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Some of the biggest news today happens to be another buyout. It looks like Microsoft and Skype are entering into an agreement for Microsoft to acquire Skype. The price tag looks like $8.5 billion in cash which is led by an investor group Silver lake. This will give Microsoft the ability to get more devices like the Xbox, Kinect, the widows phone and many other windows devices the edge giving Skype users the ability to connect with Lync, Outlook, Xbox Live and many more. Microsoft will also be investing support into non-microsoft platforms as well.

“Microsoft and Skype share the vision of bringing software innovation and products to our customers,” said Tony Bates. “Together, we will be able to accelerate Skype’s plans to extend our global community and introduce new ways for everyone to communicate and collaborate,” Bates said.

LinkedIn Corp offered 7.84 million shares in its initial public offering, which could be valued at over 3 billion at the higher end of the price offering range. The professional social networking site has over 100 million members worldwide the price of the IPO is between $32 and $35 per share. This can be seen as a big deal as LinkedIn is the first social networking companies to go public. Even ahead of Facebook. LinkedIn is offering 4.8 million shares and the rest by certain of its stockholders. The company expects to receive net proceeds of about $146.6 million from the shares it is offering in the IPO, based on an assumed offering price of $33.50 a share.

Microsoft’s popular free antivirus program Security Essentials has put in a mediocre showing in the latest quarterly tests from German test outfit AV-Test.org, finishing second to the bottom out of 22 products.
In Q1 2011 Security Essentials 2.0 (MSE) performed well at the least demanding test, that of spotting malware drawn from the industry-agreed Wildlist selection, scoring 100 percent. It also put in a good performance against a large group of recent malware samples selected by AV-Test itself, with a creditable score of 97 percent detection.
The product’s performance deteriorated sharply when pitted against 107 recent zero-day malware web and email malware attacks, described by AV-Test as ‘real-world’ testing’, spotting only half. The product’s performance in ‘dynamic detection testing’ – noticing malware on or post-execution – was also modest at only 45 percent.
The top-scoring product in the tests was BitDefender’s Internet Security Suite 2011, with a maximum weighted score of 6.0 across all tests, ahead of BullGuard Internet Security 10, F-Secure Internet Security 2011, and Kaspersky Internet Security 2011, all on 5.5. MSE scored 2.5, ahead of only one product, CA Internet Security Suite 2011.

Back in 2005 Google launched this nifty program called Google Earth. Back then you would need a computer to view a program like this but now not anymore Android users received Google Earth for Android. With the newest release of tablets based on Android 3.0 it seems Google really wanted to take advantage of the power that these tablets would contain.

The update to Google Earth for Android makes Earth look better than ever on your tablet. We’ve added support for fully textured 3D buildings, so your tour through the streets of Manhattan will look more realistic than ever. There’s also a new action bar up top, enabling easier access to search, the option to “fly to your location” and layers such as Places, Panoramio photos, Wikipedia and 3D buildings.

Cnet’s Erica Ogg is sighting that there will be plans of another cyberattack against Sony. They found this information in the Relay Chat channel used by the hackers told them that there will be a third major attack on Sony will be done to Sony’s website. They state the people involved state they are going to make public some or all of the information they are able to copy from the servers of Sony. This could include customer names, credit card numbers and addresses, according to the Cnet sources.
Several weeks ago the hacker group known as Anonymous targeted several Sony Web sites, including Sony.com and SonyStyle.com, with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in retaliation for what its members saw as Sony’s unfair legal action against hacker George Hotz. Two weeks ago Sony’s PlayStation Network, along with its Qriocity service and Sony Online, were the target of an attack that exposed the personal information of more than 100 million Sony customers. Sony was forced to shut down PSN, Qriocity, and Sony Online, and is currently working to bring them back online after rebuilding the security of its servers.

If Cnet’s sources are correct this will be a major blow to Sony and will start bring more lawsuits or even a class action lawsuit to the forefront for not being able to protect people’s information.

If you ever owned an iPhone you know when a new update hits the iOS you needed to go to iTunes and plug in the device and select the update. This would give you all the new updates for the iOS ect, well it looks like Apple is working with Verizon to change all of that. Starting this fall Apple will be giving over the air updates to their iPhones.

