In a statement published on its corporate blog, David Shannon, the company’s corporate counsel, said that “it’s not practical to build silicon or systems to address every part of the expanding market. Adopting a new business approach will allow us to address the universe of devices.” He said Nvidia had licensed an earlier GPU core to Sony for use on the Playstation 3, and Intel pays it $250 million a year in licensing fees as the result of a settlement of a lawsuit in 2011.

At least part of this can be attributed to Nvidia’s hiring of Bob Feldstein from rival Advanced Micro Devices. Feldstein was one of a batch of AMD execs who bolted for greener pastures in 2012.

Feldstein’s job at AMD was to run licensing for its ATI graphics chips, and that technology landed in Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Nintendo’s Wii, among other consoles.

“This is the right time for Nvidia to be doing this, too,” said analyst Patrick Moorhead of MoorInsights and Strategy and a former AMD exec. “Nvidia’s Kepler-based graphics give them the best competitive hand. I could very well see an Apple and Samsung interested in their graphics patents.” He also sees Nvidia technology being used in smart TVs, which so far haven’t been much of priority for the company.

One company likely to be hurt by the move, he said, is Imagination Technologies, which provides most of the licensable graphics for smartphones, a key target of today’s move.

Earlier today, Icahn proposed that Dell offer to buy back as many as 1.1 billion shares of the company in a self-tender offer, at a price of $14 a share. He also announced that he’d purchased more than 72 million shares from his partner in the proxy fight, Southeastern Management, making Icahn Dell’s second-largest shareholder, behind Michael Dell.

The committee went on to say that there’s not enough financing, nor any remedy for the company and its shareholders if the transaction Icahn proposes fails. The plan also doesn’t address the liquidity issues that the committee raised in response to Icahn’s last proposal, it said.

The committee went on to say that the latest proposal appears to offer shareholders a smaller special dividend of $10 a share, versus the prior proposal of $12. Also, stockholders would end up with shares in a still-publicly-held Dell that would have a lot of debt on its books. “Icahn’s current concept would likely force shareholders to continue to own shares in the highly leveraged company that would result,” the committee’s letter said.

“In the absence of an actionable proposal that would create more value for shareholders, the special committee continues to recommend the pending, fully financed $13.65 per share cash sale transaction” proposed by CEO Michael Dell and private equity firm Silver Lake Partners.

The offer would be 35 cents per share higher than the $13.65 offered by CEO Michael Dell and the private equity firm Silver Lake Partners.

Icahn also disclosed that he has purchased more than 72 million Dell shares from Southeastern Asset management, the Memphis-based investment fund that is Dell’s largest outside shareholder. That purchase makes Icahn Dell’s largest shareholder, with 152 million shares, amounting to about 8.7 percent of shares outstanding, and second only to Michael Dell himself.

Dell shares rose slightly to $13.46 a share.

Icahn was reported last week to be close to taking his chips off the table and walking away from the fight. He and Southeastern had previously proposed a plan to recapitalize Dell, leave some of the company trading publicly in a so-called stub, and offering shareholders a special $12-per-share dividend financed by existing cash and new debt.

The special committee of Dell’s board has criticized the Icahn plan, saying it suffers from a liquidity gap of about $4 billion.

In his latest letter, Icahn says that funding for the tender offer would be provided from $5.2 billion in debt financing plus $7.5 billion in cash that Dell has on hand, combined with $2.9 billion that would come from the sale of Dell receivables.

This would, he argues, leave $4.9 billion worth of cash to fund Dell’s ongoing operations.

He also said: “We are proceeding to obtain commitments for $5.2 billion of senior debt financing to be made available to Dell as a bridge loan to guaranty the tender offer and believe that we are on target to achieve that result. A major investment bank has indicated its willingness to make available $1.6 billion and Carl Icahn and his affiliates would make available $2 billion if necessary to facilitate this commitment.”

Update: CNBC just reported that the investment bank behind the $1.6 billion in financing is Jeffries.

The proxy vote is now exactly 30 days away, and it’s worth remembering that proxy advisory firms Institutional Shareholders Services and Glass Lewis have yet to weigh in on the deal, because, as I argued on Sunday, their opinions will carry a lot of weight with institutional shareholders.

Here’s the statement I just received from Southeastern:

“Southeastern Asset Management continues to believe that the Michael Dell / Silver Lake management buyout proposal undervalues the company and its prospects going forward.

“Southeastern and Icahn Associates have been working diligently to provide a better alternative for shareholders. Southeastern has determined that Icahn is in the best position to lead the development of an alternative transaction and to generate a better outcome for shareholders. Southeastern has therefore agreed to sell approximately 72,010,328 shares to Icahn, making Icahn the largest outside shareholder of Dell.

