How do you add $3 billion to your companies worth in these times of crisis? Easy, just get Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer to make a hint that he’s going to buy your company. Thats exactly what has just happened to Yahoo when Steve made a comment at Gartner ITXpo that a Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo would “make sense economically” to each other’s shareholders. After this comment the Yahoo stock soared to $13.73 which is over a 15% rise and has added over $3 billion in market cap. Yahoo is going to wish they accepted the original offer of $33 a share though as Steve Ballamer said that Yahoo is no longer worth the original offer stating that the company “probably thinks its still worth as least as much today,” as when Microsoft made its offer.”

According to an internal email sent to the Engadget staff the site served up a massive 14 Million views on Tuesday October 4th. This was the day of the Apple announcements for their new Macbooks and of those 14 million page views 1.3 million of them were unique visitors meaning that each visitor looked at 10 pages or more likely refreshed the browser 10 times waiting for the announcements. Even so this is quite amazing traffic and I hope for their sake they monetized all that extra traffic or it will all have been for nothing, especially when they have been named the official blog of CES it will be interesting to see the traffic they get from the event If you want to read the email check it out on TechCrunch

Wordpress or more specifically Automattic, the people behind wordpress have acquired polldaddy which will allow wordpress to have an inbuilt polling system already in the codebase instead of having to install a plugin. Polldaddy offers a range of different features that aren’t seen in other polling systems such as tracking individual votes and adding pictures and video to polls and surveys. Automattic seem to be on an acquisition spree at the moment, acquiring companies that will add features to Wordpress without them having to build their own. Auttomattic recently purchased IntenseDebate, a commenting tool to allow threaded comments and the ability to track comments over multiple blogs. It also bought Buddy Press, a social networking tool for wordpress and Gravatar which is a universal avatar system.

A new iPhone application has emerged called RjDj its a music application that takes sounds from the iPhone’s inbuilt microphone and turns them into a dynamic sound track. There are 6 different “scenes” that each do something different, there is a sample and loop based scenes where you make a noise and the application will constantly repeat it which you can layer with other sounds. Another “Scene” is one that reacts to the accelerometer, so when you are jumping around the base line will react accordingly. And the last one I’m going to mention is the one that listens to the environment you are in and changes the music accordingly so if you are in a quite environment the tune will be basic and quite while if you are in a more complex environment such as in a shopping mall the sound will be loud and complex I think this is a great little app and is even starting its own “reactive” music genre, I look forward to future updates both from this app and other apps that can build on what has been started here. If you want to download the paid app click here where as you can ...

Google are all about innovating, so what can they do different for locking and unlocking the android phone? Google are implementing a pattern unlocking system where you draw a pattern over the 9 dots on the screen to unlock your phone. This pattern can be anywhere between 4 and 9 dots and follows the bellow rules: Needs to be at least 4 dots Lit dots cannot be reused Knight moves can be used Moving over a dot lights it Can use already lit dots to reach another For a full list of the 4 dot patterns click here (Link doesn't work in IE) Using these rules the phone will be potentially vastly more secure than the 4 digit pin code on the iPhone as there are a total of 389,112 combinations where as the 4 digit system has 10,000 combinations. But whats the problem? Well the flaw with this system is the human body and what it produces, when dragging your finger on a touch screen you leave an oily substance on the screen which someone picking up the phone will be able to use to find out the password. Check out the video bellow for an explanation of how the unlock system works

Microsoft have finally announced the name of the upcoming Windows release, it’s going to be called wait for it... Windows 7. It’s a pretty boring name really and windows hasn’t been called its build number since Windows 3 but on the Microsoft blog they have stated that going back to the new naming system is because of simplicity. They tried dates, 95, 98 and 2000 but they don’t release new versions often enough to justify naming Windows versions after their year. Microsoft have also tried “aspirational” names such as XP and Vista but couldn’t come up with a name suitable for the new version. Personally I liked the names of XP and Vista they didn’t have any meaning but rolled off the tongue and sounded cool to say not only that but people knew what you were talking about, with this new version you are going to have to say “Windows 7” and not just “7” which may be a branding move from Microsoft.

The PSP-3000 is due to being launched next Tuesday but engadget got a sneak peak when a reader sent in some unboxing pics. If I’m honest though I much prefer the old design this new rounded design one looks bulky and the silver plastic covering looks very cheap. The photos are taken from weird angles though so I’m hoping that the photo doesn’t justify the actual PSP. Especially when you look at old side by side comparisons where they look pretty much the same expect with better screen. There were some worries about the new PSP early last month about the new screen draining all the battery life when John Koller, the director of hardware marketing for Sony admitted it in an interview. This was sorted out pretty quickly though as Koller went back on what he said saying that the PSP-3000 will have the same battery life as the old model.