Microsoft and Yahoo break up again, eBay's PayPal mandate is halted by the Australian government, and Barack Obama is winning the election. Online anyway. Welcome to Loaded, coming to you this week from San Francisco! Its Monday, June 16, I'm Natali Del Conte and its time to get Loaded.
Microsoft and Yahoo each issued statements saying that they are NOT going to work together late last week. Again. This on-again, off-again relationship is getting exhausting but Yahoo put the nail in the coffin by signing a search-revenue deal with Google. Microsoft will want no part of that so I think we've seen the last of this courtship. Now Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang is sitting in a very hot seat. Dan Farber has some insight on the whole thing, so head on over to read it at news.com.
Dell released details about their small and cheap laptop offering and they're calling it the Dell E. Interesting choice, don't you think? It will come in a 9 and 12-nch version and pricing will start at $299. Meanwhile, Asus released pricing for their own new line of EEE PCs. These are the 9 and 10 inch versions and they will cost between $599 and $649. We still don't have a release date for the US but it is supposed to hit shelves in the UK in July.
MySpace is supposed to get a makeover this week. The company said that it will be a significant change but you'll still be able to recognize it as MySpace. New design will apply to the homepage, navigation tools, profile editor, search features, and the MySpaceTV player. They've been talking about doing this for months now. Hopefully this improvement speeds up load times for all those feature-rich profiles.
The Australian government may not let eBay get away with mandating that users use PayPal. In April, eBay told users it was going to force them to use PayPal for all transactions in Australia. Now the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has issued a draft notice proposing to revoke that mandate. The commission claims that it is anti-competitive. eBay's requirement would go into effect on Tuesday and the government is asking them to suspend final transition. We'll keep our eye down under to see what happens.
John McCain wants you to blog for him. The Arizona senator has a bloggers help page on his Web site that directs you to political blogs and encourages readers to go to bat for him in the comment sections. He also has information that bloggers themselves can use in their own editorial. Despite these efforts, a new study by the Pew Research Center shows that Barack Obama has far more supporters online than McCain does. The survey showed that 65 percent of users who are looking for political news and information are Obama supporters, while only 56 percent are McCain backers. It also shows that Democrats outpace Republicans in monetary donations, social networking, online video, and email campaigns. It could be argued that this is because the tech-savvy skew Democratic. What do you think of this? Ring in at loaded@cnet.com.
You can now upload, view, and share PDF files in Google Docs. This is something that users have been wanting for a long time. Like most PDF files, you can't edit them but you can copy and paste text from them, which is convenient.
At last week's Steve Jobs keynote, the CEO of Loopt said he was excited to bring his service to the iPhone. But there are still more BlackBerry users than iPhone users so the company is releasing the service for BlackBerry too. Loopt is a location service that allows you to see where your friends and family are on a map. Its kind of like the Marauders Map. If you're a Harry Potter fan, you know what that means.
Those are all of your headlines for today. Thank you for watching! I'm Natali Del Conte with CNET TV and you've just been Loaded.