“Southeastern intends to vote its approximately 72,010,328 remaining shares of Dell stock against the $13.65 Michael Dell / Silver Lake management buyout proposal. Furthermore, Southeastern intends to vote its shares at Dell’s Annual Meeting in favor of the slate of highly qualified director candidates it and Icahn submitted to the Company. Icahn has Southeastern’s full support as it leads the proxy fight in the interest of all shareholders against the undervalued management buyout proposal. Southeastern will continue to participate in the proxy contest with Icahn to defeat the Michael Dell / Silver Lake management buyout proposal.”

Sources familiar with the situation and thinking behind the move tell AllThingsD that Bradley has told HP CEO Meg Whitman, “firmly and emphatically,” that he has not been contacted by Dell.

This view has been confirmed by sources at Dell, who say there is “no job” for Bradley at that company.

The speculation is understandable. Bradley is a respected senior executive who was once CEO of Palm and has been considered a favored candidate for HP’s top job no fewer than three times. During the period when former CEO Léo Apotheker was planning to spin out HP’s PC operations, it was hard to find people betting that Bradley wouldn’t be its CEO. At one time, he was even on the list of candidates to replace Paul Otellini at Intel. The challenging business conditions at Dell — on its way to a $24.4 billion leveraged buyout on which shareholders will vote next month — might represent, some would argue, the perfect opportunity.

Here’s how the rumor — presented now only because, even untrue, it makes a certain amount of sense — breaks down: Bradley might have been in line to be CEO of a newly private Dell, while Michael Dell would return to his role as chairman, which he held from 2004 to 2007. Bradley’s new title at HP — executive VP for Strategic Growth Initiatives — is the sort of nebulous post that occasionally is given to an executive who is short-timing it. It might appear to be something along the lines of the “iffy” product-innovation role that Jon Rubinstein had after he stepped back from running HP’s now-defunct webOS unit, the job he held until he left HP for good last year.

But, on its face, there is nothing “iffy” about Bradley’s new gig, sources tell AllThingsD. HP’s channel relationships — the business it does through a global network of resellers, who in turn sell HP products and services directly to businesses — have been badly frayed in recent years.

It’s a crucial segment, making up as much as 70 percent of HP’s business overall. Channel sales account for about 80 percent of HP’s sales in the Printing and Personal Systems Group, and about 60 percent of sales in the Enterprise Group. Bradley’s brief will be to repair those relationships, especially in China. “Frankly, Bradley has relationships there that Whitman doesn’t have,” said one source familiar with HP’s operations. “If there’s anyone who can do the work to get the channel back on track, it’s Bradley.”

Yet there’s another potentially important clue: HP’s announcement doesn’t name any executives reporting to Bradley in his new role — only that he will be reporting directly to and working with Whitman.

One source familiar with the company’s plans said that will change soon, and Bradley will name key lieutenants in the new effort in the coming weeks. “He will be able to reach across the organization,” one person said. “He doesn’t need many folks to accomplish anything.”

The source also described growing pressure on Bradley and other executives within the Printing and PC unit to show results, despite what has turned out to be a historically bad period for PC sales in particular, one that will eventually lead to a significant retrenchment. In its most recently quarterly filings, HP’s PC unit reported a 21 percent year-on-year decline in sales, from $9.2 billion to $7.3 billion, and saw its profit margin drop from 5.6 percent to 3.3 percent.

“The pressure on Bradley from Meg has been at an all-time high,” one source said.

Bradley didn’t immediately respond to messages.

Whitman said in an interview with AllThingsD last week that she’s happy about the stabilization that has taken place in the printing business in the last year. Printing revenue, at $6 billion, was essentially flat versus last year, while profit margin rose from 13 percent last year to nearly 16 percent. Bradley took over printing from its previous head, Vyomesh “VJ” Joshi, as the result of a significant restructuring in March of 2012.

Whitman is said by sources to want a set of “fresh eyes” on the personal computer business. That’s where Dion Weisler comes in. Currently heading up HP’s printer and PC sales for the Asia, Pacific and Japan region, he has 23 years of IT industry experience running Asian business units for Acer and Lenovo. However, despite that history, he’s considered a bit of an unknown, and has been suddenly elevated to the very top of HP’s operating structure. His role will include a seat on HP’s Executive Council, the most powerful and senior set of executives within the company.

That new role will be executive vice president, Strategic Growth Initiatives. The change comes, notably, after Bradley was mentioned on the list of favored potential CEO candidates to run Dell, by the activist investor Carl Icahn.

HP named Dion Weisler, head of its printing and personal systems in Asia, to run the global unit.

Here’s HP’s announcement:

HP Announces Leadership Change in Printing and Personal Systems

PALO ALTO, Calif., June 18, 2013 — HP today announced that Todd Bradley will step out of his role as executive vice president, Printing and Personal Systems (PPS), HP, to assume a new position at the company—executive vice president, Strategic Growth Initiatives.

