AT&T has purchased Dallas-based WiFi hotspot operator Wayport for a stunning $275 million in cash. The privately held company administers over 10,000 WiFi hotspots for various hotel chains like Wyndham, Marriott Vacation Club and Four Seasons as well as McDonald’s restaurants nationwide.

I caught this bit of acquisition news a little late (it’s been on the PR wires for about fifteen hours now), but I got pinged by Austin Startup on the news early this morning, and it made me wonder if the same deal that’s been proffered to Starbucks customers will also be extended to McDonald’s patrons.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a coffee-addict, and I’ll use any excuse to hang out in a coffee bar for extended periods of time to suck down that sweet, sweet nectar of the gods.. but as a father who happens to be a web worker, I more often find myself setting up shop at a McDonald’s than the Starbucks across the street. To that end, I’d be far more likely to start up a tab there and set myself up with a McDonald’s Card if it came with two free daily hours of WiFi (and I imagine I’m not the only one in that boat).

Stacey Higgenbotham over at GigaOm sees it as more of a move by AT&T to aleviate the load off the mobile data network than as a value add for McDonald’s customers:

Buying Wayport and offering 20,000 hot spots (including in airports and McDonald’s restaurants) in the U.S. allows AT&T to provide its customers with more places to do their bandwidth-sucking applications. Already, AT&T is willing to let iPhone and BlackBerry users access its Wi-Fi hotspots free at Starbucks. It also means AT&T can hold out a bit longer before deploying its 4G LTE network, which is designed for data.

While that’s likely the rationale being used to justify the purchase, one hopes that they see the opportunity here to continue to expand their reach and build up business for their host partners.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:AT&T Giving Away Free Wi-Fi at StarbucksiTunes Wi-Fi Music Store Now LiveiPass Offers Wireless Net Access to Consumers with WiFi/3G NetworkAre Consumers Ready for WiFi on Airplanes?WeFi Finds Friends from Their WiFiMake Money with Your iPhone. Track Wifi Access Points.Loki - Location-based Search and Navigation

Source:Mashable!

The entire Microsoft-Yahoo saga is now starting to look really sad for Yahoo. After Jerry Yang’s statement yesterday that Yahoo is suddenly interested in being acquired by Microsoft, Steve Ballmer now responds with a firm no.

“We are not interested in going back and re-looking at an acquisition. I don’t know why they would be either, frankly,” he said. “We tried at one point to do a partnership around search, not advertising. That didn’t work either, so we moved on, and they moved on.”

Although it’s still questionable that getting acquired by Microsoft is a good thing for Yahoo in the long run, now that it’s seemingly out of their grasp, any other deal (for example, the rumored AOL merger) will seem like a desperate move. Even if Ballmer is just trying to wreck Yahoo some more and get an even better deal, Yahoo is in an awful position to negotiate; they’ve tried several avenues, and all of them turned out to be dead ends.

Now, the best - and probably only - thing they can do is get new management, and start working hard at building value for their shareholders. The ship has been sinking for quite some time, and those who wanted to leave already left. Time to go back to the old drawing board and start from scratch.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Ballmer Comments on FacebookBallmer Keeps Bloviating, But Actually Makes Sense!Steve Ballmer Attacks Google’s Gmail AdsGreat, Now We’re Left with BallmerMicrosoft CEO and CFO Schedules Early Monday Morning Chat With Financial AnalystsThe Daily Poll: Should Yahoo Accept Microsoft’s Initial Offer?Microsoft Gives Yahoo 3 Weeks For ‘Definitive Agreement’ To Buyout

Yesterday, Microsoft CEO Steve “Developers” Ballmer revealed that Windows is working on a cloud-based operating system while Amazon is now offering Windows as an available server environment through it’s EC2 service.

A lot of hay has been made recently over the term Cloud Computing. Frankly, it’s a sign a term is overused when Richard Stallman is unclear on the concept. That’s why Sean and I sat down today to attempt to lay out exactly what cloud computing means in the context of these two bits of news today.

The short answer is that we’re not talking about web apps primarily here. Steve Ballmer was particularly short on details when he dropped the term “Windows Cloud,” and it seems to be a slight misappropriation of the term as purists define it.  

