Google considers funding bid for Yahoo

GOOGLE is considering providing financing for an acquisition of Yahoo! Inc by another company or a group of bidders, according to a source.

The company may opt not to take part in an offer and has not engaged in serious discussions with potential partners, said the source.

Google, which is under regulatory scrutiny from governments around the world, may lend its financial support to preserve Yahoo as a rival and bolster competition in the Internet industry, according to Greg Sterling, an analyst at US-based Opus Research.

Sterling said: "If competition is diminished or marginalized, then all the arguments about Google being a monopoly ring more true."

Google, which has US$42.6 billion in cash and short-term investments, is considering helping to finance other bidders, rather than trying to acquire Yahoo outright, the source said.

The US Federal Trade Commission has begun a review of Google's business practices, including search and advertising. The European Union and the state of Texas have also begun investigations into the company's leadership in search and advertising markets.

Potential financing by Google for a bid for rival Yahoo has parallels with the US$150 million investment Microsoft made in competitor Apple in 1997 to help preserve competition in the computer market, Sterling said.

Nonetheless, regulators might scrutinize any Yahoo acquisition that involves Google. The US government threatened to challenge an earlier proposal by Google to place ads on Yahoo's site, causing Google to abandon the move in 2008.

A growing roster of private equity firms is considering whether to pursue Yahoo, which has a market value of US$20 billion. Microsoft is considering providing financing, according to sources.

A potential investment by Microsoft, a longtime Google rival, may also have prompted Google's interest in a financing deal involving Yahoo, Sterling said.

Alibaba, whose largest shareholder is Yahoo, has said it is "very interested" in facilitating the Chinese company buying back its 43 percent stake.

Private equity companies Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Blackstone are among firms considering an offer for Yahoo, sources said. Alibaba has discussed a plan with Silver Lake Partners and Russia's Digital Sky Technologies to make a joint bid, according to sources. Another group apparently interested in an offer includes Providence Equity Partners and former News Corporation executive Peter Chernin.

Google advertising customers are able to buy space on Yahoo sites through Google's Invite Media service, according to a source.

Quoted from Shanghaidaily

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Google Earth reveals ancient stories

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," science fiction author Arthur Clarke once suggested.

A "kite" structure seen from the air used in prehistory to trap game in the Arabian desert.

Say a magic carpet and a genie's lamp, the stuff of Arabian Nights, which made the Arab desert famous for fables and legends?

Well, how about Google Earth instead? Like a friendly genie, that modern technology has started answering archeologist's wishes with its worldwide catalog of satellite views of the Earth. A pair of studies in the Journal of Archaelogical Science this year suggest these views are revealing a vast and ancient story, one only starting to emerge from the fabled desert of Arabia.

"(W)e are on the brink of an explosion of knowledge," writes archeologist David Kennedy of University of Western Australia in Perth, in a report in the current edition of the journal. Aerial photography and satellite images from Syria to Yemen are, "revealing hundreds of thousands of collapsed structures, often barely (19 to 30 inches) in height and virtually invisible at ground level," he writes.

Most often seen in the vast lava-rock fields called "harat" and the 251,000-square mile Rub'al Khali desert of Saudi Arabia, the structures take their names from their appearance from the air— "wheel" homes, "pendant"-shaped cairns, "keyhole" tombs and "kites" animal-pen traps. They are, Kennedy says, "opening up for re-interpretation the hugely inhospitable interior of Arabia which is proving to be the unexpected location of extensive human activity 2,000 (or more) years ago."

Who were the "Old Men of the Desert", as the Bedouin called the builders of these structures in 1927, when first asked about them by a Royal Air Force flight lieutenant named Maitland. Maitland published a report in a journal Antiquity, noting "hill fortresses" and other structures in the desert ear of the Dead Sea spotted on the air mail route from Cairo to Damascus.

"(T)hey certainly have the appearance of being of great antiquity," he noted at the end of his report on "The 'Works of the Old Men' in Arabia."

They actually do date from the Roman era, judging from inscriptions, all the way back to perhaps 7,000 B.C. based on flint tools found at others, Kennedy says, by e-mail. Monumental prehistoric structures cover the world from South America to Stonehenge, but the "Works" represent a "huge undertaking by prehistoric man that created an immense archaeological landscape in one of the most arid parts of the planet," he notes.