In this newly created position, Bradley will work directly with Meg Whitman, HP’s president and chief executive officer, on enhancing HP’s business in China and extending the company’s critical channel partner relationships around the world. Bradley also will work with Whitman on identifying potential partnership opportunities with early-stage companies that can contribute to HP’s long-term growth.

“There’s nothing more important to HP than our channel partners and the future of our business in China,” said Whitman. “I’ve asked Todd to use his expertise to focus on these areas. I’ve also asked him to study the landscape of small companies and startups that could partner with HP to spur growth.”

Under Bradley’s leadership, HP firmly established itself as the No. 1 PC vendor in the world and expanded its worldwide commercial channel partner organization. Bradley also is deeply familiar with HP’s China operations and global supply chain. He received the prestigious Friendship Award from China in 2009, the highest accolade presented to foreign citizens who have made outstanding contributions to China’s development.

Dion Weisler, currently senior vice president for HP PPS in Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ), will step in to Bradley’s role as executive vice president, PPS, HP. He will report to Whitman and join the company’s executive council.

Weisler joined HP in January 2012. He has more than 23 years of experience in the IT industry. Prior to joining HP, Weisler was vice president and chief operating officer of Lenovo’s Product and Mobile Internet Digital Home Groups. Before that, he ran Lenovo’s businesses in Korea, Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and Australia and New Zealand (ANZ). Weisler also enjoyed a successful 11-year career at Acer, where he served as managing director of Acer UK and also helped build Acer’s business in Central and Eastern Europe.

HP also appointed Nick Lazaridis to lead HP PPS—APJ on an acting basis until a permanent replacement is named. Lazaridis is currently chief operating officer of HP PPS—APJ, and is also responsible for the Personal Systems division in the region.

“Dion is one of our very best executives and his background is perfect given the challenges we face in the marketplace,” said Whitman. “Todd has left Dion a great legacy to build on. Today’s announcement is about putting our best qualified leaders into roles focused on restarting HP’s growth. HP is extremely fortunate to have a strong bench to draw on as we rebuild and restore the company.”

Led by Accel’s Pin Li (pictured), the firm announced that it has added two executives — Anthony Deighton, the CTO of QlikView, and Shlomo Kramer, the CEO of data security startup Imperva and the co-founder of Check Point security company — to seats on its Big Data Fund Advisory Council.

I talked with Li on Monday, and he told me that the target with this fund — the first was launched to invest in companies working primarily in the Hadoop ecosystem — is to fund companies working on what he calls “data-driven software.”

If the first wave of big-data investment was about building platforms from the foundation, this wave will be about building the software that actually helps reach the promise of big data. That promise is extracting valuable information that actually helps improve a business, and so far it’s a pretty tall order.

Companies like IBM, Oracle and SAP have thrown their weight and various software platforms behind the idea of big data and analytics. It’s the notion that with vast troves of accumulated business data being gathered as a matter of course, turning computing engines to the task of analyzing it all will yield useful and money-saving or money-making insights that help a business grow. The hardest part is the last bit — extracting value. Li calls it “the last-mile problem.”

“The whole point of doing big data in the first place is to help employees in an enterprise make better decisions,” he said. Many consumer applications — LinkedIn and Facebook are two examples — meet the definition of being “data driven,” in ways that make consumers smarter, Li told me.

The same can’t usually be said of enterprise applications. CRM and ERP applications — two classic enterprise apps — don’t usually deliver any insights by themselves, despite the fact that they generated huge amounts of data that’s directly tied to a company’s operations. “There should be a tighter feedback loop,” Li says. “The user should be getting action items and recommendations for the next thing they should do.” Think real-time insights about the state of your business that you couldn’t get before.

One example of an early investment by the new fund is RelateIQ, which came out of stealth mode last week. Its products draw information about work groups to keep track of the state of those relationships as they change, pulling data from calendars, CRM systems, email messages and so on. As it stands now, most CRM systems require you to enter data about each person manually.

Others that fit the data-driven software idea include Trifacta, in which Accel led a $4.3 million series A investment last year. Another is Sumo Logic, which turns ordinary log files from servers into a gold mine of useful information. Accel led a $30 million series C in that company.

Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com

Oracle sued ServiceKey in the U.S. District Court for Northern California last February, saying that ServiceKey plus a second company had used Oracle software code and access credentials as part of a scheme to sell support services to companies that had no active support contract in place with Oracle itself.

ServiceKey admitted in court that it downloaded, copied and distributed Oracle’s Solaris Operating System, acquired by Oracle when it bought Sun Microsystems in 2010. The company then advertised that it could provide Solaris software patches to customers. It also trafficked in passwords to gain access to Oracle’s customer support website.

Oracle had accused ServiceKey, as IDG News reported last month, of paying Oracle technical support fees for a small number of Solaris machines it owned, but then using those credentials to offer support to its customers.

