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iShare, which conducted the survey, also asked respondents if they “feel that the number of people carrying two mobile terminals will increase as a result of the expansion of the smartphone market.”

Roughly 30 percent of all respondents said “Yes,” while more than 10 percent said, “No, it will decrease” as consumers look to use one device for all of their mobile-computing needs.

According to a recent survey, the Japanese hate the BlackBerry and love the iPhone. This Nikkei Business Publications chart reveals one possible reason: smartphones aren’t generally used for business there.

No business for mobile phones in Japan

(Credit: Nikkei Electronics)

As for reasons why people would carry two mobile devices, 49.6 percent said “to separate business and private use.”

The software maker has set a Saturday deadline for Yahoo to come to the bargaining table or else face a proxy fight.

“Depends on the deal,” he said at an event Monday, according to Reuters.

Other players remain in the discussion, with reports that Yahoo is still in talks about a partnership with AOL and continues an advertising test with Google. Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch signaled Monday that he may not be totally against joining with Microsoft.

Those reports are all the more significant in that Microsoft’s bid (at least so far) is half stock. A good earnings report from Yahoo might put pressure on Microsoft to hike its bid, while a negative one might increase the heat on Yahoo to sell.

He indicated that joining with Microsoft is probably the only way News Corp. would be involved. “I certainly can’t afford to bid against Microsoft (for Yahoo),” he said in a speech before the Atlantic Council.

Coloring the state of things will be earnings reports from both Microsoft and Yahoo due this week. Yahoo reports Tuesday, while Microsoft is set to release quarterly numbers on Thursday.

This week is shaping up to be a big one in Microsoft’s nearly 3-month-old effort to acquire Yahoo.

DENVER–If you thought that the Republican Party would try to overshadow the Democratic convention this week and the attention paid to Barack Obama’s choice of a running mate, you’d be right. Just do a search on Google.

This is an offline effort as well. Just a couple of miles away from Invesco Field, where Obama is scheduled to accept the nomination to be the Democratic presidential candidate on Thursday night, a plane circled overhead this week pulling a banner that reads, “Biden was right–Obama not ready.”

As The Wall Street Journal has pointed out, the McCain campaign has nabbed the top ad spot on Google for the search terms “Joe Biden” and “Biden.” Presumably it outbid the Democrats for the top spot.

An ad from John McCain's campaign appears above the ad from the Obama campaign on searches for "Joe Biden," as well as "Biden."

The ad that appeared reads, “What Does Joe Biden Say About Barack Obama? Find Out Today!” and takes searchers to a page on McCain’s site with a 30-second ad showing Biden in a debate saying that Obama is not ready to be president, followed by a clip of the Delaware senator saying he would be honored to run with McCain because “the country would be better off.”

The McCain camp was the highest bidder for ad space tied to the Biden terms and has also bought search ads for terms like “U.S. economy” and “housing crisis.”

By around 1 p.m. PDT, the ad at the top of the page had disappeared and a McCain ad had been moved to a less-visible position on the right side of the page, below the one from the actual Obama-Biden campaign.

All in all, this is an ignominious step in the once-famed Atari’s story. In many ways, Atari started the modern video games industry, and in the 1980s it was one of the biggest names in consumer electronics. But over the years, its fortunes fell and more recently, it has been little more than a brand name used by Infogrames.

The release also said that Atari plans to appeal the delisting, but that its doing so would not delay the process of having its shares taken off of Nasdaq.

Atari, which has gone from a once high-flying video game company to little more than a placeholder brand name owned by another company, announced Thursday that it has been delisted by Nasdaq.

The company, which is now fully owned by games publisher Infogrames, said in a statement that it received a letter on May 7 from Nasdaq “stating that a Nasdaq listing qualifications panel has determined to delist Atari Inc.’s securities from the Nasdaq Global Market and will suspend trading of Atari…shares effective” Friday.

On April 30, Infogrames, which owned 51.4 percent of Atari, announced that it would buy the remaining shares.

