Tech News 5/18/2007

Lots of interesting technology news concerning Microsoft, Google, Torrents, Youtube and more.

The Pirate Bay to Launch YouTube Competitor The Pirate Bay is preparing to launch a Youtube competitor, they have confirmed it themselves, ?YES - we?re going to do a video streaming site. It?s true. It?s in the works being done right now and as usual we put a bit of Pirate Bay mentality behind every project we do.? Sounds like a version of Youtube where the copyrighted videos don’t come down, hehe.

Google Apps Partner Edition Today, we’re excited to take another step in that direction by releasing a version of Google Apps specifically designed for ISPs, portals, and other service providers, whether you have a few thousand subscribers or over a million. This new version, which we’re calling the Partner Edition, makes it easy for large and small service providers to offer your subscribers the latest versions of powerful tools, like Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs & Spreadsheets, without having to worry about hosting, updating, or maintaining any of the services yourself. Sounds interesting.

Microsoft Launches Popfly: Mashup App Creator Built On Silverlight A mashup and widget creator using Microsoft’s new Silverlight. Mary Jo Foley calls it Microsoft Popfly: Yahoo Pipes for the rest of us, an app for the people who don’t want to program, just create.

Now that Feedburner Story?. Is Google going to buy Feedburner? Some say yes and the Doubleclick deal is holding it up, if they do, it would give them a foothold in the RSS ad’s market. Sure glad I’m not running any ads in my feed….

Microsoft Gets Its Ad Network Microsoft announced the purchase of aQuantive, a 10-year-old, publicly traded digital marketing company in an all cash deal worth approximately $6 billion — the biggest acquisition in Microsoft history. That is kind of hard to believe, as long as Microsoft has been around, but they do tend to buy the smaller companies I guess. Om Malik says “Microsoft?s willingness to pay big dollars and bid aggressively for aQuantive ($66 a share versus mid-$30s trading price) shows that the Barons of Redmond truly believe that advertising will play a big role in its future. How that eventually plays out - remains to be seen.” Michael Arrington has posted lots of info from the Media Call here, such as this question from Bear Stearns: does this affect MS?s opinion on Google/doubleclick transaction. MS: no, not at all. Says this will promote competition and Google/doubleclick will hurt competition. Microsoft is in none of the businesses that aQuantive is in, whereas Google was already in direct competition with doubleclick and will give Google 80% market share in those markets.

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