Oracle will receive no monetary damages as a result of the judgment.

The machine is nicknamed Milky Way 2, but is formally known as Tianhe-2, (the word translates literally as “Sky River”), and was built at China’s National University of Defense Technology. In taking the top spot, it knocked Titan, a machine built at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, off its perch.

Now, before any of you reading in the U.S. get all bummed about the decline of American technical superiority, consider this: Its main computing engine was made in America. Tianhe-2 has 16,000 nodes, each containing two Intel-made Xeon Ivy Bridge processors and three Xeon Phi processors, bringing the total number of computing cores to 3.12 million.

Its total performance is 33.86 petaflops, which means it can conduct 33.86 quadrillion calculations per second. I’ll write that number out so you can see all the zeros: 33,860,000,000,000,000. That’s almost twice — but not quite — as powerful as Titan, which can do 17.59 petaflops. Titan runs on 560,640 processors, of which 261,632 are Nvidia-made accelerators. The rest are Opteron chips made by Advanced Micro Devices.

This is the second time that a Chinese machine has topped the list, which is updated twice a year. The first was in 2010, when the Tianhe-1A system at China’s National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin took the crown, and did so with a relatively quaint — by today’s standard — 2.57 petaflops.

China’s dominance was short-lived the first time around: Japan nabbed the title with a Fujitsu-made machine in late 2011.

American machines have dominated on subsequent Top 500 lists, until today. A year ago, an IBM-made machine called Sequoia, at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab, held the top spot. It’s now No. 3. Titan took the title in November.

A few more facts about the new list: There are now 26 machines that have a computing capacity north of one petaflop, up from 23 on the last list. Some 54 machines are using graphical processing units from the likes of Nvidia, AMD and Intel to boost their computing oomph, down from 62 on the last list.

And while it may not have the fastest computer in the world, the U.S. leads the world in total supercomputing capacity: Of the machines on the Top 500 list, 252 are in the U.S.; 112 are in Europe, with 29 in the U.K., 23 in France and 19 in Germany; 66 are in China; and 30 are in Japan.

The Top 500 list (which you can see in full here) is compiled twice every year by Hans Meuer at Germany’s University of Mannheim, Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Or rather the simulated cyber attack exercise dubbed Quantum Dawn 2. As reported by Lauren Tara LaCapra at Reuters, it’s an exercise that will run through most of the business day on June 28, simulating a significant cyber attack against several Wall Street banks.

Organized by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, it will involve numerous banks, including Citigroup and Bank of America, the U.S. departments of Treasury and Homeland Security, the Federal Reserve and the Securities and Exchange Commission. At least three executives from each participating organization will take part.

It will start off at first with some seemingly random bursts of confusing information, followed by a pause that will give execs a chance to make decisions. Later on, it will accelerate, and conditions will appear to get a lot worse.

This is the sequel to 2011’s Quantum Dawn 1, which included in its scenario a group of armed gunmen running around lower Manhattan trying to gain access to various exchanges and attempting to blow stuff up.

In that exercise, all the participants were in a single conference room comparing notes and making decisions. This time around, they’ll be working from their own offices, much as they would during a real-world attack. The point is to create a more accurate “fog of war” situation.

The simulation comes as big banks in particular are being warned by federal regulators to improve their defenses against the threat of cyber attacks. BofA, J.P. Morgan Chase and Capital One Financial are known to have come under attack in recent years. A recent survey by Verizon found that 75 percent of cyber-security incidents at large companies were motivated by financial gain.

In a disclosure published overnight, the company said that from Dec. 1, 2012, to May 31, 2013, it had received between 4,000 and 5,000 requests affecting between 9,000 and 10,000 accounts or devices. That works out to an average of two accounts or devices per request.

The disclosure follows similar ones by Facebook on Friday and Microsoft on Saturday. And, as with the Facebook and Microsoft disclosures, Apple has aggregated into a single bucket the number of requests it received from federal agencies like the FBI and local, state and county agencies around the country. Apple did not specify whether any of the requests were made under authority granted under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Apple said the requests came from a range of state, federal and local agencies. Most involved police investigations into routine criminal matters like robberies, searches for missing children and attempts to prevent a suicide.

Certain kinds of information can’t be provided to law enforcement even when requested, Apple said. These include the contents of FaceTime and iMessage conversations, which are encrypted, and not retained by Apple in the first place. Requests of Siri, its voice-activated search service on the iPhone, are not logged, either.

OED chief editor John Simpson announced the addition of the word — both as a noun and as a verb — in his June update.

Obviously the word “tweet” was in the dictionary before, dating back to at least 1851 as an imitative word for bird calls. But the definition has now been expanded to include its use to include: “To make a posting on the social networking service Twitter. Also: to use Twitter regularly or habitually.” It also includes its use as a noun for the messages.