On June 10, Geek Gestalt hits the highways for Road Trip 2008. I’ll start in Orlando, Fla., and visit many of the South’s most interesting destinations. Stay tuned, and be sure to keep up, both now and during the trip, with what I’m doing on Twitter.

It also searches across structured and unstructured sources, offering targeted news feeds, data from the Web, and from back office apps.

SkyData Systems announced at DemoFall on Monday a new mobile application that combines corporate and personal contacts and puts them one click away on a smartphone.

The service is available for Windows Mobile. An
iPhone version is coming at the end of the year, the company said.

SAN DIEGO–Wouldn’t it be nice to have access to the contact information from all your friends, family, and business associates in one place on your smartphone?

The mobile “mashup” allows easy access to information from a variety of sources, including contacts in Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, LinkedIn, Facebook, and others.

Other experiments revealed a similar mix of expected responses and surprises: a search on a George Harrison tune from All Things Must Pass not only threw up other classic rockers Neil Young and Steely Dan, but also modern-country chanteuse Neko Case and ethereal country-psych outfit My Morning Jacket. Very nice.

For example, when I picked a Love and Rockets song, it came up with some predictable picks–two more L&R songs, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Catherine Wheel–but also had some outside picks like Ministry, The Pixies, and Sisters of Mercy. All of these songs might be broadly categorized as “music that loud-rock fans in their late 30s liked in their wasted youth,” but I wouldn’t have put them together.

Although I was expecting more from Apple’s latest announcements, I’ve had a few days to play with the Genius feature introduced in iTunes 8 and I’m quite impressed. Pick any song, and it builds a playlist of other songs that fit well with that one. It’s a fun and useful feature for those of us too lazy to build playlists by hand, and bored with the auto-playlists (such as by genre, song length, or date added) and the random shuffle feature.

When I picked this Clash song from London Calling, Genius didn't just limit its suggestion to other punk and post-punk bands, but threw in the Stones and Dylan too.

At any rate, it’s a free update to a free piece of software, and I can recommend it without reservation for Windows XP users. Vista users, however, might experience the dreaded Windows blue screen o’ death when they upgrade and connect their
iPhone–check out iPhone Atlas for some possible fixes.

I was worried that the feature would be too obvious–for example, that it would just recommend songs in the same genre or by related artists. In fact, it’s much more interesting than that. I’d guess that it’s comparing data from millions of other iTunes users who have signed up for the service (part of the install process sends information about your library to Apple), then matching songs that appear frequently with the selected song. It’s probably also using my own playback data, favoring songs I’ve played back to back and have not skipped.

I did have some problems getting the Genius feature to recognize certain artists, like Fantomas and Fela Kuti, and my attempt to update the Genius feature from the Store menu resulted in an error message, as it couldn’t find some mysterious folder it was looking for. (On my hard drive? At Apple? Who could tell?)

There’s also a Genius Bar that recommends similar songs from the iTunes Store that aren’t in your collection already, but I hardly buy any music online, and many of the recommendations are already in my LP collection but not yet digitized. So this feature doesn’t do much for me, but could be useful for folks who buy lots of music online.

According to the report, Yahoo would buy AOL’s content business, but not its dial-up subscription business. Time Warner had separated the two, and given Yahoo’s online-publishing and advertising interests, it would be no surprise to see Yahoo pass over that dwindling asset.

• Stock transactions over $3.4 billion are dilutive to Yahoo. We think Time Warner was hoping for $6 billion to $8 billion, which is only possible with synergies.

The possibility grew out of Microsoft’s unwelcome attempt to acquire Yahoo, but some would be surprised to see any deal at all. In a note on Monday, Sanford C. Bernstein analysts said the deal is unlikely for three reasons:

• The primary source of synergies is staff reductions, where Yahoo has (an) unimpressive track record. Other benefits, such as pricing power in display and combining Advertising.com with Right Media Exchange, will not drive short-term incremental revenues.

