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The take-away from his speech, according to a Reuters report: Microsoft never viewed its proposed acquisition of Yahoo as strategic.

Here are Ballmer’s exact words, per Reuters:

In other words, Redmond was prepared to pay tens of billions of dollars for a non-strategic acquisition? An acquisition that would, by far, be the largest in its history? Very interesting comments, indeed.

“Yahoo was never the strategy we were pursuing, it was a way to accelerate our online advertising business,” he said. “We will spend money on some acquisitions. You can do a whole lot of things with 50 billion dollars.”

Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer made a few revealing comments Friday while speaking at a technology conference in Moscow.

Rounding a Yahoo acquisition up to $50 billion would have put it in the high $34-a-share range. Yahoo, though, was looking for something more along the lines of $37.

Yahoo may find it interesting that Ballmer rounded up his multibillion figure. When Microsoft walked away from the negotiating table on May 3, it was offering $33 per Yahoo share–making that offer worth about $47.5 billion.

The two companies have since re-entered talks, but not for a whole-hog takeover. Instead, Microsoft is now looking at acquiring certain Yahoo assets, including its search business.

I’ve worked a little with Dave at various conferences, as well as with the Startonomics conference producer, Debbie Landa. (Her company runs the Under the Radar conferences where I often moderate start-up pitch presentations.) I like what these people are doing with this conference, and I think more entrepreneurs should pay attention to the message.

However, you can’t overthink things or dawdle. Release early, watch the right metrics, and revise. McClure points to Slideshare and Teachstreet as companies that are working this way. (He’s invested in both companies.) Who’s doing it wrong? “Anyone who takes longer than a year to ship,” he says. Examples of this include Chandler and Trillian’s Astra. By being late, they are missing their market windows. The world’s moved past them.

McClure’s main point is that when you’re building a new service, you want to think about “conversion events,” in other words, moving users from one state to the next (from browsing to exploring, exploring to buying, etc.). That has nothing to do with releasing features.

There’s a conference coming up that focuses on measuring and improving the user experience: Startonomics, October 2 in San Francisco. The conference will be run by Dave McClure, an entrepreneur, investor, and familiar face to Web 2.0 conference goers.

One of the things that impressed me most during my interview with Mint CEO Aaron Patzer was his focus on iterative development and rigorously testing new features before they are rolled out. As I’ve said, most of the Web 2.0 companies I see focus on building new features more than they do on analyzing what their users are actually doing with them. It’s crazy. It’s like they all work at Microsoft in 1996.

Here’s McClure’s five-minute start-up pirate talk. He says this is the pitch that has morphed into the day-long conference.

Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer stepped onstage Thursday to tell an assembly of Wall Street analysts and reporters that, Yahoo or no Yahoo, the company plans to continue to invest until it achieves greater scale in online services.

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Today’s stories:

Scrabble maker Hasbro sues over “Scrabulous”

Sprint Nextel sells cell towers to reduce debt

Mark Stevens

Listen now:

Microsoft: Windows 7 on track

Study: Vista still struggling to gain business users

Speaking of Yahoo, CNET News’ Leslie Katz interviews Mark Stevens, author of King Icahn: The Biography of a Renegade Capitalist, to find out what has pushed this activist investor to challenge the powers that be. And Webware’s Rafe Needleman wraps context around Facebook’s bevy of announcements, including the social-networking company’s renewed commitment to engage its development community.

Zimbra Desktop gives Yahoo Mail offline access

(Credit:
CNET)

We’re told that Q1 of next year is when we finally see the fruit of Dell and Alienware’s first full collaboration, so think CES 2009 or thereabouts. As for what happens with XPS, Dell told us that it will retain the brand as a luxury line, but it won’t be tailored to gaming. Its XPS One all-in-one desktop is a good example of what Dell has in mind for XPS moving forward.

The new face of Dell gaming.

The Wall Street Journal reported this morning on Dell’s plan to stop competing with itself. Rather than selling both high-end XPS gaming PCs as well as similar products from Alienware (which it acquired in 2006), Dell will shift all of its gaming energies at Alienware, including providing Dell R&D resources. As the Journal also noted, this shift will mirror the move that Hewlett-Packard made when it acquired Voodoo, although in that case HP immediately involved Voodoo in developing HP’s BlackBird 002. The Dell-Alienware relationship has seen each brand operate under its own silo, with little product development cooperation thus far.

Masters.org's online coverage

To mark its 72nd year, Augusta is turning up the heat on its online presence. With partner IBM, Augusta National is offering a rich online experience for golf lovers. While the online coverage still does not rival what is offered currently on broadcast TV, it’s great for the times in which national TV is not covering the event, or for sneaking a peek at work.

I really have to applaud The Masters on this Web offering. This sort of online content is very unexpected from an organization like Augusta National, which is notorious for the control that it demands over live TV broadcasts of the tournament.

Over time, I think that it is safe to assume that we will see complete coverage of the tournament online, since it has been steadily adding streams since the service debuted. Rounding out the online offering is a nice slide-out, customizable leaderboard, with live stats.

This is not the first year for online coverage of The Masters. They debuted the service back in 2006, but it’s been improved upon and tweaked to the state that we see it in today. Unfortunately, the available video streams are limited to Amen Corner (holes 11, 12, and 13) and an additional stream of holes 15 and 16.

For those of you who have tuned out the golf world, the most prestigious tournament in golf, The Masters, is this weekend.

Online coverage of sports is a very exciting field, with a lot of potential. I think that this will become really clear when we see the Silverlight-powered online coverage of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing this summer. With a wealth of options for viewing video, side by side with statistics and a variety of other information, services such as this one from The Masters, the 2008 Olympics, and MLB.tv are taking the experience of watching sports online to the next level.