One weird thing about this: The OED had already added “retweet” as far back as 2011, alongside such gems as “mankini,” “jeggings” and “sexting.” No explanation from Simpson why “retweet” got in first.

The addition, Simpson said, violates at least one rule for inclusion in the OED, specifically the one that says that a “new word needs to be current for 10 years before consideration for inclusion. But it seems to be catching on,” he wrote.

Whatever the reason, “tweet” was just one of a batch of tech-related words and phrases added to the OED in the last year. Among the others is “big data,” the fashionable phrase and subject of glossy photo books that evokes the act of analyzing large data sets for otherwise undetectable patterns.

Other tech-related words added this year are “crowdsourcing,” “mouseover,” “e-reader” and “re-direct.”

Set for July 18, it may yet be close, or it may not. Much of that will be determined by whether the activist investor Carl Icahn walks away from the proxy fight he started as he has been reported to be considering.

But another key step in that process is fast approaching. The two major proxy firms, Institutional Shareholder Services and Glass Lewis, have yet to weigh in on the proposal by CEO Michael Dell and the private equity firm Silver Lake Partners. The opinions of those firms will carry a lot of weight among certain institutional shareholders. A recommendation against the buyout by either firm — ISS in particular — could sway enough shareholders that its approval might be in doubt.

As yet, neither firm has given any indication as to its opinion of the deal. CNBC reported Friday that meetings between representatives for Dell and Silver Lake and the proxy firms had not yet taken place.

The proxy firm recommendations matter in part because of the way the proxy vote will be structured. Under terms of the buyout process established by a special committee of Dell’s board of directors, neither Michael Dell nor any of his affiliates that control a combined 15 percent and change of the outstanding shares can cast a vote. That means a majority of slightly more than 42 percent have to vote in favor.

Those against the deal so far include Icahn and Southeastern, which control a combined 12.53 percent of the company’s shares. Others that have previously expressed opposition to the deal include fund manager T. Rowe Price, which had 4.09 percent of Dell shares as of March 31, and Pzena Investment Management and Yacktman Asset Management, which control a combined 1.58 percent of shares.

One critical block of shares belongs to investment funds that are passively managed, including some index funds and exchange traded funds. According to data from Thomson Reuters, more than 16 percent of Dell shares are in the hands of index funds. In some cases, these funds vote exactly as the proxy firms recommend.

According to a source close to the process, as much as 10 percent of Dell’s shares are in the hands of firms that have so-called “auto pilot” proxy policies and vote with the advisory firms. Another five percent to 10 percent will be heavily influence by the firms’ opinions.

The largest of these include State Street Global Advisors, which has 3.46 percent of Dell’s shares, and which gets some advice from ISS. Invesco’s PowerShares funds unit gets its advice from Glass Lewis.

Other firms keep their own counsel on proxy votes and vote according to their own proxy policies. The Vanguard Group (proxy guidelines here) and the iShares funds controlled by the investment firm BlackRock (proxy guidelines here) are two of the the largest in this camp: Vanguard owns 3.7 percent of Dell shares while BlackRock’s funds control about 3 percent.

In looking over all this I prepared a handful of spreadsheets. I’ll share screen grabs of two.

The first is a breakdown of the top 21 shareholders of Dell (Michael Dell, plus the next 20). Those that have previously indicated opposition to the buyout in public statements are highlighted in red. Remember that about 42 percent of shareholders need to vote in favor for the buyout to be approved. (Most of these investment stakes were current as of March 31, based on public filings, and therefore don’t account for any changes that might have occurred since then.)

The second is the top 10 index fund companies that hold Dell shares.

That’s the word from White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough who appeared on the CBS Sunday morning talk show “Meet the Press.”

Asked directly by host Bob Scheiffer if Obama feels the privacy of Americans has been violated, McDonough said, “He does not.”

Additionally, he said, Obama took a skeptical look at existing surveillance programs when he first took office in 2009 and made substantive changes to them. The White House, he said, took pains to get Congress involved in authorizing the programs. Every member of Congress, McDonough said, has been briefed on the programs, and they were approved after a vigorous debate.

If the president is going to make a stronger case about the operation, privacy protections and other aspects of Prism and other surveillance programs, it would be a logical follow-on to a deal struck between the government, Facebook and Microsoft late Friday, allowing those companies to disclose how many national security requests they’ve received.

Here’s a preview of at least some of that defense. The Associated Press is reporting this morning that terrorist plots in the U.S. and at least 20 other countries were broken up using data collected from the programs. The story cites unnamed intelligence officials who go on to say that fewer than 300 phone numbers were checked against a database of millions of phone records gathered by the NSA.

The disclosures were made to members of Congress on Saturday. Intelligence officials say they’d like to declassify more details about the plots themselves so that Americans can have a sense about the benefits of the surveillance programs, but they haven’t gotten that far yet. Problem is that doing so might reveal still-secret counter-terrorism tactics.