The Amazon offering is very easy to define, and we do so, and proceed to talk a bit about what this means in terms of long term Microsoft enterprise strategy as well as what sorts of branding issues Microsoft might be running up against with these new offerings. 

Watch our talk on it or download the MP4.

At the time we recorded, the details of the Windows Cloud were a bit, well, cloudy (though we had a pretty firm grasp on what was going on with the Amazon EC2 Windows situation).  They’ve since been cleared up a bit, so for more analysis on that, see Stan’s post from earlier today.

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—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Ballmer Keeps Bloviating, But Actually Makes Sense!Ballmer Comments on FacebookSteve Ballmer Attacks Google’s Gmail AdsGreat, Now We’re Left with BallmerMicrosoft’s Windows Cloud Smells FunnyYouTube Launches New Set Of APIsMicrosoft Gives Yahoo 3 Weeks For ‘Definitive Agreement’ To Buyout

At most companies, the post of chief information officer is a humdrum administrative job, making sure that the servers running the CEO’s BlackBerry don’t go down. At Microsoft, add to that this burden: Serving as a part-time shill for the company’s products. If anyone could change that, it may be Tony Scott, freshly hired as the software company’s fourth CIO in as many years. Scott, Tony, replaces Scott, Stuart, who left in scandal.

So why does Tony Scott stand a chance at shaking things up? As CTO of General Motors, he was a big customer of both Microsoft and Sun. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, and Scott McNealy of Sun had been carrying on a war of words. Scott, with his big budget, brought the two to the negotiating table and forced them to make their competing software offerings more compatible.

Ah, but there’s the rub. As Microsoft’s CIO, Ballmer will control Scott’s budget, not the other way around. And Scott will feel pressured to run an all-Microsoft shop. Will Scott, with those shackles, be as effective a force for change within Microsoft as he was on the outside? What I’d like to see is Scott declare a piece of Microsoft software unfit even for internal use, and replace it with a better alternative, as so many of Microsoft’s customers have done. But that’s unlikely.

Why all the lists heading into 2008? Well, laziness. That, and the urge to reflect on the year gone by. No, mostly laziness. And in that spirit, we present you Valleywag’s top 10 list of top 10 lists. Oh yeah — our lazy, it’s meta.

The Web’s top 10 top 10 lists
• 10. Wired’s “The 10 Best Gadget Ads of 2007” makes our list because it points out why everyone wants an iPhone. Apple’s genius ads.
• 9.The New York Times’ “Buzzwords 2007” can has number 9.
  
  
• 8. eMarketer’s Predictions for 2008 makes our list because we’re so handy with their charts.
  
  
• 7. Tumblr founder David Karp’s 2008 Tech Predictions.
  

  Google will launch the Web Service competitors GStorage, GCompute, and GAmazonFlexiblePaymentService.

• 6.Your Best Shot 2007 Samplr, collected by Flickr, features the most interestingness of any list in our top ten.
  
  
• 5.Silicon Alley VC blogger Fred Wilson sure can pick ‘em. No, not startups. Rock bands. Like the ones in his Top Ten Records 2007.
  function streampadPop(l,n){window.open(”http://flash.streampad.com/playerL.swf?autostart=yes&list=”+l+”&songNumber=”+n, “Streampad”,”toolbar=no,width=200,height=300,resizable=yes”);}
  
• 4.The second Wired entry — out of nearly a dozen folks, so there’s real competition here! — to make our list has to be The Top 10 New Organisms of 2007 because it reviews how we did playing God last year.
  

  Cancer-fighting Clostridium bacteria
  Surgery, chemotherapy and radiation treatment mean that a cancer diagnosis is no longer always a death sentence. But certain oxygen-starved parts of tumors are still difficult to reach with the old methods. Enter the Clostridium family of bacteria. Injected into the body, they grow and multiply only in the oxygen-poor parts of cancer tumors. In September, scientists in the Netherlands showed they could arm Clostridium bacteria with therapeutic protein genes, essentially creating search-and-destroy tumor missiles.

• 3.We’re not going to pretend we understand the Large Hadron Collider, which comes online in 2008, according to Ars Technica’spredictions for 2008. “The Higgs boson, supersymmetric particles, and dark matter candidates all beckon,” Chris Lee writes. We’ll just show you this neat video.
  newVideoPlayer(”Ars_LHC.flv”, 475, 376);
  

• 2.Tech CEOs say the darndest things, don’t they? Like remember when Zuck said media changes every 100 years? Wired’s editors do, and they bring it all back in their 2007 Foot-in-Mouth Awards.
  

