Microsoft is currently evaluating its bid to buy Yahoo after saying that Yahoo may have lost value, according to sources telling Reuters.

The news of the re-evaluation saw Yahoo’s stock down by more than 5 percent after extended trade on NASDAQ. The source told Reuters that it has lost value after losing valuable key personnel, while giving pay rises to executives and full-time employees.

Yahoo’s board of directors have rejected the Microsoft bid on January 31st, after Microsoft offering $44.6 billion, above the now current value of $42 billion. They said that the bid “substantially undervalues” the company.

Yahoo have also started talks with News Corporation and Time Warner’s AOL to find alternatives to no avail.

The buying of Yahoo by Microsoft is seen to compete with Google, who is currently the leader in the search engine and advertising markets. Google is also currently siding with Yahoo to stop a possible buyout from Microsoft.

However, due to the recent market downturn and the fears of a possible recession, with Google’s shares being down more 16 percent since Microsoft’s offer. Sources also say the overall decline increased the premium of the deal.

Co-founder Bill Gates said he expected the new version of Windows operating software, code-named Windows 7, to be released “sometime in the next year or so.”

The software giant has been aiming to issue more regular updates of the operating system software that powers the majority of the world’s personal computers. Nevertheless, Gates’ comments suggested that a successor to the Vista program might be released sooner than was generally expected.

Microsoft has said it expected to release a new version of Windows approximately 3 years after the introduction of Vista in January 2007. A company spokeswoman said Gates’ comments are in line with a development cycle that usually releases a test version of the software before its official introduction.

“That’ll be sometime in the next year or so that we’ll have a new version,” Gates said in response to a question from the audience.

Gates, who is due to leave his day-to-day functions at Microsoft and dedicate himself to the efforts of the Gates Foundation in June, said the company aimed through its $6 billion annual research and development budget to take the products running on its software to “the next level.”

He said new versions of Windows would help revolutionize mobile phones and run the desk of the future, which would have a touch surface display allowing users to call up items using their hands.

Two people have been arrested after being found of creating a fake Craiglist ad that led to an Oregon man’s house being looted, watching helplessly as they took his stuff.

Police say that the incident stemmed from an attempt by two thieves to cover their tracks from an earlier robbery.

Robert Salisbury came home on March 22 to find his house being looted by 30 strangers, after Brandon and Amber Herbert posted an ad on Craigslist saying that he had left town and no longer needed his belongings. Nearly of what the independent contractor owned, including a horse, was taken.

When he tried to stop it, they showed him his ‘ad’ and told him that they had a right to do so. Trucks left loaded with his things, including furniture, work ladders and a swing that hung on his front porch. Some of the items were given back to him after Salisbury recorded the license plate numbers, but thousands of dollars worth of goods are still unaccounted.

The press originally thought it was a hoax or a prank turned out to be a robbery, just with a twist. The Smoking Gun published a “Probable Cause Affidavit” saying that they were covering their tracks on the robbery.

Police found the couple by tracing the ad to their computer at home, along with saddles stolen from Salisbury’s home.

The devious plot is similar to a case in April last year, where an unoccupied rental home was stripped bare when a Craigslist ad invited people to take anything they wanted. Looters took anything that was not bolted, including appliances, the front door and the kitchen sink.

In that case, Nichole Blackwell, the niece of the owner Laurie Raye, was charged with the hoax. She was reportedly upset that Raye evicted her mother from the house.

The pair that posted the fake ad have been charged with two counts of burglary in the second degree, two counts of computer crime and one count of theft.

P.S - Whoever went to Salisbury’s home, please return his stuff to the police.

Technology problems are to blame according to the Associated Press as the United States government will be forced to go back to the old times on counting the 300 million people living in the nation with paper and pencil.

The new change will see as much as $3 billion added to the overall cost, pushing it to now more than $14 billion.

Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez was scheduled to tell a House subcommittee about the new plans, which will see the use of handheld computers to collect information scraped from millions of Americans who do not return the forms mailed out by the government.

The project to develop the computers have been plagued by schedule, performance and cost issues.

The 2010 census was expected to be the first high-tech count in the nation’s history, with the Census Bureau awarding a contract to purchase 500,000 computers at the cost of $600 million. The new computers proved too complex for some workers when a trial was done in North Carolina and the computers were not initially programmed to transmit larges amounts of data.

The officials have been blamed for not spelling out the technical requirements and specifications to the contractor, Harris Corporation - based in Florida

In the latest effort by the music industry to stop losses, three out of the ‘Big Four’ have struck a deal with the social networking site MySpace to start a music website.

As part of the deal, MySpace will spun out its Music service as an independent joint venture with Universal Music, Sony BMG and Warner Music. EMI, the forth major label, is not part of the deal but they are in negotiations saying it would join soon. All three music companies signing up now will have minority stakes in the company.

Visitors to the site will be able to listen to the music for free via streaming with advertising and are allowed to create customized playlists with their ‘friends’. They will also download the tracks to play on mobile and audio devices, putting it in the competition with similar music stores from eMusic, Amazon and Apple.