The best-known structures are the "kites," made with a diamond shape. They are animal pens with their open mouths placed at low points between hills, where gazelles, antelopes and other prey were driven by hunters. "Mass kills" of Persian gazelles in these pens likely led to the loss of the species from the region, suggested an April Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciencesreport led by archeologist Guy Bar-Oz of Israel's University of Haifa, looking at a mass gazelle gravesite, a kite in modern day Syria dating back to around 4,000 B.C.

The other structures are more mysterious. "Wheels overlie Kites but never vice-versa, therefore Wheels are probably younger than Kites," Kennedy says. Some walls just seem to meander purposely and random "gates," more than 100 spotted so far, appear to have no purpose at all. "There is no complete agreement on two key questions: 'When were they built?' and 'What for?'" he says about the structures.

Figuring that out will take archeologists on the ground, Kennedy suggests in a look at cairns, wheels and other structures seen at just one site in Jordan published earlier this year in the Journal of Archeological Science. "Aerial imagery can take research so far but is not an end - merely a means to an end. What is needed is more intensive and extensive field research," he says.

For now though, satellite images will have to do for inspecting places like Yemen, and Saudi Arabia, difficult for foreign researchers to investigate. "The number of high-resolution 'windows' onto the landscape of Saudi Arabia is still limited; most imagery is too poor for our purposes. We need the high-resolution coverage to be considerably extended," he says. An alternative, Bing Maps, has higher quality images, but less of them, he says.

Arthur Clarke, who famously called for the development of communication satellites in 1945, likely would be delighted by this latest advance in space-based archeology. "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible," he wrote, after all, in the same essay where he propounded his law of magic technology.

Quoted from Usatoday

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Scientist: Satellite must have crashed into Asia

BERLIN (AP) — A defunct German research satellite crashed into the Earth somewhere in Southeast Asia on Sunday, U.S. scientist said — but no one is still quite sure where.

Undated artist rendering provided by EADS Astrium shows the scientific satellite ROSAT.
Andreas Schuetz, a spokesman for the German Aerospace Center, said Saturday Oct. 22, 2011
the best estimate is still that the ROSAT scientific research satellite
will impact sometime between late Saturday and Sunday 1200 GMT.
Photo: EADS Astrium / AP

Most parts of the minivan-sized ROSAT research satellite were expected to burn up as they hit the atmosphere at speeds up to 280 mph (450 kph), but up to 30 fragments weighing a total of 1.87 tons (1.7 metric tons) could have crashed, the German Aerospace Center said.

Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said the satellite appears to have gone down over Southeast Asia. He said two Chinese cities with millions of inhabitants each, Chongqing and Chengdu, had been in the satellite's projected path during its re-entry time.

"But if it had come down over a populated area there probably would be reports by now," the astrophysicist who tracks man-made space objects told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

Calculations based on data made available to scientists by the U.S. military indicate that satellite debris must have crashed somewhere east of Sri Lanka over the Indian Ocean, or over the Andaman Sea off the coast of Myanmar, or further inland in Myanmar or as far inland as China, he said.

The satellite entered the atmosphere between 0145 GMT to 0215 GMT Sunday (9:45 p.m. to 10:15 p.m. Saturday EDT) and would have taken 15 minutes or less to hit the ground, the German Aerospace Center said. Hours before the re-entry, the center said the satellite was not expected to land in Europe, Africa or Australia.

There were no immediate reports from Asian governments or space agencies about the fallen satellite.

The satellite used to circle the planet in about 90 minutes, and it may have traveled several thousand kilometers (miles) during its re-entry, rendering exact predictions of where it crashed difficult.

German space agency spokesman Andreas Schuetz said a falling satellite also can change its flight pattern or even its direction once it sinks to within 90 miles (150 kilometers) above the Earth.

Schuetz said the agency was waiting for data from scientific partners around the globe. He noted it took the U.S. space agency NASA several days to establish where one of its satellites had hit last month.

The 2.69-ton (2.4 metric ton) scientific ROSAT satellite was launched in Cape Canaveral, Florida, in 1990 and retired in 1999 after being used for research on black holes and neutron stars and performing the first all-sky survey of X-ray sources with an imaging telescope.

ROSAT's largest single fragment that could have hit is the telescope's heavy heat-resistant mirror.

"The impact would be similar to, say, an airliner having dropped an engine," said McDowell. "It would damage whatever it fell on, but it wouldn't have widespread consequences."

A dead NASA satellite fell into the southern Pacific Ocean last month, causing no damage but spreading debris over a 500-mile (800-kilometer) area.

