Martin Fackler / New York Times:
High-Tech Japanese, Running Out of Engineers  —  TOKYO — Japan is running out of engineers.  —  After years of fretting over coming shortages, the country is actually facing a dwindling number of young people entering engineering and technology-related fields.  —  Universities call it “rikei banare,” or “flight from science.”

Jemima Kiss / PDA:
Spielberg pops up on Seesmic  —  Seesmic, the video discussion site, has gone wild this morning as Steven Spielberg, Harrison Ford, George Lucas and more big names from Indiana Jones 4 join a Q&A session on the site.  —  It's a simple enough idea but incredibly exciting …

How many Kindles will Amazon sell in its first year out? We've seen two estimates so far:

• An Asian screen supplier is supposedly gearing up to provide Amazon (AMZN) with parts for more than 600,000 Kindles in the device's first year.
• Citi analyst Mark Mahaney makes a more modest guesstimate, pegging sales at half of the iPod's (AAPL) first-year rate -- about 190,000.

Well, time for context: How did other breakthrough gadgets do in their first year or so? All over the map. But if Amazon's e-reader can get anywhere in the range of Mahaney's estimate, it might not be the bust we first thought.

Amazon Kindle (2007)	Apple iPod (2001)	Apple iPhone (2007)	RIM BlackBerry (1999)	Palm Pilot (1997)	Motorola Razr V3 (2004)	Nintendo Gameboy (1989)
189,000 - 600,000	376,000	5.4 million*	165,000**	0.5-1 million	23 million	2.8 million

*Number of Apple (AAPL) iPhones sold through the end of March, 2008; approx. 9 months of sales.
**Number of RIM (RIMM) BlackBerry users according to 2001 Annual Report, 2 years after its release.

For the first time in a long time, we didn't see a single minute of the broadcast networks' upfronts sales pitches this year. Apparently, we didn't miss a thing.

In a nod to the 100-day writers strike (and the specter of an actors likely actors strike) these were slimmed-down affairs, low on bombast and fun. And the boozy afterparties some of us relished? They've gone the way of the $10 million pilot.

So what did we miss? We assumed we'd be able to catch most of the pitches on the Web. But given that broadcast giants are desperate to prove they're digital, it's amazingly hard to find good footage of the proceedings online.

Still, here's a sampling: We turned up a bootlegged clip of Conan O'Brien poking fun at his employers at NBC, and a montage of ABC's shows. CBS and Sci Fi are disseminating pilot clips on YouTube (smart!). The highlights:

Conan O'Brien introduces NBC's non-upfront:

Montage of ABC's returning shows

CBS's "The Mentalist"

Sci Fi's "Battlestar Galactica" (final season)

We've spent the last two years with a Palm Treo, and it's proven to be both the best and worst phone we've ever owned. In the next few months, we hope to upgrade to a 3G Apple (AAPL) iPhone.

Why not another Palm (PALM)? Take a look at the photo to the right.

Mobile site Boy Genius Report has unveiled a photo of what it claims is the Palm 800w, the company's new Treo smartphone. And... we think it's hideous.

Pretty much everyone else in the mobile business has been able to lift at least some of the features that make the iPhone so appealing -- large, glossy screen; thin, elegant case; etc. Not Palm.

Will it sell? That depends how much Palm wants for it. At $199 -- no higher -- it might do okay.

Palm's Centro -- basically a miniature version of this phone -- has done well, helping Palm sell a record number of phones in the last quarter. But that's because Palm only wanted $99 for it (after carrier subsidies). Meanwhile, that cut-rate pricing has torched their profits -- the company lost $31.5 million last quarter on $312.1 million of sales.

Palm still has a little time to figure things out: We won't know much about the company's long-term prospects until its new, Linux-based operating system -- and whatever slick new phones they can sell along with it -- comes out in 2009. The smartphone business is going to grow rapidly for several years, so if Palm can deliver a competitive product, there's still plenty of growth opportunity for them. But they're going to have to do much, much better than this.

See Also:
Palm: Wait 'Til Next Year
Palm Blows Another Quarter
Palm: Buy A Centro, Sell The Stock

Henry Blodget / Silicon Alley Insider:
Best Buy (BBY) Buying Netflix (NFLX) For $44?  —  A reader says there was chatter to that effect this afternoon, as Netflix (NFLX) pushed 6% higher on high volume.  —  Would this make sense?  Only if Best Buy (BBY) has been persuaded that the Blockbuster (BBI) - Circuit City (CCI) deal makes sense, which we certainly haven't.