If that’s deja vu you’re feeling, you’re not the only one. In 2003, Dell jumped into music biz with its own player. Three years later, it jumped out, with around a 3 percent share of the market. It was one of several disappointing and ultimately abandoned consumer efforts, including forays into televisions and handheld computing devices (though there are reports that Dell may get back into the mobile market).

The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that Dell for the last few months has been testing a digital music player that could go on sale as early as September. The story (which will surely serve as a nice trial balloon for Dell’s marketers) says the music player could sell for less than $100. It will use Wi-Fi to connect to third-party music services.

Then again, Dell could decide to do nothing at all. That’s what trial balloons are for. But it’s hard to imagine Dell or any other PC maker sitting by forever as Apple becomes more and more entrenched in home entertainment.

That online music market must be awfully tempting catnip to Michael Dell.

There are plenty of potential partners for Dell, of course. The company already has ties to music services from Pandora and Rhapsody. And MySpace Music, a major music service that’s expected to launch in September with music from at least three of the four major record labels, could also be a major partner, though the Journal article doesn’t mention it.

Could it be different this time around? While it’s hard to imagine Dell posing a real threat to the
iPod’s more than 70-percent share of the digital music player market, never say never. The software behind Dell’s device came from Zing, a small company Dell acquired a year ago, according to the WSJ. Dell’s music software could also come pre-installed on new Dell PCs. An excerpt from the story:

Software would connect the device to an online subscription service that Dell expects to launch later this year. Through licensing agreements with online music providers, Dell’s new service will let consumers download songs and move them between devices like PCs and cell phones. While the device Dell is testing is focused on playing music, Dell’s new service also would allow movies to be downloaded and displayed on PCs, for example. Pricing for the new service hasn’t been determined.

(Credit:
Dell)

Dell may get back in on the music action.

Heremans’ group has also more than doubled the efficiency rating with which the previously most efficient thermoelectric material could convert heat into electricity, from 0.71 to 1.5.

The development could have a direct application for converting
car engine exhaust heat into electricity, according to a statement from the university.

The invention’s story is also an example of how scientific breakthroughs are really the culmination of many people’s efforts over long periods of time.

Heremans credits a breakthrough development published in 2006 by researchers at Michigan State University on the quantum mechanics of thallium and tellurium with directly inspiring him after 10 years to try a new approach to producing this type of material. Testing of the new thermoelectric material was a collaborative effort between Heremans’s group and scientists at the California Institute of Technology and Osaka University.

Researchers at Ohio State University have invented a new material that can generate electricity from heat in hot machine environments at an unprecedented rate.

The new material is called thallium-doped lead telluride.

The group, led by Joseph Heremans, Ohio Eminent Scholar in Nanotechnology at Ohio State University, developed a material that is effective between 450 and 950 degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature range for most car engines.

“The material does all the work. It produces electrical power just like conventional heat engines–steam, gas, or diesel engines–that are coupled to electrical generators, but it uses electrons as the working fluids instead of water or gases, and makes electricity directly,” Heremans said in a statement to the press.

Details on the physics behind how the thallium-doped lead telluride was developed can be found in the journal Science.

Using thermoelectric materials for generating power is not new. It is the group’s improvements on this type of alloy that are newsworthy.

Project Guru is in pilot release with select partners and is planned for pilot release to customers in the second half of the year, Symantec said.

Project Guru lets people diagnose problems on remote computers over the Web.

Symantec is showing a demo on Tuesday at the Demo 2009 conference in Palm Desert, Calif., of a Web-based tool that allows tech savvy people to provide remote support to friends and family having computer problems.

Are you sick of trying to diagnose your friends’ computer problems over the phone?

The software uses that same internally developed technology as Symantec’s Software as a Service Online Remote Access offering and is complementary to NortonLive PC help services, which offers round-the-clock phone support.

Project Guru allows a user to connect remotely to another computer to troubleshoot and correct problems, with the connection secured using encryption and authentication. The tool offers diagnostic tools for network monitoring and identifying software installed on the remote computer.

(Credit:
Symantec)

The start-up announced an initial funding round of $10 million in January with investors including LinkedIn Chairman Reid Hoffman and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.

Zynga, which specializes in games for social-networking sites, has received $29 million in a new funding round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Institutional Venture Partners.

Zynga, based in San Francisco and started by Tribe.net social-network founder Mark Pincus, added that Bing Gordon, a Kleiner Perkins partner and former chief creative officer of Electronic Arts, is joining Zynga’s board. Zynga also announced its acquisition of YoVille, which it describes as the “largest virtual world game on social networks.”

The service, which boasts 18 million monthly visitors, makes money through ads and selling customers add-ons to the games.

The round, announced Wednesday, also includes funding from previous investors Union Square Ventures, Foundry Group, and Avalon Ventures.

Zynga’s social games include a poker match that lets players send virtual drinks to friends. According to its site, Zynga also offers other casino games, word games, role-playing, and board games.

“Our tests found that leaving a PlayStation 3 on while not in use would cost…almost five times more than it would take to run a refrigerator for the same yearly period,” Choice wrote in its study.

And no, not using them is not enough. As the Australian researchers at Choice found, the machines continue to gobble up power, even when they’re in stand-by mode.

The PlayStation 3 was found by an Australian research group to be one of the most power-hungry consumer electronics devices in the world, even when in stand-by mode.

If you’re aiming to be green these days, I’m afraid I have to counsel you to turn the power off on your next-generation video game console.

According to Reuters, an Australian research firm has concluded that machines like Sony’s
PlayStation 3 and Microsoft’s
Xbox 360 lead the field when it comes to consumer electronics that consume the most power.

(Credit:
Sony Computer Entertainment of America)

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.

The PS3 topped Choice’s list, followed by the Xbox and then plasma flat-screen TVs, Reuters reported.