It's just hours till the start of what promises to be the biggest Consumer Electronics Show in recent memory. Sure, Silicon Valley is known the world over as the world's high tech capitol, but beginning Sunday night, with Bill Gates' keynote, Las Vegas will hold that distinction; at least for a week.
Stocks had one of their worst opening days ever after getting slammed by $100 oil and bad news for manufacturing and the credit industry.
This past year was a busy one for tech, including Apple's iPhone release; Halo 3; Xbox vs. Wii vs. PlayStation; HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray: Google's new mobile strategy; Intel's surge at AMD's expense; all things wireless; Oracle and Microsoft's blockbuster earnings; Yahoo's CEO shakeup; VMWare's IPO; the ongoing shake-up at Dell; and of course my favorite: Star Wars celebrating its 30th anniversary.
Microsoft inked a 5-year online ad deal with Viacom, better positioning the software colossus against rivals Google and Yahoo. Philippe Dauman, chief executive at Viacom, and Kevin Johnson, president of the platforms/services division at Microsoft, discussed the strengths of the partnership in an interview with CNBC.
I hope you had a chance to read my 8 for '08 blog predictions. Here now is what I've done for the TV side of CNBC, in using the ole 'crystal ball. A couple of them you'll find similar, but there are plenty that are different. Enjoy!
We last saw Tim Koogle, in a very public way, on his way out the door as Yahoo's CEO, just as the company was suffering some internal strife and a kind of internal innovation slowdown. The company was mulling layoffs, had issued a Wall Street warning and Koogle tells me he had reached the decision, on his own, to leave the company he had helped build from scratch.
I was talking to one of our assistant managing editors today and asked him a question: how much is Oprah worth? His response? "I don't keep that data top of mind; I'll have to Google it." A few clicks of the keys and there it was. It's almost as if we've off-loaded a bunch of material we used to keep in our heads, and now we store it on the web, using Google as a way to keep all that data handy.
As part of CNBC's Outlook '08 coverage, here are my eight predictions in technology for 2008. At the end of next year, we'll look back on how well I did: just don't hold my feet to the fire too closely!! Before going forward, here's a quick look back. Tech set the tone for 2007 and became a safe-haven of sorts for so many investors fleeing the financial meltdown on Wall Street and Main Street.
Yahoo Japan and U.S. rival eBay said on Tuesday they would link up their auction sites to make cross-border bidding easier.
Yahoo! better break out the hammers and nails. There's a lot of fence-mending the company needs to do. The day after the so-called Cyber Monday where online merchants usher in their own holiday shopping seasons, thousands of them are trying to get answers from Yahoo! about a payment system outage that left their online cash registers closed.