Today's Squawk Box was a little different because it was recorded from a hotel lobby in Toronto which did not prevent us from discussing the tech headlines of the day and the past week-end. Au menu:
- The main topic today was Microsoft unsolicited offer to buy Yahoo for around $44 billion announced on friday. Microsoft is a distant number 3 in the online advertising market to Google and sees the acquisition of Yahoo as a way to scale pretty quickly in a business that is all about scale. Of course rumors have been flying over the week end about different companies that would be willing to make counter-offers and Google finding a way to support Yahoo while calling out Microsoft in the process.Today's participants try to make sense out of all this and discuss the consequences for Internet and users.
- Next topic was about "status update" applications modeled after twitters (Jaikku, Plaxo Pulse, Facebook, or newly released hellotxt…) and where they were taking us… Another set of walled garden services? Jeanette Fisher provided an interesting piece of information telling us twitter status is picked up by Google (intriguing for businesses but questionable for privacy)
- Finally we discussed the announcement made last week by Garmin that their last GPS device will include… A phone. When Motorola is contemplating getting out of this space, we discussed the opportunity for new players to enter it and the opportunities for specialized device like the Garmin GPS.
See you tomorrow at a special time; 2pm standard eastern time.
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry make Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
