Hasta La Gadget!

BlackBerry is up for sale, and the men who founded it are definitely interested. Back in 1984, Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin co-founded Research in Motion, which was renamed earlier this year to BlackBerry. The company already has a takeover bid on the table, placed by its largest shareholder Fairfax Financial Holdings, which owns about 10 percent. Fairfax’s bid is non binding and subject to its due diligence, there have been reports that it is struggling with raising the required finances to close the $4.7 billion takeover at $9 per share. Fairfax will return on November 4th, until then BlackBerry is free to seek buyers, and it just might receive a bid from Lazaridis and Fregin.

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BlackBerry Co-Founders Mike Lazaridis And Douglas Fregin Considering Takeover Bid original content from Ubergizmo.

There has been a lot of speculation about BlackBerry’s future over the past few months. The company is officially up for sale though interest has been thin. Recently it signed a letter of intent with Fairfax Financial Holdings, which offered $9 per share to take BlackBerry private, pending due diligence. Analysts believe that Fairfax might lower the bid once its sees that there are no other offers on the table, whereas BlackBerry is said to have reached out to companies like Google, Samsung and Intel to seek bids. The deal with Fairfax isn’t exactly confirmed right now and there doesn’t seem to be much interest in a complete acquisition of the entire company. Bloomberg reports that BlackBerry is now “more open” to the idea of breaking up and being sold off in pieces.

Apparently the company has warmed up to this idea amid reports that Fairfax won’t be able to generate the required funding to complete its part of the $4.7 billion takeover bid, “a person with knowledge of the matter” tells the publication. Companies that were approached by BlackBerry recently have reportedly expressed interest in certain parts, such as its enterprise network and its patents. Analysts have long predicted that BlackBerry might considering breaking up in order to complete the sale. Its struggling handset business isn’t said to hold much value in case this happens. BlackBerry has until November 4th to shop itself around, that’s when Fairfax will come back after having studied the company’s books and possibly having lined up the required funding.

BlackBerry ‘More Open’ To Sell Itself Off In Pieces original content from Ubergizmo.

This article was written on January 01, 2007 by CyberNet.

Welcome! We have a bunch of new features that will hopefully interest you as we begin our new year. I’ll go ahead and jump right into the list…

• Advanced Search
  This is a feature that I’m sure many of you will appreciate. Next to the search box above the right sidebar you’ll notice a button that says “Advanced“. Clicking on that will bring up an advanced search screen where you can choose custom categories to search, or even have it scour the comments for text! The other key thing is that you can have it sort the results by relevance instead of just by date.
   
• Updated CyberMarks
  There are a lot of changes to how CyberMarks are used. For those of you not familiar with CyberMarks it is our bookmarking system here at CyberNet. Underneath each article’s title you’ll notice a link that says “CyberMark,” and clicking on that link will store the article for you to retrieve later on (assuming that you’re a registered user who is logged in). The whole system utilizes AJAX so that bookmarking an article keeps you on the page you’re currently viewing.

  The first thing that we added is a sidebar module on the homepage that gives you access to your last 5 CyberMarked articles along with a quick link to get to the CyberMark Management screen. This makes it easy to store articles that you may not have time to read right now and come back to them later on.

  On the Management screen you’ll also notice a section that lists the number of articles that have been CyberMarked by all of the users and the top-5 most CyberMarked articles. Hopefully as the system begins to grow these statistics will closely reflect some of the most popular articles.
   

• Tip System
  This feature has been requested for quite some time. We have been putting it off because there was a decent amount of backend work that we wanted to do on it. Most of you won’t really notice the work that has been put into this feature but believe me, it’s there. Now All-Stars are not solely based on the number of comments that they have left, because registered users can earn stars for tips that they send to us. Anyone who is already an All-Star cannot have that status taken away but they can continue to earn more and more stars.

  Here’s how it works. If you send us a tip and we end up writing about it we will give you some “stars” (as we like to call them). Depending on how unique the tip is you can receive anywhere from 1 star to 10 stars which will quickly help you become a CyberNet All-Star. Don’t worry, you’ll still receive one star for each comment. The Management screen will tell you how many stars you have from leaving comments and how many you have from sending us tips. That way you always know where you stand.