  There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It’s a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I’d prefer to have our software in 60 percent or 70 percent or 80 percent of them than I would to have 2 percent or 3 percent, which is what Apple might get. — Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on the iPhone, which is outselling all Windows Mobile phones combined.

• 1. How’s this for meta? We’re going to declare Valleywag’s own “The Web’s top 10 top 10 lists” the winner. Meta FTW!

(Photo by andrer69)

Thanks to Steve Ballmer’s so-called friends, we got our hands on the juicier bits from the Microsoft CEO’s Facebook profile — the wall post messages other Facebook users left for him. The gem? JupiterResearch vice president’s Michael Gartenberg’s jovial joshing that Ballmer wasn’t planning to buy an iPhone, posted for all of Ballmer’s friends to see. Also, what the heck is this “WHiPS 2007″ group that Ballmer joined? Wait, never mind, I don’t want to know. After the jump, the full profile in all its glory.

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Dwight, the detestable lackey of NBC’s The Office, has ventured into Second Life. “Second Life is not a game,” he testily declares. Exactly. A game would be, y’know, fun. We hope Chris Anderson of Wired watched this episode.

Source:Valleywag

Google’s mission? Organize the world’s information. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s mission? Underpants. A very brave tipster answered our call to forward us screenshots of brain-eating Ballmer’s actual Facebook profile. Which, of course, is a thousand times better, and stranger, than our fictional profile. By the way, any other powerful Facebook friends whose illusions about privacy you want to violate? Send us more screenshots. Here’s Ballmer’s.

CNET has sold photo-sharing site Webshots to American Greetings for $45 million — a website it spent $70 million on three years ago. And this in an age when MySpace bought Photobucket for hundreds of millions. An internal memo reads:

Today, Webshots was sold to American Greetings for approximately $45 million. This was a tough decision but the right business decision. Selling Webshots allows us to focus our efforts against long term strategic goals, and concentrate on the passion-based categories we believe offer the most promise for CNET Networks.

We are pleased that Webshots can become an important ingredient to American Greetings’ business, and we are committed to making this a successful transition over the next several months.

The full internal email from CEO Neil Ashe is after the jump:

Hi Everybody,

The third quarter marks a turning point for us. After a year on the job, I am confident we are building a company that can succeed in 2008 and beyond. Today, during our Q3 Earnings Call, I will make several major announcements that underscore our progress.

Strategically, we are focused on providing people with brands that make a difference and that help marketers win. Financially, we evaluated our asset mix and are focused on those areas that best fit within our brand portfolio, represent the largest opportunity and where we can be leaders. Operationally, we have a winning team that knows what success is and is committed to achieving it.

Let me provide more detail for you on those announcements.

Sale of Webshots Today, Webshots was sold to American Greetings for approximately $45 million. This was a tough decision but the right business decision. Selling Webshots allows us to focus our efforts against long term strategic goals, and concentrate on the passion-based categories we believe offer the most promise for CNET Networks.

We are pleased that Webshots can become an important ingredient to American Greetings’ business, and we are committed to making this a successful transition over the next several months.

New Head of the Combined Entertainment and Lifestyle Business Unit I am pleased to announce Stephen Colvin as EVP of our new Entertainment & Lifestyle business. A 20-year media veteran, Stephen joins us from Dennis Publishing, where he built Maxim, Blender, Stuff and The Week magazines. He has a track record as a dynamic leader and brand builder. Stephen will be based in our NYC office which allows us to expand our presence in a city that is the hub of the media world. Stephen will be spending a lot of time in San Francisco.

The merger of CHOW and Urban Baby into the Entertainment & Lifestyle business unit simplifies our business, and allows us to leverage infrastructure, tools and best practices across this larger group. Over the next few days and weeks there will be individual and team meetings within Entertainment and Lifestyle to discuss the transition process.

Stephen will be in San Francisco next week, and he is looking forward to meeting the team.

