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Google has invested US$10 million in BrightSource as part of the Internet firms’s RE>C initiative. According to news.com and ValleyWag, BrightSource builds solar thermal facilities and sells the generated electricity to commercial customers and electricity. The generation system is cost-effective during peak periods of the day.

Google’s data center use large quantities of electricity, so Google.org has been awarding grants to suppliers of renewable energy technologies such as solar, thermal and wind.

Google also announced today that it is hiring a Head of Renewable Energy to supervise the company’s research & development programs. The company already invested in eSolar and Makani Power - see this Google web page more details and links.

The Honolulu Advertiser reported yesterday that Pacific LightNet has been sold to a group of mainland and local investors. Current president pat Bustamente is in the investment group. All 95 current employees will be retained.

The company had been controlled by a Japanese firm called Tomen. This prevented PLNI from bidding on many state and Federal contracts. LightNet will become a more competitive firm in the local telecom market.

PLNI has 25,000 business customers and over than 6,000 Internet subscribers in the state of Hawaii, and provides colocation, broadband Internet, VoIP, long distance calling and other services. According to the company’s web site, its telecommunication infrastructure in Hawaii includes over 10,000 miles of terrestrial and undersea fiber-optic cable connecting the six major islands.

The sale price was not disclosed in the 15 February 2008 filing with the Hawaii Public Utility Commission.

Cisco Systems, the world’s largest network equipment company, has released its largest switch ever. The Nexus 7000 can move 15 terabytes of data per second, and is designed to connect distant data centers together. According to Forbes, that is fast enough to move the entire Wikipedia in about 40 seconds. The 1-meter tall box will require special cabling and cost US$200,000 a year to maintain and operate.

As companies move their servers and data storage into larger data centers, these types of switches are necessary. The continued growth of web-based applications is also supporting this trend. Networks are a lot like plumbing, but there’s only a finite amount of water on the planet. The amount of data produced and stored continues to grow.

According to a Reuters article, John Chambers, the long-time CEO of Cisco, believes network growth will continues at a fast pace for the next ten years as ISPs and data centers add capacity.

Early Sunday, I saw this on a BoingBoing article: Google legal counsel David Drummond has released a statement that criticizes the proposed merger as anticompetitive. Here’s a New York Times article about the announcement. Google claims that Microsoft would use Yahoo to push proprietary solutions. Microsoft has a long history of developing and implementing its own extensions to Internet standards.

Elizabeth Montalbano of NetworkWorld had similar concerns in her article. She and the Register point out that Microsoft is really buying Yahoo’s computing platform and user base, partly because Microsoft’s Internet presence ls ineffective.

Of course, both companies have different cultures. One uniting factor may be their mutual envy of Google, as discussed in this BusinessWeek article.

This is not a “done deal” by any means

Yahoo’s board will most likely resist the buyout offer, which may give the Federal government and the EU more time to raise their objections. BusinessWeek has a good summary of the potential challenges to the proposed purchase in this article.

Even if Microsoft does actually purchase Yahoo, victory is not assured. As Joe Nocera of the New York Times pointed out in his article today, Microsoft’s online division is the only one of the company’s five strategic business units (SBUs) that loses money. Adding Yahoo may not stem the flood of red ink.

See my Friday, 1 February 2008 post and comments about the proposed Microsoft purchase of Yahoo for more information and links.

As I told my IS 7010 class last night, Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo. Microsoft made the announcement this morning (AP, New York Times, ValleyWag, BoingBoing). The offer is almost US$45 billion in cash, or $31 per share.

Note: I didn’t discuss this story with anyone I know at Microsoft (MSFT) or Yahoo (YHOO) , and I don’t own stock in either company.

This deal has been anticipated for almost a year now, ever since former Yahoo CEO Terry Semel spurned another Microsoft offer to purchase Yahoo. Microsoft needs Yahoo’s technology, user base and web properties to battle Google. Here’s a 10 January 2008 blog article that discussed a few aspects of an anticipated merger, and a response that more or less said such a deal was a fantasy.

As the New York Times points out, this offer is well-timed. If Yahoo doesn’t come to terms quickly, Microsoft can pursue a hostile takeover through several means, including a board takeover at Yahoo’s June annual meeting.

Yahoo has lost its yodel

Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang took over as the company’s CEO last year. He hasn’t helped a great deal, but he may be one of the few Yahoo CXOs to remain after Microsoft cleans house. Co-Founder David Filo will go to work in Microsoft’s data center division. As ValleyWag points out, if Microsoft wanted to keep the remaining CXOs, this would have been a friendly takeover offer.

This BusinessWeek article is mild compared to other criticism of Yahoo that I had read in the Wall Street Journal, SearchEngineLand and Screenwerk.

The company had previously announced that it was laying off 1000 employees. Financial results were below expectations, and the online advertising market is in flux. Yahoo depends on ad revenue to fund its acquisitions, but Microsoft, Google and other companies have been more aggressive.

Yahoo is also losing a significant chunk of its guaranteed revenue from AT&T’s residential DSL business. A new web advertising deal for AT&T’s mobile network may cushion the blow. Yang promised a plan to renew Yahoo within his first 100 days. After 200 days, stakeholders are still waiting.

Microsoft needs Yahoo’s position in web advertising, and could easily absorb Yahoo’s large international user community. After that, it’s a sorting process that’s similar to what HP did with Compaq. There is a great deal of overlap between the Microsft’s and Yahoo’s web services, including search, webmail, IM, online images, social bookmarking, and news. I’m sure Microsoft’s CXOs have an initial plan, but the merger – if it does happen – would take 2 years before the dust settles. SearchEngineLand has posted a long article that discusses what might happen in each business unit.

In a way, I’m almost sad to see Yahoo in play. I still use my first Yahoo ID, which has a space character in it. Yahoo fixed that hole a few months after I set up that account in 1996.

The company was the first major commercial Internet search portal, but it’s best days were in the 20th century. I have often used Yahoo’s main page as an example of cluttered web design and as a symbol of an overly broad corporate strategy. MSN.com’s main page isn’t much better.