If you aren’t aware of a recent bid by Microsoft to buy Yahoo, this article certainly wasn’t meant for you. However, if you have, you may also know that Microsoft pulled its offer last weekend.

Some speculate that Microsoft will try to install a more take-over friendly board in June. Some speculate that Microsoft is letting Yahoo’ stock fall so they can retry later at a better price.

Both of these are incomplete speculations; after all, if the offer is off the table, how does microsoft install a new board? And how does a dip in yahoo’s stock price help microsoft? After all, if they put the offer back on the table, the stock prices will immediately rise again.

The answer to both of those questions might be the following idea, which so far I haven’t seen on any blogs:

In the movies, the CIA sometimes has ‘front companies’ - companies secretly owned by the CIA through a long line of other front companies and individuals, for business. The idea is not totally unheard of; plenty of corporations are actually conglomerates of hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of smaller (but very real) companies. if you were to map out the ownership of all those subcompanies it would make quite a picture.

Microsoft can have many front companies if it wants. And those front companies can buy yahoo stock. At its current lowered price. Microsoft is also rumoured to be behind SCO’s attack on Linux; its far less of a leap to consider microsoft leaning on friendly companies to buy some yahoo stock as well.

Because at the end of the day, buying yahoo is all about controlling some stock. The more stock microsoft controls (either through front companies or through friends), the less of a percentage of the rest of the yahoo-stock-owning world needs to be convinced that microsoft is the future for Yahoo. The stock holders decide the board. For hostile takeovers, Microsoft needs to control more than 50% of the stock. That’s a lot easier to get to if 25% of all yahoo stock is already under your control.

I’m not streetwise enough in the finance sector to actually figure out if microsoft has front companies and if those are buying yahoo stock right now. However, if you have a vested interest in the Microhoo future, that’s where I’d look to see if Microsoft threw in the towel or if its just switching tactics.

Last weekend it was time for the third Barcamp here in London, a.k.a. BarcampLondon3. The location was the beautiful Google Office in London and the organization was brilliant (thank you Ian!). Besides all the nice food, the games of Werewolf, and riding the Google Segway, we also had some moments to present our talks. I actually knew what to present before I went, which made it easier to follow some of the other talks going on without the need to build on my own presentation.

At BarcampBerlin2 I had spoken about Yahoo Pipes and noticed that not too many people knew about Yahoo Pipes at all. Many people that had missed my talk there happened to be attending the Barcamp in London and so I decided to hold the same talk, but presenting it is as more of a walk-through/hints-and-tips session. It turned out to become quite an interesting session, with people ranging from newbies on the topic to people like Ian Forrester that I had a discussion with on the practical uses of Pipes and what was needed to make it realy handy as a tool for commercial developers.

Click To Play

I don’t have slides except for these here which I used at Barcamp Berlin, but lucky for you Tom Morris has recorded my talk on video. The quality is not brilliant and sadly you can’t see what is on the screen, but if you use my previous post on Yahoo Pipes and the slideshow as a reference I think it can be interesting to watch.

This article was originally posted on 23 November 2007 on Cristiano’s own blog. This article is technical but not necessarily complete on the details, keep that in mind. Further more, this article served as the basis for Cristiano’s BarcampLondon3 talk.

So, as you might have noticed I build my own little copy of a Lifestream, much like Jeremy Keith (Adactio) did on his website. Although it is fun to build a lifestream, it isn’t the simplest thing to do, so I took a different approach to use mine and build one using Yahoo Pipes.

The cool thing of using Yahoo Pipes is that my Lifestream is all Javascript+HTML and no server side logic (a.k.a. PHP). I gave a little talk during BarcampBerlin2 explaining what I did, but in the next few paragraphs I will hopefully explain with a bit more detail how it was exactly done, and also focus on some quirks of Yahoo Pipes that I had to work around.

[Next up: Combine Your Blog Posts]

As anyone was supposed to, I gave a quick presentation during Barcamp Berlin. I decided to give a quick how-to about using Yahoo Pipes to make a lifestream like this. In the end I think it would have been more interesting to just have talked about Yahoo Pipes in general as the most people didn’t get what and how Yahoo Pipes works. An hour was way to long for my standard talk anyway so the ability to show people how Pipes works was a real joy. Below are the slides I used, and I will put on a post explaining my presentation in a bit more words soon.  

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I decided to attend the first London Hackday last weekend. I actually didn’t know what to expect, but in the end it was a lot of fun. This article covers the event, the hacks created and my own progress on a little project I have been working on for a while.

The Hackday Concept

The idea of a London Hackday was taken from the Open Hack Day held at the Yahoo! offices in California in 2006. The basic concept is much like a BarCamp, where developers are invited to stay and camp at the premises for a 2 day experience. Where BarCamp focuses on presentations, Hackday is a concept that tends to lean towards “hacking stuff together” using the organizers API’s.

In 2006, the organizer was Yahoo!, but in London we also had the BBC as an organizer. The BBC has a backstage department that focuses on making their data (schedules, history, casts, etc) available to developers under a “do-no-evil/non-commercial”-license. The existence of this department should be a great example to other (read: Dutch) broadcasters.

A Lightning Experience

When I arrived at the venue (Alexandra Palace) I decided to hang out with the regulars like Dan W., Thomas Scott, and Guy West. After defeating Tom in a game of Halo2 on the big screen we were in for a surprise as we heard a bang the size of a bomb. The roof vents opened soon after this and everyone was surprised. What happened? We got struck by lightning!

Unfortunately, the roof vents had opened and couldn’t be closed for a while as no-one seemed to know how. And with thunder comes rain, so we all had to leave the hall before being washed away by rain. We spent a couple of hours in a smaller area of the building before we could move back, but the rest of the day was filled with jokes about the lightning strike. Later on I found out that Alexandra Palace wasn’t hit by lightning since 1920, and last weekend we were hit twice!

Hacking Away

Once we claimed the main area back, we started hacking away. Originally half the first day was filled with presentations about various Yahoo and BBC API’s but I kind of missed these in the lightning debacle. Strangely I also missed what FireEagle was (can anyone tell me?).

I started off a bit slow, discussing ideas with Dan and Tom while the WiFi remained extremely unstable. The WiFi has become very unstable since the lightning strike, but somehow it took 15 people of BT and Cisco running around to get it fixed. Somehow this didn’t prove to me that these are skilled companies. After a couple of hours the WiFi was finally up and running and we could start making our hacks for real. (Un)fortunately this was right about the time that someone managed to get a copy of the episode of Doctor Who of that evening, which we then all went to watch on the big screen. I must say that Doctor Who works pretty well on the big screen!
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