SAN FRANCISCO — Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang pushed for an employee severance program that made it more expensive for Microsoft to engineer a takeover even after an outside consultant questioned the plan’s generous benefits, according to previously sealed documents in a shareholder lawsuit against Yahoo.

The details about the severance program and other information about Yahoo’s efforts to thwart Microsoft’s takeover bid became available Monday after a Delaware judge released redacted portions of a shareholder complaint filed last month after Microsoft withdrew an oral offer to buy Yahoo for $47.5 billion, or $33 per share.

Full article @ USATODAY

Adobe has just unleashed a new online platform containing a word processor, file storage and sharing, both tied together with a Flash-enabled Acrobat 9.
The free Acrobat.com beta includes the Buzzword word processor. Its ConnectNow Web conferencing and desktop sharing tool enables chatting via text, video, and voice. The hosted services invite file storage and sharing with the capability to convert up to five documents to PDF.
Users of Acrobat.com can join each other in virtual rooms, and all those in the room have access to the same document. This is a great feature for virtual meetings, paper editing, and much more.
Acrobat 9 will include many features aided by the integration of Flash. Some of these features include animation integration and dynamic maps.
For creating online forms, Acrobat 9 adds intelligence to recognize content for conversion to fillable fields. And a forms tracking dashboard will show, for instance, the status of responses to a mass party invitation e-mail and let a user send reminders to guests. Responses can be sorted, filtered, and exported to spreadsheets.
With this Acrobat facelift, we can also expect a speedier environment. Everyone has had the ‘PDF opening blues’, which is hoped to be eliminated with Acrobat 9.

View: news.com
Visit: Acrobat.com Beta

IETester is a free web browser specifically designed for testing web sites in Internet Explorer including IE 8 beta, IE 7, IE 6, IE 5.5 on both XP and Vista.
Like any web browser, IETester has the usual forward and back buttons, refresh, stop, home, and favorite buttons, but it also has a special feature that allows you to launch new tabs which render the web site in different versions of IE. With IE8’s public beta just around the corner, web site owners need to verify that their sites are going to display properly in the new browser, which runs in standards-compliant mode by default. You can download IETester for free (donations accepted) from here. (via Ajaxian)

Download: IETester v0.2.2 | 23.8MB (Freeware)
Screenshot: >> Click here <<
View: IETester Homepage

Apple’s iPhone, a new model of which is widely expected this summer, took 19.2 percent of the U.S. market for smart-phones sold in the first quarter of 2008, according to research firm IDC’s vendor survey. That was down from 26.7 percent of smart-phones sold in the fourth quarter of last year, which included the holiday shopping season. Much of the slack was picked up by Research In Motion’s BlackBerry, which took 35.1 percent of the market in the fourth quarter and then 44.5 percent in the first. IDC analyst Ramon Llamas said the BlackBerry is now strong in the “prosumer” segment, as RIM has successfully widened the appeal of the device beyond the professionals who have been its core customer group.

View: Full Story at SiliconValley.com