Facebook disclosed Friday that it had received requests for information on as many as 19,000 accounts during the last half of 2012. Microsoft made similar disclosures the next day. Google and Twitter are still arguing with the government over the terms of the disclosure they’d like to make.

You can see McDonough’s comments in the video below.

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Damien Evans (pictured), an archaeologist with the University of Sydney, is a bit of an Indiana Jones with a GPS receiver and a laser-carrying helicopter. He and his team led correspondents with Australia’s The Age on an expedition to explore a forgotten city complex called Mahendraparvata not far from the popular tourist attraction Angkor Wat. Angkor Wat dates to about the year 1125 and is to this day considered the world’s largest religious monument.

They found it using a technology called lidar, which isn’t, strictly speaking, new: It has been around since the 1960s. But its application to the field of archeology has been yielding some impressive results recently, especially when it comes to finding lost cities in jungles. Last year it was used to locate another lost city in the jungles of Honduras.

Lidar scans taken from a helicopter that had flown over the site were combined with GPS coordinates, giving archeologists the precise location of where the ruins are, essentially hiding under the growth of jungle.

The Age also sent a cameraman who shot the 10-minute video below.

(Image is a screen grab from an early portion of the video.)

Numbers covering the final six months of 2012, shared in a company blog post, are slightly higher than Facebook’s.

As with Facebook’s disclosure on Friday night, Microsoft’s new figures include the number of requests made by law enforcement and national security agencies under the auspices of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The disclosures were worked out as the result of a deal between the companies and government agencies because under current U.S. law, such disclosures are illegal.

Microsoft said it received between 6,000 and 7,000 requests for information from local, state and federal law enforcement agencies in the United States. The affected number of accounts was between 31,000 and 32,000.

Before adding six months’ worth of FISA requests to the overall statistical bucket, Microsoft had previously disclosed in its 2012 Law Enforcement Requests Report that it had received 11,073 requests for information affecting 24,565 accounts from government entities in the U.S. during all 12 months of 2012.

These requests covered the following services: Hotmail ad Outlook.com, SkyDrive, Xbox LIVE, Microsoft Account, Messenger and Office 365. Skype was reported separately in part because, before Microsoft bought it in 2011, it was tracking this data differently.

Assuming a consistent run rate, the difference between FISA-inclusive and the non-FISA numbers would suggest a difference of no more than about 3,000 overall requests per year.

But when taking into account the average number of accounts affected per request, the picture changes. In its FISA-inclusive figures for the second half of the year, Microsoft averaged between four and five accounts affected per request. That’s about double the average of 2.2 accounts per request in the earlier data that didn’t include FISA requests. (Facebook, in its FISA-inclusive disclosure, averaged about 2 accounts per request.)

What this suggests is that requests made to Microsoft by government agencies under FISA tend to cover multiple accounts more often than in non-FISA cases. Why the higher average? It’s unclear.

But here’s another bit of data that may tell part of the story. Remember that Microsoft’s non-FISA disclosures counted Skype, Microsoft’s audio and video calling service, separately. The 2012 report shows that U.S. agencies made 1,154 requests affecting 4,814 for an average of 3.62 accounts per request. This is just a guess from the math, but it may explain — at least in part — why the FISA-inclusive average of affected accounts is higher than the non-FISA one: Maybe it contained more Skype requests.

Also, this may be precisely the kind of analysis that makes the government so ticklish about releasing any of these numbers in the first place.

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In North America, nearly 80 percent of the population has access to the Internet. According to the International Telecommunications Union, in Asia, where the United Nations pegged the population at nearly 4 billion last year, slightly more than a billion people, a little better than 27 percent, has access. In Africa, the rate is less than 16 percent.

Internet giant Google says that two out of every three people on the globe has no access to a fast Internet connection and so is not participating in the global conversation that connected people take part in every day.

That’s the problem it’s aiming to solve with its latest “big idea” project out of its Google[x] research and development unit. Announced yesterday in a corporate blog post, it’s called Google Loon, and the idea is deceptively simple: Float a bunch of balloons carrying solar-powered equipment that generates a wireless data signal up to the stratosphere, high above where airplanes fly, but still far below where orbital satellites circle the Earth.

Eventually, Google hopes to float a huge network of balloons that circle the Earth following wind patterns which would blanket countries currently lacking in Internet infrastructure with wireless networks comparable to today’s 3G networks.

This week, the company launched a pilot program in New Zealand, and it’s looking for other countries in the same latitude as New Zealand to do more trials. The video below explains how it will work.

(Image from the classic French children’s film “The Red Balloon.”)

The disclosures follow negotiations that Facebook and other tech companies have held with federal agencies over their desire to include requests approved under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Those requests are approved by a secret court and even discussing the fact that the requests have ever been made has been prohibited by law.

