Buzz Report: Microsoft wants Yahoo's baby Video

Buzz Report: Microsoft wants Yahoo's baby Video Transcript

[Intro Music] Announcer: Hi, I'm Molly Wood and welcome to the Buzz Report. This week more on MicroHoo, Honda's crime spotting and Cooley takes on iTunes tagging. First let's get to the headlines. An update in the Microsoft Yahoo soap opera, things are getting serious. Microsoft gave yahoo an ultimatum this week saying that Yahoo better come to the table by this Saturday or get ready for a proxy fight because damn it Microsoft's getting older too and it wants to have a baby. Honda is rolling out GPS technology in Japan that will download local crime figures to your car. Japanese drivers can already get real time information like weather and where to find an open parking spot, but the crime figures would tell drivers whether their cars are likely to be stolen if they park in those spots. I offered to try out the system to see if it would be a hit in the US, but I live in Oakland and that made it explode. This week Microsoft notified people who bought songs from MSN music that they wouldn't be able to transfer that music to new computers or devices after August thirty first. That's because the DRM server that authorizes the songs is being taken offline. In an interview with News.com, Microsoft exec Rob Bennett said it was the labels that made Microsoft sell the music wrapped in DRM in the first place and besides, he said, hardly anybody bought music from MSN music anyway. Which is true. I mean their big marketing coo was contestant performances from Rock Star INXS and let's be honest, right? The folks who bought those songs have probably been begging for reasons like let them expire. Don't ask me how I know that. Okay, let's have a quick look at what's clogging the tubes. [Sound Clip] It's South Park studios.com. The South Park website was updated about a month ago with full episodes available for free streaming and it's taking off like wildfire. I know because no one's done any work around the CNET office in weeks and you though hoolo [phonetic] was bad. I mean most people weren't even watching South Park and now look. And finally, let's finish off with our regularly occurring segment, What The Hell with Brian Cooley. Brian: You hear something great on the radio and you want to remember to go buy the music. What do you do? You pull out these and one of these and you write down the artist, track and title name, if you can even figure it out. That's pretty sad it the twenty first century, don't you think? So along comes the supposed answer. iTunes tagging. You do it with one of these new HD radios out, when you hear something you can't live without, you hit this button right here which sends the tag to your iPod docked, well it should be docked right there. If it's not, the tag gets stored in the radio, then you have to bring your iPod over, dock it here and then the tags get transferred to the iPod. Then the iPod comes out of the radio, goes over to your computer, reconnect it there and sync it with iTunes. Now, the tag is transferred to iTunes. The iTunes store gets a word about it and tells you we have the song, hopefully, that you wanted, do you want to buy it now? You do that and then you resync and the song is now on your iPod. Now you take a little nap. What the hell is that? This is basically sneaker net for the iPod, about as elegant as a Pontica Aztec. Either of these HD tagging radios need their own network connection or the iPods do. Meanwhile, I'm going to keep using an established multi layered technology that incorporates the visual yellow spectrum. These. Announcer: I'm Molly Wood and this has been the Buzz Report. Thanks for watching.