Machines show you how to vote - you know how this ends

As New Labour prepares itself for electoral meltdown in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election, here's a site that might, as Peter Snow would have put it, be "just a bit of fun".…

Beltzner / Mozilla Developer News:
Firefox 3 Release Candidate now available for download  —  Please note: The Firefox 3 Release Candidate is a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback.  It includes new features as well as dramatic improvements to performance, memory usage and speed.

Marshall Kirkpatrick / ReadWriteWeb:
Snackr is an RSS Addict's Dream Come True  —  Snackr is a new Adobe AIR app that lets you display items in your RSS feeds in a beautiful scrolling ticker on any edge of your screen.  I am absolutely giddy about it after only a few minutes of use.  Snackr is something you'd supplement your existing reader with, not a replacement.

Robert Scoble / Scobleizer:
Mike Arrington is Right, Facebook is Wrong  —  Mike Arrington and I had a sometimes violent disagreement on today's Gillmor Gang.  —  The reason we were arguing?  Because we both were arguing different things.  —  Mike Arrington was arguing that Facebook was in the wrong …

Michael Liedtke / Associated Press:
Yahoo seeks to conceal parts of shareholder suit  —  SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Yahoo Inc. is seeking to conceal large portions of a shareholder lawsuit alleging the Internet company's board improperly thwarted Micrsoft Corp.'s $47.5 billion takeover offer, raising shareholder questions over the motives for the secrecy.

ReadWriteWeb:
The Most Popular Twitter Apps According to the Blogosphere  —  Six weeks ago, ReadWriteWeb published their definitive list of the top Twitter clients.  The methodology for that list was watching the Twitter public feed and logging tweet sources.  However, how does the list of clients people …

A reader says there was chatter to that effect this afternoon, as Netflix (NFLX) pushed 6% higher on high volume.

Would this make sense? Only if Best Buy (BBY) has been persuaded that the Blockbuster (BBI) - Circuit City (CCI) deal makes sense, which we certainly haven't.

On the "why not?" side, a Best Buy - Netflix combination would of course be vastly more powerful than a Blockbuster - Circuit City combination---because it would be two No. 1's vs. two No. 2's and because Netflix is stronger than Blockbuster in the only business that could provide real synergy: mail-order subscriptions and digital downloads.

We can understand why Best Buy would want to have content subscribers, especially those to whom it could sell new home electronics gadgets (on the web and in stores). We can also imagine Best Buy salespeople selling Netflix subcriptions to customers who buy DVD players (along with those fat-margin warranties). The combo would presumably reduce Netflix's marketing costs. And a combined Best Buy/Netflix would also give both companies more clout when negotiating with video-box-makers: Netflix for installing its digital download service and Best Buy on pricing.

All that makes sense. But beyond that, these two companies are in different businesses, and there would be next to no management or operational synergy. As a result, the companies would probably be better off doing a long-term partnership deal. (Which, by the way, would end any hope for the Hail Mary Blockbuster-Circuit City deal).

See Also: Found! Someone Who Likes the Blockbuster-Circuit City Deal

When we saw the first photos of Research in Motion's new "Bold," we assumed co-CEO Jim Balsillie had just plunked Apple's iPhone down in front of his engineers and said "Give me something like this." Not so, says RIM's other co-CEO Mike Lazaridis. In this interview with Natasha Lomas, Mike says RIM's been working on the Bold since time immemorial:

This is three years in the making. So I'm sorry but this wasn't a response to another device. Either that or we have a time machine somewhere, or some kind of magic crystal ball or something. This was actually designed three years ago and the actual physical design of this product--I have the original models from 2006.

Mike also argues that QWERTY keyboards are only going to get more popular, now that mobile email, Facebook, etc., are going mainstream:

The most exciting mobile trend is...full Qwerty keyboards. I'm sorry, it really is. I'm not making this up. People are running out of their two-year contracts and they're coming into the stores and they want to be able to do Facebook and they want to be able to do instant messaging and they want to be able to do e-mail and they ask for those features thinking that they're going to get another flip phone and they're walking out with a (BlackBerry) Curve or a Pearl because they're the best devices for doing those kinds of activities. And so what is the defining factor? The keyboard.

