All Things Digital

Take-Two Interactive shares are trading lower after Morgan Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter cut his rating on the stock this morning to Neutral from Outperform. He keeps a $13 price target on the stock, which closed Friday at $11.73. Read More »

CEO Tim Armstrong says he’s still overhauling the Internet company in advance of its spinoff from Time Warner, but he has hopeful noises to make about ad sales. But he has nothing to say about chats with Microsoft. Read More »

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski this morning proposed broad new rules prohibiting Internet providers — both wireless and wireline — from selectively blocking or slowing Internet traffic. “It is vital that we safeguard the free and open Internet,” Genachowski said during at event at the Brookings Institute. After the jump, Genachowski’s speech in full. Read More »

Launched just last week, Learn That Name is a new iPhone application with an award already under its belt–from a Microsoft event. Eric Koester, a 32-year-old attorney at Cooley Godward Kronish, won at the recent Startup Weekend on Microsoft’s Redmond, Wash., campus, for the app. Read More »

David Johnson, the mergers-and-acquisitions specialist Dell hired away from IBM earlier this year, has clearly been busy these past few months. This morning, the PC maker announced plans to buy information technology services outfit Perot Systems for about $3.9 billion. Read More »

According to numerous sources, Yahoo has been shopping around Zimbra, the open-source email company it bought in late 2007 for $350 million. Zimbra is only one of the many assets of Yahoo that are now on the block, including its personals business, its HotJobs online classified unit and more to come. The effort to unload Zimbra is yet another sign that the company is trying to slim down its diverse portfolio, even as it strives to redefine itself this week with a new, pricey marketing campaign that seeks to position Yahoo primarily as a consumer company. Read More »

Amazon.com, which wants to be the Internet’s general store, is adding one more category to the range of private label products it sells online: electronics accessories. The “Amazon Basics” line launched on Saturday with products like audio-video cables and blank DVDs–all sourced and designed by the e-commerce company. Read More »

QOTD

“The one that I am the most pleased with is Chrome. This is a personal answer. Because Chrome has a lot of subtlety to it. It’s all of these complex design choices that the Chrome team made that makes Chrome faster and just [intuitive]. And once you start using Chrome it’s very hard to go back to a different browser. And you can’t quite say why. And those are the trade-offs. And they’re all subtle. And that’s the kind of stuff I like. And obviously that extends to Chrome OS as it becomes available.”

– Google CEO Eric Schmidt on his favorite Google product

BoomTown went to visit the HQ of Adobe in San Francisco several weeks ago to have a chit-chat with its CTO, Kevin Lynch, for a lovely discussion about the future of its Flash online video technology and more. But he somehow did not mention the then-pending purchase of Omniture by Adobe for $1.8 billion. Go figure. Read More »

Is the newspaper advertising slump about to end? Nope. But it’s continuing to get a little bit less awful. A survey of some of the remaining analysts covering the industry, as well as people who actually work in it, concludes that Q3 ad revenue will be down 25 percent. Awful by any standard except those of this year: Q1 was down 28.3 percent and Q2 was 29 percent. Read More »

Yahoo is planning to reintroduce its battered brand to the public Tuesday with a massive global marketing campaign, according to people familiar with the effort. The Internet company’s new tagline, according to one of those people: “It’s You!” Read More »

One of Microsoft’s top execs, Debra Chrapaty, who heads its infrastructure business, is leaving the software giant to take a top job at Cisco, sources said. Chrapaty–whose title is corporate VP of Global Foundation Services–is also one of increasingly few top women tech execs at Microsoft, where she has worked for seven years. Chrapaty will now shift to products at Cisco, running the collaboration software group, according to sources. Read More »

Another high-ranking Yahoo exec is leaving–this time, Jim Schinella, the company’s SVP for corporate partnerships. Schinella announced the move internally last week, telling staff he would stay on until the end of the year. Located in New York, he has been focused on strategic deals with big Yahoo partners. Read More »

Geekfighting may never become its own UFC event, but following tech news this week seemed, in places, like a view to a big, well-funded cage match. Read More »

Is it just me or is it completely ironic that a pair of European entrepreneurs kept out of the United States due to tantrum lawsuits from the music industry are stamping their own legal feet like two ill-tempered toddlers of late? That would be Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, who today filed yet another lawsuit in their seemingly never-ending quest to win in court what they couldn’t in business dealmaking. Read More »