In the post, Facebook general counsel Ted Ullyot said that the company had received a total of between 9,000 and 10,000 requests from government agencies, meaning that about two accounts were involved for each request received. And that’s out of about 1.1 billion total Facebook accounts or about 0.0009 percent of total accounts. It’s unclear exactly how many times Facebook cooperated, and how many times and on what grounds it may have refused. The disclosure covers the six months ending December 31 of last year.

As yet the government has allowed Facebook to disclose only aggregate numbers, so it’s impossible to know how many of these were FISA-related requests. Ullyot writes that the requests ran a wide gamut from a “local sheriff trying to find a missing child” to police departments investigating routine cases like assaults to national security officials investigating terrorist threats.

CNBC’s David Faber reported minutes ago that Icahn is getting close to dropping his bid for Dell. What changed? Perhaps it’s the matter of funding. The New York Post reported today that Icahn and partner Southeastern Asset Management are having trouble pulling together the $5.2 billion needed to make an offer that would improve on the $24.4 billion leveraged buyout offer put together by Michael Dell and the private equity firm Silver Lake Partners.

Icahn, the Post said, had told investors that at least part of the delay is addressing the $3.9 billion funding gap called out on June 5 by the special committee of Dell’s board overseeing the go-private process. Icahn and Southeastern proposed last month to recapitalize Dell and pay shareholders a $12 special dividend while leaving a publicly held stub.

One problem is that interest rates have risen a bit in recent weeks, making the prospect of borrowing that kind of money a lot more expensive. The other is that any potential lenders have been looking at the state of Dell’s deteriorating business and found it hard to underwrite a bid for a company with so much risk.

Icahn has — if nothing else — made the Dell situation a lot more colorful. One day he openly proclaimed in a televised rant that he would fire Michael Dell if he were ever to get control of the company. Since then, Icahn has proposed a new slate of directors as well as a short list of CEOs he might like to hire, though at least one of them, Oracle president Mark Hurd, has indicated he’s not interested.

The vote of Dell shareholders on the go-private proposal is set for July 18.

iStockphoto | maumapho

The Obama administration has ordered agencies of the U.S. federal government to examine how they use wireless spectrum, with an eye toward letting go of the signal bands they aren’t using as much, so they can be shared with the private sector.

This idea has been knocking around for awhile. When TV broadcasters were being pressured to give up a bunch of spectrum they held for old-school, over-the-air broadcasting, they and their defenders in Congress were often quick to point out that the federal agencies have held on to a big block of wireless spectrum that they don’t always use as efficiently as they could.

The point of all this is to free up spectrum for wireless broadband networks that are straining under the growth of smartphones, tablets and other devices.

Also part of the deal is a $100 million investment to study technologies and techniques to share spectrum. I’ve embedded the original memo from President Obama below.

Public Knowledge, a lobbying group, applauded the move in a statement. Its senior vice president, Harold Feld, said: “Those who have constantly sought to politicize what should be an engineering issue by reflexively balking at the very idea of ‘spectrum sharing’ should consider that we cannot hope to clear more federal spectrum for auction unless we can accommodate more federal users in a smaller number of bands. That requires new sharing technologies. Those who care about supporting our growing wireless economy should recognize that all new spectrum access, whether open to a myriad of innovators and industries or exclusively auction to companies like AT&T and Verizon, is equally valuable. We need more of both.”

The other piece of this is that the White House released a report (PDF here) on improvements in access to residential broadband. You may remember that when President Obama first came into office, expanding access to broadband was a primary cog in his technology and economic development agenda. Sparsely populated rural areas generally had been struggling to get access to the cable modems and even old-school DSL servers that people in cities and suburbs have available as a matter of course.

So the marquee claim on this front today fell just short of declaring victory: The administration now thinks that about 91 percent have access to broadband speeds of at least 10 megabits per second, and another 81 percent have access to wireless networks that are as fast as that.

If that is indeed the case (it will be interesting to see these findings vetted elsewhere), it would be a big improvement over what the situation was as recently as late 2010. That was when a report by the Communications Workers of America, the union representing telecom workers nationwide, found that more than half of all residential broadband connections fell below the baseline speed that the FCC said at the time constituted “broadband.”

White House Wireless Spectrum Memo June 14 2013

Software giant Microsoft released a version of its Office application for Apple’s iPhone today. It has been the subject of a lot of speculation, and apparently there were some contentious issues between Apple and Microsoft regarding the split of revenue.

A few things to know about this app: First, in order to use it, you must have an existing Office 365 subscription — so you can’t just use it as a one-off app — and you can access documents stored in SkyDrive and SharePoint, and you can only save documents to those services. Second, you can create and edit Word and Excel documents, but not PowerPoint decks, including PowerPoint decks, and there is a feature for displaying them and showing them off in “presentation mode.” It also opens Office documents attached to email messages. (Update: Microsoft says you can edit PowerPoint decks. My mistake there.)