  For those of you that have already sent us tips you can still get credit for them if you send us an email with links to the articles that we give you credit for. We would go through and do this ourselves but it would take a long time to find out who is registered and who isn’t as well as assign each of those people stars. When thanking someone for a tip we typically use the name that shows up on the blog in comments, so you can probably just use our search feature to find the articles that we credited you on.
   

• CyberNotes Sidebar
  We’ve made it even easier for you to keep up with our CyberNotes articles. There is now a sidebar module that lists the last 7 CyberNotes articles along with their corresponding days. Remember, you can always collapse the sidebar module should you decide that you don’t want to see it.
   
• Updated Comment Tracking
  As more and more users comment on articles it becomes increasingly difficult to keep tabs on the new comments. We previously added a comment system that keeps track of the last time you viewed an article in order to calculate whether there has been any new comments. There is now one small feature that makes the system even better…a tilde (~) is added in front of any article that you have commented on:
  
  Now you’ll easily be able to tell whether you should check the article for a response to one of your own comments!
   
• New Spam Notification
  Our last feature deals with spam notification. Every now and then a good comment (even one posted by a register user) may get filtered as spam and won’t get removed until I go and do so manually(which is done about 2 to 3 times per day). In the last major update to the site we made it so that registered users would get notified if one of their comments was being held back by our spam filter…but now everyone will get to know. If your comment is filtered as spam you’ll see this notification located above your comment immediately after it is posted:
   

There we go, that’s everything that we have to introduce to you today! It is the start of a New Year and hopefully you’ll find these new features to be useful when gathering news. Most of these features, actually I think all of them, have been requested by both visitors and users of the site. So if you have anything else you would like to see implemented make sure you let us know because we want to make your experience the best it can be. Happy 2007!

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

It was rumored back in March that Amazon had been awarded a $600 million contract by the CIA to develop a cloud computing infrastructure for the clandestine agency. It is believed that this new infrastructure will cut costs for the CIA as it looks to build a new way to handle enormous amounts of data efficiently. When Amazon was named as the provider, IBM moved the court to reopen bidding for the contract. IBM had concerns on the process through which the contract had been awarded to Amazon, it believed that the prices were not properly evaluated and that a contract requirement had been waived for Amazon. The effort to reopen bidding has been squashed by Amazon in court.

The hammer was laid down by Judge Thomas Wheeler of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington. IBM is obviously not happy. The company says in a statement that it is “disappointed” with the ruling made by the court and that it plans to file an appeal against this decision. IBM goes on to say that in light of current times this decision is “especially inappropriate,” adding that IBM’s bid was superior in a number of ways while also being “substantially more cost-effective.” Amazon is yet to comment on this ruling, but it seems to be far from a victory, given that IBM is showing no signs of backing off any time soon.

Amazon Defeats IBM In $600 Million CIA Contract Case original content from Ubergizmo.

HBO makes some of the most popular TV series viewed in the U.S. and around the globe. However, those who don’t subscribe to HBO or HBO Go don’t have any other means of accessing the content apart from going down the pirate route, which is illegal. That’s probably why the folks at HBO decided to offer another alternative, one that doesn’t require any subscription. Seven of the most popular series are now available from the Google Play Store in both standard definition and high definition, for you to legally enjoy on your Android device.

The Google Play Store now plays host to seven of HBO’s most popular shows which include Boardwalk Empire, Girls, The Newsroom, Game of Thrones, Veep, The Wire and True Blood. Prices per episode range between $1.99 and $2.99, those who want to them in high definition would need to pay a dollar more. The offering caters to binge watchers as well, offering entire seasons of the aforementioned series for purchase. Prices for entire seasons vary between $19 to $29. International views are out of luck though as HBO content is exclusive to U.S. customers only at this point in time. This is just the start of HBO’s partnership with Google, there are plans to bring more shows, documentaries, movies and other content in the future.

Seven HBO Original Series Available Now From Google Play Store original content from Ubergizmo.