The subscription-based component of the site will see users paying a monthly amount to download unlimited tracks, rivaling eMusic, is being considered.

Terms of the deals and details about the site, like the price of the downloadable songs, were not disclosed but there is some good news. The songs that you download will not have any digital rights management (DRM) software. This means that you can play the music on any music player, including the iPod and the Zune.

Universal Music, however, has a pending lawsuit against MySpace for copyright infringement from 2006. It has not said that it has been dropped.

Viewers will be able to watch high definition television (HDTV) on Freeview from 2009, the broadcast watchdog has confirmed.

Ofcom has said that new technologies and the digital switchover will enable more channels, including HD services. However, viewers who want to watch the new services will need a HD-ready TV and a brand new set-top box. The new services are expected to start at the north-west of England.

Up to four free HD channels will be broadcast, including the already-launched BBC HD service. The other three spots will be taken by ITV, Channel 4, Five or the Welsh language network S4C (which replaces Channel 4 in analogue television). They will also be invited to bid on the new services as well.

Viewers have to wait until the analogue television signals are switched off before receiving them, meaning that London will need to wait until 2012, even though trials were done in the area. Other areas who will wait until 2012 are Northern Ireland and the north-east of England.

Ofcm will also change the way digital terrestrial television are arranged to make way for the new services. Digital televisions are arranged in six “multiplexes”, owned by different operators including the BBC, which owns two.

The BBC will have to move some of its channels to create space for the HD channels or other new services. HD channels take up four or five times the space than the SD signal.

But if you want the HD channels now, you can get them from satellite or cable, paying a subscription fee. BBC and ITV are also launching a new satellite service, dubbed Freesat, and will include HD services.

Google has announced its first job axing at its online advertising unit DoubleClick by axing 300 jobs, about one-quarter of it’s 1,200 workforce in the US. Worldwide, it has 1,500 employees.

Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, also suggested that overseas operations maybe affected but at a later date.

Some workers have been already laid off already, with Google saying that others will be offered contract jobs after the two companies are ‘fully integrated’. Google bought DoubleClick for over $3 billion and was completed just less than a month ago, after being held up by competition regulators for over a year.

The deal was heavily criticized by many non-profit privacy groups, Microsoft and AT&T. They had argued that it would give Google unprecedented access to information about the consumer and their online behaviors.

On top of the layoffs, Google says it will also sell DoubleClick’s Preformics Search Marketing; which helps marketers place ads on search engines, including Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineLand.com praised the decision of selling it off, as many saw it represented a “conflict of interest” for Google, and says it was not unexpected.

We are launching a new blog, filled with anything technological or anything we like. This blog is called The Journal. Gadgets, News that won’t be featured here and opinions will mainly take up some of the blog.

It will be written by the TECHGEEK team here, but we will be getting some writers that will write for The Journal exclusively. It will also feature content from many other blogs, under permission from the author, Creative Commons licensed or from our blogs.

The Journal already has some content, with more on the way.

You can find it at http://journal.techgeek.com.au.

Microsoft has announced a new version of it’s Windows Mobile operating system. The new version, dubbed 6.1, boasts several overhauls, with one significant one in the Internet Explorer browser. It also introduced a new services plan to make it easier for business customers to buy Windows Mobile devices and services at the same time.

According to Scott Rockfeld, Group Product Manager for Windows Mobile, the new version of IE Mobile will take the “full rendering of Internet Explorer [for the desktop] and brings that down to Windows Mobile 6.1″. New features include the ability to pan and zoom.

It will also support rich web application technologies such as Flash and Silverlight, as well with Ajax applications. The new browser will be available towards the end of the year.

It will offer threaded text messaging for the first time on the latest release. A new release will include the Live Search plug-in and will be released at the end of April or the start of May for a variety of mobile platforms.

The new Microsoft file formats, Open Office XML (OOXML), have succeeded to be an international standard, with the ISO (International Organization for Standardization) scheduled to release an official announcement today.

Once that is final, the development of the file formats will be handed over to the members of the ISO, which has 100 countries being represented, including Australia. It’s official name is now known as Draft International Standard (DIS) 29500.

On a technical level, this means that any changes proposed during the process will need to be incorporated into the OOXML by Microsoft, Novell and other companies and are expected to conform to the changes in the near future.

There are still distrust, however, by Microsoft’s attempts to promote interoperability between its products and others - including open source. But the ISO ratification is a significant step to support the standards.

During the vote, it is believed that a number of national standard bodies voted “no” or abstained from voting even after the BRM (Ballot Resolution Meeting” in February, which was supposed to resolve the technical issues.

The tally shows that 75% approved the new standard while 14% voted against it. Australia chose to abstain from voting.

Before the vote, IBM executives lobbied against the vote; saying that OOXML was redundant with the OpenDocument Format (ODF), technically flawed and was not exactly open.

The OOXML is now the default file formats in the latest version of Microsoft Office, replacing the original file formats that started in Office 97.