Sources say the new feature will debut in iOS 5, meaning iOS 5 will not come over-the-air but following point updates to it will. Just like tethering in iOS 3, Apple has the technology but cannot just unleash it everywhere. Apple and Verizon Wireless are said to have been in talks over these wireless software updates since early this year. Sources could not comment on whether or not Apple is negotiating similar deals with AT&T or international iPhone carriers.

The true geek in me needed to share this. Engadget received one of the new iMacs and shared their story but what is truly epic about this is they decided it would be cool to place 2 30 in monitors on the iMac to make a 3 monitor display as seen above. Wicked cool right? So here are some other tidbits of info on these new iMacs: those who’d rather swipe than drag can now choose to order theirs with a Magic Trackpad instead of a Magic Mouse, though we’re sure Apple would surely be happy to sell you both. Additionally, the 21.5-inch model can now be configured with a 256GB SSD, just like its big bro. The bigger news, of course, is what’s on the inside, with updated Radeon HD graphics featuring GDDR5 memory and Sandy Bridge processors all-round. Oh and did I mention two thunderbolt ports. Thank you Engadget for sharing this information with us!

Twitter has acquired TweetDeck, sources close to the deal say the transaction should be announced within the next few days. The price tag is around $40-$50 Million and this purchase price includes both cash and stock of Twitter.

In February we reported that an acquisition of TweetDeck by Bill Gross’ UberMedia was all but done, in the $25 – $30 million range. And that deal was in fact all but done. But Twitter quickly provided an unsolicited counter offer, and TweetDeck was in play again.

This move is big for Twitter no doubt and will keep the Twitter family growing. This deal is defensive for Twitter, say all the sources we’ve spoken with over the last couple of months. They simply couldn’t allow UberMedia to have so much market share in this space. The company has acquired UberTwitter, EchoFon and a number of other Twitter-related startups. Adding TweetDeck to the UberMedia stable of products would give them too much leverage over Twitter, say our sources.

It was a long time coming and this day and age how could the death of a major figure somehow not be linked to technology. When most people turned to breaking news they would turn on CNN and catch what was happening, well twitter had many moments of breaking news. It is said that Twitter was the first place to report that President Obama would be addressing the nation and this happened at 9:45 and then at 10:25 Keith Urbahn, the former chief of staff for Bush’s Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, broke the news and quoted from twitter: “So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden. Hot damn.”

The rest of the media didn’t officially confirm it until 20 minutes later and President Obama didn’t speak until 11:35. Then came the rumor to fact and then interesting observations, such as that Hitler was actually confirmed dead exactly 66 years before.

It seems that Twitter is a good way to get information and also talk with other people about the events that are happening; maybe twitter isn’t as useless after all. Oh and one more thing to add to this…. We got em!

George Hotz, aka Geohot is one potential suspect in the PSN security breach but he is denying the attack. Assuming he’s telling the truth (“I’m not crazy, and would prefer to not have the FBI knocking on my door,” he said), that leaves plenty of other suspects for Sony to consider, like the patchwork group of hackers calling themselves “Anonymous,” who have been known to cause distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Hotz does talk about the fact that Sony did this on themselves by basically stepping over the line and making enemies with hackers: The fault lies with the executives who declared a war on hackers, laughed at the idea of people penetrating the fortress that once was Sony, whined incessantly about piracy, and kept hiring more lawyers when they really needed to hire good security experts. Alienating the hacker community is not a good idea.” He continues on: : “Running homebrew and exploring security on your devices is cool, hacking into someone else’s server and stealing databases of user info is not cool,” he said. “You make the hacking community look bad, even if it is aimed at douches like Sony.” “Sony execs probably haughtily chuckled at the idea of threat modeling. Traditionally the trust boundary for a web service exists between the server and the client,” he said. “But Sony believes they own the client too, so if they just put a trust boundary between the consumer and the client (can’t trust those pesky consumers), everything is good. Since everyone knows the PS3 is unhackable, why waste money adding pointless security between the client and the server? This arrogance undermines a basic security principle, never trust the client.”