Which doesn't explain why RIM is about to release its next iPhone-killer, the keyboard-less Thunder, (Dan Frommer has photoshopped a hypothetical version below).

See Also:
Touchscreen, No Keyboard Blackberry Headed to Verizon
RIM's New iPhone Killer: Just Like the iPhone, But Crappier

Monica Chen / DigiTimes:
Asustek to add more features to Atom-based 8.9-inch Eee PC  —  Asustek Computer will launch its Atom-based 8.9-inch Eee PC 901 in June and the company is planning to add more features to it in order to clearly separate it from its competitors, according to market channel sources.

Former Jamaican World Cup soccer star Chris Thomas is used to winning. But Thursday night the Cornell engineering student celebrated a different sort of victory: He and his teammates, who created a business plan for battery company Widetronix, won DFJ Gotham's second annual East Coast Venture Challenge. Now the real game begins.

Thomas and his Cornell teammates beat out 10 other startup companies from Ivy League universities, NYU and Carnegie Mellon for $250,000 in seed capital from DFJ. Their winning venture, Widetronix, is trying to make long-lasting batteries that they hope to market for use in pacemakers. Thomas and his fellow entrepreneurs used their engineering backgrounds to manufacture the devices themselves. But now this group of grad students has to turn their Ithaca, NY-based venture into a business.

The money should help: It will go toward developing a second generation prototype of the battery. But Thomas and his colleagues also have to make a few more hires, including a grown-up CEO. On the plus side: The company has already figured out that it needs to find multiple markets for the batteries, and is already making inroads with Lockheed Martin. The next goal: Raise another $5 million in a Series A, and try to get their product to market within a year.

Paul / Netcraft:
PayPal XSS Vulnerability Undermines EV SSL Security  —  A security researcher in Finland has discovered a cross-site scripting vulnerability on paypal.com that would allow hackers to carry out highly plausible attacks, adding their own content to the site and stealing credentials from users.

Yahoo is trying to conceal large parts of a lawsuit brought against the company by shareholders who say the board should have taken Microsoft's bid, the AP says. The suit, filed in Delaware about three months ago, is your standard shareholder complaint, but the fact that Carl Icahn's now making his play makes it more interesting:

In a letter sent Friday to the judge overseeing the case in Delaware, a lawyer for the shareholders argued Yahoo is trying "to whitewash embarrassing documents" because the company thinks the information will damage the board's efforts to repel a challenge by activist investor Carl Icahn...

Yahoo is trying "to sanitize the public record and maintain a cloak of secrecy regarding unflattering evidence of breach of fiduciary duty," shareholder attorney Joel Friedlander wrote in a letter to Chancellor William B. Chandler III

The redacted documents include information about an employee severance plan that Yahoo adopted shortly after Microsoft made its initial bid Jan. 31 and notes about a conversation between Yang and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Friedlander wrote.

It's standard procedure for companies to redact information if their suits ever get to trial. But count on Carl Icahn to make hay from this: The AP dryly notes that "the information would be particularly damaging to the board if it suggests the directors deliberately took steps to make Yahoo more expensive for Microsoft."

We doubt they implemented the plan just to make the company more expensive--but retention and spiteful self-enrichment-in-the-event-of-a-takeover were certainly on their minds. In any event, we figure the new severance plan would have added another $1 billion to $3 billion to MSFT's costs.

See Also: How Much Will Yahoo's New Severance Plan Cost Microsoft?

William Patry / The Patry Copyright Blog:
The Anti-Piracy Scam: Canada Insulted Again  —  The Congressional International Anti-Piracy Caucus (IPAC) was established in October 2003.  Its website states: " The Congressional International Anti-Piracy Caucus is a bipartisan and bicameral group committed to protecting American intellectual property …

Associated Press:
France's Orange signs new iPhone deal with Apple  —  PARIS (AP) — French wireless operator Orange said Friday it has signed a deal with Apple Inc. to sell its iPhone in the Middle East, Africa and several European countries.  —  France Telecom's Orange said in a one-sentence statement …

Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Breaking: Condé Nast/Wired Acquires Ars Technica  —  Condé Nast has acquired popular technology blog Ars Technica (ranked #5 all time on the BloggerBoard), we've confirmed.  The site will become part of Wired Digital (which in turn is under CondéNet, run by Sarah Chubb).