A Yahoo acquisition of AOL could happen as early as this month, TechCrunch reported Monday, citing sources close to the negotiations.

“It’s rumors and speculation, which we don’t comment on,” Yahoo spokesman Brad Williams said. Update 2:30 p.m. PDT: AOL also declined to comment.

• Regulators might not allow the AOL-Google paid-search deal to pass to Yahoo, which would wipe out the other synergies–creating a large risk for both sides.

While some sticklers will point out that the PS3 can’t output Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio in bitstream format, it’s definitely a non-issue. Decoding the audio at the source is actually better than having the ability to bitstream high-resolution soundtracks, since it means even people with older HDMI-capable receivers can enjoy the high quality audio. Sure, your receiver won’t light up the pretty DTS-HD Master Audio logo, but who cares–you still get the same great sound.

(Credit:
CNET)

The new firmware will also include a much-needed overhaul to the PlayStation Store. The official PlayStation Blog posted a walkthrough of the new store, and we have to admit it looks pretty good. Check it below.

We have ranked the PS3 as the best Blu-ray player for quite some time, and this only sweetens the deal. Almost all of our major complaints have been addressed, except for the fact that it still doesn’t work nicely with a universal remote. Some diehard home theater fans will cringe at the idea of using a game console as their main disc player, but they should get over their hang-up as the PS3 is currently the best Blu-ray has to offer and it also happens to be the cheapest. And you can play high-def games and stream music, movies and photos.

From Crackle: PlayStation Store video walkthrough

Sony has announced the details on the next PS3 firmware update–version 2.30, coming mid-April–and the big news for home theater fans is that the
PS3 is getting onboard DTS-HD High Resolution and DTS-HD Master Audio decoding for Blu-ray movies. Home theater fans have long lamented that the PS3 could not decode the new DTS soundtracks at their highest resolution, especially since movie studios like Fox have opted for DTS-HD Master Audio on many Blu-ray releases. Without getting too technical, DTS-HD Master Audio offers 7-channels of lossless audio at 96K sampling frequency and 24-bit depths–which means that the sound sent to your receiver should be identical to the studio master.

Google didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about the issue.

Update 5:25 p.m. PDT: Google fixed the problem, according to an update notice Google pointed out to me.

“At around 1:40 p.m. we were able to isolate the issue, and requests are currently serving normally,” the update said. “This outage was the result of a bug in our datastore servers and was triggered by a particular class of queries. We have isolated the bug and we’re currently working on a fix. Going forward, we’re also working to further isolate queries so that in the future a bug like this won’t affect the stability of the system as a whole.”

One advantage of cloud computing is that it’s an expert’s job to keep the centralized computing infrastructure up and running. But even experts have problems, and that’s what’s going on Tuesday with Google’s App Engine.

(Via TechCrunch.)

The service has been having outages Tuesday, according to a mailing list posting Tuesday. App Engine, launched in April and still in “preview release” mode, is a service that lets people create interactive Web applications written in the Python programming language.

“We’ve experienced several outages during the past 12 hours, the most recent of which started at 6:30 a.m. PDT and is still ongoing. During these outages, a significant percentage of requests resulted in errors. The errors are related to usage of the Datastore,” the note said. “We’re working hard to determine the cause of these outages and will continue updating as we make progress.”

After more than a year of kicking the tires on a proposed merger between XM Satellite Radio Holdings and Sirius Satellite Radio, the Federal Communications Commission has reached a tentative deal with the companies, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

If she signs off on the deal, Tate will join two other commissioners, also Republicans, who have already given their blessing to the deal. The two remaining commissioners, both Democrats, from the five-member board oppose the deal.

The report, however, notes that FCC commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate, seen as the swing vote, has yet to vote on the proposed merger, but is expected to take the plunge shortly.

According to the Journal, Tate is expected to vote to approve the deal, provided that a consent decree is drafted that would call for a fine of roughly $20 million and address several enforcement issues, such as complaints revolving around satellite radio receivers surpassing the FCC power limit.