo board member to jump ship before this is over. He thinks Kozel and any who follow him are getting out of Icahn’s line of fire lest their reputations suffer. “I think he sees the bomb coming,” Enderle said, “and is wisely deciding to not be there when it hits.” Icahn, by the way, has yet to file his preliminary proxy.

Still More Yahoo Watch
“I like Google.” – Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang when asked about a possible outsourcing deal with his rival.

Android Near Complete
Google demonstrated an almost complete Android operating system for smartphones at the company’s I/O developer conference in San Francisco Wednesday. Like Apple’s iPhone, the Android demo used a touchscreen that replaces a password with a shape, zooms in on web content, bookmarks favorite web sites, plays Pac Man and includes a YouTube button.

Belgian Papers Seek Damages from Google
The Belgian newspapers that objected last year to Google News reproducing their headlines and running extracts of their stories while archiving the complete stories without permission and got a Belgian court to back them up are demanding somewhere between $51.7 million and $77.5 million in damages. And they want $6.3 million on account ahead of a September court appearance. The damages were calculated by a Belgian professor and the papers said they are perfectly happy to submit the figures to a panel of Belgian experts if Google objected. Google has appealed the original verdict.

IBM Joins Barcelona Parade
With Dell and HP out ahead of it with Barcelona machines, this week it was IBM’s turn to throw its support to the AMD quad-core by way of three updated System x servers. A new System x3755 will scale from the standard two sockets to three- and four-socket configurations.

Dell’s Got a ‘Hybrid’ PC
Dell is promising a desktop that’s 80% smaller and 71% more energy efficient than a traditional PC. Michael Dell referred to it as a “hybrid PC.”

Sun Claims Virtual Success
Sun says that the cross-platform VirtualBox desktop virtualization widgetry that it bought to give away especially to developers has hit five million downloads in 18 months. It claims its transforming software development, untethering programmers from big testing labs.

Google Up
ComScore says the search giant’s paid clicks were up 20% year-over-year in the US in April. The tabulator caused a stir – and a drop in the stock – a few weeks ago when it said Google’s paid clicks in the US only grew 1.8% when overall they proved to be up 20%. Yahoo dropped 4.4% in April and Microsoft dropped 9%.

Now That’s Penetration
There were 3.3 billion cell phone users in the world at the end of last year according to the International Telecommunications Union. That’s 49% of the world’s population. The global annual growth rate was 22%.