Since 1991, space agencies have adopted new procedures to lessen space junk and having satellites falling back to Earth. NASA says it has no more large satellites that will fall back to Earth uncontrolled in the next 25 years.

Quoted from Seattlepi

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Wiggle considers float as cycling becomes the new golf

Owner Isis plans sale of online retailer Wiggle as cycling increases in popularity spurred on by the successes of riders Mark Cavendish and Bradley Wiggins

Cycling has risen in popularity fueling the growth of online retailer Wiggle,
which is considerings its options after hoisting an estimated £200m for-sale sign.
Photograph: Tetra Images / Alamy/Alamy

With a new world champion in Mark Cavendish and Tour de France contenders such as Bradley Wiggins, there's never been a more opportune time to back British cycling. But with a different prize in mind, the private equity group behind Wiggle, the cycling and triathlon gear website, is working out its race plan after hoisting an estimated £200m for-sale sign.

Its owner Isis Equity Partners is deliberating whether to quietly sell to another buyout firm or attempt the City equivalent of the Alpe d'Huez by pursuing a stock exchange listing. Its chief executive, Humphrey Cobbold, is insists an IPO is a "serious option".

Sales at Wiggle have more than quadrupled in the last five years to reach £86.8m in the year to 31 January, thanks to a growing obsession with cycling and triathlons among "mamils" – a phrase coined by analysts at Mintel as shorthand for "middle-aged man in Lycra". Profits surged 43% to £10.2m. In a bombed out retail sector, Wiggle is a welcome success story with growth of 56% last year helping it to attract buyout firms such as Fat Face owner Bridgepoint and Warburg Pincus, which owns Poundland, to the auction.

"Cycling is the new golf," says Cobbold. "Middle-aged men and women have decided that they are better off spending three or four hours on their bike than hitting a little white ball around a fairway." Even without the buzz generated by high-profile wins such as Mark Cavendish's recent triumph in the world championships road race, the sport has a growing amateur fan base with sportives – cycling competitions – popular fixtures. Britons are also queuing up to compete in triathlons, with last month's event in London, which attracted 13,000 entrants, the world's largest.

Alexander Grous, an academic at the London School of Economics, has calculated that cycling provided a near £3bn boost, or "gross cycling product" as he puts it, to the UK economy in 2010 based on manufacturing as well as related retail sales and jobs.

His study found 13m people are now cyclists, with 3.7m bikes sold last year, a 28% increase on 2009 as high petrol prices and crammed trains and buses encouraged commuters to switch to two wheels. Social and economic factors have resulted in a "step-change" in the UK's cycling scene, says Grous adding: "The growth in involvement we've witnessed in recent years feels like a sustainable trend for the first time."

Wiggle started life as Butlers Cycles, an independent bike shop in Portsmouth that had been trading since 1920. Its entrepreneurial founders Mitch Dall and Harvey Jones branched out into selling accessories online, launching the website in 1999. The venture took off and in 2006 Isis acquired a stake for £12m, valuing the business at nearly £30m.

In short order the internet has grown to account for 8% of UK retail sales with "pure play" retailers escaping some of the pain experienced by traditional store groups. Online penetration is even higher for cycling goods with demand for puncture repair kits, power shakes and Lycra unitards a £1.4bn market.

Wiggle doesn't compete with the cut-throat pricing of the supermarkets, which import bikes from China, selling them for less than £100. It concentrates on serious riders willing to spend more than £600 on their wheels and its range includes top-end bikes by US manufacturer Felt that cost as much as £7,500. "It is a brand-led marketplace – guys love gear," says Cobbold.

Febrile financial markets are making investors increasingly risk averse with companies big and small getting their wings clipped. Fellow internet retailer The Hut Group has delayed its listing until next year while daily deals website Groupon last week scaled down its fundraising plans. "Retail flotations are viewed suspiciously at the moment," says Panmure analyst Philip Dorgan who points to the experience of Ocado which failed to get big institutional investors and fashion website Asos, the former stock market darling which has seen its shares tumble 40% in the last three months. "It might not be a good time to float a pure play online retailer."

If Wiggle does float, the company's management and advisors are in for a gruelling ride. Cobbold adds: "I'm absolutely committed to leading Wiggle into its next phase whether it is a listed or private company." He also points out neither road is easy: "Private equity [firms] are not renowned for being pushovers."

Quoted from Guardian

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