Microsoft is positioning this as the optimal way to see and use Office documents on the iPhone; this is, for now, an-iPhone only app. Charts, animations and other elements are supported. There’s no iPad version yet, though obviously it will run on the iPad. Offline editing is supported.

Two features only work if you have Office 365 running on a Windows PC: Recent Documents shows documents you’ve read recently on your computer, and Resume Reading keeps track of where you left off reading a document on your computer, and brings you back to that point.

Here’s the official screenshot from iTunes:

The cuts are part of a company-wide reorganization first announced in January as part of a turnaround plan instituted by Steve Bennett, Symantec’s new CEO, who joined the company 11 months ago.

Bennett, a former CEO at Intuit and a veteran of General Electric, told Reuters in a January interview that the company has too many management layers and would be streamlined into 10 business units.

Ellen Hayes, a Symantech spokeswoman, sent the following statement:

“Symantec is in the midst of a company-wide transformation. As part of this effort, we are engaged in a company-wide reorganization. As a result, some positions are being eliminated. This action is a reflection of our new strategy and organizational simplification initiative announced by Symantec’s executives on Jan. 23rd, 2013. One of the goals of Symantec’s reorganizational effort is to make the company’s employee reporting structure more efficient and support the company strategy moving forward. There are several stages to the reorganization process, as we define executive and management layers down to all levels of employees. Some notifications are happening this month, as part of this the process. We are communicating with employees directly and do not have more information to share at this time.”

The company said in its 10-K annual report, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on May 17, that it plans to take charges related to its reorganization plans amounting to between $220 million and $250 million. Those cuts are to be completed by the end of the company’s 2014 fiscal year, which began March 30. But, as of the end of March, it had taken only $10 million worth of those charges, meaning the biggest reduction in force is yet to come.

People familiar with the company’s operations say job cuts have been under way for several months, but only a relatively small number of people have have been let go so far. One source close to the company said the next round of cuts was to be “the biggest yet.” Some employees had already been told their positions were being eliminated this week.

The cuts are to be carried out in two phases. About 1,000 positions would be eliminated this month, and some affected employees had already been notified as early as Wednesday. Another 700 positions are to be eliminated in July. The combined cuts would amount to about eight percent of Symantec’s 21,500 employees worldwide.

Earlier this year, Bennett complained that most Symantec managers had on average only five people reporting to them. As such, the job cuts are expected to hit the company’s middle-management ranks especially hard. Bennett said in a May 7 conference call with analysts that Symantec would eliminate between 30 percent and 40 percent of its management positions. “We will have fewer, bigger jobs for our best and brightest,” he said at the time. He also said those cuts would be completed by the end of July.

Symantec reported $6.9 billion in sales for the fiscal year ended in March. Its biggest line of business is its storage and server management segment, which accounted for $2.5 billion, or about 36 percent of sales. It is best known for its consumer-facing security software business, which accounted for $2.1 billion in sales. Sales for fiscal 2013 rose by less than three percent year on year while net income rose four percent. Its shares have risen by more than 18 percent this year.

Update: Shareholders are reacting to the news of the layoffs with a nod of approval. As of 12:05 PM Pacific Time, Symantec shares are up by 27 cents or more than one percent to $22.44.

I just got off the phone with CEO and founder Roman Stanek (pictured) who said that TOTVS, which is Latin America’s biggest software company and the sixth largest provider of enterprise software in the world, had been looking for a data analytics product to offer its 30,000 customers.

“The discussions started about six months ago and in the end they liked us so much they decided to invest,” Stanek said.

Existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst Partners, Next World Capital and Tenaya Capital all participated in the round. Its last funding round was a $25 million Series C led by Tenaya Capital, while Andreessen Horowitz led its Series B. The latest round pushes its total capital raised to north of $75 million. TOTVS’s Alexandre Dinkelmann will join the GoodData board of directors.

In addition to the investment, TOTVS has become a distribution partner, giving GoodData access to a market worth about $9 billion.

GoodData, you’ll remember, has sought to create a business based on finding meaning within otherwise indecipherable data. This wouldn’t be the first time you’ve heard this idea. Indeed, companies like IBM, Hewlett-Packard, SAP and Oracle, as well as many other VC-funded startups, are all trying sell their customers on varying iterations of the same idea.

GoodData’s approach is to offer its business intelligence platform as a cloud service. Its customers include AOL and LivingSocial. And rather than compete directly with the usual providers of business-intelligence software, like SAP, Oracle and IBM, it offers its service indirectly, via cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services, Dell’s Boomi cloud-integration service, and Okta, the start-up focused on providing unified access to SaaS services.