Partnership Marketing and Sales Jack Haire joined us several months ago to evaluate and evolve our sales structure and go-to-market strategy. As a result of his assessment, Jack will be taking on the newly formed role of Chief Client Officer. In his new position, Jack will oversee the Partnership Sales team, chair the revenue council and have responsibility and final decision making for sales best practices, infrastructure and policies.

This new sales construct provides the flexibility to tap our best people across the company and align them against our best opportunities for revenue growth. The team will include dedicated centralized resources as well as part time allocation of resources from each BU. More announcements regarding this new team structure will be made in the coming weeks.

Channel Moves into the CNET BU The joining of Channel and CNET brings together two category leaders. Together, they cover the spectrum of bringing information and services to manufacturers, distributors, retailers and consumers. The two businesses will benefit from a holistic view of tech consumption with the channel and to the consumer.

Steve Parrot will report to Joe Gillespie and continue to manage Channel as a stand alone business within the CNET BU.

Credit Facility Last week we announced that we secured a $250 million credit facility. A credit facility is a set of loans that allow us to borrow money in order to enhance our ability to grow. Together, with the proceeds from our sale of Webshots, we have the financial resources available to create value for our shareholders.

Q3 Earnings We reported that revenues for the third quarter were $99.5 million up 7% compared to the same period in 2006. Excluding all exited businesses, including Webshots, from both 2007 and 2006, total revenue increased 11% during the quarter. In addition, CNET networks’ global Internet properties reached and average of 141 unique monthly users consuming over 91 million pages per day.

At the beginning of the year, I laid out three initiatives and key areas of focus as part of our long term growth strategy:

First, realize the potential and opportunity of existing brands. Second, identify new opportunities for growth. And third, continue to strive to do what we do better.

Today’s announcements directly support our ability to achieve these initiatives and build a vibrant and valuable company that seizes the long term opportunity and creates value for users, employees, marketers and shareholders.

As we exit the third quarter, we have made real progress on our transformation to a new CNET Networks. A bold company that is entrepreneurial and aggressive. CNET Networks is not the site-of-the-day. CNET Networks is the media company of the future.

Best, NA

__________________________ Neil Ashe CNET Networks, Inc. 415-344-2284

Source:Valleywag

Remember former Business 2.0 editor Josh Quittner, whose tech magazine got shut down by parent company Time Inc.? Now an executive editor at Fortune, he outranks, on paper, assistant managing editor Jim Aley — the man he replaced as Business 2.0’s editor five years ago. Which makes the following curious: The New York-based Aley, pictured above, is in town this week. Valleywag hears he started off his visit with a breakfast with Quittner. And then Aley met with the remnants of Business 2.0’s staff, who now make up Fortune’s San Francisco bureau — without Quittner. Remind us again who’s in charge here? And if you want your startup written up in Fortune, who’s the right guy to schmooze?

Source:Valleywag

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In case you missed the whole hullabaloo about Microsoft taking a $240 million stake in Facebook, CNBC has the 15-second version. Tech pundits with a bad case of blogorrhea could take notes from the cable network’s brevity.

Source:Valleywag

With a $240 million dollar investment in new best friend Facebook sealed, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is probably enjoying an afterglow of congratulatory pokes on the social network. We don’t know. The chief executive has maintained a profile on Facebook for some time, but strangely, hasn’t reciprocated my request to be his friend. So we’re left to imagine what that profile might look like. Anyone got a screenshot of the real one? Send it in.

Intel settled a patent infringement suit with Transmeta, agreeing to pay the microprocessor patent-holder $150 million upfront and $20 million a year for the next five years. [WSJ]

Source:Valleywag

Internal memos offer, if not juicy gossip, telling insight into the character of an organization. Not so with the missive Microsoft lead negotiator Kevin Johnson sent around to explain his Facebook triumph. It’s just more “win-win-win” blather that you’d expect from a salesman. Johnson tells coworkers the deal will demonstrate to advertisers that Microsoft is a winner and that for publishers “it is further evidence of Microsoft’s commitment to long-term innovation.” I’m sure the thousands of geeks in Microsoft’s R&D labs are stewing over that line — not that they’ve come up with anything even vaguely as cool as Facebook. But whatever. We know the real reason Johnson sent the memo. To get this reply from Ballmer — the CEO’s actual words: “Great job you really pulled this together unbelievably.” Cha-ching!